Trip to Soga Reido

Over to Eiko's restaurant at Soga Reido Sanctuary today. It's about fifteen miles from here, over on the other side of National Highway 51. Hey! Thinking about it, didn't Bob Dylan write a song about Highway 51 once?

God said to Abraham "Give me a son!"
Abe said "Man,you must be putting me on ..."

Oh! But wait a minute, maybe I'm having another 'senior moment' here. Thinking about it, it might have been Highway 61 eh? Us statisticians don't worry too much about numbers, they are only indicative you know. It was certainly 'Route 66' where we were supposed to 'get our kicks' and if you've not been on to old Route 66 across the desert in California and Arizona you should make a trip, it's certainly a good place for kicks.

Ho hmm .. wehere was I. Right, crossing Highway 51. North of there is a bit of a mystery to me, real 'terra incognita'. Places like Shisui, that you usually only ever see through the window of a train. That part of old Shimosa - Imba-gun - is low lying and drains up into the Tonegawa and until the 1920's when a huge drainage scheme was finished, was basically just a big lake surrounded by swamps.

Eiko is a friend of Kodemari's and she has a nice vegetarian restaurant on the corner across the road from the temple there. It's a popular local shrine because it commemorates a local samurai who back in the Edo era petitioned the shoguns to reduce taxes and provide relief during a famine. To do such a thing in those days attracted an immediate death sentence, but that brave man did it nevertheless because he saw how local farmers suffered. He - and his family - were executed of course, but the government did relent and provide relief. I don't know the full story but I'll have to find out. I was last there with Rev. Mugo back in April when the cherry blossom was out, as you can see from the picture at the top of today's entry. Today I didn't take my camera and in any case it's that heavy flat time of year when the greens seem almost too 'mature' when the sun isn't shining on the trees.

And tonight - choir practice! Mustn't be late, we've had some apologies for absence already and it seems like I'll be the only man tonight. I'll have to contend with a dozen women at least eh? Sounds good to me - I'd better start on some arpeggios now before I go so that I'm in good voice eh?

Illusions of safety?

I spent quite a while today writing up some information on ways earthquakes get measured. It was very interesting - once I'd got my nose into it I could hardly drag myself away.

For anyone studying Japanese cities earthquakes are an important background topic. Everyone knows that Japan is the most earthquake prone country in the world. Ever since people started to construct homes and temples here they learned to take earthquakes into account. Until ferroconcrete began to be used in the Taisho era all buildings, even the largest, were made of wood using 'post and beam' designs. Brick or stone as used in Europe and China would just collapse in a strong quake if you tried to use them.

So much wood around was a source of frequent major fires, another feature of Japanese cities. Even today construction methods are quite distinct to guard against earthquake and fire.

There are several ways in which earthquakes are measured around the world. In the West the technique used by the American geologist Carl Richter is normally used. A network of seismographs around the globe pick up the strength of vibrations and a single overall magnitude can then be calculated for each quake. But in Japan a separate JMA ('Japan Meteorological Agency') shindo scale is used and the size of each earthquake at many different points is recorded and reported. In a way this makes good sense - if you live in Chiba it's how big the quake is here that matters, not how they felt it in Kanagawa or Tochigi. What counts in the JMA scale is how fast and far the ground moves.

I never experienced any earthquakes until I came to Japan and it was a very novel experience those first few times. It didn't worry me at all. But back in 2003 eating our dinners one evening we felt the distant shaking of the big quake in the Pacific off Iwate-ken and the kids dived under the table as they had been taught to at school. Later that summer I saw the damage that earthquake had done around Tono and after that I began to feel nervous. Now, whenever we have one, which is around once a month, I'm as apprehensive as everyone else in those first few seconds when you sense the ground suddenly move and don't know how it will end up.

Looking at my JMA Scale table today I realised the worst I've felt so far is probably upper shindo 4 or maybe low 5-. It's scary to see just how far out of control the consequences get in even a shindo 5+ quake, let alone the very big ones.

It seems to me that ultimately what is really scary about sitting in an earthquake is that for a few seconds it's only too clear to us that we have no control over our destinies at all and don't know what will happen next. It must be a bit like the kind of fear soldiers feel before going on active service when they would comment that "if a bullet's got your number on it you'll get it".

