Of Rain and "Sweding" Japanese Anime Films...

Our kids love Studio Ghibli's animated films from Japan, and one of their favorites is about a young pair of sisters who find a magical creature called a Totoro living in their back yard. It's called "My Neighbor Totoro", and we have watched it dozens of times.

Today, amidst the unceasing downpour, Peri asked if we could go outside and play in the rain and mud. While out there, we got the idea to re-enact one of our favorite scenes from the movie. It takes place when, while waiting for their dad to come home on the bus from work, the two girls find themselves standing in the rain with their neighbor, the good natured but giant Totoro (click the link to see the 20 second YouTube clip of the rain scene from "My Neighbor Totoro"). If you like, you can also click the video below to see our attempted "Sweding" of the scene from the movie.

Of Weekends and Seminal "Mecha Anime"...

We watch a lot of Japanese Anime at our house. In fact, over the past five plus years, i'm fond of saying that we've probably consumed more animated entertainment from Japan than from anywhere else in the world, and could probably compete even with most Japanese people for our mastery of the relative plot-lines and universes associated with our favorite series titles. In Eastern Europe last November, i actually spent 90 minutes on a bus from Krakow to Auschwitz with a Japanese exchange student from Tokyo and, combined with my affection for martial arts and history, made him laugh at one point as he commented that i was "probably more Japanese than he was".
At any rate, if you watch much Anime, you can't go for long without engaging the series called Neon Genesis: Evangelion. It's your standard "mecha anime" and revolves around the notion that there are aliens (called "Angels") attacking Earth at regular intervals, and only a crack team of child-piloted giant robots (called Eva's - short for Evangelion) can save the earth from these extra-terrestrial monsters. The Eva's are gigantic, cybernetic creatures capable of their own thought and action (sort-of), and while the plot of the Anime isn't really that unique, it's still considered seminal to many that followed in the same vein.

The "point" of bringing this up is that in each episode, the human EVA pilot must stay "in sync" with the gigantic cyborg he/she controls. At the headquarters of NERV (the covert organization that maintains and deploys the EVA units) a huge board displays a set of nerve and psychographic data for the pilot, and a similar set of nerve and neuro-motor data for the EVA. In order for the EVA to function properly, the pilot and EVA have to be in "perfect sync". Some of the most tense moments in the series occur when a young pilot, distracted or rendered unconscious for some reason, "loses sync" with the nimble creature she is controlling, leaving the immense and heavily armored beast absolutely vulnerable to the inevitable attacks by the assaulting Angels sent to destroy the earth. So... "it all depends on the 'sync'!" No matter how capable your EVA, without "good sync", it's just a pile of cybernetic trash waiting to be hammered by frothing waves of alien firepower.

I feel like this on weekends a lot. My family, when all of us are together, are an "immensely powerful organism capable of repelling even the most aggressive alien attack"! I believe it! We are good together. But our biggest problem often seems to be "maintaining sync" with one another. We all come from such radically different worlds on the weekends. Elijah is in a whole world of activities, relationships and challenges at school. I run like a freak for hours on end here at GCC, and operate in worlds ranging from Indiana to India. Sami and Peri staple down the home with all of its myriad errands and to-do lists. When we all come together for 48 hours on the weekends, there's so much "turbulence" as we all try to figure out each other's relative frequencies that by the time we actually manage to achieve some level of "sync" again, the weekend is over and we all rev up for our separate individual combat environments. I'm sure some families are way better at it than we are, but we're trying to spend some significant time analyzing why for people who love each other as much as we do, what the contributing factors for why we struggle to relax together may be. If anyone has any recommendations, i'd love to hear them.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

So I was in our weekly Missions Dept/Communications Dept meeting on Wednesday morning, and Kem Meyer piped up toward the end and grabbed a copy of Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind from the top of her book shelf. She asked if i was familiar with Pink, and while i hadn't read New Mind, i had heard his name before from discussions with Ron Martoia. Then she told me that Pink had won an award that landed him a stint in Japan studying Manga (it's basically "print Anime"... but don't call it a comic book), and had produced his next work as a treatise on business survival and market leadership, but using the Japanese traditional graphic representation of it for effect. The end result is a fun-looking new book called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. There's a hilarious trailer for the book on Amazon.com, but the general jist is that the protagonist (Johnny Bunko) finds himself in a dead-end job with the Boggs Company and little prospects of advancement or satisfaction. During his time there, he discovers (through his interaction with an attractive "career counselor" named Diana), the 6 critical lessons necessary to understand to survive:

* There is no plan.
* Think strengths, not weaknesses.
* It's not about you.
* Persistence trumps talent.
* Make excellent mistakes.
* Leave an imprint.

I'll be downloading the book for my Kindle tomorrow, and will comment here on my thoughts after finishing it (hopefully) this weekend.

The concept, interestingly, reminds me of an actual Japanese manga/anime called Salaryman Kintaro, which has enjoyed considerably popularity in Japan, and is available for viewing (with English subtitles) here in the States via Netflix (if you're a subscriber). In the series, Kintaro is a former gang leader who decides to join a local corporation after losing his wife. In the corporation, he uses his "street smarts" to challenge long-held corporate protocols, and manages to best most of the corporate moguls in the process by blending his savage "gangsta" tactics with simple nobility and a refusal to do the dishonorable. The series provides interesting social commentary into the Japanese psyche and the tensions often held between the underlying morality of the Bushido-based culture and the bottom-line-driven bloodthirstiness of most corporations.