忠義 - Loyalty

In romaji: chuugi. The first Kanji stands for 'chuu' - something along the lines of sincerity, faithfulness and loyalty. The top part of the Kanji represents middle and the bottom represents the heart. The second is 'gi' - right action, duty and justice.

In these times, at least for me, this word has a great significance. I shall write a vague explanation below.

One sensei recently said: 'If you feel you distrust or disagree with your sensei, you must simply leave. At absolutely no point do you betray your sensei.'
And I remember my sensei saying to me and the rest of the new students something along the lines of this: 'The most important thing in choosing a martial art is that you trust the sensei. If you don't trust the sensei, just leave. It is only when you trust the sensei that you feel the most reward.'

Now I drop onto the most frank part. Under no circumstances do you betray your sensei. You may leave, if the entire class disagrees with that sensei, the entire class can leave. But never should a club throw out a sensei, especially one who has taught at that club for over a decade. If they believed that the sensei was taking the wrong direction against their will, leaving will show the force of their will.
Betrayal only makes a mockery of everything that sensei ever taught.

These students were, to put it as nicely as possible, selfish and misled.
As for the few who led the coup; rotten to the core.

Photobucket stats

Just got an email today from photobucket, the standard spammy sort of thing. But something caught my attention - the subject field: 'Your photobucket stats: 374 new views this week'

I thought long and hard about this. What pictures in my albums are hotlinked to sites that would receive quite a few views? I delved further and viewed the more detailed statistics on the photobucket site only to find that out of all the pictures, two were contributing the most to these view counts. In second place...is the animated gif of Shampoo (from Ranma 1/2) placed on a (Shampoo) fan page on myanimelist.net. Back then, I simply saw a niche in the fanpages ie. there wasn't a Shampoo fanpage, and sought to take overwhelming power and monopoly over the fandom of Shampoo. And I haven't done much in the way of tyrannical activity since.
In first place...it's quite obvious, afterall I am suddenly writing on this blog after a few weeks of no longer bothering. The background of this blog has been rigging up stats while I left the blog untouched...this is either paranormal activity, or I sleep surf the internet, or there are actually some poor people out there who end up on this blog. It boggles the mind. Bloody google must have routed people here!

Well...I guess I should keep this up and continue my little reviews and snippets of life. There should be a marked improvement in my posts, I have been heavily influenced by the Japanese culture of prose, poetry and private diaries thanks to a book: 'Japanese Culture' by Paul Varley. My main intention from hereon is to structure this blog like a 'nikki' - basically a private journal of observations and poetry from early times. "Of all Heian prose writing, the private diary (nikki) was commonly thought of as a journey, accounting for daily events in an intimate and personal mode." - Paul Varley.

This is the age of the internet. And I'm sharing my journey with you, even if it was a bit unintentional.