Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

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metalangel
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by metalangel »

Liminaut wrote: If someone is dead but has no vocal problems it is possible to teach them to speak. It involves placing hands on throats to feel the sound. (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 540AAWd9DS) The main answerer on the thread says that she hated the training and learned sign language as soon as she could anyway. Granted, Shizune might have had other damage to that would make speech impossible.
AG Bell (the association founded in his name) is notorious and reviled in parts of the North American Deaf community because of what you're describing. Trying to teach someone who can't perceive sound to communicate using it? Are you some kind of sadist? It's all extremely hit and miss, down to the individual's aptitude and also inclination (you might really want to learn the oral method but just can't)
Jigoro says in so many words that he hired people to train Shizune to normality. This is somewhat reasonable if Shizune became deaf. It also becomes a reasonable explanation as to why Jigoro never learned/accepted sign language; he has been thinking all along that Shizune would speak real soon now. Granted keeping this up after 12 years is a bit much.
I'd read enough anecdotal evidence from Deaf people where they're the only person who is Deaf/HoH in their family but also the only one who signs: the parents and siblings were convinced throwing time, money and effort at things to make a person who is Deaf hearing as opposed to supporting that person in whatever means *they* chose* are extremely common and upsetting.
It's not impossible that Shizune *could* have learned to speak, and Jigoro *could* have learned sign, but the last 12 years have been spent in a battle of wills that neither one is willing to give in on.
Who's being unreasonable here? The daughter who might just not be able to learn the father's method, or the father who is unwilling to accommodate his daughter? A hearing person can learn to sign, a Deaf person cannot 'learn' to hear.
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Potato
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Potato »

metalangel wrote:Trying to teach someone who can't perceive sound to communicate using it?
Technically, they're being taught using the vibrations created by vocalization. They can perceive those just fine, provided they've not lost their sense of touch.

Also...
If someone is dead but has no vocal problems it is possible to teach them to speak.
It took me longer than I care to admit to realize this was a typo.
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metalangel
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by metalangel »

Potato wrote: Technically, they're being taught using the vibrations created by vocalization. They can perceive those just fine, provided they've not lost their sense of touch.
I had ear infections throughout my early childhood which affected my hearing. They also affected my speech because I couldn't hear and correct myself. Following a lot of visits to the ENT and operations, I had my hearing back and my speech became coherent.

"Technically" in the very barest sense, in that it is conceivably possible.
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Liminaut »

metalangel, you have a lot of person experience with these issues and I appreciate the insight you can bring here. It sounds (pun not intended!) like we are in agreement.

Let me summarize it to make sure:
We can't be sure about the history, but a reasonable history is:

-- Shizune lost her hearing at 6
-- Therapists promised Jigoro that they could train Shizune to speak
-- This therapy can work, but it is hit-or-miss at best and awful to go through in the best of situations
-- Jigoro refused to learn to sign because he thought his daughter should learn to speak
-- Depressingly, this is not an uncommon phenomena of households refusing to learn sign because they think the deaf child should speak
-- In this case, the blame lies with Jigoro for not being willing to work with his child and learn sign

God, it must have been hell for Shizune growing up.

And also:
Damn, that's an embarrassing typo, claiming dead people can be taught to speak. :)
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Oddball
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Oddball »

Your summary does leave Shizune's mother out of the picture. It's not uncommon for only one person in a family to learn sign language, so it's possible that she did the communicating with Shizune. Where is she now is something the game never touches on, however.

Also, as bad as Jigoro is, he does have a point... sort of. MANY of Shizune's problems come from her inability to communicate with others. I'm not necessarily referring to her inability to speak, but she doesn't even seem to want to write or return emails. In fact, she seems to react to Hisao not knowing sign language as a problem on his part, not hers. Basically, you talk to her on her terms or not at all, and most people can't talk to her like that.
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Liminaut »

Did Shizune have a mother? Maybe she burst fully-grown out of Jigoro's ego.
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by brythain »

Liminaut wrote:Did Shizune have a mother? Maybe she burst fully-grown out of Jigoro's ego.
Pallas Shizune! Someone should do a visual image of that. :)
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by SpunkySix »

brythain wrote:
Liminaut wrote:Did Shizune have a mother? Maybe she burst fully-grown out of Jigoro's ego.
Pallas Shizune! Someone should do a visual image of that. :)
That's not a request, right?

