Kakuta Haruo---Decoding Japan---

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Location: Sakai, Osaka, Japan

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Branding English Classes

Establishing the identity of a course will strengthen the brand equity of the course. The stronger brand equity of each course can be woven into a web of brand equity, which enhances the school identity of Sumiyoshi Senior High School.

"Establishing a school identity can give your children a sense of security and help them to feel 'normal'. ... The more you put into your school identity, the more unity and pride your kids will feel." (Beverly Hernandez, "Establishing a School Identity")
Obviously, The stronger school identity makes students more motivated and confident.
"An effective brand strategy will create a unique identity that will differentiate you from the competition." (Laura Lake, "Developing Your Brand Strategy ")
If we can establish more effective brand strategy, we can enjoy a stronger school identity.
To establish more effective brand strategy, we have to
"analyze the factors of brand equity which underlie brand strategy." (Osuga Akira, "The Relationship between Brand Strategy and Brand Equity", Journal of business and economics, 2005, Vol.51, No.3(20050331) pp. 363-376, Kinki University)
By analyzing the factors of brand equity, we can
"clarify the relationship between brand strategy and the key factors of brand equity." (Osuga, ibid.)
All in all, we can, and have to, accumulate course identities and accumulate brand equity to strengthen school identity. Thinking through a more effective brand strategy is the key of the accumulation, and is very important for Sumiyoshi Senior High School, which is in an accumulation crisis.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Haru ya Mukashi (translation) (1)

Spring is ... in times gone by.
A really small country is trying to get civilized.
One of the islands of the country is Shikoku Island, and Shikoku is divided into Sanuki, Awa, Tosa, and Iyo. The capital of Iyo is Matsuyama.
The castle is called Matsuyama-joh Castle. The castle town has the population of 30,000 including samurai. In the middle of the urban area, there lies a hill, which looks like an iron pot upside-down. The hill is covered with red pine trees. You can see, through the trees, 20-yard high stone walls grow into the heaven. High above the walls against the heaven of the Seto Inland Sea, there stands a three-layered donjon. From earlier days, Matsuyama Castle has been praised to be the biggest castle in Shikoku. With the elegant landscape around, however, the stone walls and turrets don't look that coercive.
We may say the main character of this story is small Japan at this time. We, however, should follow three people. One of the three became a haiku poet. He is Masaoka Shiki, who became the father of the restoration of Japanese traditional short poems such as haiku and tanka, by breathing new life into them. Shiki, in the 28th year of Meiji, came back to this home town, and made this haiku:

Spring's in the castle town
of three thousand samurai
in times gone by
This haiku's flaw might be that it is rather too lovely. Shiki sang the praise of the relaxed humanity and scenery of Iyo Matsuyama in a relaxed manner, while Ishikawa Takuboku, who started making haiku after Shiki, had a complex feeling toward his hometown. The difference might have been caused by the different climates and features of Toh'hoku and Nankai-doh, the Northeastern district and the Southern-sea district.
"Shin-san"
Akiyama Shinzaburoh Yoshifuru was called so, and was born as a child of o-kachi, an infantry samurai. O-kachi is a class higher than ashigaru, a footman, but cannot claim to be joh-shi, a knight. Akiyama Family has been given as little as 10 koku, nominaly 4 bushels of rice, as a stipend by the lord for generations. Shin-san was born in the 6th year of Ansei, in 1859, as a 7-month-born baby. He, however, grew up to be a big man. Being a premature baby might not affect their later growth.
In the spring when Shin-san got 10 years old, an incident broke out, which upset the feudal clan, the castle, and Akiyama Family.
The Meiji Restoration was that.
"Tosa soldiers are coming to the town!"
Thus, the feudal clan, their men, and the townspeople were all frightened. The lord of the feudal clan is Hisamatsu Clan. Tokugawa Ieyasu's stepbrother was the ancestor of the clan, and had enjoyed special conditions than other 300 clans. At the end of Edo Period, the clan were ordered by Shogunate to cross the sea for the Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh, and fought within Choh-shuh's territory. In short, from the division of the era, they belonged to the pro-Shogunate.
In the same island, Shikoku, Tosa belongs to the loyalist army. Tosa State come up to north, with only less than 200 men, to occupy Matsuyama State.
"Surrender to Imperial Government. Pay the government the reparation of 150,000 ryo [nominally half a ton of gold]."
A young commander from Tosa demanded. The clan was thrown into an upheaval, but decided to follow the demand. The castle, the town, and the territory were all temporally under the rule of Tosa in the form of a protectorate. Signs were put up at government offices and temples in the castle town:
"Tosa Temporary Camp"
Shin-san, who saw the scenes at the age of 10, could not forget them through his whole life.
"Remembering those scenes rises my anger even today,"
He revealed years later in his letter from Paris.
Iyo Matsuyama has fertile hinterland, rich harvest, mild climates, and even Dohgo Hot Spring in its outskirts. Everything there is peaceful and relaxing. People there naturally lack fighting spirits.
This clan was defeated in the Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh. Instead of being chagrined at the defeat, they made a chant.
The war in Choh-shuh, de and feat,
like a cat within a bag,
in a crawl made a retreat.
Even samurai children sang the chant.
Speaking of defeats, they lost in Toba-Fushimi too. The men ran away home across the sea. They lost and lost, and even their castle and territory came to be charged by Tosa State.

Bakumatsu Pilgrimage in the Western Seto Inland Sea (2nd draft)

