japan education system的八卦，YOUTUBE、PINTEREST和Yahoo名人娛樂都在討論

Am back home from #APEC2018!

Spoke twice at the APEC - Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit yesterday, at the #APEC Leaders’ Retreat and the working lunch. Both times I touched on coping with the disruption caused by digitalisation and technology on our economies.

We need to update current trade rules to address the digitalisation of trade, e.g. cross border flows of data, e-payments, digital standards, and even our approach to AI. At the WTO, Japan, Australia and Singapore are co-convenors of an initiative to develop rules on e-commerce, which will provide business certainty and keep the e-commerce space open. APEC too should pursue initiatives to promote the digital economy.

At lunch I spoke about how we are dealing with economic disruption in Singapore – by building on traditional strengths such as finance, and overcoming traditional constraints through innovation and new technologies. We are also taking care of our people – by making our education system prepare our students for the future economy, by equipping workers with relevant and up-to-date skills, and by looking after workers whose jobs may be displaced by technological disruption. – LHL

China’s “New Squabbling Situation” (Lee Yee)

Yesterday, I mentioned that the US deterred the Soviet Union’s intention to employ nuclear weapons to attack China’s military base in 1969, and since then implemented a half-century policy of interactions with China. Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always said that “the US will never give up their ambition to destroy our nation,” looking back at history, even when the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China in the nineteenth century, the US did not make territorial claims from the Qing empire. Instead, it advocated “open doors to share the benefits equally” to avoid China being carved up. The US’ share of the Boxer’s indemnity has been gradually paid back through the training of Chinese talents and the studying of Chinese students in the US. The Rockefeller Foundation founded the Peking Union Medical College (PUMCH) in 1917, the predecessor of Tsinghua University, bringing modern western medicine into China. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, a veteran American military aviator Claire Lee Chennault was hired as an aviation adviser and trainer in China. He organized the First American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Republic of China Air Force, nicknamed the Flying Tigers, and assisted China in fighting against the Japanese in World War II.

In response to the anti-China speech given by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a mainland Chinese netizen commented, “you needed education, they gave you Tsinghua University; you needed medical care, they gave you PUMCH; you needed to fight against Japan, they gave you the Flying Tigers; you needed to oppose the Soviet Union, they gave you a platform; you needed to open up, they gave you foreign funding; you needed trade, they gave you a trade surplus...You say that they have an endless ambition to destroy your nation, they will give it a try!” This is a very vivid description of how Sino-US relations have evolved so far.

Just a few days before Pompeo delivered his “Communist China and the Free World’s Future” speech, Chinese State Councilor and Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi also gave a long speech at the inaugural ceremony of the Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy Studies Centre on July 20. The speech was titled, “Study and Implement Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy Conscientiously and Break New Ground in Major-Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics." I share the URL here ( https://www.sohu.com/a/408705618_99900926 ) and strongly recommend readers to browse this masterpiece. Let’s see if anyone can tell me after reading it, what is the content of Wang’s three to four thousand words on “Xi’s Thought on Diplomacy,” and what specific facts were there about “breaking new ground in major-country diplomacy.” Nowadays, the daily news is about Western countries’ policies, acts, and speeches directed at China and Hong Kong. Mainland netizens have recently lined up the front-page headlines of the Chinese internal newspaper “Reference News,” and they were all, “China condemns…, China warns the UK…, China is resolute to fight back…” This is not at all a new diplomatic situation but a new squabbling situation.”

After reading Wang’s speech, why not make a comparison to see if this Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has the same ranking as the US Secretary of State, is of the same caliber and merit as Pompeo? Then you will understand why the US now refuses to restart dialogue with China and only looks at China’s actions.

Looking at the successive Chinese foreign ministers after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, with the exception of the time during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi to Qian Qichen were all decent. I still remember that after the breakthrough in Sino-US relations in 1971, the New York Times columnist James Reston visited Zhou Enlai in China and their battle of words was brilliant. Why does the current foreign minister only speak empty words but know not what they are?

Of course, this is related to the current situation in China for the apotheosis of the core leader. In addition to the unknown “Xi Jinping’s Thought on Diplomacy,” there will be “Xi Jinping’s Thought on Economics, Education, Military…” one after another.

A netizen quoted Wang’s speech and left a comment, “Brown-nosing is linguistic corruption and spiritual bribery...The giver only has to expend dignity and cunning with words, and the recipient is rewarded with personality and public interests. It is consensual for both giver and taker, and they usually have a tacit understanding where they jointly commit an ugly conspiracy...In a totalitarian society, brown-nosing is a multiple outbreak and refractory Covid-19. After an organized and large-scale epidemic, it will eventually become an incurable disease of personality cult detrimental to the entire nation and society.”

German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that “the nature of folly is a moral rather than an intellectual defect.” I believe this moral defect stems from a totalitarian system. When power becomes absolute, all those in power at various levels will, as Lu Xun said, “fawn upon their superiors and be overbearing upon those below.” The regime causes those with authority to never hear the true voice, how is this not stupid?

Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….

2012年7月11日/3歳1ヶ月　Dad makes a point of taking a walk a morning.
Dad began preparations for jogging.
Rino who woke early in the morning says "Where do you go to? I go, too!".
This is an early morning occurrence of about 5:00 a.m.
She does not usually get up so early in the morning.
She seems to know where dad goes to early in the morning when.
Dad stopped jogging and decided to take a walk on that morning with her.

1時間30分の長めの散歩（笑）

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2012年2月12日/2歳8ヶ月　　While a mom prepares for the lunch; Dad and Rino have a chat.
She did the quiz of dad and the animal.
Then the lunch was ready.
Dad asks her "Do you eat, too?"
Rino replies "I eat, too!"
Dad say "No, you may not."
Rino replies "The difference! No, you may not."
Dad say "You never takes any notice of what dad says."
Rino replies "Not no."

叱り方も成長してきた（笑）

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2013年4月27日/1歳6ヶ月　Yuuma loves opening and shutting of the doors.
He opens a door to look for a mom of the other side of the door on that day.
He who was called by dad opens a door again, but he closes a door for some reason.
Dad calls him many times, but he is crazy about the opening and shutting of the door.

臭い残して立ち去る（笑）

☆傷つくことを言う...( ﾉД`)Rino
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVoktIYewxA

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