But doesn't that beg the bigger question that all this is probably equally true of most, even all, of our every waking day and the sense of safety we have about our lives is pure illusion. As a statistician I know that, for most of us, we are much more likely to end up being struck down by a traffic accident on the way to the local supermarket or an unforeseen heart attack, than we ever are by the 'Big One'. But somehow we manage to kid ourselves by maintaining an illusion of safety around all that stuff.

Exercising power

An early start this morning to get into Chiba to go to the visa office but despite catching the early train we still didn't beat the queues. By the time we arrived shortly after nine the waiting room was already packed full of the usual crowd of fed-up looking adults and fractious kids. But it wasn't too bad, we only had to wait about ninety minutes.

It's that time of year when I need to get my residence visa renewed. Until now it's been an annual event and I also need to get a special stamp to let me back into Japan if I travel abroad so this office has become rather familiar me. This time it looks like I might get a three year permit which will make life easier, and after that perhaps permanent residence status.

As a foreigner you need to be very careful to keep your paperwork in order here; if you don't get the right stamps at the right times you could soon find yourself with a one way ticket back to where you came from. Politicians in Japan are as keen as anywhere else to point fingers at 'foreigners' for every kind of social malaise.

I can't complain, our lot in England are just as bad. When there's some news story running about gaijin being responsible for soaring crime Japanese people I know will say that they involve 'some' foreigners - by which they mean Chinese and Koreans I guess - but the same rules apply to us all. There are not many reasons you can legitimately reside in Japan longer than 90 days (learning the tea ceremony and marrying a Japanese are two of them)

I have to say that I find the staff in this office very good. It can't be an easy job doing such 'official' business with a seething mass of aliens all day every day but they are calm, courteous and - as long as your papers are in order - generally sympathetic wherever you come from. I've never met their UK equivalents but I hope they are as helpful and polite.

All this was a bit of a contrast with our second call of the day, which was to return a mobile phone and end the contract. We've had it about three years now and we use it so little that we aren't even using up our free ten mnutes worth of calls every month. It was a two year contract, up nearly a year ago, so we went back to the shop to cancel it. Naive eh? How innocent can we be?

Well, our first surprise was that we couldn't cancel it there, we had to go to the TU-KA shop across the road. There by degrees we discovered that this company wanted to shake another 10,000 yen out of us to cancel the contract. According to their interpretation it was true that the contract COULD have been cancelled for free after two years, but as we didn't they had renewed it and so now we'd need to pay penalty charges. Needless to say no-ne explained it to us like THAT when we signed the original deal.

People who know me well will have spotted not just one but a whole dashbord of buttons that this would be likely to press for me. I a peaceable sort but I just hate sharp practice. Henry Thoreau once said "When the State says to you 'your money or your life' don't be in a hurry to hand over your money" and how right he was - not just about the state but any bunch of people who use their power, the law and their own interpretation of the small print crafted by their lawyers to empty your pockets unfairly.

Back in the olden days bandits used to be hanged for highway robbery but these days it seems the law is on the side of businesses. How often do you see it? And I hate to say it but I think Japan is particularly bad. Certainly in Europe good consumer legislation usually gives the public a chance against sharp practice. If you changed your politicians more often here you might have better consumer protection - well it's only an opinion of course. In the meantime TU-KA I think the way you do business stinks. Thats only an opinion too, but I'll certainly never be a customer of yours again. Ho hmm ... another day over ...

Brushes with fame

I often wonder if I've ever met someone really famous in Japan - maybe a pop star or a politician or an author, and was just too dumb to realise it. I think I'd recognise Mr. Koizumi if he was sitting opposite me on the train but that's about my limit.

In England over many years I had several brushes with fame and most of those I was blissfully unaware of too. Last time I was in London I was in Foyle's book shop in Charing Cross Road at the same time as Michael Jackson. I didn't know until I overheard the sales assistants muttering excitedly and crowding around to admire his autograph on a Visa card slip.

Oh! And the real classic, I still blush to think of it. Year and years ago I was invited to a party at Kendal attended by lots of local drama club types - it was someone's birthday or wedding anniversary. I talked to a nice quiet middle aged guy in glasses who told me he was a writer so I told him how I worked for a brewery but liked writing in my spare time too. Much later I realised it had been Alan Bennett, probably Britain's best-loved and most famous playwright. You just don't expect famous people to look ordinary do you?