“I'd rather go to Suwoh-Ohshima,” said my younger daughter. “What on the earth is it?” asked my wife. “A tiny island occupied by Tokugawa Shogunate Navy at the beginning of the Second Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh,” said I. “What are there?” asked her mother. “I just want to immerse myself in the air there,” replied the girl.
Thus our pilgrimage to Suwoh, the eastern half of today's Yamaguchi Prefecture, started.
Suwoh-Ohshima is just a strait away from Honshu Island, and is hooked with a bridge today. Yet, the island is not along Shinkansen Line, and you must take a local train and a bus for hours to get there even from its nearest Shinkansen station, Iwakuni. The most convenient way to visit the island may be hiring a rental car.
The most reasonable way to get around there is by long-distance bus. A night bus runs to Shimonoseki, the largest city in Yamaguchi, and stops at Iwakuni on its way. A day bus runs either to Hiroshima or Kokura, but both of them arrive there in the afternoon and leaves there early in the morning. If I were much younger, I would plan a four-day trip with two stays on the bus and one stay in a hotel. That sounds like a suicide to today's me.
An idea hit me. A day bus runs to Matsuyama very often, as often as to Kochi, where we visited last spring. We might take a ferry to Suwoh-Ohshima from Mitsuhama, a port town near Matsuyama. The sea used to be a road rather than a boundary.
The itinerary has, however, a risk. August 18/19 is just after Bon holidays. Beach hotels and inns must be still busy, being occupied with sea bathers. It may be at the start of a typhoon season as well. That might be worked out by staying in Matsuyama, although our stay in Suwoh-Ohshima will be a short one.
Preparing for the trip, I watch a TV program on Beijing Olympics. The announcer shouts: “Toki o koete, yume o tsunagu” (To pass the dream over the history), as a captain of the Japanese male gymnastics team lands to gain their silver medal after the gold in Athens.
The port of Matsuyama has 3 districts. Its oldest district is called Mitsu-hama Port. The history of Mitsu-hama Port goes back to Muromachi Period, when Kohno Clan castled to the opposite bank (Minato-yama Joh, namely Port-Mountain Castle), and made it to the base of their Navy.
Kohno Clan used to be the biggest clan in Iyo, the Northwestern part of Shikoku Island, and prosperous for about 400 years till it was subverted by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1585.
It is in this Mitsu-hama Port that Natsume Sohseki got off when he came for his post to Matsuyama in 1895, and thus the port became one of the stages of the popular novel Bocchan, one of two youth-market-oriented well-known novels by Sohseki. Of course at that time, there was not a satisfactory wharf, and was only a summer-house-like waiting room as an equipment of the port. People used to take a shallop to land from a ship which dropped anchor off the shore.
Today, a car ferry sails to Yanai Port in Yamaguchi Prefecture from Mitsu-hama Port.
In the Autumn of 1853, Murata Zohroku, later known as Ohmura Masujiroh, a founder of modern Japanese Army, sailed from Yanai to Matsuyama on his way from Choh-shuh to Uwajima for his post. That is the one of two reasons why my daughter wanted to visit Suwoh-ohshima.
Ohmura had wanted to sail directly from Yanai to Matsuyama, but having found no service available, and having made up his mind to go island-by-island, he took a boat from Tohsaki to Suoh-ohshima. According to Shiba Ryotaro's Kahin, he arrived at Komatsu Port on the island, and stayed there for one night. My daughter had wanted to breathe the air Murata (or Ohmura) breathed.
Out of Mitsuhama Port, there stands Iyo-ko-Fuji (“A Mt. Fuji in Iyo”: named after Mt. Fuji near Tokyo, to show their admiration to the mountain or that to the central culture). We leave Mitsuhama Port westward, past Iyo-ko-Fuji, Tsuji-jima, which has one of the oldest western-style modern lighthouse, Koichi-jima, Yoko-jima, and Futagami-jima. Now we are in the easternmost teritorial waters of medieval Suwoh Country. We sail through the strait between Nasake-jima, the easternmost tiny inhabited island of Suwoh just having Moro-jima, an uninhabited island, a channel east, and Suwoh-Ohshima, and land at Ihoda, the easternmost port of the island. Here sleeps one of the last medieval pirates, Shima Yoshitoshi (?-1602). In Edo Period, people's world was Han (a feudal domain) they belonged to. Yoshitoshi and his men seem as if they were turning their back on the world, later known as Choh-shuh Han.
Yoshitoshi worked and fought for Murakami Takeyoshi (1533-1604), who led Noshima Branch of Murakami Clan, one of the biggest navy or pirate clans in medieval Japan, and enjoyed the control of the Western Seto Inland Sea in his days. Three branches of the clan, castling in three tiny islands (Noshima, Kurushima, and In'noshima) in the inland sea between Honshu Island and Shikoku Island, sometimes worked and fought for Kohno Clan in Shikoku, sometimes for Mohri Clan in Honshu, and other times for themselves; sometimes together, and sometimes separately, fighting each other.
As early as in 838, the central government of Japan at the time issued an order for their local governments around the Seto Inland Sea to chase and arrest pirates. A century later, Fujiwara Sumitomo (?-941) was Iyo no Joh, a third-ranked local official, to chase and arrest pirates, but did not come back to the capital in 934 even after his term there ended. From here, we have two stories. One story says that, in Hiburi-jima Island in 936, more than 2500 pirates surrendered to him. Another story says that, in the same island in the same year, Sumitomo gathered more than 1000 boats to start his rebellion. Anyway, he attacked the local capitals of Iyo and Sanuki in 939, but was defeated by Ono Yoshifuru (884-968), who had been appointed as general to chase and arrest Sumitomo.
After 7 and a half centuries after the first order, Pirate Prohibition was issued once again by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. This time, it worked. Navy clans' powers including Murakami's were forced to decline. Isn't it interesting that the difference between navies and pirates had been so unclear? Ever since Sumitomo's time?
At last, Noshima Branch of Murakami Clan was secluded into Suwoh-Ohsima after Seki-ga-hara War, as they fought with Mohri Clan against Tokugawa Clan. Mohri Clan was reduced into the westernmost two countries in Honshu Island, Nagato and Suwoh. Isn't it interesting again that Mohri was reduced into almost ¼, while Murakami was “reduced” into an island which is 51 times larger than Noshima? Mohri's two countries were later called Choh-shuh with Nagato's first character, naga or choh. Ihoda is at the easternmost tip of the easternmost island of Choh-shuh. Murakami Takeyoshi's grave is also just a mile west from the port. Takeyoshi and Yoshitoshi themselves, and their successors or descendants as well were not turning their back to the West, but were turning their face to the East. The war between Choh-shuh and Tokugawa Shogunate started in this island 261 years after Takeyoshi's death, or 263 after Yoshitoshi's. Were their dreams passed over the history?
