「English」カテゴリーアーカイブ

シャプトン砥石を水に長時間漬けるとどうなるか実験

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シャプトンの昨日届いた1500番のセラミック砥石（マグネシア系）について、ちょっと使う気が失せたので、この際マグネシア系がどの程度水に弱いのか調べるために、一晩水に漬けて放置しました。大体7時間半です。結果として、見た感じの変化はほとんどなく、クラックや剥がれも発生しませんでした。ただ、やはり硬度は落ちている感じがあり、試しにアトマエコノミー（ダイヤモンド砥石）で角部をこすってみたら、結構簡単に削れました。おそらくこういう吸水した状態で刃物を研ぐと、ぼろぼろいきそうな感じです。実際に研いでみれば良かったんですが、朝で時間がなかったのでそこまでしませんでした。まあこの結果からは普通の人造砥石のように使う前に15分くらい水に漬けても、そこまでひどいことにはならないのではないかと思います。ただ注意点は今回テストしたのは5mmの砥石層に15mmの補強層が付いたタイプであり、15mm全体が砥石層で補強がない「刃の黒幕」シリーズが、長時間水に漬けてトラブルがない、という保証にはならないと思います。

マグネシア系の長所は、1000℃以上の高温で焼き固めるビトリファイ系に比べ、ほぼ常温での製造になるので、収縮が小さくサイズについて精度を出しやすく、特に研磨粉の径が小さい仕上げ砥が作りやすいということだと思います。（ビトリファイ系で小さい径の研磨粉を使うと収縮が大きくなり、歩留まり良くサイズを揃えるのが難しくなる。）

ちなみにビトリファイ系のビトリとは、元々ラテン語で「ガラスの」という意味です。丁度12月の実践ビジネス英語で、体外受精のことをIVF＝in-vitro fertilizationというと習ったばかりです。（この場合はガラス＝試験管のことです。）日本語でガラスのことを昔「びいどろ」と言いましたが、これはこのvitroと同語源で、おそらくポルトガル語のVidro（ガラス）から伝わったものです。

Japanese cuisine and kitchen knives

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The following is my essay that I wrote as an assignment for an English school in Japan:

Topic: Japanese cuisine and kitchen knives
Style: Free writing

Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese are now quite famous worldwide, and UNESCO added them to their list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013.
One of the most important factors that supports this sophisticated culture is wide variety and long tradition of Japanese kitchen knives. If you think of Japanese dishes, you might be reminded of sushi or sashimi. Both dishes use raw fish. Some people may think the latter one is quite easy to prepare since it is just a dish with cut raw fish pieces. Yes, it is just cutting fish, but what is important is how you cut it. If you cut raw fish with a normal kitchen knife, the cells of fish meat will surely be crushed, and you cannot get cut pieces of fish with sharp edges. It is alleged that bad way of cutting diminishes the taste of sashimi quite a lot. All Japanese skilled chefs use very thin and long special knives specially dedicated to sashimi. They cut fish meat utilizing the whole length of a knife and cut it by drawing the knife quickly because the edge degree will be minimized and it will enable better cutting.
In order to keep sharp edges, it is vital to sharpen them before you use them. In western countries, chefs use a grinding bar to sharpen knives. Japan has a long tradition of Japanese swords and sharpening skill has reached at the highest level in the whole world. Japanese blacksmiths and chefs use several different grinding stones to sharpen Japanese swords and kitchen knives. The stones are usually flat stones with sizes usually around 7 X 30 X 3 cm. They start to grind swords or knives by rather harsh stones, and gradually change to stones with finer surfaces. Most grinding stones now in Japan are made artificially, but some good chefs stick to natural stones. A good natural grinding stone costs sometimes more than $1,000. Some say that each good knife has an ideal grinding stone as a pair, and they do not spare money to find it.
Another interesting thing about Japanese knives is that many of them are single-edged while most western knives are double-edged. It is said that single-edged is better in cutting but is difficult to cut something straight. There are also big differences in the way we sharpen single-edged knives compared to sharpen double-edged ones by grinding stones. Good chefs in Japan usually sharpen their knives by themselves, but there are also many of those who leave it to some professionals.