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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Atario »

metalangel wrote:AG Bell (the association founded in his name) is notorious and reviled in parts of the North American Deaf community because of what you're describing.
The North American Deaf community reviles people for getting cochlear implants to regain their hearing, too, branding them traitors. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it.
Trying to teach someone who can't perceive sound to communicate using it? Are you some kind of sadist?
I can't perceive radio waves, but I communicate using them all the time…
Who's being unreasonable here? The daughter who might just not be able to learn the father's method, or the father who is unwilling to accommodate his daughter? A hearing person can learn to sign, a Deaf person cannot 'learn' to hear.
All things being equal, I'm inclined to say anything Jigoro wants is unreasonable. And, no, a deaf person can't learn not to be deaf. However, it is completely possible for a deaf (or Deaf) person to learn to get along ok in the hearing world. I've known several who did it just fine.
Liminaut wrote:-- Shizune lost her hearing at 6
-- Therapists promised Jigoro that they could train Shizune to speak
Hang on a sec. She would already have been speaking for years by age six. Most likely in this scenario would be Shizune going to mommy and/or daddy one day and complaining that she can't hear (well) lately. If she had stopped speaking, it would have been by choice; "therapy" would consist of convincing her not to continue the stoppage.
NB: none of the above is a request

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Liminaut
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Liminaut »

Atario wrote:
Liminaut wrote:-- Shizune lost her hearing at 6
-- Therapists promised Jigoro that they could train Shizune to speak
Hang on a sec. She would already have been speaking for years by age six. Most likely in this scenario would be Shizune going to mommy and/or daddy one day and complaining that she can't hear (well) lately. If she had stopped speaking, it would have been by choice; "therapy" would consist of convincing her not to continue the stoppage.
Check out metalangel's story above. When metalangel temporarily lost his hearing in similar circumstances, his speech suffered dramatically because of the lack of feedback. Although I can see your point -- Shizune having been speaking for several years at this point would have given Jigoro a lot of good reason to believe that she could learn to speak.
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Mirage_GSM »

I at one time assisted in a first aid course for the hearing-impaired.
There were participants who lost their hearing when they were already adults. They were able to speak, but it was extremely hard to understand what they were saying. So it is apparently very difficult to even retain one's fluency in spoken language without hearing. Learning it without having ever been able to hear has to be much harder still.
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ProfAllister
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by ProfAllister »

Liminaut wrote:
ProfAllister wrote:I may have to work on my reading for comprehension :) , but I thought I saw this issue discussed, but not this take on it. That Shizune may not have been born deaf, but became deaf around around age six, either through disease or accident. Everybody had been debating about the twelve years of silence and how much Jigoro was at fault for that; I didn't see any discussion of the implications of Shizune speaking to Jigoro at one time.
Point taken. It just so happens that the subject of he timing of Shizune's deafness has been discussed, just not in this thread. You are correct, though - to my knowledge, that specific subject hasn't been discussed on these forums, to my knowledge.

That being said, I personally fall into the camp that she was, for a time, able to hear - that she became deaf some time between 4 and 6. That's also been taken into account for my other posts here.

As for all the reasons you put forth, I am aware and agree that it puts some heft behind that argument. But then we have a deaf girl who rebels against Bell's philosophies, has severe misgivings about her ability to communicate with hearing people and yet there is absolutely no indication that she has deaf friends or acquaintances in a school that is easily 1/3 deaf? That last bit is what makes me skeptical of Bellite Jigoro.
Liminaut wrote:We can't be sure about the history, but a reasonable history is:

-- Shizune lost her hearing at 6
-- Therapists promised Jigoro that they could train Shizune to speak
-- This therapy can work, but it is hit-or-miss at best and awful to go through in the best of situations
-- Jigoro refused to learn to sign because he thought his daughter should learn to speak
-- Depressingly, this is not an uncommon phenomena of households refusing to learn sign because they think the deaf child should speak
-- In this case, the blame lies with Jigoro for not being willing to work with his child and learn sign
If we accept your premises, the logic is sound. However, the assumptions made to reach that conclusion imply a severe confirmation bias. If you want to argue that Jigoro is an ass, it's easy to make assumptions that support him being an ass. Conversely, if you want to argue that he's a misunderstood saint, it's easy to make assumptions that way, too (hence why I insist only that this is a possibility, not a certainty). So let's try to separate the facts/propositions from the assumptions:

Shizune lost her hearing in early childhood - As the premise for our discussion, it would be absurd to dispute this. Not that we couldn't present evidence that this premise is unlikely, but that's not (currently) a point of contention.
Jigoro consulted/hired therapists. - Trying to keep this to the facts here. The therapists could have made all sorts of promises. As for what sorts of therapists and what sorts of promises, that's open to speculation, but the implication seems to fall heavily on the side of "I tried anything and everything." So, even if he received promises from Bellite therapists, he'd at least have heard the counterarguments from therapists from other schools.
Opponents of Remedial Speech Therapy for the Deaf argue that such techniques can work, but usually doesn't. - Personally, I agree with the opponents, but let's stick to the facts. The fact that AG Bell is a current and active entity implies that this approach isn't entirely discredited.
There is nothing conclusive to state whether or not Jigoro knows Sign Language - The assumption is that Jigoro doesn't know Sign Language, because he never uses it. In sticking to a "just the facts" approach, all we can say is that Jigoro displays no proficiency in sign language (and we HAVE gone on about this detail in this thread, for anyone who cares to discuss that point further).
Many households operate under the expectation that the deafie accommodate the hearing - An unfortunate reality. However, we're trying to speculate about a specific household, so the utility/applicability of this fact is marginal, at best.

There's no obvious conclusion from these facts, but it does help narrow the focus of our inquiry. The questions to answer are the following: 1) What sorts of therapists/tutors/specialists did Jigoro Hire, and how did they advise him? 2) How receptive was Jigoro to this advice? In the interests of maintaining some level of coherency, I'll defer discussion of these questions to the end of this post.
Atario wrote:The North American Deaf community reviles people for getting cochlear implants to regain their hearing, too, branding them traitors. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it.

I can't perceive radio waves, but I communicate using them all the time…

All things being equal, I'm inclined to say anything Jigoro wants is unreasonable. And, no, a deaf person can't learn not to be deaf. However, it is completely possible for a deaf (or Deaf) person to learn to get along ok in the hearing world. I've known several who did it just fine.

Hang on a sec. She would already have been speaking for years by age six. Most likely in this scenario would be Shizune going to mommy and/or daddy one day and complaining that she can't hear (well) lately. If she had stopped speaking, it would have been by choice; "therapy" would consist of convincing her not to continue the stoppage.
Since it's relevant to this topic, I'm going to pull something I just said the other day:
Deafness occupies a unique position among common disabilities. Unlike the others, it significantly impairs what the average individual would consider the most natural form of communication - verbal. For a "deafie" to communicate with the "hearing," one of them is normally speaking in a foreign language. This even extends to the written word. Sign Language isn't "English (or whatever other language) with your hands"; it is an entire language unto itself, with its own syntax and grammar. The ability to communicate in your native language is a luxury most people take for granted until it's gone. A result of this communication-based isolation is the development of a "deaf culture" - a phenomenon notably absent from other major disabilities (which may have shared experience and commisseration, but lack the same sense of culture and community).
An additional feature of deafness (tied into the former) that separates it from many other disabilities is that deafies are expected to accommodate the hearing, instead of the other way around. Deafies are expected to be able to read lips, even to speak, to use a pencil and paper or terrible speech-to-text and text-to-speech utilities (all in a foreign language, mind you), to watch closed-captioned TV shows and movies in a manner convenient to the hearing people around them, all while hearing people can't even remember to give the basic courtesy of looking at them while talking. For comparison, this shows all the sensitivity of telling a paraplegic to man up and use the stairs like everyone else.

The point of all this is that a significant portion of deafies consider their deafness part of their identity; part of who they are. It's why you have the sub-community of CODA (children of deaf adults) and, essentially, "honorary deafness" when a hearing person is accepted into the community. As a result, many deafies look upon cochlear implants in a very negative light - just the newest in a long line of humiliations deafies are expected to subject themselves to so that they might be "Fixed" and acceptable to the hearing populace.
As far as that applies to your comments:
The cochlear implant issue is more complex than you imply (also, that is one HELL of an false dilemma).
You can communicate using radio waves, but you'd be pretty pissed off if people expected you to communicate exclusively by radio waves, because everyone else perceives them just fine (besides, your meat-slapping "vocalisations" aren't a real language, and it's kinda vulgar to look at; certainly not something anyone should have to learn - you should be fine with carrying around a portable HAM radio).
Refer to my previous quote about paraplegics sucking it up and using the stairs.
And that damn paraplegic is just being lazy by using a wheelchair. With enough physical therapy, he should be able to manage.