The second reason why my daughter wanted to visit the island is that it is an old battlefield of the war between Choh-shuh and Bakufu, Tokugawa Shogunate, in the year 1865. The war has 3 kinds of names. If you are pro-Shogunate, you call it Choh-shuh Seibatsu, Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh. If you stand neutral, you may call it Choh-Baku Sensoh, the War between Choh-shuh and Bakufu. If you lived in Cho-shu at that time, you definitely called it Shi-kyo Sensoh, Four Fronts War.
Kashin writes; “Shogunate had formulated the strategy; 'first of all, to attack Ohshima with its fleet, to land the Army soldiers and occupy the whole island, and to make Kuga Port a temporary naval port' to have command of the Western Seto Inland Sea.”
From Ihoda Port, we are driving further westward. After more than half an hour drive, we are standing at the beach of Kuga, facing Mae-jima off the shore.
“In Ohshima's coast of Kuga, the Shogunate fleet of warships, each with 1000 tons or more, is heavily anchored. Those days, night attack was considered to be impossible in naval battles. Takasugi Shinsaku, a well known revolutionist and military tactician at Bakumatsu, the end of Edo Period, dared do it. His military ship alone opened fire against Shogunate fleet, which had turned off their steam, and ran away into the dark with its lamplights off. Having only light cannons, the physical damage he gave was not so big, but the psychological fear was so huge that the fleet escaped from the sea around Choh-shu to the east in panic, with their beached blue forces left. After a while, they were unseated from the island.”
My daughter is breathing the air people of Kuga and soldiers of Bakufu breathed. After her long breath for about a half hour, we are examining stone statues in a bush near the beach. They were built in 1891, the 24th year of Meiji, 26 years later to memorize the war. Coincidentally, the Sino=Japanese War, the first full-scale external war as modern Japan, broke out 3 years after the erection. It seems as if the monuments had been the preparation of patriotism for the coming wars; the Russo=Japanese War, World War I, and so on, rather than recollections of the past heroic loyalism.
We are driving eastward to go back to Matsuyama. Past Ihoda, we drive a little bit southward across a small mountain pass and its tunnel. Now we are in Johsei-Ji Temple, which commands the view of a fishing village, Yuh.
“The first attack was on a morning, June 7. A battleship of Tokugawa Shogunate came, sailed around Ohshima, bombarded the fishing villages Agenoshoh, Tononyuh, and Yuh to burn out, and left somewhere. The next day, the Shogunate Army and Navy raided Ohshima in force. They bombarded several places, and landed soldiers afterward.”
One web-page argues there is a hole made by a bomb on its stone wall, but we can hardly tell which hole was made at the time.
We have left Ihoda Port at dusk, and are sailing back to Matsuyama in a total darkness now. There sometimes pass some boats with tiny lights. They appear from the darkness almost suddenly, at least it seems to me. I wonder how Takasugi Shinsaku dare to make up his mind to attack the Shogunate fleet, and how lucky he was to arrive at the sea without being wrecked on the way in the darkness.
We have another reason why we have chosen Matsuyama route. Matsuyama has Saka-no-ue-no-Kumo Museum.
The novel Saka no ue no Kumo starts as:
“A really small country is trying to get civilized.
“One of the islands of the country is Shikoku Island, and Shikoku is divided into Sanuki, Awa, Tosa, and Iyo. The capital of Iyo is Matsuyama.”
Matsuyama is a birth place of Akiyama Yoshifuru (1859-1930), Akiyama Saneyuki (1868-1918), and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Saka no ue no Kumo continues:
“We may say the main character of this story is small Japan at this time. We, however, should follow three people.”
After staying at a hotel in front of JR Matsuyama Station, we are following the three people.
First, Masaoka Shiki. We leave the hotel, and drive a little bit southward in the city of Matsuyama following the direction of a car navigation system. We are definitely around Shiki Doh House, his birth place, but can find no sign showing its entrance. We keep driving in despair, this time eastward, toward Dohgo Hot Spring area. Kohno Clan's main castle used to be in this area, and was called Yu-duki Joh, (namely Hot-spring Built Castle). The castle is now Dohgo Park.
Shiki Memorial Museum is built in the north area of Dohgo Park. The museum has collections of his original handwritten manuscripts, copies of his publications at the time, and related materials such as his bag and so on. We are impressed with the quantity and quality of their collections, and also overpowered by how productive Shiki was. Shiki started editing "Shuji-gaku Zairyoh" (Rhetoric Materials) as early as in 1889, or as the latest in1891. He made 65 notebooks of 3 categories: seasonal words, things and affairs, and forms. He also made another notebook on tones. Furthermore, with those materials, he edited a tree diagram of the relationship among haiku poets, and a chronological table of haiku. It is also surprising that so many collections have not been scattered and lost. We must pay respect to his survived family and followers as well as to the good job of the museum.
He was actually struggling to reform haiku, tanka, and novels in Japan. He researched and classified almost all haiku published during Edo Period, and organized three types of literary salons for haiku, tanka, and Japanese novels. Each of the salons produced distinguished talents of the field. Natsume Sohseki was only an example of many. Shiki also was working as a newspaper reporter, and even tried to report the Sino=Japanese War.
Saka no ue no Kumo's author, Shiba Ryohtaroh, tried to describe how Japan modernized itself by writing a story of struggling young people at the time.
Akiyama Brothers struggled to defeat Russia in battlefields. At the war time, the elder brother, Yoshifuru, was a cavalry brigade commander, and the younger, Saneyuki, was a Navy staff officer.
The birth house of the brothers shows how poor they used to be, and Saka-no-ue-no-Kumo Museum tells how many people have been moved by the story, but the both lack the exhibits which show how hard they had struggled. Without the contents, they are just a showcase of a success story or a sightseeing attraction.
Shiba writes about his interest in the stage of Japanese history:
“The 30 years or more after the Meiji Restoration till Russo-Japanese War is very distinctive in the history of Japanese culture and mentality, in its long history.
“There used to be no age as optimistic as this.”
He thought people at the time were, however poor they were, optimistically struggling to progress:
“Optimists walk forward, as often the case in such an era, just looking ahead. As a cloud in a blue heaven shines over a hill they are climbing, they keep climbing the hill fixing their eyes just on the cloud.”
Have we ever caught the cloud?