Cell phones and social etiquette

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The following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of an English school AEON.

Topic: Cell phones and social etiquette
Style: Formal
Among many alleged manners for cell phones or smartphones, the most vocal one in these days might be “do not use your cellphone/smartphone while you are walking on the street”. It is absolutely true that looking at the screen of a cellphone/smartphone during your walk is quite dangerous not only for you, but also for others whom you may jostle. Some of smartphone applications, however, require users to watch the screen while they are walking. The most typical one is Google Map. Many people (including myself) use the app to find destinations when they are lost in unfamiliar areas. Some may argue that we should use the “vocal guidance” function so that we do not need to look at the screen. For many others, however, it is inevitable to look at the screen even with some vocal guidance since the app is named “map”. And a map is to look at while we are walking. In the past, when we had no cellphone/smartphone, nobody said that we should not look at a paper map while we were walking. The difference between the old information system and the new one is, just the number of people who use it. People did not always have maps in the past, but now most of them have smartphones and they use them almost all the time while they are awake.
From this example, we can argue that we should think more how to solve the addiction to smartphone than to expect good manners for smartphones. For many young people, the first thing to see in the morning after they woke up and the last thing to see before they fell asleep are the same thing, their smartphones. When I travelled in China in last September, what shook me most was the fact that many young engineers with whom I had a lunch one day started to check their smartphones as soon as they finished eating. At this point of change in personal behavior, we should intensively study potentially negative impacts to human health for both body and mind.
As a conclusion, smartphone addiction is quite a serious problem and to consider good smartphone etiquettes is quite useless without thinking of possible solutions for this addiction.

TOEIC L&R 234回結果

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TOEIC L&Rで10月末に受けたのの結果が出ましたが、何と20点下がって945点でした。それもリーディングは前回より5点上がって490点で満点まで後5点になりましたが、リスニングは前回より25点も下がって455点でした。
以下がこれまでの受験結果。
年月　　　　　L　　R　　Total
1995年02月　　470　420　895
2014年07月　　430　440　870
2015年06月　　460　455　915
2016年06月　　450　465　915
2017年06月　　480　485　965
2018年10月　　455　490　945

リスニングは水物、ということかと思いますが、この結果はまったく納得出来ません。少なくとも35歳で受けた時の470点より、今の方がリスニングの能力はずっと上がっています。また、試験の一週間前に書籍版の模擬試験でのリスニングは100問中97問正解でした。
それで、来年1月13日にまたL&Rをリベンジで受けることにしました。更に勢いでその次の週の1月20日にS&Wも受けることにしました。

Childhood

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The following is an essay that I wrote as an assignment for an English school AEON:

Topic: Childhood
Style: Casual

Let me start with one picture of Tusguharu Foujita (Leonard Foujita) that I found in his exhibition held in September:

The picture was drawn in 1958 and 1959 and was titled “The Machine Age”.
It may draw nostalgic reaction from people born in around that time. (I was born in 1961.) Most toys shown in this picture are quite familiar to me, such as tin toys (I had one of Astro Boy at home), remote-controlled cars, toy cars (in Japan they were called “minicars”), HO scale train models, and so on.
As the title of the picture shows, the 1960’s were really “the machine age”, and Japan was just in the midst of high-speed economic growth. In my childhood, I believed so many things were common knowledge without any doubt such as:
(1) Economics will grow eternally.
(2) No music, no life (sorry Tower Records)
(3) Human beings will soon reach Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn.
(4) Flying cars will be available within several decades, at the latest by the 21st century.
(5) Animation films or dramas are mostly Sci-Fi based.
(6) Students are attending universities not to study, but to join political movements or some protests.
(7) The whole world will perish soon with nuclear weapons.
All of these expectations were revealed to be untrue, in the 1970’s or later. (The last one was fortunately proven to be not true.) I gradually started to think that the 1960’s were actually very unique, strange, but energetic periods that are completely different from the 1970’s, 80’s, or later. I also knew that there had been some “spiritual” people claiming that the 1960’s had been the start of “new age”.
I am currently addicted to watch Sci-Fi based old TV dramas from the 1960’s. I have so far bought DVDs or Blue-rays: the four series of Irwin Allen dramas (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of The Giants), two of Gerry Anderson’s (Thunderbirds, UFO), and the original series of Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry. By watching them, I can now understand how I was brainwashed or imprinted during the 1960’s as a then kid. In 2018, very few people care about cold war (except concerns for the start of “new” cold war with China), only limited people talk about possible “doomsday”, but such topics were quite seriously considered in many of the above dramas.
Honestly to say, I’m living 50% of my life still in the 1960’s. You can check out any time you like, but you can NEVER leave!