Back in 1978 I had to set up a press conference in Cardiff for the UK British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, who was the local MP. He was opening a new police station and he chatted with me over a cup of tea afterwards about a new freezer he and his wife Audrey were going to have delivered that weekend while behind us some policemen entertained local reporters with gruesome pictures of recent homicides. Gentleman Jim, or Sunny Jim, he was known as - brought up as a poor child on the streets of Portsmouth and held every major office of state in British government. He died a few days after is wife back in March, just before his 93rd birthday

Once I had ties with the city of Swansea in Wales, a tatty but interesting old industrial town by the sea. It was the home town of the poet Dylan Thomas, and a lady I knew there told me of his interest in her as a girl. Dylan was more than a bit of a boozer and hell-raiser, and his favourite place to hang out during the day - when he wasn't in one of many, many pubs in the town - was at a small blue-painted bookshop called Ralphs. My friend worked just over the road in a newspaper wholesalers, and on his way to check over the second-hand books would put his head around the door to chat her up. But sadly, or maybe luckily, her father found out what bad company she was keeping and she was forbidden to ever talk to him again. If things had worked out differently maybe she would have lived an outrageously Bohemian life with him in the old boat house down at Laugharne while he wrote poetry like a whirlwind until the cash ran out and the drink caught up with him.

The story that really makes me laugh though was one I heard about the Irish president Eamonn de Valera. Back in the 1950's when the President of the Republic could still go out with just one plain clothes policeman for company, he went to see a play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Taking his seat at the front of the circle he found himself sitting next to two American tourists who gave him a kind of running commentry on the action on stage through the whole production - "Hey! I never thought he would do that!" - Wow! Look at her!" In the interval they chatted away about what a wonderful little old country Ireland was and then after telling him all about their garage business in Idaho one of them thought to ask him what he did for a living. "Oh! I'm just the President here .." he muttered.

Anyone like to add their own brushes with fame?

Hitting the road again ...

A friend in Taiwan (hello Linzy!) was on Skype yesterday when I logged onto my laptop and we messaged each other in a lazy way for about ten minutes talking about stuff like humidity and typhoons and other attractive aspects of the east Asian climate at this time of year. Taiwan is one of the places I hope I'll visit soon, and after we'd logged off I found myself daydreaming again about the places around this part of the world that I'd like to visit sometime soon if I see a cheap enough flight.

You would have thought my visit to China in May would have been enough for even my 'itchy feet' for one year. But I think it's given me a bit of an appetite for all things Chinese and Taipei looks so interesting to a student of Asian cities. I hope I'd get to see a bit more of it than I did of Shanghai. We'winged' my way through there on arrival and by the time we made it back to the city on a rainy evening after our adventures in Zhejiang I just wanted to sit in a hotel room and suck my thumb. So I spent the evening watching TV before catching the plane the next morning.

I'm not sure if Edera's patience would currently run to a visit to Taiwan without her though. Seoul would be a better bet, she's already been there so she can't complain (not that she ever does your honour!) . You can get a pretty cheap Korean Railways all-lines pass so maybe a rainy week dozing on trains rumbling from small town to small town would be fun. I think the Korean countryside in the south must be rather like Kyuushu.

One day I must check out the possibilities of travelling to the Russian Far East. That's also high on my list, but such places are always expensive to get to. If you fly from Tokyo to Europe you cross the Amur River near Khabarovsk and the landscape around there looks amazing - big ranges of snow-capped mountains that I'd never heard of until I first flew to Japan. The island of Sakhalin looks good on the map too - bigger and longer than Hokkaido and it's got such an interesting history and ethnic make up. Until WW2 the southern half was a part of Japan. And north of Sakhalin Kamchatka is the far east of Siberia, really still a wilderness on the scale of Alaska.

In the opposite direction I also regularly keep an eye on the airline ticket prices to Australia and New Zealand from here. I can't think of a good reason to go either just at the moment, except to annoy my daughter Julia who hopes to get there first, but there must be one if I think hard enough (only joking!) Half of our students seem to have either been to Australia or are planning to go. And they all love it.

Well, it's all just a daydream at the moment, but watch this space. I'm getting a reputation for hitting the road in my mature years. And if I don't go, at least I'll buy myself a good map.

Cat on the tracks!