Friday, August 22, 2008

Bakumatsu Pilgrimage in the Western Seto Inland Sea (1st draft)

“I'd rather go to Suwoh-Ohshima,” said my younger daughter. “What on the earth is it?” asked my wife. “A tiny island occupied by Tokugawa Shogunate Navy at the beginning of the Second Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh,” said I. “What are there?” asked her mother. “I just want to immerse myself in the air there,” replied the girl.
Thus our pilgrimage to Suwoh, the eastern half of today's Yamaguchi Prefecture, started.
Suwoh-Ohshima is just a strait away from Honshu Island, and is hooked with a bridge today. Yet, the island is not along Shinkansen Line, and you must take a local train and a bus for hours to get there even from its nearest Shinkansen station, Iwakuni. The most convenient way to visit the island may be hiring a rental car.
The most reasonable way to get around there is by long-distance bus. A night bus runs to Shimonoseki, the largest city in Yamaguchi, and stops at Iwakuni on its way. A day bus runs either to Hiroshima or Kokura, but both of them arrive there in the afternoon and leaves there early in the morning. If I were much younger, I would plan a four-day trip with two stays on the bus and one stay in a hotel. That sounds like a suicide to today's me.
An idea hit me. A day bus runs to Matsuyama very often, as often as to Kochi, where we visited last spring. We might take a ferry to Suwoh-Ohshima from Mitsuhama, a port town near Matsuyama. The sea used to be a road rather than a boundary.
The itinerary has, however, a risk. August 18/19 is just after Bon holidays. Beach hotels and inns must be still busy, being occupied with sea bathers. It may be at the start of a typhoon season as well. That might be worked out by staying in Matsuyama, although our stay in Suwoh-Ohshima will be a short one.
Preparing for the trip, I watch a TV program on Beijing Olympics. The announcer shouts: “Toki o koete, yume o tsunagu” (To pass the dream over the history), as a captain of the Japanese male gymnastics team lands to gain their silver medal after the gold in Athens.
The port of Matsuyama has 3 districts. Its oldest district is called Mitsu-hama Port. The history of Mitsu-hama Port goes back to Muromachi Period, when Kohno Clan castled to the opposite bank (Minato-yama Joh, namely Port-Mountain Castle), and made it to the base of their Navy.
Kohno Clan used to be the biggest clan in Iyo, the Northwestern part of Shikoku Island, and prosperous for about 400 years till it was subverted by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1585.
It is in this Mitsu-hama Port that Natsume Sohseki got off when he came for his post to Matsuyama in 1895, and thus the port became one of the stages of the popular novel Bocchan, one of two youth-market-oriented well-known novels by Sohseki. Of course at that time, there was not a satisfactory wharf, and was only a summer-house-like waiting room as an equipment of the port. People used to take a shallop to land from a ship which dropped anchor off the shore.
Today, a car ferry sails to Yanai Port in Yamaguchi Prefecture from Mitsu-hama Port.
In the Autumn of 1853, Murata Zohroku, later known as Ohmura Masujiroh, a founder of modern Japanese Army, sailed from Yanai to Matsuyama on his way from Choh-shuh to Uwajima for his post. That is the one of two reasons why my daughter wanted to visit Suwoh-ohshima.
Ohmura had wanted to sail directly from Yanai to Matsuyama, but having found no service available, and having made up his mind to go island-by-island, he took a boat from Tohsaki to Suoh-ohshima. According to Shiba Ryotaro's Kahin, he arrived at Komatsu Port on the island, and stayed there for one night. My daughter had wanted to breathe the air Murata (or Ohmura) breathed.
Out of Mitsuhama Port, there stands Iyo-ko-Fuji (“A Mt. Fuji in Iyo”: named after Mt. Fuji near Tokyo, to show their admiration to the mountain or that to the central culture). We leave Mitsuhama Port westward, past Iyo-ko-Fuji, Tsuji-jima, which has one of the oldest western-style modern lighthouse, Koichi-jima, Yoko-jima, and Futagami-jima. Now we are in the easternmost teritorial waters of medieval Suwoh Country. We sail through the strait between Nasake-jima, the easternmost tiny inhabited island of Suwoh just having Moro-jima, an uninhabited island, a channel east, and Suwoh-Ohshima, and land at Ihoda, the easternmost port of the island. Here sleeps one of the last medieval pirates, Shima Yoshitoshi (?-1602). In Edo Period, people's world was Han (a feudal domain) they belonged to. Yoshitoshi and his men seem as if they were turning their back on the world, later known as Choh-shuh Han.
Yoshitoshi worked and fought for Murakami Takeyoshi (1533-1604), who led Noshima Branch of Murakami Clan, one of the biggest navy or pirate clans in medieval Japan, and enjoyed the control of the Western Seto Inland Sea in his days. Three branches of the clan, castling in three tiny islands (Noshima, Kurushima, and In'noshima) in the inland sea between Honshu Island and Shikoku Island, sometimes worked and fought for Kohno Clan in Shikoku, sometimes for Mohri Clan in Honshu, and other times for themselves; sometimes together, and sometimes separately, fighting each other.
As early as in 838, the central government of Japan at the time issued an order for their local governments around the Seto Inland Sea to chase and arrest pirates. A century later, Fujiwara Sumitomo (?-941) was Iyo no Joh, a third-ranked local official, to chase and arrest pirates, but did not come back to the capital in 934 even after his term there ended. From here, we have two stories. One story says that, in Hiburi-jima Island in 936, more than 2500 pirates surrendered to him. Another story says that, in the same island in the same year, Sumitomo gathered more than 1000 boats to start his rebellion. Anyway, he attacked the local capitals of Iyo and Sanuki in 939, but was defeated by Ono Yoshifuru (884-968), who had been appointed as general to chase and arrest Sumitomo.
After 7 and a half centuries after the first order, Pirate Prohibition was issued once again by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. This time, it worked. Navy clans' power including Murakami's were forced to decline. Isn't it interesting that the difference between navies and pirates had been so unclear? Ever since Sumitomo's time?
At last, Noshima Branch of Murakami Clan was secluded into Suwoh-Ohsima after Seki-ga-hara War, as they fought with Mohri Clan against Tokugawa Clan. Mohri Clan was reduced into the westernmost two countries in Honshu Island, Nagato and Suwoh. Isn't it interesting again that Mohri was reduced into almost ¼, while Murakami was “reduced” into an island which is 51 times larger than Noshima? Mohri's two countries were later called Choh-shuh with Nagato's first character, naga or choh. Ihoda is at the easternmost tip of the easternmost island of Choh-shuh. Murakami Takeyoshi's grave is also just a mile west from the port. Takeyoshi and Yoshitoshi themselves, and their successors or descendants as well were not turning their back to the West, but were turning their face to the East. The war between Choh-shuh and Tokugawa Shogunate started in this island 261 years after Takeyoshi's death, or 263 after Yoshitoshi's. Were their dreams passed over the history?