Kyoji Shirai: Shinsen-gumi

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Heibonsha: the first volume of the complete set of public romacnes (Kyoji Shirai)

The current available version of Shinsen-gumi published by Kodansha.

Let me introduce today another great work of Kyoji Shirai, namely “Shinsen-gumi”.
Shinsen-gumi was serialized from 1924 through 1925 on a weekly magazine “Sunday Mainichi”. Sunday Mainichi was published by Mainichi Newspapers Co., Ltd as the first weekly magazine in Japan. As the name shows, the magazine was first published as a Sunday issue of Mainichi newspaper. Since the distinction between normal newspaper and this weekly magazine was not clear for many readers, the number of prints remained stagnant in the early stage. The publisher then tried to make the contents of this weekly magazine clearly different from daily newspapers and it placed Kyoji’s new romance on the top of the magazine. It was a kind of gamble for the publisher, but very interesting stories of Kyoji’s novel attracted many new readers and the financial status of the magazine was thoroughly stabilized.
Another important topic related to this romance is that it was put in the first volume of the Heibonsha’s complete set of public romances, to which Kyoji committed himself very much. The fact that 330 thousands copies were sold for the first volume brought a big success to this set.
Shinsen-gumi was a group of Samurai warriors who guarded Kyoto under the authority of the Tokugawa Shogun regime from around 1863 through 1867. Many members of Shinsen-gumi took rather violent and brutal ways to guard Kyoto and killed many pro-Imperialists by their Japanese swords. Shinsen-gumi was one of the most favored topics for many novelists of public romance at that time.
Kyoji, however, did not write an usual story related to Shinsen-gumi. The story of the romance was mostly of battles between three different schools of spinning tops. Spinning tops were not only toys for kids but also a genre of street performance in Japan. A school of spinning tops here means combination of street performers and meister-level artisans. The first battle was between Orinosuke of Tajimaryu school and Monbee of Kinmonryu school. In this battle, two beautiful ladies were the prize of the battle, and the lady of the lost side had to be gifted to a foreign merchant. The second battle was between Orinosuke and Inosuke of Fushimiryu in Kyoto. In the second battle, both participants tried to get the heart of a lady.
These battels of spinning tops described in this romance were technically very deep and enthusiastic. For example, the both sides selected very special types of wood for their tops and the battle started from guessing which type of wood the counterpart selected. Orinosuke used one very special wood growing on the Nokogiri-yama mountain in Chiba, while Monbee selected one growing on Ontake mountain in Nagano. The Monbee’s top could generate strange wind while it spins trying to weaken the rotation of the counterpart’s top. The Orinosuke’s top, however, was not affected by the wind from the Monbee’s top, since he used a special wood growing on Nokogiri-yama mountain. (It means that Monbee failed to presume the type of wood used for the Orinosuke’s top). This kind of “professional” battles between two craft-persons attracted the then readers much and made them excited.
On the contrary to the battles of tops, Shinsen-gumi plays only in the background of the stories. Orinosuke witnessed the famous Ikedaya incident in which Shisen-gumi killed many famous pro-Imperialists. Kyoji developed a new way of fights between appearing characters in a romance other than sword battles (Chambara). This can be compared to the fact that he adopted a battle by debates in Fuji ni tatsu Kage.
The impression of this romance to the readers was tremendous and people requested Kyoji to write another romance of this type and it distressed Kyoji later for a long period, since he was thinking that he was always trying to change his styles and did not want to stay at the same stage.

