School Sports

A few rumbles of thunder around lunch-time. Poor old Kuu is a real astraphobic - one dark cloud on the horizon and he's yelping to be allowed to hide in the genkan.

After eating I went off on another wood buying expedition, but on the way I stopped at the Post Office cash machine. My last 15,000 yen in my Japanese account before my pension goes in next week!

Since I moved here I've started to think of numbers Asian style, it's much easier to do that than try and convert everything. If you don't know what I mean in China and Japan they don't just have words for 'ten', 'hunded' and 'thousand' but also for 'ten thousand' too. In Japanese it's 'man'(Chinese 'wan') But Japanese doesn't have a word for 'million' - that's a hundred man. The next one up is an 'oku' 100 million - or ten thousand ten thousands.

So here if something costs 15,000 yen we'll say it's 'one man five thousand yen' (or colloquially 'one and a half man yen'). When you first come to Japan you try and translate back into thousands and millions in your head but after a while you just do what everyone else does.

As I was pulling away from the Post Office, my wallet bulging with GBP 75, I got entangled in a big 'hike', a caravanserai of around 300 kids which must have been one of the local elementary schools on the move. They were threading through the village in a long crocodile closely supervised by teachers. On a hot sticky Sunday in the summer vacation? Well,they were really enjoying themselves whatever the occasion. Here children get to spend much more time together in this kind of colective activity, and also later in school 'clubs' which account for most of their social lives.

Seeing them reminded me of a Saturday I spent last year attending the sports day at one of our local Junior Highs. Anything less like a typical English secondary school sports day would be hard to imagine.

In England most schools do have a sports day but the whole focus is usually very much on individual achievment. The programme is made up of conventional athletic events - 100 metres, 200 metres, javelin, long jump etc. - and basically you get entered for the ones you are good at. Kids who aren't good at anything are usually just spectators, or help to run stalls etc.

Often a strong if artificial 'team spirit' is encouraged by having 'Houses' - a relic of our Public School system. When I was at my grammar school back in the 1960's we had four Houses in the school. Every student was allocated at random to one of them - I was in 'Southall'. Rivalry was intense on any sporting occasion - rugby, cricket or athletics. I can still rememeber our chant, maybe I'm the last person in the world that knows it!

Southall! Southall!
It's all for the south and Southall!
S -- O-- UTH -- W -- E -- double 'L'
SOUTHALL!!!!!!!!!!

But Houses were ONLY relevant for sporting events, they had no other purpose in the school at all.

In Japan it's utterly different. For sports days the whole school is divided into two - the 'reds' and the 'whites' and usually this is done by class group. If it's a four class intake school two classes will be reds and two white. So to prepare for sports day - and students do train hard - already you are working within your accustomed social group - with classmates you may have known since kindergarden.

The biggest difference though is that there are no 'individual skill' events - no 100 metres or long jump. In fact the only events familiar to Western eyes are the team relays and tug-of-war. This is not an occasion to promote excellence by star performers. All events involve everyone in the team and are designed solely to encourage working within the group. In the tug of war, everyone pulls together, in the centipede race, everone is in step together. Whether you win or loose will depend how well you have trained to move together and how weak your weakest link is.

One thing I noticed was that this really puts pressure on weak students to perform, no hiding place for the 'fatties'and the physically challenged here. It also makes the impatient more tolerant because at the same time it's in everyone's interest to make it work. No point in wringing our hands and wishing we had a perfect team, we compete with what we have. The intensity of emotional involvement is extraordinary by Western standards too. I'd be very curious to see how a bunch of fourteen year olds in Cheltenham or Coventry coped compared with their Chiba counterparts if they had to take part in an event like this.

Confrontation

A few days ago I said I'd be returning to the topic of 'power', and there's an incident I wanted to write about while it's still fresh in my mind. It seemed to me at the time to be a small cameo of many changes at work in Japan.

It happened last Wednesday as I was catching the train back from Chiba. After my work in the library I'd gone over to Sogo department store to buy a few things and when I got to the station there was a train home due to leave in eight minutes. I hurried up to Platform 8 and it was already in and quite full. But there were still a few empty seats to be had for someone prepared to hunt for them.

In the second coach I spotted a window seat in a group of four and squeezed in. My three travelling companions were a small woman and two older men - 'farming types' who weren't together but I would guess had been into town on similar kinds of business, visits to their banks or suppliers perhaps? They were looking uncomfortable and out of place in the city, sitting there sweating in their best suits and wearing ties despite the heat.

The train got relentlessly fuller - a connection arrived in on the next platform from Tokyo and a crowd rushed across to make our train. If you haven't travelled here trains in Japan are formidably precise in their time-keeping. Ours was scheduled to depart at 16:43 and that's exactly when it would leave to within a few seconds. So if a connection that leaves you just two minutes to change that's exactly what you have - and you hurry!

Now people were standing quite deep in the aisle. I guess most people of us were a bit tired and hot after a long humid afternoon. This is a 'country service' from Chiba, an 'all-stations' kakuekiteisha full of school kids going home and country people laden with shopping after a visit to the big shops.

And this was when the confrontation happened. I'd not noticed it myself but across the aisle from us, in the block of four seats opposite, were two girls of maybe seventeen or eighteen and another woman passenger. The fourth seat contained a large fashion store carrier bag which belonged to the girl sitting next to it. Suddenly the farmer next to me - a very 'patriarchal' and weather-beaten countryman of around sixty-five - tugged the sleeve of a woman standing in the aisle next to the seat with the bag on and said meaningfully "Why don't you sit down there?"

The bag remained where it was and the woman muttered something about "well, no-one has moved it". But this guy wasn't going to take that for the last word of course. He immediately said very directly and clearly to the owner of the offending bag so that the whole coach could hear "Why don't you put your bag on the rack so that this woman can sit down?". Everyone looked. The girl stared angrily back at the farmer. It felt like a very close-run thing to me and for a moment I thought she wasn't going to do it. And then very, very slowly and as if she'd discovered something unpleasant on her shoes she shifted to put her shopping up on the luggage rack and the woman sat down.

That was pretty well all there was to it, except when the farmer got off later at Enokido he glared meaningfully at the girl who ingored him totally.I was curious to see where she got off too - a 'townie' from Yachimata perhaps maybe recently moved there from Tokyo? - but no, she was still on the train when I got off and maybe was headed out as far as Choshi.

There were so many interesting angles to this confrontation. I'd guess even ten years ago the girl's behaviour would have been unimaginable, no one would have had the cheek to occupy two seats like that or confronted an 'elder' in such a way. Here was one rather selfish day to day face of globalisation arrived in leafy Chiba-ken, these two people inhabited not just different planets but quite different universes. She a teenager with a keitai (mobile phone), out with her buddy and with money for shopping sprees; the branded bags with fashion goods; no 'respect' for older people. "We got here first so I got a seat for my bag." "What's wrong with that?"

He a respected and perhaps quite rich person in a small village, involved in parish politics and used to people doing what he told them, firm ideas about what acceptable behaviour was, probably a very negative opinion of 'the youth of today'.

I wondered after if my sitting next to him had influenced the outcome - if there hadn't been a large gaijin watching with interest would she have gone the other way? Possibly. It's the classic double hermeneutic of social science fieldwork eh? I see you seeing me.

I reflected afterwards that in Britain this guy probably wouldn't have got away with it. If people do ever have the courage to confront selfish teenagers in public in the UK - and it's got to be very rare - the least they are likely to get is a mouthful of abuse. And there's a fair chance that violence would follow. So at least from that perspective, despite the deluge of international influences acting on young people, Japan is still a very safe society. For the moment. I wonder how it would play in the United States - say on BART or the New York subway.

Out to lunch

Just back from the big Cainz in Yachimata where I spent yet another fortune on wood. I ought to buy shares in some forestry companies the way I use the stuff. It's not my usual store - don't tell them but somehow I don't like Yachimata much - but they do have a much bigger selection than than other timber stores in this part of leafy Chiba-ken.