And now back to those questions stated earlier:

What sorts of therapists/tutors/specialists did Jigoro Hire, and how did they advise him? - I kind of touched on this earlier, but it bears repeating: when I read Jigoro's "twelve years" bit, I'm not hearing a man saying "Shut up. I disagree with you, and I'm better than you. Ergo, you're wrong." but rather "Do you honestly think I haven't tried that?" I see him as defeated, resigned to the idea that there's nothing he can do about her rejection of him. His only hope is that it's normal for children to reject their parents like that, and not something he, as a(n ostensibly) single father and parent to a deaf child, failed at. I'd also say it can be interpreted less as "I taught her to speak, yet she won't speak" and more "I gave her everything, yet she still rejects me." More relevant, I most definitely do not think he made a single attempt, then gave up when that didn't show the results he wanted.

So we return to the facts available to us: Jigoro is very wealthy (implicitly due to being a successful businessman), yet his profession is something relatively normal in the West, but quite unconventional (in a bad way) in the East. so we know that he has been, at the very least, subject to some significant Western influence. And whatever he does, he is demonstrably quite successful (hence the wealthy). There are perhaps other explanations for his wealth, but they would be, to say the least, highly unlikely. An important rule of business success is to find intelligent people who disagree with you, and pay attention to what they say - in other words, have an open mind and be willing to reconsider your assumptions. A successful businessman (i.e., one expected to have continued success) isn't likely to double down on a course of action that isn't working, especially when he's able to admit that he's not an expert and there are experts who tell him it's precisely the wrong course of action.

Much more to the point, there's the inconvenient fact that Shizune knows JSL, is comfortable with it, and is good at it. This of course implies that someone taught it to her. On the one hand, she could have learned it in a Bellite school, through the Secret Underground JSL Resistance (which probably doesn't have a cool name like that, but would most certainly exist); on the other, she could have been taught JSL by one of the many people Jigoro hired. If the former, we're faced with the question of why Shizune does not appear to have any deaf friends or no interest in the Deaf community at Yamaku. If the latter, we reach our second question.

How receptive was Jigoro to this advice? - It seems patently absurd that Jigoro would disregard the recommendations of one of the few tutors who actually got any sort of results. It's certainly possible that he would do so, but that displays a level of petulance so extreme that it once again becomes a wonder how Jigoro could be as successful as he is. In fact, I'd be inclined to question the legitimacy of this Jigoro's wealth.
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Oddball
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Oddball »

Just were are you getting the idea that Shizune used to be able to hear but lost the ability when she was young? I don't recall anything in the game that suggests that.
In fact, I'd be inclined to question the legitimacy of this Jigoro's wealth.
Maybe his wife is the rich one.
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Kutagh »

Atario wrote:[...]
Who's being unreasonable here? The daughter who might just not be able to learn the father's method, or the father who is unwilling to accommodate his daughter? A hearing person can learn to sign, a Deaf person cannot 'learn' to hear.
All things being equal, I'm inclined to say anything Jigoro wants is unreasonable. And, no, a deaf person can't learn not to be deaf. However, it is completely possible for a deaf (or Deaf) person to learn to get along ok in the hearing world. I've known several who did it just fine.[...]
Sure it is completely possible for a Deaf person to learn to get along just fine in the hearing world. I'm doing that. But your statement is incredibly ignorant because you're not seeing the effort, the years of practice that I (we) spent on sharpening our skills. It is a conscious choice on my part to continue this development of myself, because I choose to participate in the hearing world on my terms (which is to be as self-sufficient as possible). Not because I want to appease or accommodate the hearing people. So please stop using us as an example so you can continue being lazy and unaccommodating, because I (and I suspect most of us) do not wish to be an example for your goals.
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Re: Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

Post by Oddball »

Liminaut wrote:Did Shizune have a mother? Maybe she burst fully-grown out of Jigoro's ego.
She's not in the game, but ... http://shimmie.katawa-shoujo.com/post/list/mayoi/1
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