More than words...

There’s a proverb that states that one picture can say more than thousand words. Since I reached puberty I held the view that one picture could destroy what more than thousands words had carefully build up. I had and still have a preference for books without any illustrations and usually could appreciate movies adapted from books but always liked the book better.
Thus I am perfectly happy with a blog which only consist of my written accounts but there have been remarks from some people that they would like some more visually attractive things to look at.
I like pictures but for me they can’t compete against those little dots of black inkt on paper.
Words possess so much power! They can take you away to worlds you never have been to, can give you new insights about life, can cease wonder and can make you sad or happy.
But words also can pose problems for you. Not just a succession of words, such as a very difficult book, but even just one word can. How can you describe and explain the meaning of a word to somebody else? This is not only the problem of a language student trying to build up a vocabulary but also of academics who use certain words in their books to describe a situation. As an academic you always have to give an account in which way you are using a word and what you are implying with it, because words can carry certain connotations.
One of the most difficult words in the academic discourse is the word culture. I will refrain from exploring all the different meanings that word can have but I want to share with you what my classmates thought would fall under Japanese culture. Because one teacher asked us to name a thing that we associated with Japanese culture. We started off with sadou (the way of the tea), calligraphy, mono no aware, bushidou (the way of the warrior), Zen but soon we moved on to karaoke, manga, anime and convenience stores and not to forget the pachinko halls. I guess that the image you have of Japan partly depends on the things you are interested in and thus what you would like to see in the culture. What strikes me in Japanese culture, is the diversity that you can come across, ranging from very stylised forms from the past to the ultra modern flashy places where people can replace the real world for a virtual one. In Leiden I tried to study the various aspects of the culture by reading books and now I am here I am surrounded by and drowned in all parts of it’s culture , including some that are not really taught at the university. Even though we got a lecture about food culture in Japan during Modern History where we learned that the Japanese used freely their own creativity to make something new out of existing dishes, the banana pizza was a little bit too much of Japanese culture for me and my poor stomach. And thus for once I will let a picture do the talking.