Anyway - what a lovely evening to drive over there. The countryside was still baking in the dusk and about a billion cicadas and frogs were singing happily. At one point I could smell garlic very strongly for about a mile, there must have been a big field of it ripening somewhere nearby. There's a town in California that describes itself as "Garlic Capital of the World" and I was trying to remember where it is - Gilroy perhaps? One of my American readers (that's your cue Jim!) on this site can surely tell me. Yachimata of course is Japan's Peanut City.

This morning I was in Togane to help out at an English class E-chan has been running all week. It was in the kominkan ('community centre') - an annual summer event run by the local UNESCO group. There were eighteen students. Usually we teach much smaller groups here at home - not more than six or seven - but the previous teacher had retired and suggested E-chan as a successor.

They were a really nice bunch of kids - very switched on and polite and interested enough in learning some basic English to give up their mornings for the whole week. I was kind of wheeled in by E-chan on the last day as a 'surprise'. The children had no idea that I was going to turn up but they weren't phased at all by a large grey-bearded English guy in khaki shorts looming through the door. I duly drilled them and grilled them on the stuff they had learned all week - "What's your name?", "Where are you from?", "What is yur favourite animal?" etc.

Later we had a party and played some increasingly rowdy games. Yeah! Lots of fun. And to end with the closing ceremont and group photo. It was especially fun for me teaching in this room bcause this is the very place where I learn Japanese on Saturday mornings.

Afterwards E-chan and I went out to lunch with a couple of the committee, one of whom was still teaching in a local elementary school. We had a very nice meal and an even nicer time chatting and sharing views on things. I've been explaining to my Japanese Mixi readers that "Out to lunch" has a rather funny double meaning for us native English speakers - it suggests someone that has consumed so much beer they aren't even sure what day it is. "Oh! He's REALLY out to lunch!" people would say about yours truly!

But I have to say our lunch was a happy and entirely sober one. It's a long time since anyone took me out to lunch last and I enjoyed it! If any of you lot who've already made the journey through the 'looking glass' to the Little House in the Paddy feel an overwhelming urge to feed me sometime around the middle of the day don't hesitate to ask!

Summer suns are glowing

It was such a gorgeous day today out here in leafy Chiba-ken that despite the awful heat I couldn't resist taking a trip around our local area to admire the tanbo (rice paddies). You can see by the pictures I've added how good the rice crop is looking at the moment. If you are stuck in Tokyo or Yokohama or live abroad - sad! I wish you could see with your own eyes how beautiful the countryside is here on a sunny day in July.

I'm no expert but it looks to me like this year's crop is a bit later than usual. We had a slow start due to cold weather in April, and farmers had to keep the water deeper than usual to protect the young shoots. But I'd guess we are around four weeks from the harvest now.

Until I first came to Japan in 1997 I'd never seen rice growing. In the UK 'Dulux' paint range I remember that there was a colour called 'young rice' but it was a pale imitation of the reality, nothing can prepare you for the vividness of the real thing, a green you don't see elsewhere. It's by far the most beautiful of all the grain crops to see growing, you want to stand and stare at it.

Another thing I like about rice is that initially it starts off life planted in a very 'ordered' way in the field but around now it gets bushier than my beard, a great green fuzz. And yet - stand at just the right place and those underlying ordered rows are still visible.

Interesting to think that almost everything that you can see in these photographs is devised and created by man. The rice was introduced here 2000 years ago from south east Asia, and the cedar forests are rather recent too. The trees are originally native to more sandy areas and wood has only been widely grown for building around here for a few centuries. In traditional Japanese country life the balance between fertiliry and renewability was well understood. The way of life still represented in these pictures is an ancient one - but in just one generation it has changed more than through the whole of the rest of Japanese history.

Hard to imagine now, but when I first came to Japan I thought that the landscape here was very messy. I was looking at it through totally 'Western' eyes, noticing the ubiquitous power cables and the absence of planning controls - the density and sprawl of recent housing and the garishness of hoardings and neon signs. Japanese people in turn find Britain astonishingly restrained and 'neat'. Now I notice more the care that is so often taken of small things, the lack of litter and graffiti, and the intensity of colours.

I felt very cheerful today, and I remembered with a laugh a hymn we used to sing in our dark Victorian elementary school in Middlesbrough, in the shadow of the Dorman Long steelworks on cold November days! It's by a Yorkshireman - the former Bishop of Wakefield, William Walsham How. I can almost hear Mrs. Keilor banging it out on the old upright paino in the hall as we sang in lusty voices

Summer suns are glowing,
Over land and sea.
Happy light is flowing,
Bountiful and free.

People with power

Into Chiba to use the library today - you'd have to be mad to be out there on the streets with a notebook if you could do something else instead. Even on the 9:07 into town everyone was looking crabby after a bad night's sweaty sleep and it was still sticky despite the air conditioning in the train roaring away at full blast.

At Yotsukaido a rather odd guy got on. Our coach was so crowded that I didn't notice him at first but after a couple of minutes I twigged that he was talking way too loud and only to small children and himself. I couldn't make out what he was talking about but the word 'baka' ('fool') cropped up in pretty well every sentence. Hmm ... you get the picture.

He was harmless and reasonably dressed but you could sense the deepening expressionless rigidity of everybody around him, notice their overly focused examination of various points on the train floor and ceiling. At the next station it got even more crowded around him, and his 'normal' neighbours couldn't edge away at all. Eventually at Higashi Chiba, a small station just before the terminus - we had a 'bolter'. A neatly dressed lady jumped off the train like a gazelle as soon as the doors opened and sprinted off as if she'd suddenly remembered she'd left a kettle on the stove towards - huh! Dang it! -the railing at the end of the platform - we were in the front coach. Big loss of 'face' there - we all watched her sprinting back, obviously looking for space in a coach without a guy talking to himself as an intimate neighbour.

It really came to me then how much power people can exercise over others just be behaving in an 'abnormal' and mildy unpredictable way, outside the norms we easily accept and run our lives by without thinking much. We are like bunny rabbits watching a snake eh? Easily made to do things by the threat of the unknown.

Today I visited four libraries where I often come across power exercised in a completely different mode. I needed to get some photocopies of some (very old and ordinary) topographic maps, and I was well prepared for the job. Hmm, but .. though none of the staff in these institutions have ever spoken to me in English maybe I should be careful here in case any actually read 'Mixi'. Let's call them libraries A, B, C and D

Psst ... step closer and let me pass on a few secrets about being a subversive within the Japanese library system. One thing foreigners really notice in Japan is how much people are in love with the detail. "If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing properly" could be the national motto. A practical consequence of this is that people spend (waste?) their whole lives doing jobs that elsewhere would be considered trivial, meaningless and in fact would be non-existent because someone would have found a way of making these tasks redundant to save some cash.

So in libraries A and B you have to fill in a form detailing the pages you want to copy and have it checked and countersigned BEFORE they even let you into the same room as a xerox machine. They count the copies you have done too. Library 'C' also has a form but it's quiet there and the nice guy in a wheelchair is usually too busy chatting up the other assistant so he lets you fill it in afterwards when you know what you've copied and doesn't count your copies either. Library 'D' (the University Library) couldn't care less what you copy but sadly they don't have much I actually need to copy.

Now, from the 'power' angle the interesting twist is that all these libraries have completely different and contradictory interpretations of the Japanese copyright laws. Library 'A' will only let you copy half a map ('hanbun!') no matter how old it is- although all the maps I am copying are more than 60 years old and so long out of copyright. Library 'B' has similar rules BUT treats local city atlases as maps, not books, so you can photocopy either the left or right hand page of the whole book if you like. Library 'C' knows what the law really is and you can photocopy the whole sheet but sadly doesn't have many old topographic maps I need.

The people 'in charge' at these institutions take their power very, very seriously. The also love to get the forms filled in right, compiling daily and weekly reports for management's amusement and monthly reports for the library committee I guess. I learned long ago that it was hopless to try and discuss, debate or argue, they aren't really interested what the law says anyway, just that you follow their rules to the letter. There's an aspect of 'training' around this isn't there?