TOEIC L&R第234回受験

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TOEIC L&R 第234回を受験しました。場所は明治大学の生田キャンパスで多分3回目です。前回965点取れたのでもういいかと思っていましたが、今回は1年半前の受験時よりリスニングがかなり向上したのではないかと思ってそれを確認するのが主目的でした。しかし、実際は風邪薬を飲んで若干頭がぼうっとしていたせいか、リスニングは苦戦し、よく聞き取れないで山勘で解答したのが数問ありました。下手したら前回より下がっているかもしれません。これに対し、リーディングは特に難しいと思う問題もなく、比較的すらすら解けて、最後は8分くらい余ったので最初の30問を見直して1問修正出来ました。こちらは前回よりいい感じですが、問題が全体的に易しい時は高得点が出にくいと聞いていますので、さてどうなるか。しかしどうでもいいですが受験者の8割以上は大学生に見えます。生年月日を解答用紙にマークシートで記入しますが、西暦の最初の選択肢が1と2があります。後数年で2000年以降生まれの人の比率の方が増えて、2をマークする人の方が多数派になるんだと思います。

Food safety

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The following essay is what I wrote as a writing assignment of an English school AEON. The title this time is “Food Safety” and I described three notorious incidents in Japan.

Topic Food safety
Style Formal

We eat to live, not we live to eat. Food is, however, one of the most essential parts for our health. In the traditional thought of oriental medicine, foods occupy the crucial part of medication. In Japan, we believe that we can drink rather safe water and eat mostly safe foods. Despite the alleged fact that Japan is the safest country in the world for water and foods, it does not mean that Japan is 100% free from risks caused by poisonous water or foods. Let us look at three notorious examples happened in Japan from the late 1950’s to the present:

(1) Morinaga Milk arsenic poisoning incident (1955)
Dry milk corrupted by arsenic produced at the Morinaga’s Tokushima factory killed 130 infants and 12,044 suffered from arsenic intoxication for a long period. This is practically the first incident in Japan where the safety of food was strictly reviewed and the related consumer protests were highly activated. Because this incident happened during the country’s rapid growing period, the then government tried to protect Morinaga rather than to defend the victims and actually oppressed the related consumer activism. In 1969, 14 years after 1955, a professor at Osaka university found that the victims still suffered from aftereffects and it stirred up strong boycott campaign in all over Japan. Morinaga finally accepted its responsibility and closed its Tokushima factory in 1970.

(2) Kanemi oil symptoms (Yusho) incident (1968)
Because of edible oil contaminated by PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl), more than 14,000 people suffered from skin and visceral disorder. Some pregnant mothers gave birth to so called “black babies” and it stunned people all over the world. The oil was produced by Kanemi Warehouse company and PCB that was used as a heat medium in the production line leaked from wrongly allocated pipes and was mixed with edible oil. PCB changes to dioxins once heated and caused many health troubles for the victims. The production and import of PCB were prohibited in 1975, although it had been until then widely used as a good insulating material.

(3) Yukijirushi mass food poisoning incident (2000)
14,780 people who drank Yukijirushi’s low-fat milk described symptoms such as diarrhea, nausea, or abdominal pains. Despite the fortunate fact that no one died, it was the biggest incident related to food safety in Japan. In this case, the reaction of Yukijirushi was quite bad and what the CEO said in an interview was harshly criticized. (He said that he has not slept at all by the incident). Although Yukijirushi was one of the biggest food related companies at that time, it lost its market share in a very short period and it was finally absorbed by another company.
The current relatively safer status for food was built upon such harsh experiences. Some weekly magazines now frequently report the risk of foods imported from China. We can be sure that China will also experience such incidents in the near future. (Please note that many visitors from China to Japan often buy Japanese dry milk including Morinaga’s claiming that they are much safer than Chinese companies’ products. It sounds very ironic.)

Computers

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(The following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of writing English on October 6.)

Title: Computers Style: Casual

I have a CD of Japanese Tokusatsu (special-effects dramas) theme songs. There is a song among them named “Time Limit”, and some very interesting parallel phrases are included in it. Quote:

“Turn around, turn around the earth! Angels inhabit computers. Let’s charge! They give us energy of dream and hope with some items that can increase our happiness.

