Yuki-Onna: the Snow-Woman of Japan

Yuki-Onna from the movie Kwaidan (1964)...

...and in a geisha play from 2006...

Yuki-Onna [], whose name literally ...and from a Japanese TV series in 2010. means snow woman, is a legendary spirit in Japan that is believed to appear only during snowy weather; and the more stormy the weather, the more she's expected to be out in it. Tales tell how she hunts for humans to freeze to death; and they also tell of how she fell in love with a handsome young man, and became human to be his wife... until he betrayed her trust. Yuki-Onna is so well-known in Japan that she has become a stock character in television, movies, novels, comics, plays, and games, a ghostly snow-white figure immediately recognized by both the young and the old. Her story is referenced so much in modern Japan that the snow woman has made my list of the Six Japanese Monsters anyone interested in Japanese culture needs to know about. The fame of Yuki-Onna in Japan is especially interesting because it is entirely due to an European traveler and writer who lived in Japan at the turn of the 20th century! The "Discovery" of Yuki-Onna The oddly named Lafcadio Hearn [1850-1904] was a traveling journalist, born in Greece to an Irish father and Greek mother. Hearn was already well-known for newspaper editorials and reports written while he lived in Cincinatti and New Orleans in the United States before he first traveled to Japan. In 1890 he took a teaching position in Japan, and found the country so to his liking that he soon married the daughter of a samurai, and accepted Japanese citizenship in 1896 (as well as a Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo) when he moved to a teaching position at the University of Tokyo. Hearn became the interpretor of Japan and its customs to the English speaking world as he started to produce book after book on various topics of Japanese life and history. Hearn had learned the Japanese language well enough to read tales in old manuscripts when he could find them, and to converse with his Japanese friends about the tales and legends they grew up with... and all of these became the stuff of his books. More remarkable still, like the Brothers Grimm of Germany, Hearn was sometimes the first person to record these older tales in writing, which made his books of interest to the Japanese as well as foreigners, precisely because he presented various local legends that many in the country had never heard before themselves. The tale of Yuki-Onna was one of those unique legends. It is now acknowledged that Hearn was the first person known to present the tale of Yuki-Onna in writing... and he got it straight from the storyteller's mouth. Hearn stated in the introduction of his book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things [1904] that the story of Yuki-Onna, which is presented in said book, was told to him by a farmer of Chofu, Nishitama-gori, in Musashi Province. Chofu is now a city in the western end of the Tokyo Metropolis... so Yuki-Onna may have once walked where modern Tokyo now exists. The farmer told the tale as a legend of his village, but Hearn never stated whether the farmer actually believed the tale to be true. To summarize Hearn's tale of Yuki-Onna briefly, it tells how an older man, Mosaku, and a younger man, Minokichi, left their village one winter's day to gather firewood, only to be caught out when a storm started. They took shelter in a small hut and soon fell asleep. Minokichi awoke suddenly in the

night to discover the hut's door open, and a ghostly white woman -- both beautiful and terrorifying -leaning over Mosaku and gently breathing white mist over him. When she turned to Minokichi, he immediately feared for his life... but the strange woman offered to spare him if he swore to never tell anyone what he had seen that night. Not surprisingly, he made the vow; and the strange woman left the hut fading into the storm outside. Minokichi turned to Mosaku, and found his friend frozen to death. Minokichi kept his word for years after that strange night and told no one, not even his beloved wife who he married about a year after the incident. They lived a simple and happy life, raising their ten children... but the memory of that hideous night always haunted him. One evening, as the children slept and his wife sat quietly mending some clothes, he was suddenly struck by how much his wife looked like that strange woman of many years ago as the fire light flickered across her features. Without thinking he started to tell her about the night, and how much she reminded him of it at the moment, and she set aside her sewing and listened patiently... and when he finished the story, his wife rose, now completely snow-white and enraged, and told him the only reason she wouldn't kill him immediately was for the sake of the children. Warning him strongly to never give them reason to complain, she drifted out into the night and disappeared in the falling snow forever. When Kwaidan was published in Japanese, the tale of Yuki-Onna was absolutely loved by the new generation of urban Japanese who had little of their ancestors' experience with living in wild terrain. The tale -- and later, movies based on Kwaidan that included Yuki-Onna -- proved so popular that everyone in Japan came to know who the character of Yuki-Onna was.

Objective and subjective[edit]

Assessment (either summative or formative) is often categorized as either objective or subjective. Objective assessment is a form of questioning which has a single correct answer. Subjective assessment is a form of questioning which may have more than one correct answer (or more than one way of expressing the correct answer). There are various types of objective and subjective questions. Objective question types include true/false answers, multiple choice, multiple-response and matching questions. Subjective questions include extended-response questions and essays. Objective assessment is well suited to the increasingly popular computerized or online assessment format. Some have argued that the distinction between objective and subjective assessments is neither useful nor accurate because, in reality, there is no such thing as "objective" assessment. In fact, all assessments are created with inherent biases built into decisions about relevant subject matter and content, as well as [6] cultural (class, ethnic, and gender) biases.

Objective Tests Objective tests are those that have clear right or wrong answers. Multiple-choice tests fall into this group. Students have to select a pre-determined correct answer from three or four possibilities. Subjective Tests Subjective tests require the marker or examiner to make a subjective judgment regarding the marks deserved. Examples are essay questions and oral interviews. For such tests, it is

especially important that both examiner and student are aware of the grading criteria in order to increase their validity.
Subjectivity is a term used to refer to the condition of being a subject: i.e., the quality of a subject's perspective, experiences, feelings, beliefs, and desires.
[1]

Subjectivity is used as an explanation for what

influences and informs people's judgments about truth or reality. It is the collection of the perceptions, experiences, expectations, personal or cultural understanding, and beliefs specific to a person. It is often used in contrast to the term objectivity, any individual's influence.
[1]

which is described as a view of truth or reality which is free of

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrEqlMLOSo4

objective test require a user to choose or provide a response to a question whos correct answer is predetermined such a question might require a student to : select a solution from a set of choices {MCQ, true-false, matching} supply brief numeric test

What are Objective Test Questions?

Objective tests require a user to choose or provide a response to a question whose correct answer is predetermined. Such a question might require a student to :

select a solution from a set of choices (MCQ, true-false, matching) identify an object or position (graphical hotspot) or supply brief numeric or text responses (text input)

Because the correct answers to objective test questions are pre-determined, they are well suited to the many forms of CAA that involve automated marking. The electronic marking of the responses is completely nonsubjective as no judgement has to be made on the correctness or otherwise of an answer at the time of marking. However, it is worth noting that in terms of in-built bias, an objective test is only as objective as the test's designer makes it. The tutorial below offers an introduction to a selection of question types in popular use with advice on construction and best practice. As the question type most commonly associated with CAA is multiple choice, particular emphasis has been given to this and should be viewed first. The principles

detailed within that section should however, be of use when considering other types.
1. Multiple Choice Items o Anatomy of a question o Writing Stems o Writing Distracters 2. Extending Multiple Choice Items 3. Assertion-Reason 4. Multiple Response 5. Matching 6. True/False 7. Text/Numerical 8. Ranking 9. Graphical hotspot 10. Sore Finger 11. Field Simulation 12. Sequencing 13. References