There's no one single strategy to approach this with BUT of course where there's a will there's always a way. Not even Japanese libraries keep forms for ever, there's always a chance to get something else another time, they don't ask for a lifelong promise never to request items again. And as a gaijin a useful tactic is to always look helpless and apologetically complete the forms in romaji - Roman characters - a gentle bit of subversiveness because of course no-one wants to let on that they can't read them. No one with any vanity is going to say "If I'd been able to read English I wouldn't have let you do that" are they? One way and another, and between all the different sets of rules in each collection, I usually manage to get what I want.

There's some other angles on power I'd like to talk about, but another day.

A modest typhoon

It's a fair old typhoon eh? But so far we haven't had any really severe gales down here in our bit of leafy Chiba-ken, so it's a modest one as typhoons go. Actually our house is rather well sheltered by a low forest-clad hill from the south west. But tonight it's certainly raining 'like stair-rods' as we say in northern England (to show that we are affluent enough to be able to afford stairs in our house I suppose, or at least well connected enough to know someone with stairs in theirs). We also like to say - so many idioms in English to confuse foreigners - 'it's raining cats and dogs'. Why do we say that? Our old dog Kuu definitely doesn't go anywhere in the rain, you can't even see his nose in the kennel. But the older of our cats, Tora, is pretty dumb and instinctive and insists on demanding the door opened whatever is happening outdoors.

Still, it looks like they are getting a real hammering over in Shizuoka-ken this evening. I've just been watching pictures on TV of traffic at a standstill as the waves come crashing in over the coast road.

The extremes of climate here in Japan can be a bit scary. When I first lived here I wondered why all the rivers had been so drastically engineered into huge drainage channels and penned behind 10 metre high concrete walls but now I know. As it happens I've just been putting together the information on Chiba's climate over the last 30 years and it really surprised me just how much rain can fall here and how fast. A few typhoons have brought more than 300 mm in a single day - that's as much rain as East Anglia gets in half a year. In Britain we'd think that a tenth of that was a very wet day. And we are rather fortunate up here - they get it far worse down in Kyuushuu and the south west.

In April Rev. Mugo and I went to Hokyouji, a small and ancient temple in the forest above Ono in Fukui-ken. Around this time last year they were totally washed out, so much rain fell that the whole mountainside became one big deluge and crashed through the meditation hall. Luckily their temple treasures - which include famous paintings of Tendo Hyojo and Dogen - are in a special secure concrete building away from the main part of the temple - and the disaster passed them by. But it took a long time to get the place habitable again. It was certainly a terrible storm - the railway from Ono down to Fukui was washed out so badly that it still isn't working.

Extremes of weather are really fun aren't they? - unless we get too close of course. One of my first jobs was in the far north of Britain in the Orkney Islands and how I loved to head for the Atlantic shore every time we had a good gale. And up there in the 'Far North' the winter is just one good gale after another. I loved it in Orkney, perhaps I should move to Hokkaido and study bears, I'm suited to that kind of life.

My good news today was that I had my blood tests and my long term sugar levels are really coming down - in two months from 10.6 to 7.8. Maybe this has something to do with someone only allowing me a bowl of unpolished rice a few raw green vegetables and a glass of water every day (ho!ho! Only joking of course! Honest guv'nor!). But it's a good result, credit where it is due. Also my blood pressure is down to 112/65.

As clear as mud!

My grandfather was always one for having his 'facts straight' and if he wasn't satisfied with explanations about things he didn't understand he would mutter scornfully "Well! That's as clear as mud to me!" It wasn't intended as a compliment, he meant that it was so messy that he just couldn't see through it.

When I first started working towards my thesis I used to find myself getting impatient with academics saying to me things like "well, it depends what you mean by ...". They were always suggesting that I ought to be thinking more about about 'ontology' and 'epistemology' whatever they might be. But I've been doing this studying too long now it seems. Those kind of questions about the 'basis of reality' are starting to interest me, although I don't lie awake at night thinking them over - so far.

In my years as a brewery statistician it used to make me smile to think that in our grand old company we had a very good run of accurate sales statistics from the beginning (1742) until about 1980 - but then some fool introduced computers and after that we hadn't any idea at all of how much we'd sold ever again. Bits of paper and magnetic media got lost, people made programming mistakes, bits of the business were bought and sold (should we count those sales or not?). Some soft drinks were sold as syrup and diluted (should we include the water we added?) Oh! The list was endless.

But what was going on here? I couldn't help but wonder if those older and 'accurate' sales statistics were really as 'copper-bottomed' as they seemed. Maybe all these issues came up in the old days too but they just got forgotten about, once the clerks had balanced their leather-bound ledgers it was down with their quill pens and off to the pub to consume some of the stuff. Who cares about the deeper meanings of data then or now?

Today I was looking at how Chiba city has grown. In Japan there's a census every five years and since 1960 they have used a way of measuring area and population of towns called jinkou shuuchuu chiku or "Densely Inhabited Districts" (DID). Basically DIDs are areas made up either of census 'walks' (about 50 houses) with a population density of 40 people per hectare or ajacent areascontaining public, industrial, educational or recreational facilities.

What's that again? - clear as mud to me!

Well, basically it's saying it's 'densely inhabited' if either lots of people live there OR it's got some non-residential 'town' bits like factories, parks or schools.

So my task today was pretty easy eh?. All I had to do was sit down with a pile of maps showing DIDs at each census, a sheet of tracing paper, and trace out how the Chiba DID area has grown since 1960. What snags could there possibly be?

Well, as any statistician will tell you one very dodgy word is 'OR'. In Chiba it's a heck of a big 'OR' - 'adjacent indstry' includes four square kilometres of Kawasaki Steel Plant - about a quarter of the 'densely inhabited'part of town where no-one actually lives at all. But I already knew about this one.

What came as a complete surprise to me today was to discover that many parts of town that had been 'densely inhabited' DIDs weren't any more. Sometimes it was changes of boundaries, but often it was because with falling family sizes these days there are often far MORE houses but less people - so no longer 'dense'!

And then there's the question "so what do we mean by adjacent?" In English the word means 'next to' but in Japan it's slightly different. Here if boundaries meet at a cross-roads the opposite quarters (for example north west and south east) would be considered 'adjacent' becasue they meet at one point.

I could go on. But my basic point is this. No matter how simple and straightforward "the facts" might seem to be if you look closer they are always "as clear as mud".

No set of information or numbers is ever what it seems and often - especially when you are trying to look back in time - you simply can't get your 'tape measure' up against reality at all. The past is gone and no-one measured it for you the way you needed it to be done while they had the chance.

In fact - to use another on my grandad's favourite phrases - if something seems to be 'crystal clear' (what Americans sometimes innocently call a 'no-brainer') watch out! You obviously haven't understood at all!

They also serve ...

At yesterday's 'flea market' [see previous diary entry!] it was my job in the wider plan of things to be showing people stuff outdoors and in our famous shed for most of the morning. This meant that I was only occasionally in the heat of the action around the kitchen and 'trading floor'. I was kept busy enough and the rest of the 'gang' were just though the open French Window, but that well known quotation kept popping into my head "They only serve who only stand and wait".

I'm ashamed to say that, until yesterday evening when I got around to looking it up in my copy of the "Oxford Dictionary of Quotations", I had no idea where this maxim came from. It's something you often see used in newspaper features in the context of military old comrades reunions and the like, and I had a vague idea that it might be a line in some poem by a First World War poet. A kind of expression of respect for those soliders standing guard at home who never got to fight the enemy face to face.

But the line is much older than that, and about something quite different. It comes from a poem written by John Milton written in 1655.

Milton is a man I know very little about, and I have read almost none of his work. Actually although he lived fifty years after Shakespeare, and so should be easier to follow, I find his English much more difficult to understand. Everyone knows that he wrote - but few can say they have read - a very long and famous poem called "Paradise Lost". I've also heard somewhere that he was such an accomplished scholar that he couldn't decide at first whether to write this work in English or Latin.

The other thing that is common knowledge about his life is that he went blind in his forties, probably the consequence of too much study by candle light as a young man. And that is where this quotation comes from, a sonnet he wrote about coming to terms with his disbility called "On his blindness". Even though it is only fourteen lines long the seventeenth century scholarly English and the many biblical allusions make it a rather difficult to understand, even for a native speaker.