Stop, stop the earth! Devils inhabit computers. Let’s charge! They bring us to the stage where we hate each other with dark and ambitious energy.” (from the ending theme of Choujinki Metalder, broadcasted in 1987 – 1988)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbxm9OGMUyo

Is a computer an angel or a devil? It is quite an interesting and still imminent question. Now, in 2018, we can rephrase it: Is AI an angel or a devil? Since the early years of the 1960s, there has been naïve belief that computers can do everything. Nearly 60 years later, there are many people who still believe that AI can do everything. I watched recently one such story in Voyage to the bottom of the sea, an old Sci-Fi TV drama broadcasted in the 1960s. In that story, the submarine Seaview was attacked by a huge coelenterata (simply said, just a giant jelly fish), and the skipper Crane asked her computer about necessary evasive actions he should take, and he closely followed the instructions given by the computer. The drama described the then near future, namely the 1970s. We know that even in the 1970s there was no computer that could give us such sophisticated knowledge for something. But who can laugh at Irwin Allen (the director of the drama)? If we remake the drama now, the computer would be replaced by AI, eventually. There is absolutely no difference at all.

It may be true that AI programs will go beyond human beings in the near future. Some scientists expect that in 2045 and call it “singularity”. A clear and famous example is Google’s Alpha Go, AI Go program. The latest version of Alpha Go has made itself stronger and stronger by repeating battles inside it for more than 100 million times. Now the program is alleged to have reached the level that even its programmers could not expect in advance.
Since this essay is “casual”, I won’t discuss this problem further. But honestly to say, I have no answer for the above-mentioned question whether a computer/ AI is an angel or a devil. But I feel like that the year of singularity will come earlier than expected. Thus, the song “Time Limit” may sound like a prophecy, very realistic.         

Bullying in Japan

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(Again, the following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of AEON.)

Topic Bullying in schools
Style Formal

Bullying in Japan is a serious, insidious, wide-spread, and long-lasting problem, not to mention bullying in schools. In the Edo era, there was a custom called “Mura hachibu” in most villages in Japan. It was a form of Japanese ostracizing, and if a resident of a village violated the laws of the village or disturbed the peace, all other residents terminated the communication with him/her in addition to the ban of the usage of common water and fuel. This system was often abused by some leaders of villages as a means of eliminating unfavorable person for them. There was no option other than to leave the village for the person who was declared “Mura hachibu”. Although this custom was judged to be illegal by the supreme court in 1909, we still hear similar cases even now.

If we describe some characteristics of bullying in Japan, the followings can be exemplified:
(1) It is usually done in a closed, small community (including a class in a school).
(2) There is/are a bully or bullies and a/some victim(s) and the others who are just neutral bystanders and are reluctant to stop bullying.
(3) It is mostly conducted in an insidious way, in stealth, without being seen e.g. by a teacher.
(4) It can start without any specific reasons and it usually lasts long.

From above mentioned characteristics of bullying, most cases are difficult to detect from the outside, and many teachers in schools are not aware of them. As for the others aside from bullies and victims, it is quite difficult for them to stop bullying because they fear that they would also be the targets of bullying if they try to stop them.
One of the harshest cases of bullying happened among groups of children who evacuated from the metropolitan areas in Japan during World War II. For example, a Japanese novelist Nobuhiko Kobayashi evacuated from downtown Tokyo to the Hanno city in Saitama. All children who evacuated there experienced serious lack of food and bullying among children was quite harsh. Kobayashi was forced to stand in a urinary pot with bare feet during the night. (He later wrote two novels based on the experiences at that time). There were a plethora of similar stories at that time.
In Japan, people are often implicitly forced “to read the air”, namely to sense the atmosphere in a group and to follow others. If we try to stop bullying in the future, it is vital to strengthen the independence of every single person so that anybody can have a courage to stop bullying.

Nobuhiko Kobayashi, Fuyu no Shinwa (A Myth in Winter)

Nobuhiko Kobayashi, Tokyo Shonen (A Boy in Tokyo)