The second reason why my daughter wanted to visit the island is that it is an old battlefield of the war between Choh-shuh and Bakufu, Tokugawa Shogunate, in the year 1865. The war has 3 kinds of names. If you are pro-Shogunate, you call it Choh-shuh Seibatsu, Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh. If you stand neutral, you may call it Choh-Baku Sensoh, the War between Choh-shuh and Bakufu. If you lived in Cho-shu at that time, you definitely called it Shi-kyo Sensoh, Four Fronts War.
Kashin writes; “Shogunate had formulated the strategy; 'first of all, to attack Ohshima with its fleet, to land the Army soldiers and occupy the whole island, and to make Kuga Port a temporary naval port' to have command of the Western Seto Inland Sea.”
From Ihoda Port, we are driving further westward. After more than half an hour drive, we are standing at the beach of Kuga, facing Mae-jima off the shore.
“In Ohshima's coast of Kuga, the Shogunate fleet of warships, each with 1000 tons or more, is heavily anchored. Those days, night attack was considered to be impossible in naval battles. Takasugi Shinsaku, a well known revolutionist and military tactician at Bakumatsu, the end of Edo Period, dared do it. His military ship alone opened fire against Shogunate fleet, which had turned off their steam, and ran away into the dark with its lamplights off. Having only light cannons, the physical damage he gave was not so big, but the psychological fear was so huge that the fleet escaped from the sea around Choh-shu to the east in panic, with their beached blue forces left. After a while, they were unseated from the island.”
My daughter is breathing the air people of Kuga and soldiers of Bakufu breathed. After her long breath for about a half hour, we are examining stone statues in a bush near the beach. They were built in 1891, the 24th year of Meiji, 26 years later to memorize the war. Coincidentally, the Sino=Japanese War, the first full-scale external war as modern Japan, broke out 3 years after the erection. It seems as if the monuments had been the preparation of patriotism for the coming wars; the Russo=Japanese War, World War I, and so on, rather than recollections of the past heroic loyalism.
We are driving eastward to go back to Matsuyama. Past Ihoda, we drive a little bit southward across a small mountain pass and its tunnel. Now we are in Johsei-Ji Temple, which commands the view of a fishing village, Yuh.
“The first attack was on a morning, June 7. A battleship of Tokugawa Shogunate came, sailed around Ohshima, bombarded the fishing villages Agenoshoh, Tononyuh, and Yuh to burn out, and left somewhere. The next day, the Shogunate Army and Navy raided Ohshima in force. They bombarded several places, and landed soldiers afterward.”
One web-page argues there is a hole made by a bomb on its stone wall, but we can hardly tell which hole was made at the time.
We have left Ihoda Port at dusk, and are sailing back to Matsuyama in a total darkness now. There sometimes pass some boats with tiny lights. They appear from the darkness almost suddenly, at least it seems to me. I wonder how Takasugi Shinsaku dare to make up his mind to attack the Shogunate fleet, and how lucky he was to arrive at the sea without being wrecked on the way in the darkness.
We have another reason why we have chosen Matsuyama route. Matsuyama has Saka-no-ue-no-Kumo Museum.
The novel Saka no ue no Kumo starts as:
“A really small country is trying to get civilized.
“One of the islands of the country is Shikoku Island, and Shikoku is divided into Sanuki, Awa, Tosa, and Iyo. The capital of Iyo is Matsuyama.”
Matsuyama is a birth place of Akiyama Yoshifuru (1859-1930), Akiyama Saneyuki (1868-1918), and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Saka no ue no Kumo continues:
“We may say the main character of this story is small Japan at this time. We, however, should follow three people.”
After staying at a hotel in front of JR Matsuyama Station, we are following the three people.
First, Masaoka Shiki. We leave the hotel, and drive a little bit southward in the city of Matsuyama following the direction of a car navigation system. We are definitely around Shiki Doh House, his birth place, but can find no sign showing its entrance. We keep driving in despair, this time eastward, toward Dohgo Hot Spring area. Kohno Clan's main castle used to be in this area, and was called Yu-duki Joh, (namely Hot-spring Built Castle). The castle is now Dohgo Park.
Shiki Memorial Museum is built in the north area of Dohgo Park. The museum has collections of his original handwritten manuscripts, copies of his publications at the time, and related materials such as his bag and so on. We are impressed with the quantity and quality of their collections, and also overpowered by how productive Shiki was. Shiki started editing "Shuji-gaku Zairyoh" (Rhetoric Materials) as early as in 1889, or as late as in1891. He made 65 notebooks of 3 categories: seasonal words, things and affairs, and forms. He also made another notebook on tones. Furthermore, with those materials, he edited a tree diagram of the relationship among haiku poets, and a chronological table of haiku. It is also surprising that so many collections have not been scattered and lost. We must pay respect to his survived family and followers as well as to the good job of the museum.
He was actually struggling to reform haiku, tanka, and novels in Japan. He researched and classified almost all haiku published during Edo Period, and organized three types of literary salons for haiku, tanka, and Japanese novels. Each of the salons produced distinguished talents of the field. Natsume Sohseki was only an example of many. Shiki also was working as a newspaper reporter, and even tried to report the Sino=Japanese War.
Saka no ue no Kumo's author, Shiba Ryohtaroh, tried to describe how Japan modernized itself by writing a story of struggling young people at the time.
Akiyama Brothers struggled to defeat Russia in battlefields. At the war time, the elder brother, Yoshifuru, was a cavalry brigade commander, and the younger, Saneyuki, was a Navy staff officer.
The birth house of the brothers shows how poor they used to be, and Saka-no-ue-no-Kumo Museum tells how many people have been moved by the story, but the both lack the exhibits which show how hard they had struggled. Without the contents, they are just a showcase of a success story or a sightseeing attraction.
Shiba writes about his interest in the stage of Japanese history:
“The 30 years or more after the Meiji Restoration till Russo-Japanese War is very distinctive in the history of Japanese culture and mentality, in its long history.
“There used to be no age as optimistic as this.”
He thought people at the time were, however poor they were, optimistically struggling to progress:
“Optimists walk forward, as often the case in such an era, just looking ahead. As a cloud in a blue heaven shines over a hill they are climbing, they keep climbing the hill fixing their eyes just on the cloud.”
Have we ever caught the cloud?