In the poem Milton begins in despair that with the loss of his sight he can no longer do what he was best at - write. How can he serve God 'in this dark world and wide' with this new disability? But 'Patience' points out that the Eternal does not need "either man's work or his own gifts. Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best..." And the poem ends with the line that I knew ... " ... Thousands at His bidding speed And post over Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait."

As someone who has done their fair share of 'speeding and posting over land and ocean' for most of the last fifty eight years - though possibly not always at the Eternal's bidding - I find that these last three lines move me almost to tears. The older I get, the more standing and waiting is probably in store for me. For Milton, actually his most profound and important writing was yet to come when he composed this. But he needed to rely on his daughters to put it down on paper for him.

The ground did move

A large earthquake at 4:40 this afternoon down here in leafy Chiba-ken - 5.8 according to the NHK news. That's small fry compared with the one in Niigata-ken last year but still enough to set the house really rocking.

I was taking a nap upstairs after a busy day here. Before I came to Japan I'd never experienced an earthquake and the first few times - we get a noticable one about twice a month - it had a real novelty value. Somehow it's only after a while that you start to become aware of the potential danger there and also that there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Usually in a quake the shaking gets stronger for about ten seconds, then there are a few distinct lurches like riding a train going over points after which it subsides slowly. Once you realise what's happening all you can really do is wait to see if it's going to be the dreaded 'Big One' - and 999 times in a thousand it isn't. This afternoon's had all the lamps and curtains in the room swaying around like on board a ship in a storm, but nothing down from the shelves thank goodness.

There's always something to make us smile. About seven we got a phone call from a worried student to tell us that the trains were still stopped for the track to be checked and he couldn't make his class. But we reminded him that it was cancelled tonight anyway - what a bummer eh? The perfect excuse on the one day he didn't need one!

His class was cancelled because today was our annual Kotoba no Hiroba 'flea market'. Our students and their mums can come around between 11:00 and 2:30 and bring stuff to sell and barter in a kind of discreet car boot sale. Of course no-ne really waits until eleven for the fun to start, I think the first arrival was 9:30. Today around 60 turned up and there wasn't much spare floor space as the haggling began. But it's not just the bartering that draws the crowds - the catering is something sepecial too with a choice of traditional recipe curries, pizzas, cakes and all the sugary goodies that I'm forbidden these days. And also this time one major attraction was a chance to visit my famous shed and see what's really inside that legendary edifice - oh! But more of that another time.

Big Ben in Chiba-ken

Interesting how words and sounds often mean something subtly different between cultures. I'm going to start to keep a notebook when I notice these. Actually I'd guess that most of the thousands of English words adopted into Japanese mean something different to the original if you look closely. This applies to music and other sounds too.

Down the lane towards the station from home there's a driving school, a very successful local business. Driving schools in Japan are utterly different to their British counterparts, the only thing that they have in common with the likes of 'BSM' (British School of Motoring) is that people go there hoping to get a driving license. Here in Japan everyone starts off with several lessons driving around a kind of 'toytown' arrangement with about a dozen other learners. This area covers about the area of a school yard, and you can carefully practice stopping at halt signs and traffic lights and creeping through a chicane at about 5km.p.h. under the watchful eye both of your instructor sitting next to you and the controller in his little watch tower. It's a kind of ultra slow motion trip to the dodgems. To keep things flowing smoothly a minibus will come from the school to collect you from your home for your lesson and take you back afterwards.

After weeks of patient (and I'd guess profitable) study you eventually make it to a heavily supervised foray onto some quiet country highways in your heavily marked car.

I'm sure Japanese friends simply wouldn't believe me if I described what we do in Britain. A typical first lesson is ususally around a car park or industrial estate on a quiet evening to 'get the hang' of the gears and remember which is the brake, and then you are straight onto the public highway to cope as well as you can. Any qualified driver can escort you pretty well anywhere except onto motorways - you can take a turn around central London in the rush hour if you want to.

So the basic difference between the two systems seems to be that in Japan you learn by the book, in Britain you learn by experience. I can't say which is best.

The link with meaning the meaning of sounds? Oh yes! The driving school lessons start at 30 minutes past the hour s so at 26 minutes past, from 9:26 through to 7:26 excluding Mondays and the lunch hour, they play the "go to your car music" over the loudspeaker system. And here for that they use a recording of Westminster chimes. So when you hear "ding-dong, ding-dong" starting you can set your watch at ... huh!?! ... 26 minutes past the hour. Even after listening to this for two years it still confuses the heck out of me. To a local Japanese learner driver Big Ben says "get the keys and walk to the car" but to an Enlishman it always says "it's on the hour".

Something similar that always makes me smile is the ubiquitous use of "Auld Lang Syne" in Japan. For westerners of course it says 'New Year', or at least 'Time for a last waltz with your partner'. Here; 'store closing time'. I've made so many 7:30 pm late dashes to our local Cainz DIY store, where it plays to empty aisles of hardware and dog food, that even for me now it will always be the "hurry up and get your timber, you are the last customer" music.

And with eglantine

When I was at school I used to really struggle with Shakespeare. One of his plays was always a set text for our GCE (16+) exams and for me it was Romeo and Juliet, a story I've always disliked. Way back in those days Shakespeare hadn't been dead so long and we were expected to read the original texts, not the kind of manga Reader's Digest versions kids get away with today. In fact we were told that we were lucky that our school was rich enough to buy new-fangled books so we didn't have to make our own copies with quill pens on parchment. Huh!

But one summer - maybe 1962 - I went to Regent's Park in London to see an outdoor performance of "Midsummer Night's Dream". It must have been an awful long time ago because you could still listen under the trees in that central London park without the poetry being drowned out by planes approaching Heathrow. As the evening wore on we were drawn deeper and more intimately into the magic of this vision of midsummer fairies, sitting there under a dark canopy of leaves, and for the first time I had some insight into the quality of Shakespeare's understanding of those things.

About ten years later I was working in Ireland and driving down an empty country road in County Sligo late on a misummer evening when, just for a moment, I sensed the same strong presence of magic. The low sun touching the western horizon caught the swaying boughs in a certain light, and suddenly all the vast extent of time buried and hidden within the very stones piled by the verge became visble, as if I had been granted a wish to see the world for a second through the eyes of a fairy.

And a third time, returning once to the woods by the river at Barnard Castle where I played as a child, climbing some stone steps near a deep and dangerous bend in the evening sun. There I had a glimse for a moment over the timeless as if looking out across the country fom a high place. There was such a rich and heavy scent in that damp July dusk, the smell of every flower and green thing that might be named. And a slight fear too. Go home children before the fairies come! Maybe this is the place Puck talks of:

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.

I've not found this place yet here in Japan but it's somewhere close. Here and now maybe it's darker, thick with dragonflies and moths filling the air under a single dim lightbulb at the corner of a lane though a bamboo thicket on some hot night alive with the sound of cicadas. It's not been a simple year for me - the pain of a death and so much unresolved and confused karma flowing from that. I hope at O-bon some of it might be put to rest.

Adieu, sweet Amaryllis!

Wednesday night is choir night. A bit thin on the ground tonight though because of the holidays. We even met out at distant 'Asobimura', a kindergarten run by one of our members, because our usual meeting place was closed for a holiday.

Frequently I feel that we sing 'too little, too often' but at the moment we are 'between events'. It's what we call in Britain the 'silly season', that time during the summer when once there was never any real news and so newspapers would print daft stories like "Talking dog may meet Queen" etc. Sadly news seems to be a 365 day a year thing now, but as we are not practising seriously for anything we are trying out lots of new stuff. It's a serious choir, maybe the best I was ever in - they really understand wha singing in harmony is about and I don't just mean musically.

Recently we've sung a lot of seventeenth century Europen music, both sacred anthems and secular madrigals. They seem to appeal to everyone in the group. If you only sing a capella it is a period that is going to appeal to you - people really understood what singing was about in those days in a way that they didn't before and haven't since.