Recently some of my fellow academic geographers have been writing 'Alternative Geographies'. 'Geographies of Childhood' seem especially popular - how we see and understand the areas we live in as children, how we move around the place as kids and what in a locality is important to us.

And of course we can also compare our own childhood experiences of places with today and see how children who live there experience them Sadly. their world has often shrunk to only a fraction of the scale of th eone we lived in due to alternative amusements indoors and today's new dangers, real or imagined. In Britain the risk from traffic is certainly far greater than it was, but I'm glad to say out here in leafy Chiba-ken kids still pretty well move around as they like.

Of course us humans seem to think we own the world. I sometimes like to daydream about what other animals make of the places that are just familiar addresses to us. Do the pigeons on city buildings still hear the sound of the ocean from the streets below? What kind of geography does our dog Kuu create in his head from the barks and other sounds he hears during the day and night?

This all jumped into focus for me this morning when I was sitting reading in the sunshine in our newly decorated school room. Our two cats, Tora and Pero, were fast asleep on the nice blue wall to wall carpet when suddenly there was the sound of a cat fight in progress somewhereup the lane. At the first squark outside Tora - rather middle aged and barrel-shaped these days - rushed to the window with a "Let me at 'em! Let me at 'em! I'll show them who is boss!" look in his eye. He stood up and in a posture I've never seen a cat use before, on his haunches with paws up like a prarie-dog or an otter. Pero, who has been coming second in a lot of furry fisticuffs around here lately, just moved closer to my ankle and looked nervous.

It suddenly struck me what a different world existed outside our window even for our two pets. For them this peaceful looking Japanese street was a pussycat Bronx or Sicilian stakeout, inhabited by bad guys who would mug you for your last mouthful of tuna if you gave them the chance.

After all the work we've done in the garden this year both cats love to lurk amongst the conifer shrubs along the fence which offer excellent cover and a clear line of fire down the lane. But since I drove the Limestone Brae railroad through the forest here last month Pero - always a lover of high places - has taken to sleeping or meditating on the tracks under the mistaken idea that this added landscape feature is some kind of walkway around the garden I've put up for her sole use.

Since scheduled services began this misconception has resulted in a few frights for all concerned as I can't see some parts of the track from my controller. Now I've learned to look out of the window before giving the 'Right Away!' to the 'Scotch Express' and Pero has realised that fast moving 1:87 scale Amtrack FP45's stop for no felines. Hopefully she won't get rammed in the B-T-M as she dozes on the 'right of way' another time.

Yes, there are so many different geographies out there if we could but see them.

A gap between the showers

We were very lucky with our choir barbeque last night. It's been wet most of the week but yesterday evening was sunny and cool and even the humidity and mosquitoes were tolerable. So we had our barbeque outdoors after all, rather than huddled in a leaky car port. The timing was perfect - when I woke up around three this morning the rain was already hammering down again.

This event is held in the yard of Asobimura ('Play Village'), a kindergarden that belongs to K-san, our lead soprano. It's way out in the country and only a couple of miles from the Ocean, so there's lots of space there. If you are a plane buff - I'm not really - it's a great place to watch the aircraft circling to land at Narita too. If you ever fly here your first sight of Japan might well be of Asobimura!

It always amazes me just how different something as ordinary as a barbecue can differ so much between Japan and Britain. It starts even with the equipment. The average British BBQ enthusiast likes to wear a chef's hat and apron and uses a pretty professional brick built grill in his garden, while here we make do with some breeze blocks set up on the sand. Inevitably the ingredients differ widely too - we don't often grill fish in the UK, and I don't even know where you could buy octopus. But the range of meat and sausages on the grill is bigger and we can also get delicacies like feta cheese to cook on skewers. I guess in America and Australia steaks are pretty cheap.

However it's the social stuff that's so very different. In Britain you always go along to dates like this with your husband or wife. In Japan, never, it seems, unless like us they happen to be involved in the same group. I've never seen a society where husbands and wives lead such separate lives as this one.

Perhaps because of that the eating is relatively much more important in Japan. At any British barbeque the garden is likely to be crowded with guys swigging huge quantities of lager and talking about football. Here a whole party can be fuelled by a couple of cans of beer and a bottle of sake, a level of alcohol intake unlikely to satisfy even a single reveler in England.

Also people in Japan are just so instinctively aware of what needs to be done. At events like this everyone helps with the organisation and preparation, the cooking and cleaning up, no-one needs to be told what has to be done.