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Content-Based Instruction and Grammar (2nd draft)

"Content-based grammar instruction involves showing students how grammar works within texts.” (DelQuadro) I have made 3 types of lists, which relate English authorized textbooks with Grammar & Sentence Structures. My idea is to relate Grammar & Sentence Structures with the contents of the textbooks, so as that our students can understand “how grammar works within texts.”
Understanding Grammar (= syntax in the terminology of linguistics) needs a competency to process abstract symbols. Every human being is better at some things and worse at others. We have varieties of students, and some of them are, as the matter of course, not good at handling abstract knowledge. Having the competency or not is a matter of nature, and it is we teachers who are to show its solution.
Handling abstract or academic knowledge needs a corresponding schema. Let me describe the schema something like a map in our mind. Those students who are worse at handling academic knowledge are not good at drawing the mental map (=cognitive map) of the academic knowledge, and their knowledge tends either to be that of sticking to pieces of concrete, yet incidental, realities or to be isolated pieces of abstract one. They should be provided with opportunities to weave the pieces into a web of knowledge, to make all the dots they have into a map. Their chances of connecting these dots are, of course, educational school activities, including classes themselves.
It is clear that a mental map is drawn with the activities of brain cells, but it is yet to be seen how it relates with the neural networks of the cells. Here I would like to propose a procedure of the solution on the hypothesis that showing an explicit mapping of English-related knowledge can help their brain draw an English-related mental map.
In the traditional idea of English education, students are supposed to need the knowledge of Grammar, Words, Idioms, and Sentence Structures to generate English language and to pass entrance examinations. If you are good at abstract understanding, you can implicitly fabricate those types of knowledge items into one web of English language competency. If not, you should be shown how each items are related each other, and the understanding itself can facilitate the acquisition of each items.
"Schematic mapping” is “a simple technique that enables the user to graphically encode information in an organized manner" (Suenaga, p.136) To help students draw the Mental Map of English Usage (MMEU), English classes and materials should be provided in the way to explicitly and clearly form one network. Considering the English classes in Sumiyoshi Senior High School have been naturally organized around the idea of Content-Based Instruction, the best way to provide whole parts of them in an explicit and clear form of networks might be to organize them under the principle of CBI.
The lists I have made help Grammar and Sentence Structures networked around the contents of authorized textbooks. Idioms, then, could be networked around the contents, as idiom cards to remember them are made from the textbooks instead of having students buy a ready-made phrase book off the shelf. The form of “cards” is preferable, because idioms should be remembered not only in the relation with contents or, worse, in alphabetical order, but also by categorizing them from the view point of the certain key word of their constitutive parts to have students ready for entrance examinations. With the cards, Idioms could be regrouped under different categories from time to time. That is why the card-type textbook is preferable for Idioms.
With the lists of Grammar & Sentence Structures and Idiom cards, I have provided a prototype of MMEU, but only for the first and second graders, in the hope that the students, once learned, will form their favorite type of networks of knowledge when they become the third graders.

References:
Gillian Cohen, ‘schemata’, "The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology", 1990, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK
Levia DelQuadro, "Content Based Grammar Instruction in the Basic Writing Classroom", Community College of Southern Nevada
"It was not until I delved into the mysteries of teaching ESL that I realized that grammar had a subtle, yet vital, role to play."
"Content-based grammar instruction involves showing students how grammar works within texts. This can involve using either the student’s own papers or using published texts. What makes this very different from the old drill and practice ideology is that the student is never looking at grammar at only the sentence level. This type of instruction entails using at least paragraphs to contextualize how grammar works."

Peter Morris, ‘cognitive maps’, "The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology", 1990, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK
Eiji Leland Suenaga, 'A Content-Based Approach to the Learning of Vocabulary Through Composition and Schematic Mapping', "Studies in Culture" No.1, November 1993, Hokkai-Gakuen University
"by encouraging the students to personalize the theme" (p.133)
"It is hoped that this personalization of thematic unit will heighten the students' involvement with the content and, thus, increase their motivation." (p.133)
"One way that writers can directly access vocabulary schemata appropriate to a theme is through schematic mapping, a simple technique that enables the user to graphically encode information in an organized manner" (p.136)
"Through this technique, users learn to identify not only main ideas, subcategories, and supporting details but also associated vocabulary --- the same skill that is necessary when constructing coherent paragraphs and essays." (p.137)

A Poet at Sumiyoshi (revised)

Prof. Satoh visited our high school to recruit candidates for Kinki University. He delivered a common appeal for his university, and then, abruptly enough, started talking about Itoh, a poet. According to him, the poet used to be a teacher at Sumiyoshi Secondary School before the World War II. His story moved on to his field of study, Mishima Yukio, one of the most famous novelists after the war, who was also known to be a chauvinist. The novelist respected the poet very much, imitated his poems, and even once visited Sumiyoshi SS to see him.
A math teacher here recalled that we have a stone monument for Itoh along the small alley which leads from an old gate, which used to be a front main gate of the school. Prof. Saitoh was excited about the information, and left the office in rather hurried but lovely haste.
Walking from the old gate, approaching the school gym, you can find a deep-green stone monument on your left, between the alley and the ground, surrounded by a small bush, Sumiyoshi no Mori. A poem is carved in white. The poem is titled Koh’ya no Uta.

Koh'ya no uta
(The Song of an Empty Field)
Itoh Shizuo
waga shisemu
utsukushiki hi no tame ni
(For a beautiful day when I may have died)
renrei no musoh yo! na ga shirayuki o
(Mountains of dreams! Have not your white snow)
kesazu are
(melted away.)
ikigurushii kihaku no kore no koh'ya ni
(In this air-thin empty field)
hitoshirenu izumi o sugi
(Past an unknown fountain)
tokijiku no ki no mi ururu
(Past a hidden place)
kakure taru basho o sugi
(with ever-fragrant citrus ripening)
ware no maku hana no shirushi
(On the day when my seeds come to show,)
chikazuku hi waga nakigara o hikan uma o
(these signs would lead home)
kono shime wa izanai kaesamu
(a horse that pulls my coffin.)
aa kakute waga towa no kikyoh o
(Alas! Thus my eternal homecoming is)
kohki naru na ga shiroki hikari miokuri
(seen off by your white beacons)
ki no mi teri izumi wa warai---
(by the shining berries, and by a rippling fountain.)
waga itaki yume yo kono toki zo tsuini
(My aching dreams will rest forever)
yasurawamu mono!
(on this moment at last!)

