I think my initial point was more that it’s unusual to see foreign words altered significantly, or outright fabricated (or adapted to new, Japanese-only meanings). My post has been edited to comment on this…

As for teaching religious holidays… Honestly, I wouldn’t even have taught Christmas if I hadn’t been in a bit of a time crunch this year. My assumption going in was that it had probably been done to death by my predecessors, so I’ve been trying to limit my presentations on holidays to personal anecdotes and regional variations. Things they probably HAVEN’T seen yet.

Thanks for the well wishes! I hope DC has some better weather in store this year for you guys than it did the past couple of years

By the way, I get annoyed when American people try to correct my pronunciation of “Iwojima,” “Karate,” “Karaoke,” “Sake,” “futon,” etc… lol…

Have a safe trip home! Merii Kurisumasu!!

Telling our children all to be entrepreneurs is no better than telling them that they should all go to college. It might, however, be worse because of the relative success rate. I’ll take 300 million bored, well-educated middle-managers (~10% of whom are unemployed) over 300 million uneducated “entrepreneurs” (60% of whom are unemployed) any day.

Successful entrepreneurs are successful because they’re motivated to learn what they need to learn to succeed – whatever that is. The problem with our education system is just that: motivation. Not improper direction. Unmotivated college students would be unmotivated aspiring entrepreneurs if we took his advice, and without the academic system they’d be uneducated too. At least this way we give students something to fall back on.

Frankly, if those “special”, “creative” people are truly capable of succeeding as an entrepreneur, they’ll be capable of pulling themselves out of the system or moving beyond it. That’s why people like Zuckerberg never finished college. If those students can’t hack that, or aren’t smart enough to figure out that’s what they need to do… Well, then maybe they’re better suited for Finance, Consulting, IT, or a nice, cozy academia job after all.

I’ll add the book to my list

I recently finished reading Anathem (Neal Stephenson), a thought experiment that touches on the value of universities. Academically-minded folks (lawyers and engineers as well as literary critics and historians) are completely segregated from the rest of society, cloistered into monasteries and consulted as needed. Fun read, if you ever find the time.

Safe travels, and talk soon…