It was a very nice do and I enjoyed it. But sometimes I find this kind of evening seems to make me feel like a foreigner far from home even when I'm surrounded by so many friends. I'm no extrovert at parties but I do love to talk to people and if your grasp of the language is poor you have to sit and listen rather than speak. I also felt a bit ashamed that after so long my Japanese is still so weak. Sometimes, even if you love a culture and feel very at home in a place, it's still not always easy to live as a foreigner in a different country. But if everyone had experience of it the world would be a much better place.

I found myself thinking of two good friends of mine who have all this to learn for themselves - my 'Japanese daughter' Akko now just started at University in New York State and her friend Miso from Saitama who will soon be in Newcastle in England. Good luck to the pair of you and take care!

Then all the mighty floods were out

On my way back from Yacs drugstore this afternoon (don't ask! - a stash of diet Pepsi for tonight's party) I took a look at our Yakuta River. It's no Mississippi, nor Old Father Thames, in fact it's not even a Tonegawa. It drains the rice fields on it's short journey down our local yatsu. But the beaten down and muddy grass showed ithat t had been brimful to the bank top last night after all those thunderstorms.

There's something in me that finds sudden floods both very scary and very exciting. The stuff of nightmares, especially when they happen in the dark and we are only dimly aware of their scale in the thin light of a single light bulb or a wan moon.

As a child I used to live in a small town in County Durham. Our river - the Tees - had a fearsone reputation for sudden and dangerous flooding. If rain in the hills was heavy enough a wall of water a metre or more high would come crashing down the valley. This was called a 'roll', and at school we had the danger of 'rolls' drummed into us. We were cautioned to keep well clear of the river after storms, but even so in every generation there was always one or two foolhardy types whose bodies were fished out far downstream. as a warning to the rest

My grandfather said that during the War a platoon of soldiers once began learning to build a temporary bridge across the river. One morning after a storm a farmer warned them of the danger of a sudden flood, but the officer in charge laughed and said 'he had his orders'. A few minutes later the farmer saw a big 'roll' flooding down river but couldn't get back to give an alarm and all those soldiers were drowned.

Perhaps becaue of this story one of my favourite poems at elementary school was Jean Ingelow's "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire" where she described a flood on the coast of Eastern England back in 1571 caused by a tidal surge. Seeing the danger the mayor of Boston tried to raise the alarm by having the tune "The Bride of Enderby" rung on the bells of the church and then suddenly the river bursts over the levees

Then bankes came downe with ruin and rout-
Then beaten foam flew round about-
Then all the mighty floods were out.

And then the stuff of nightmares begins because in the dark, rainy dusk you just can't run fast enough, far enough.

The heart had hardly time to beat,
Before a shallow seething wave
Sobbed in the grasses at oure feet:
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee,
And all the world was in the sea.

In Britain our best known tidal bore is on the River Severn between Newnham and Gloucester. The best ones - around 25 a year send a wave or aegre over a metre high up river but these are so popular now that the banks are crowded and there are dozens of surfers ready to ride the crest upstream. Still, it's well worth the effort of getting to see one.

There are tidal bores like this elsewhere in the world (are there any in Japan I wonder?) By far the biggest is on the Ch'ient'ang'kian (Hangzhou-fe) in China. On big Spring tides it tops 7.5 metres high and they say you can hear the roar of it coming at night 20 kilometres away. I crossed this river on the train in back May but sadly it was low tide - maybe I'll go back there to see a big one soon.

Will this summer ever end?

We're having a neat old thunderstorm down here in leafy Chiba-ken at the moment. Nothing too extreme but it's been around the block three times at least since dark and we've had a lot of rain off it. Well, it's keeping the frogs happy.

Interesting how Junior High students don't need too much discouragement to miss a lesson. The old days when starry-eyed youngsters thirsting for knowledge would trudge through storms for hours so that they wouldn't miss their English class, even though the trains had stopped running and the bridges all got washed away, are long gone it seems. A single peal of thunder is all it takes to keep kids in front of the TV now.

Anyway - an unexpectedly free evening has let us finish our painting in the teaching area, and hopefully I'll get the carpet laid in the morning. We don't have a lot of space so it will be good to get all the piles of books off the floor in the washitsu (Japanese style tatami room) and back into bookcases. It will spoil the cats' fun though, they've been happily testing out several new places to sleep over the last couple of days and the empty bottom shelf of the bookcase seems to be a favorite with both of them.