Bakumatsu Pilgrimage in the Western Seto Inland Sea (preparation notes)

“I'd rather go to Suwoh-Ohshima,” said my younger daughter. “What on the earth is it?” asked my wife. “A tiny island occupied by Tokugawa Shogunate Navy at the beginning of the Second Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh,” said I. “What are there?” asked her mother. “I just want to immerse myself in the air there,” replied the girl.
Thus our pilgrimage to Suwoh, the eastern half of today's Yamaguchi Prefecture, started.
Suwoh-Ohshima is just a strait away from Honshu Island, and is hooked with a bridge today. Yet, the island is not along Shinkansen Line, and you must take a local train and a bus for hours to get there even from its nearest Shinkansen station, Iwakuni. The most convenient way to visit the island may be hiring a rental car.
The most reasonable way to get around there is by long-distance bus. A night bus runs to Shimonoseki, the largest city in Yamaguchi, and stops at Iwakuni on its way. A day bus runs either to Hiroshima or Kokura, but both of them arrive there in the afternoon and leaves there early in the morning. If I were much younger, I would plan a four-day trip with two stays on the bus and one stay in a hotel. That sounds like a suicide to today's me.
An idea hit me. A day bus runs to Matsuyama very often, as often as to Kochi, where we visited last spring. We might take a ferry to Suwoh-Ohshima from Mitsuhama, a port town near Matsuyama. The sea used to be a road rather than a boundary.
The itinerary has, however, a risk. August 18/19 is just after Bon holidays. Beach hotels and inns must be still busy, being occupied with sea bathers. It may be at the start of a typhoon season as well. That might be worked out by staying in Matsuyama, although our stay in Suwoh-Ohshima will be a short one.
The port of Matsuyama has 3 districts. Its oldest district is called Mitsu-hama Port. The history of Mitsu-hama Port goes back to Muromachi Period, when Kohno Clan castled to the opposite bank (Minato-yama Joh, namely Port-Mountain Castle), and made it to the base of their Navy.
Kohno Clan used to be the biggest clan in Iyo, the Northwestern part of Shikoku Island, and prosperous for about 400 years till it was subverted by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1585. Its main castle used to be in today's Dogo Hot Spring area, and was called Yu-duki Joh, namely Hot-spring Built Castle).
It is in this Mitsu-hama Port that Natsume Soseki got off when he went for his post to Matsuyama in 1895, and thus the port became one of the stages of the popular novel Bocchan, one of two youth-market-oriented well-known novels by Sohseki. Of course at that time, there was not a satisfactory wharf, and was only a summer-house-like waiting room as an equipment of the port. People used to take a shallop to get on a ship dropped anchor off the shore.
Today, a car ferry sails to the Yanai port in Yamaguchi Prefecture from this port.
In the Autumn of 1853, Murata Zohroku, later known as Ohmura Masujiro, a founder of modern Japanese Army, sailed from Yanai to Matsuyama on his way from Choh-shuh to Uwajima for his post. That is the one of two reasons why my daughter wanted to visit Suwoh-ohshima.
Ohmura had wanted to sail directly from Yanai to Matsuyama, but having found no service available, and having made up his mind to go island-by-island, he took a boat from Tohsaki to Suoh-ohshima. According to Shiba Ryotaro's Kahin, he arrived at the Komatsu Port on the island, and stayed there for one night. My daughter had wanted to breathe the air Murata (or Ohmura) breathed.


The second reason why my daughter wanted to visit the island is that it is an old battlefield of the war between Choh-shuh and Bakufu, Tokugawa Shogunate, in the year 1865. The war has 3 kinds of names. If you are pro-Shogunate, you call it Choh-shuh Seibatsu. If you stand neutral, you may call it Choh-Baku Sensoh. If you lived in Cho-shu at that time, you definitely called it Shi-kyo Sensoh, Four Fronts War.
Kashin writes; Shogunate had formulated the strategy; "first of all, to attack Ohshima with its fleet, to land the Army soldiers and occupy the whole island, and to make Kuga Port a temporary naval port" to have command of the Western Seto Inland Sea.
The first attack was on a morning, June 7. A battleship of Tokugawa Shogunate came, sailed around Ohshima, bombarded the fishing villages Agenoshoh, Tononyuh, and Yuh to burn out, and left somewhere. The next day, the Shogunate Army and Navy raided Ohshima in force. They bombarded several places, and landed soldiers afterward.
In Ohshima's coast of Kuga, the Shogunate fleet of warships, each with 1000 tons or more, is heavily anchored. Those days, night attack was considered to be impossible in naval battles. Takasugi Shinsaku, a well known revolutionist and military tactician at Bakumatsu, the end of Edo Period, dared do it. His military ship alone opened fire against Shogunate fleet, which had turned off their steam, and run away into the dark with its lamplights off. Having only light cannons, the physical damage he gave was not so big, but the psychological fear was so huge that the fleet escaped from the sea around Choh-shu to the east in panic, with their beached blue forces left. After a while, they were unseated from the island.
We have another reason why to have chosen Matsuyama route and stay. Matsuyama has Saka-no-ue-no-Kumo Museum.
The novel Saka no ue no Kumo starts as:
“A really small country is trying to get civilized.
“One of the islands of the country is Shikoku Island, and Shikoku is divided into Sanuki, Awa, Tosa, and Iyo. The capital of Iyo is Matsuyama.”
Matsuyama is a birth place of Akiyama Yoshifuru (1859-1930), Akiyama Saneyuki (1868-1918), and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Saka no ue no Kumo continues:
“We may say the main character of this story is small Japan at this time. We, however, should follow three people.”
Its author, Shiba Ryohtaroh, tried to describe how Japan modernized itself by writing a story of struggling young people at the time.
He writes about his interest in the stage of Japanese history:
“The 30 years or more after the Meiji Restoration till Russo-Japanese War is very distinctive in the history of Japanese culture and mentality, in its long history.
“There used to be no age as optimistic as this.”
He thought people at the time were, however poor they were, optimistically struggling to progress:
“Optimists walk forward, as often the case in such an era, just looking ahead. As a cloud in a blue heaven shines over a hill they are climbing, they keep climbing the hill fixing their eyes just on the cloud.”
Have we ever caught the cloud?