Tonight we sang a madrigal by the English composer John Wilbye - 'Adieu, sweet Amaryllis' from his 1606 collection. Strange to think of the work of this Tudor musician being sung on the other side of the world four hundred years after he wrote it, but then again perhaps not. He was a Norfolk man and spent most of his life in the East Anglian countryside, he would have felt very much at home out here in leafy Chiba-ken I'm sure.

As usual quite a debate, which I could only dimly follow, began about how to sing the piece. Actually we sing it much faster than I've heard it before in England, but I think it works well. I can never quite make up my mind if the composer really regretted parting from the lady in question, or if there is a hint lurking in the music that he was glad to see the back of her because he'd grown a bit bored with her charms ...

"Adieu, sweet Amaryllis!
For since to part your will is;
Oh! Heavy tiding, here is for me no biding.
Yet once again 'ere that I part from you.
Amaryllis, sweet adieu!"

One thing that I really notice singing it is how easy it sounds to the ear sung in a Tudor accent - a bit like today's English Somerset dialect and a way of speaking that eventually became the basis of American English. You can spot poetry from that time simply by the sound of it.

It's a good song to sing around holiday time though eh? Adieu, adieu! To everyone I know who is getting on a train or a plane to travel to distant places during the holiday season a sweet adieu and also a safe return.

Edge of the World

A pretty hot day on the streets of Makuhari hongo today, but I managed to cover a large area - six of my city plan sheets (a record!) - and also to visit a few places that have always looked interesting on the map and I've been curious about.

The one I really wanted to see for myself was the boundary line between Chiba and the neighbouring city of Narashino, which runs straight as a die south west to north east for a few kilometres up from the Tokyo Bay shore. It follows an old but absolutely straight narrow lane, and it's one of those boundaries which s so striking on maps and on ariel photos that you can probably even see it from space!

South of this very nondescript lane are densely built up city blocks but to the north - apart from an occasional house - only broad fields. On the ground it's almost as striking as it looks on the map, as if you've suddenly arrived at the 'edge of the world' where all roads suddenly stop and beyond a white fence lies fertile brown soil and ripening crops.


I must research how this boundary has come about. It's rare for any kind of city planning provisions to actually 'stick' in Japan and usually developers seem to get their way, so I'm curious how this striking boundary endures. I'd guess someone holds all that farmland and is waiting for the next big Japanese property boom to make a killing.


It brought to mind for me a trip I made to Israel about ten years ago. There the situation was exactly the opposite - boundaries were hardly ever obvious or even marked in maps (actually I understand it was against the law to do so!). But they certainly existed in reality. So driving along some apparently harmless country lane in your Eldan hire car (yellow plates - from a Jewish area!) you would turn a corner and suddenly come on a real chasm between two worlds - a checkpoint crossing bristling with soldiers on the (non-existent) border between Jewish Israel and Arab Palestine. That really was one of the world's most dramatic edges, invisible but very real, not at all like Makuharihongo. No one from Narashino will have you in their gun sight if you climb over the white fence - well, I don't think so but I didn't try it!

Lost villages

Too hot to spend much time outdoors for me today and in any case I'd lots of interesting study to catch up on at home. I settled down with a fan running to a job I've wanted to finish for some time - to make a complete list of all the 'villages' in Chiba-shi.

In case it sounds odd to be counting villages in a city I should say that the Japanese term 'shi' doesn't really mean 'city' at all in a Western sense though that's how it is usually translated. 'City Region' might be better - more than half of the area of Chiba-shi is still deep countryside and some of it hasn't changed much in the last century.

But many of the villages I was counting this afternoon really have been swallowed up by the city - of the hundred or so I identified on the detailed 1925 maps about 40 are now part of the built up area. When you actually go to these places though they often still have quite a 'village' feel to them, they usually still look like country villages but people there are usually elderly and no-one farms any more, the land was sold off long ago for building danchi housing estates.

I was interested to find one village on the old map that looks like it has vanished - at Dainichi in Hanamigawa-ku. This was a military training area in the 1930's and it looks like the old village had to make way for a gunnery range.

There's a similar village in England on Salisbury Plain called Imber. It's still in the middle of an army tank training area but there most of the buildings are still intact and former residents go back once a year to tend family graves in the churchyard. It looks from the map as if the old Dainichi has completely disappeared, but there are new houses there now.

The discovery got me thinking about the fascination of 'lost places'. These are many sites of 'lost villages' in England, in fact there's at least one entire book devoted to them (Maurice Beresford's Lost Villages of England). We mislaid them due to all kinds of reasons. Many medieval villages were abandoned in the years after the plague because there just weren't sufficient people left alive to live there. In Tudor times many places across the country were demolished and their occupants evicted to make way for sheep farming when it became more profitable for landowners than growing wheat. You can see the remains of one of the best examples - Lilbourne - fom the M1 motorway in Warwickshire if you know where to look. In the eighteenth century some aristocrats even demolished whole villages to improve the view from their mansions. Other villages vanished becasue of natural disasters - several in East Yorkshire fell into the sea as the coastline was eroded back.

And in America too there's a long history of 'ghost towns'. Once in an old Atlas I found a cattle town in Arizona called "Bovine" but I've never found it on more recent maps.

It's interesting how easily places can vanish - destroyed, gone broke or just simply evaporated over time.

O-bon odori

Over to Sojiji temple today for Sunday zazenkai, something I do once or twice every month. One of our Throssel Hole Abbey congregation, Colin Salmon from Leeds University, is over here in Japan from the UK at the moment so we arranged to meet up at Kawasaki station and get the train down to Tsurumi together. I'd fixed up for Colin to have the 'Cooks Tour' and afterwards he came along for zazen too.

As it turned out it was a pretty short sitting - only about half an hour followed by the usual lecture, today on part of the Shushogi. Then we all headed off in a crocdile to another part of the temple - I love this experience of being blissfully unaware of what is going to happen next! It's a common one for me these days ...

Next on the agenda turned out to be a kind of 'Sunday Zazenkai AGM'. Lots of questions for four of our regular lecturers and I think we also re-elected our 'committee' on the nod - well, they all stood up, looked pleased and sat down again. Interesting for me because I find I can sometimes follow questions a bit now but maybe an ordeal for Colin to sit cross-legged on the tatami for nearly two hours.

We were all set to leave for the station afterwards when Tsuchida-san, one of our 'regulars' mentioned to us that there was another ceremony at 5:30. It turned out to be the outdoor O-bon service, held in the main car park down near the gate. Within half an hour the whole of the temple grounds seemed to fill up with local Yokohama people - parents with picnics and small children in kimono who were all so excited that it was hard to hear the chanting even with the help of a big loudspeaker system. At the end of the ceremony the kids all got to offer incense and then so did we.

I think the odori (dancing), fireworks and Festival of Lights were set to finish late but Colin had to get back to Shibuya and me of course all the way over to leafy Chiba-ken, so we left around 7:30 and headed into Tokyo for something to eat.

End of Term

When I was a kid we used to chant a little rhyme that began "No more lessons! No more school!" at the end of each term but I've forgotten the bit that comes next, maybe I was already out of the playground gate before they got to that. However bad my memory is I have to remember not to go to the kominkan next Saturday morning because there will be no one there. Japanese classes have finished for the summer and don't start until 10 September.

We had our 'summer social' a few weeks ago when we had a picnic [see picture!] in the local park so we kept our noses to the grindstone this morning as we grappled with transitive and intransitive verbs until the stroke of noon. No slacking - benkyo, benkyo - see how Japanese we are all becoming!

I'll miss the weekly class. It's run by the local IVC and the volunteers there do a really brilliant job for us. Japanese doesn't come easy to me and I also have to admit that out of class I'm a lazy student. But now they have endured me me for almost three years and even I can see some improvement. I think in that time I've had eight teachers. One or two - espacially M-san - are just really brilliant professional educators. Others I've sometimes thought have been learning from us almost as fast as we've been learning from them but we've surely all got the hang of it together. Yes, I'm very impressed with our volunteers - their commitment and friendship makes us feel so welcome here.

Interesting too to meet with the students at the IVC. Plenty from other parts of Asia - Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans and Filipinos - and also a few Westerners - an American girl, a Canadian and two of us from England. I like being in such an mixed international group and sometimes Japanese is the only language we have in common. I think everyone should have the experience of having to live in a completely different culture, it would make the world a far happier and more tolerant place.