Content-Based Instruction and Grammar (1st draft)

I have made 3 types of lists, which relate English authorized textbooks with Grammar & Sentence Structures.
Understanding Grammar (= syntax in the terminology of linguistics) needs a competency to process abstract symbols. Every human being is good at some things and bad at others. We have varieties of students, and some of them are, as the matter of course, not good at handling abstract knowledge. Having the competency or not is a matter of nature, and it is we teachers who are to show its solution.
Handling abstract or academic knowledge needs a corresponding schema. Let me describe the schema something like a map in our mind. Those students are not good at drawing the mental map (=cognitive map) of academic knowledge, and their knowledge tends either to be that of sticking to pieces of concrete, yet incidental, realities or to be isolated pieces of abstract one. They should be provided with opportunities to weave the pieces into a web of knowledge, to make all the dots they have into a map. The chances are, of course, educational school activities, including classes themselves.
It is clear that a mental map is drawn with the activities of brain cells, but it is yet to be seen how it relates with the neural networks of the cells. Here I would like to propose a procedure of the solution on the hypothesis that showing an explicit mapping of English-related knowledge can help their brain draw an English-related mental map.
In the traditional idea of English education, students are supposed to need the knowledge of Grammar, words, idioms, and sentence structures to generate English language and to pass entrance examinations. If you are good at abstract understanding, you can implicitly fabricate those types of knowledge into one web of English language competency. If not, you should be shown how each items are related each other, and the knowledge itself can facilitate the acquisition of each items.
To help students draw the Mental Map of English Usage (MMEU), English classes and materials provided should explicitly and clearly form one network. Considering the English classes in Sumiyoshi Senior High School have been naturally organized around the idea of Content-Based Instruction, the best way to provide whole parts of them in an explicit form of networks might be to organize them under the principle of CBI.
The lists I have made help Grammar and Sentence Structures networked around the contents of authorized textbooks.
Idiom could be networked around the contents, as idiom cards to remember them are made from the textbooks instead of having students buy a ready-made phrase book off the shelf. The form of “cards” is preferable, because idioms should be remembered not only in the relation with contents or, worse, in alphabetical order, but also by categorizing them from the view point of the certain key word of their constitutive parts to have students ready for entrance examinations. Accordingly, idioms should be able to be regrouped under different categories from time to time. That is why card type is preferable.
Here I provide prototype of mapping only for the first and second graders, in the hope that the students, once learned, will form their favorite type of networks of knowledge when they become the third graders.

References:
Gillian Cohen, ‘schemata’, "The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology", 1990, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK
Levia DelQuadro, "Content Based Grammar Instruction in the Basic Writing Classroom", Community College of Southern Nevada
Peter Morris, ‘cognitive maps’, "The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology", 1990, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK
Eiji Leland Suenaga, 'A Content-Based Approach to the Learning of Vocabulary Through Composition and Schematic Mapping', "Studies in Culture" No.1, November 1993, Hokkai-Gakuen University


Eiji Leland Suenaga, 'A Content-Based Approach to the Learning of Vocabulary Through Composition and Schematic Mapping', "STudies in Culture" No.1, November 1993, Hkkai-Gakuen University:
"by encouraging the students to personalize the theme" (p.133)
"It is hoped that this personalization of thematic unit will heighten the students' involvement with the content and, thus, increase their motivation." (p.133)
"One way that writers can directly access vocabulary schemata appropriate to a theme is through schematic mapping, a simple technique that enables the user to graphically encode information in an organized manner" (p.136)
"Through this technique, users learn to identify not only main ideas, subcategories, and supporting details but also associated vocabulary --- the same skill that is necessary when constructing coherent paragraphs and essays." (p.137)


Levia DelQuadro, "Content Based Grammar Instruction in the Basic Writing Classroom", Community College of Southern Nevada:
"It was not until I delved into the mysteries of teaching ESL that I realized that grammar had a subtle, yet vital, role to play."
"Content-based grammar instruction involves showing students how grammar works within texts. This can involve using either the student’s own papers or using published texts. What makes this very different from the old drill and practice ideology is that the student is never looking at grammar at only the sentence level. This type of instruction entails using at least paragraphs to contextualize how grammar works."

Theme-Based Vocabulary Building

As I argued in “How far could we apply Content-Based Instruction?” Theme-Based Language Instruction, the sub-method of Content-Based Instruction, is naturally associated with cramming for entrance examinations. The first publication of “Janru Betsu Eibun Dokkai Izen” (Furufuji Akira, Kenkyu-sha) in 1992, the first Theme-Based cramming reader, suggests having secure background knowledge in related themes or genres has become essential to understand English essays within limited time in today's English entrance examinations.
Since then, varieties of Theme-Based cramming vocabulary textbooks have also been published, such as “Ei-tango Bun'ya-betsu” (Kanai Takahisa et al, 1996, Kawai Shuppan), “Wadai-betsu Ei-tango --- Lingua-Metallica” (Nakazawa Yukio, 2006, Z-KAI), “Sokudoku Ei-tango” (Hayami Hiroshi, 1992, Z-KAI), “Dokkai Ei-tango” (Kohbe Fumiaki, 2003, Gakushuh Kenkyuh-sha), and as such. At first, all we had to do seemed to be choosing the right one at the right time.
As a part of their title, “-betsu” (namely: “classified”), suggests, the first 2 vocabularies are divided into sections of themes. The latter 2 have either “doku” or “dokkai” in their titles, which suggests they incline to reading, although their words and phrases are slightly divided under certain numbers of themes.
Some English teachers firmly believe that "words should be taught in the context of story, theme, or content area." (Barney, p.3) Because of the belief, the latter 3 titles have short essays to give their words and phrases certain contexts.
Sharing the belief somewhat however, I find the 3 rather reading-oriented and, above all, high-class-entrance-examination-oriented. Simpler structure may be preferable.
Then should we choose “Ei-tango Bun'ya-betsu”? Unluckily enough, it is out of print. I am afraid we have no other way but to make it by ourselves.
“Ei-tango Bun'ya-betsu” has 2178 words and phrases. I have entered the English words and phrases into an EXCEL file. Those words and phrases are divided into 15 categories. The categories have 83 sub-categories in total. The category names and those of sub-categories in the title are in Japanese. I have input the data along with their English translations. The question is whether its grouping is appropriate in quality and in quantity or not.
The number of sub-categories, 83, means each sub-category has 26.2 words and phrases on average. The biggest number of entries is, however, 59. From my experience, students might find difficulty in handling, mainly in memorizing, new words and phrases when the number gets far beyond about 20.
Reconsidering the categorization of the data might be indispensable. Including and excluding some entries may be inevitable. Checking my translation of category and sub-category names must be critical.


References:
Carol Barney, "The Impact of Contextual Vocabulary Strategies for ELL Learners", 2005, Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, http://www.smsd.org/custom/curriculum/ActionResearch2005/Barney.pdf
Jack c. Richard and Theodore s. Rodgers, "Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching" (2nd ed.), 2001, Cambridge University Press, New York
Eiji Leland Suenaga, 'A Content-Based Approach to the Learning of Vocabulary Through Composition and Schematic Mapping', "Studies in Culture" No.1, November 1993, Hkkai=Gakuen University