Before I came here I spent a year taking the Cambridge qualification for teaching English as a foreign language to adults. It was a very practical course based at a busy college in North London and my classes involved teaching students similar to our IVC group. Later I helped teach refugees, but it was usually on a one to one basis in their homes. These days I think I would make a much more sympathetic teacher and be much more careful in the way I presented material.

Tonight for the first time this summer I'm noticing the cicadas singing in the lane at dusk - they can be very noisy and even rather spooky in the damp evening gloom down here in leafy Chiba-ken. I can see why in Japan people thought that the dead returned around the season of O-bon. Getting through the hottest weeks of July and August is as much an ordeal for me as it is for many of my neighbours and I'll probably spend some of the time on hot grey humid afternoons lying on the bed and listening to the sound of the cicadas singing.

Town dog, country dog

On foot in Shin-Kemigawa again today and it was hot enough to fry eggs on the pavement, if you had wanted to. I don't know why we say this but we do, it's a common English idiom. I'd guess that it probably comes from the 1914 - 1918 War with 'Tommys' expressing amazement at the heat of French and Italian summers. You certainly couldn't fry eggs on the pavement on a July day in Lancashire.

It was a day to scuttle from one pool of shade to the next taking advantage of every tree and shrub as you went - and so I didn't notice the corgi lurking stealthily behind his wire garden fence until he 'jumped' me with much barking and hopping around. It was a fair cop! He had all the fun of making me briefly airborne, probably the most excitement he'd had in a boring morning.

Of course I immediately thought of our Queen. As every British child knows our Queen has seven Cardiganshire corgis. A while back I saw some BBC children's TV presenter obseqiously enquiring of Her Majesty what they were called, "Excuse me Ma'am but could you tell us the names of each of these exquisite pedigree animals ...." etc. What a creep eh? The Beeb is stuffed full of them. However I'm pleased to say that the Queen's corgis have an unoffical reputation for being a pretty beastly lot, sinking their fangs from time to time into the ankle of some equerry or footman at the palace.

Myself, I can take them or leave them. I'd better be careful what I write here, one of my English friends keeps corgis and sometimes she reads this blog. Heh! Heh! Only joking Margaret. Once in a motorway shop I saw a remaindered book with the title "More corgi recipes" which looked good ("take one lightly braised corgi" etc.) and I nearly bought it for her birthday but even reduced it was still GBP 4.50 and I'm a mean person. You can pay too much for pleasure.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make today, if there is one, is that in Japanese urban areas usually there aren't many dogs, but those that there are are a pedigree bunch. More globalisaton at work here; a Cardiganshire corgi is a Cardiganshire corgi in Carmarthen, Cinncinnati or Chiba. The commonest pedigrees are the usual 'toy' breeds and the odd tired golden retriever. Often you do see a "Beware of the inu" sign on a gate in the suburbs but it's a bluff, you know it's only another LDP voter keeping the poor from his doorstep, no dog would live at such a property.

On the other hand, out here in the inaka of leafy Chiba-ken we have lots and lots of dogs. They all look exactly the same which is no surprise as they are all closely related. Many bitches aren't sterilised and every male dog is trickier than Houdini. Brown small tough little husky type dogs with curly tails who live outdoors in kennels. I've really come to like these mutts, they are intelligent, resourceful and friendly. Our thirteen year old - Kuu - still has hearing so sensitve that he can hear a sweetie wrapper at 600 paces. He's also I'm proud to say in the Japanese national team for the Yakking Olympics. He can nag and whine with the best of them. He only has to hear someone roll over in bed at 5:30 a.m. to launch into his own version of a dawn chorus

No documents!

I had a quick trip over to our local Cainz store tonight. I expected this jaunt to be rather a treat. Our ancient but sporty Nissan Skyline is getting checked over for the long trip down to Hiroshima during the holidays so, while Sase-san has it in his garage, we are using his equally ancient Tuscan red Volvo estate. It’s the difference between flying a fighter aircraft and driving a tank.

But it turned out to be rather a nervous trip because I realised that my driver’s licence and international permit were still sitting in the Nissan glove compartment. I drove even more carefully than ever through the usual shoals of teenagers on the wrong side of the road on lightless bikes and deaf joggers in black tracksuits. English readers might wonder what the problem was as we never carry any documents with us when we drive in England. If we are stopped by a patrol and asked for them we have five days to take them to any police station. Here is Japan it’s serious stuff not to have the right bits of paper to show on the spot, although I took some comfort from the knowledge that the only time my UK licence ever was examined by a Japanese policeman he wrote my name down as Mr. Bedfordshire (the county in England where my UK home is).

To make matters worse the Volvo has the standard European controls so every time I turned a corner I switched the windscreen wipers on instead of the indicator, not the best way of remaining inconspicuous. But relax, I made it home without incident.

These two things put me in mind of the very long list of day to day things I find hugely different between England and Japan. You have to be enormously more organised to live here. Someone once asked me “are you really tough enough to live in Japan?” and I’m still working out the answer to this question. In England if we don’t have the right bits of paper about us we just shrug and make a vague apology, but here people seem astonished if you can’t produce the right receipt or form and find it impossible to believe you don’t know where it is. How could anyone be so incompetent? Segoi! Last year returning from England KLM left my case behind while changing planes at Amsterdam and, after eighteen hours in the air, I’d mislaid the baggage receipt I’d been given the day before at Manchester. The ANA ground staff at Narita virtually had me stripped naked looking for this wretched bit of paper; as if this missing case was my fault!

If you want to go to the doctor or dentist in Japan or even pick up a prescription you have to produce your yellow health insurance card but in Britain no one would ask you for your national health number at a surgery or hospital. When the car goes for it’s annual examination here it has to be on the right day with the right forms.

But perhaps the hardest things to get right are money and travel. In England we don’t really spend much cash – it all goes on our credit or debit cards – but when we do need cash it’s easy to get some out of any ‘hole in the wall’ at any time day or night. Or when we use our debit card at the supermarket checkout we ask for ‘cash back’. In Japan almost everything is in cash and everybody seems to walk around with a king’s ransom stuffed in their wallets and with pockets bulging with coins. As a Post Office cash machine user myself, in most places in Japan I can only get money during the day and not at all on major public holidays because the machines are actually inside the offices.

Travel is even more painful for disorganised gaijin. In the UK I go everywhere by car so here I seldom remember to leave in enough time to catch the train without a sprint (and have enough money with me of course, because you can only use credit cards for long distance tickets). In England everyone has a detailed UK Road Atlas in their glove compartment and, as a map lover, it was one of the things I looked for on my first trip to Japan. I searched in vain and now I know why. Who would ever buy such a thing? With the maze of unsigned lanes across the land it would need to be the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica to be any use at all, and most of us are content to have just a Prefecture Road Atlas on board because we seldom drive any further.

Preston Cafe

Joyful Honda is an amazing name for a store. Just to speak it makes me feel like I should be skipping down some yellow brick road in Kansas. Every visit I make I live in hopes that this time I’m going to draw up in the car park to discover that a good witch was there in the night and that now at last it is rightfully staffed by happy munchkins dressed in white rabbit costumes. They will be there in a long chorus line and be dancing a can-can with linked arms, singing lustily about today’s astonishingly low price of 12mm plywood

We are from Joyful Honda, happy girls and boys
Our wood and hardware is so nice
As good as Cainz but half the price…

Not today though. It was a normal relaxed ‘day off’ visit for us to take back some black guttering which I’d overestimated on (that famous shed of course!) and to buy another roof rack full of timber.

Actually this Narita Joyful Honda branch is more a complete industrial estate or even theme park than a mere ‘store’. It covers about a square mile of pylon strewn Tomisato-shi near the Higashi Kanto Expressway. An interesting if not pretty area with several of those Japanese urban institutions such as Pachinko Parlors and Love Hotels [and more on these some other time]. Tomisato has to be the most formless place I ever came across in this bit of Japan. Sometimes I’ve seen road signs to ‘Tomisato City Center’ but it’s a joke of course, pure ‘Wizard of Oz’, a bit of midsummer madness on the part of bureaucrats. You could drive around for your whole life and never discover such a place.

There are many many retailing experiences to be experienced at the Tomisato Joyful Honda theme park, and all are labelled in a kind of English for would-be shoppers. Here you can find emporia like Smile Honda, Tool Honda and Pets and Green [that’s Dog Cat Bird Fish Flower to you and me]. In the garden centre we found something interesting – old railway sleepers (in the USA ‘ties’) for making garden paths. But these hadn’t been spiked at 3’ 6” (the JR 1067 mm gauge) but the very unusual 5’ 6” gauge – unlikely to be from the Deccan or Ireland so my guess would they were the remains of some Siberian branch line track.

But what I really like to see on visits to Joyful Honda is the amazing Preston Café. When I first discovered this I could hardly believe my eyes, it’s like a scene from the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, where the unsuspecting space voyagers take an unwitting step into a completely parallel universe. Here in a big dusty Japanese car park is a perfect facsimile of a restaurant called Guy’s Court in Lancashire. I know the original very well, I have eaten there many times. It was only a few hundred yards from where I once lived just outside the town of Preston.

And I do mean perfect facsimile. Not the exterior, which is just a typical big store ‘shed’ – but the interior. Same fake antique wooden trader’s signs as décor, same wall and flooring decoration, same menu. Someone obviously went into the original Guy’s for lunch, loved it, took some pictures, flew back to Tomisato and said “Build me one of those! I need a perfect facsimile!” To call it The Preston Café is a kind of ultimate accolade isn’t it? We don’t just want to steal your ideas but we’ll even have the name too. Mr. Wilkinson, the proprietor of the original and no mean entrepreneur himself, would be very impressed. This is the real and practical face of globalisation I guess.

Well, the food in Preston Café is OK but, like the original, not that special. So today we ate at Za Sarabureddo (for non-katakana readers that’s ‘The Thoroughbred’) an Italian eatery at a riding stables a few miles away. Maybe it’s also a perfect facsimile of somewhere in Venetia or Sacramento but who cares, they still serve the best bucket of pasta for miles around.

Learning Chess

This is Shinta. I’ve been teaching him to play chess – the European version - for the past couple of months. Luckily his English is much better than my Japanese.

It’s interesting to teach someone chess, and probably most people come to learn by chance rather than design. I can remember being taught the game myself when I was about Shinta’s age by someone my mother knew in Sussex. I’ve no idea who he was, nor can I even remember what he looked like, but I do remember the pleasure of handling the pieces and being taught the moves they make. The castle, the bishop, the knight and the perilous queen, there is a mystery of a kind in their shapes. He gave me a small travelling chess box with a marquetry board that I still have half a century later.

When you teach someone chess the first things to cover are the ground rules such as “white (square) to the right” and of course the moves permitted to the individual pieces. Curiously the least significant – the pawn – is the hardest to explain. It can only move forward one or maybe two steps, but it attacks other pieces by taking on the diagonal and sometimes en passant (whatever that means …).

After this introduction, you can only learn by playing - by doing it and making mistakes. You can read all the chess books in the world but only playing will make you a player. I was never much of a player - at school we’d play to pass the time after end-of-term exams and I always lost. So I’m not a hard target, and of course with beginners we don’t stick to the rule of having to move a piece once you have touched it. At the start if he was going to do something really dumb I’d suck through my teeth and look askance.

Shinta is a bright boy – actually musically a very gifted person. There’s a grand piano in the lounge at home and he sometimes plays in big competitions. He tells me he prefers Bach to Beethoven and believe me he should know because he plays both brilliantly. So it’s rather surprised me that he’s struggling a bit with chess and isn’t already giving me a good thrashing.

Why is this? He’s not found winning form yet because to win a game of chess you have to be able to evolve a strategy. So far he knows how to move the pieces, but not why or what for. He’s so busy trying to hoodwink me into loosing a piece that he’s not thinking about the big picture. Chess really is like a battle, you could corner your opponent’s king and win a game without even taking another of his pieces.

Maybe I should have played much more chess as a child because I can see now how late I came to really understand the real importance and place of strategy in respect of life generally. There’s a line in a track on the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon that goes …

“No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun ….”

I’m sure that this was very true for me. I’m not talking here of dreams of the fruits of ‘conventional success’. I don’t hanker after the lifestyle of those I often met as a student who were already sprinting down the inside track in the race of life towards a prestigious career in accountancy or the law. No –it’s the more fundamental issue that is on my mind. If you never get around to having dreams and ambitions of your own you’ll spend all your life responding one way or another to the imperatives of the dreams and ambitions of others. Maybe if I can teach Shinta this he’ll win a game.

In defence of yatsu

Another long hot day doing fieldwork in Chiba, this time around Mitsuwadai, an area built over in the 1970’s. I covered about three square kilometres in detail; it might not sound so much but usually one square kilometre will take seven kilometres of walking and I also had to get over there from Tsuga station. But I enjoyed it, I’m getting used to walking in the heat. At lunchtime I dived into a suburban Denny’s and cooled off for half an hour surrounded by about a hundred High School students.

Mitsuwadai is crossed by a ‘yatsu’ (in Kanagawa and Tokyo-to you say ‘yato’) a kind of small valley very typical of southern Kanto. About 50,000 years ago the whole of our region was buried in ash from erupting Mt. Fuji and a wonderfully intricate network of narrow valleys was carved through this fertile dust. Rising sea levels later left the valley bottoms filled with level fertile alluvium.

Travelling around this part of Japan you often discover these yatsu which in rural areas form beautiful stretches of tanbo – complex patchworks of rice fields which in July are vividly green with ripening grain. The intervening plateaux are a completely different world - also often very fertile but usually dry fields planted with vegetables, tobacco and orchards. Between these two levels are short but very steep slopes with dense bamboo thickets and cedar or deciduous woodland.

This aspect of “different worlds” usually endures as yatsu are swallowed up by housing. Often the breezy plateau fields are turned over to higher quality danchi housing, while down on shadier rice field land parallel blocks of rented public apartments might be built. It can be very easy to spot these urban yatsu on maps. The local road networks are usually quite separate and only the occasional steep flight of steps for pedestrians up through the wood connects two communities that might only be a hundred metres apart and yet seem to inhabit different worlds.

You need to be so careful and much more protective of these wonderful places in Japan, they seem frighteningly vulnerable to me. The more so because their beauty is subtle, small scale and, well, just apparently so ‘ordinary’ in the face of determined politicians and speculators. Maybe they have taken a thousand years of careful farming to create but they can be destroyed in a single summer. Over Tokyo-to and much of Kanagawa-ken cultivated yato are just a memory, and I’d guess about half of the yatsu of the old province of Shimosa are already buried under the suburbs of Chiba, Narita, Yotsukaido, Yachiyo and Sakura. Believe me, you only have to look at what’s happened to the tidal lands of Tokyo Bay and the shores of the Seto to understand that with places like this, “when they have gone, they’ve gone”.

The drain meeting

It's getting hotter and stickier isn't it? Those dreaded eight weeks of 'high summer' seem to have arrived in leafy Chiba-ken at last. This morning I was sawing wood and sweating so much that I just couldn't keep my spectacles on at all, they slid off in every direction. It felt like my ears and the bridge of my nose had been lubricated with KY Jelly.

With all this hard work (OK - it was a power saw but it's heavy) you might think that after lunch I was lined up to catch up on a few air conditioned zzzs but this Sunday we had bigger fish to fry. Our area 'Head Man' had called a meeting in our community hut about the field drain that runs along this side of the tanbo (paddy field) at the bottom of the lane. There was something in the nature of the note he'd put in our mailbox that started "Big Bill Looming" alarm bells ringing in my head.

Out here in the country we still do this kind of thing in the traditional way, and it's very interesting for a foreigner to see. Real democracy in action - you sit there and say your piece. Our aza ('parish') is divided into three sub-areas and then local 'areas' of about 25 houses. From time to time there are meetings about things like street lights (literally on a bulb by bulb basis) and our refuse collection and recycling points. During the year one person from each house (not me!) helps on a few mornings to tidy the local shrine and clean up the lane and strim some grass. The general communal commitment to keeping the area looking nice would astonish most English people.

What really interested me about this land drain meeting was to see how people the world over end up addressing this kind of issue in the same ways. It seems part of a small retaining wall of this land drain is looking dodgy and (possibly) in danger of imminent collapse but (and here is the big surprise coming!) it seems that everyone thinks that someone else should be paying for this to be remedied. The town office, much though they would have liked to have helped out of course, say they are certain that it isn't their responsibility and (with that hint of menace that local beaureaucats love to spice their replies with) if they were to get involved they would also need to look closely at issues of water quality (that means our septic tanks ho hmm ...). The 'riparian' owner of the adjoining field, who is rich and owns quite a lot of land, in his turn is sure that it must be down to local residents whose baths and kitchen sinks run into this ditch to cover the cost of repair. We on the other hand are sure that if the town office won't cough up then it's certainly up to him (especially as he's rich).

All the big existential, epistemological and ontological questions you might expect inevitably got raised. So what was the original deal between the fudo-san (estate agent) who made a packet putting this little housing area deal together and the council? No straight answer on THAT one of couse. Who should be counted a 'local resident' anyway? Did this problem just refer to waste water (i.e. our bath tub contents) or general drainage? Who built that first wall that's falling down? Should we involve our local Diet member? Can we appeal to some 'Higher Authority??' I could go on ....

Well, we had to leave early because the afternoon's students were due for their lessons but watch this space for further developments

A parcel came

I was fixing some strip lights out in the shed this afternoon when the doorbell went. It was our post-lady with a birthday parcel from my daughter Julia in England, so I made myself a cup of coffee and settled down to inspect the contents.

Yes, she knows my secret cravings well. Inside were some packets of cheese and onion flavoured crisps and cheese biscuits carefully packed in a plastic container and some blackcurrant and liquorice sweeties. My diabetic doctor at Naruto Hospital would go crazy if she saw this little stash of contraband, I'll have to put it away and ration my consumption over several weeks (only joking!).

Certainly if you are living in a different dietary world as a culinary ex-pat you can get fearsome cravings for this kind of stuff. There's a pirate called Ben Gunn in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island" who has been marooned on the island for years and is obsessed with memories of cheese. Well, I know just how he felt, sometimes I can wake up dreaming of a big wedge of extra-strong Cheddar.

Also in the parcel was the CD that goes with my "Teach Yourself Chinese" so maybe at last I'll struggle a bit less with pronunciaton. I'm told native English speakers find Chinese phonemes rather easier than Japanese speakers, but this slight advantage is more than outweighed by Japanese knowledge of kanji - you might not know how to say it but at least you can often guess at the meaning. And a teatowel containing several Scottish recipes. Maybe this week we'll try the oatcakes.

But perhaps what I most enjoyed were the pictures my daughter took on a trip to Kirkby Stephen a couple of weeks ago. This small town in Cumbria was my grandfather's home and I've known it all my life. In my opinion it's one of the most beautiful places in England but of course you'd need to know which little paths to take to see the country around there at it's best.

I was especially touched to see the photos of her big black flat-coated retriever, Darcy, swimming in the aptly named River Eden at Stenkrith (actually it's not the picture of her I've included here but one like it). Reckoning it up in my life so far I've taken five generations of excited dogs down that shady path to go swimming here. As a child my grandmother's fox terrier Shiela, then as a teenager and university student my grandad's two Jack Russell's Sally and Sam. Later with my own kids our own dear Cocker Spaniel Crackers. And now another generation of Robinson dog has been swimming there too.

Adding comments

Apologies to anyone who tried to add a comment to "Little House in the Paddy" yesterday. When I set the Blog up I forgot to enable them but it works OK now. Domo Sumimasen.

I guess it left lots of disappointed wannabe contributors staring at their laptops in disbelief ... but now is your chance

The Force out in force again I see ...

In the course of my (generally law-abiding) life I've taken as much care as any other man to keep a low profile when policemen are about but us seasoned travellers can't help noticing the interesting variations in attitudes towards law enforcement between different nationalities.

Down here in leafy Chiba-ken our law officers never seem to move around in less than platoon strength. Last night when I dropped Diva-chan at the station to catch her train to juku there were five of them sheltering from the rain in the doorway. I can't imagine what their purpose was - fare dodgers perhaps but if that was the case they were wasting their time because as everyone knows all the ticketless passengers vault the fence at the other side of the station.
Again, today, driving back from Togane there were another five congregated near a stop sign in the middle of nowhere. Hard to tell why, what with their sashes, armbands and luminous batons they might as well have had a flashing neon sign erected on a pole.

There are so many different police styles eh? Maybe the most impressive policeman I saw was a Highway Patrol interstate motorbike cop in New Mexico. He was in a freeway MacDonalds wearing 'shades' and leathers and with a McGrand and enough weaponry on his person to sink a battleship. The nicest was in Ireland where I got stopped by the Gardia doing twice the speed limit and was given some gentle advice on "taking it a bit easier sir". In Portugal I got involved in a turf war beteen city and prefectural police who spent a whole day with tape measures arguing whose patch I had been rammed in by a sleepy local driver (I still don't know). And once in Italy I came across a regiment of carabineri hauling un-taxed motorists before a roadside magistrate with a prison van parked in an adjacent lay-by. In rural China they can be pretty scary - one even came and looked over my shoulder to see what I'd just written on a scrap of paper.

Japanese policemen seem to follow pretty closely the French model - they love to put on a good 'manifestation'. "Be seen" is certainly their watchword. Sometimes in France too I've seen a bunch of a dozen or so hauling over unwary motorists for a spot fine. Japan is such a safe and law-abiding country they seem under-occupied to me compared with their harrassed colleages in some other lands. And with our 40 km.p.h (yes! That's 25 m.p.h. even on out of town roads!) speed limits that's bad news for anyone behind a steering wheel.

The Empty Seat

If you are Japanese this picture probably will mean nothing to you, but if like me you are a gaijin living in Japan you'll recognise it immediately. It's the seat opposite every gaijin who travels by train here - the empty one. Often the seat next to us is empty too. but I'd estimate that on 80% of the train journeys I make this seat opposite me is vacant. When we foreigners talk about our experience of life in Japan it's something we always mention to each other.

This one is a particularly good example because, as you can see in the background, the train is rather crowded. I counted nearly forty people standing in the coach, but somehow no-one noticed the empty seat across from me which, of course, was the only one on the train which was vacant.

I've always thought I'm a mild looking type, rather professorial. Maybe I'm scarier than I realise.

This seat remained empty for four stops, all the way from Chiba to Sakura where a nice middle-aged lady with armloads of shopping took it and smiled kindly at me.

What's this empty seat about? I'm really curious to know. If my Japanese was good enough I'd ask everyone around me. There are a few racists wherever you go in the world but I don't feel that especially here, most Japanese people are very kind and friendly. Some I've asked have suggested that it's because people in Japan are shy, or maybe are afraid that we foreigners might start asking them questions in English or behave in some unpredictable way. I'd really like some opinions as to why 90% seem to prefer to stand.

Usually this empty seat ends up being grabbed by some elderly lady who either isn't bothered who she sits next to or maybe needs her eyes testing, or by some younger kids who either don't care or want to get a good squint at me. Next time you are travelling and see one of these seats why not take it?

Introducing "Little House in the Paddy"

I've had this Blog lurking around for some time and now at last it's getting the 'make-over' it deserves ...

Lately I've been keeping a regular internet 'diary' page in Japan, but sadly this isn't easy for any of my English and American friends to read as I use a Japanese Blog site called 'Mixi' which many of my Japanese friends use.

So from now on I'm planning to post my daily diary to both Mixi AND here in "Little House in the Paddy". Most of the items relate to life here in Japan so I hope you'll find them interesting, if maybe confusing sometimes.

"Little House in the Paddy" is open to all comers; please feel free to add whatever comments you want. Bookmark the site and come back regularly as I'll add stuff every day