When the storm was at its worst the doorbell went. It felt kinda spooky, as if Heathcliff was going to be standing outside, but it was only Chihiro's flat mate Sara-chan who was dropping off some stuff. She gave us a hand to finish the pink on the walls and we took this picture to celebrate our progress.

Today somehow I caught myself really wishing this summer was over. We've had weeks of temperatures up in the mid 30's and high humidity and suddenly I've begun to dream of cool crisp October mornings when you can breathe the air rather than bathe in it. Us Brits can only take so much sub-tropical climate. We've probably only got another three weeks of the tough stuff before the weather breaks but then no doubt we'll have a typhoon ot two before autumn proper arrives. I see the first of the season is heading north from the Phillipines towards Okinawa at the moment and we can expect the tail end of it on Thursday up here in Kanto.

Well, keep your fingers crossed for us tomorrow evening anyeay. It's the choir barbeque at Asobimura and I'd rather feed my face under a romantically starry sky than camped under the car port with the rain hammering on the roof. It may not be quite the 'Hunt Ball' and we might not be quite the Sanbu-gun County Set but this year I'm planning on some candid 'Country Life' style party photos so, yet again, watch this space!

People in uniform who wave sticks

I've realised on many occasions during my life that I can easily 'have a problem' with 'authority'. It's a tendency I have to be very aware of in Japan and one that I need to keep on a short leash. Basically I don't like people in uniforms with sticks.

What do I mention this? Well, I often come across people here in positions of often arbitary, and usually trivial authority, that expect to be obeyed. These people don't exist in Britain, or certainly to nowhere near the degree that they do in Japan. I don't know the position in the United States.

In Britain our culture doesn't tolerate any 'figures of authority' easily. In fact many of us have a very stubborn streak. Policemen usually have our respect - as long as they are polite. Security people are accepted in defined situations - airports, industrial sites and shopping malls.

That's about it. We have a social, trade union and common law tradition of not letting ourselves be told what to do which has evolved over a long time. It's a two-fingered tradition with some famous landmarks - the Peterloo Massacre and the Chartist riots of the 1840's to name but a couple. Actually we see it as a virtue to thumb our noses at figures of authority.

When I was a child there were many more serious authority figures around. Teachers with big sticks were certainly soemthing to beware of. And there were others too, like park keepers and priests, that told you what and what not to do. These have nearly all gone, although they are mourned by many.

Here in Japan you love uniforms eh? It seems that I can't get in a car without an army of people in uniform waving luminous orange batons at me to give me advice I don't need. 'What? Drive straight ahead rather than veer into that concrete wall - I would never have thought of it!' Even the most trival maintenance works have at least three of them doing a kind of ballet in the road although temporary traffic lights as used everywhere else in the world would be a lot cheaper. Sometimes these people are 'policing' or enforcing temporary road closures - we have a lot of those.

Often people in uniform with walkie-talkies - who are basically parking attendants - will stride out into the road to halt traffic on the highway to let a customer out of a supermarket car park. I've noticed one particular chain - Maruhei - doing this very assertively around here. In Britain anyone trying this would end up in either hospital or the mortuary within the hour for sure.

But the ones that really concern me are the private security guards that seem to be much more a feature of Japanese life than anywhere else I've ever been. Considering Japan is unarguably already an incredibly 'safe' society what is all that about? It's certainly very much about the control of public spaces. At Chiba City library there are at least a dozen uniformed guards supervising the parking of bicycles, orderly stowage of 'brollies' in wet weather and making sure no-one is eating their lunch in the foyer.

When I was in Nobuto recently I passed an apartment building with no less than six baton-wielding guards striding around the car park and access area, it was a level of 'presence' that was obviously meant to inimidate - but who and why? Surely not the mothers bringing their kids back from the kindergarden?

But the scariest example I saw during the summer was in the small Saty department store near Shin-Kemigawa station, a leafy and genteel part of Chiba. On my way out of the basement grocery exit with my lunchtime sandwich I noticed two security guards with enough gold braid on their uniforms to command a battleship collecting empty shopping baskets. Both were well over sixty years old and one - a small white haired lady - had a spring loaded extensible steel baton at her belt of the kind used in Britain by riot ploice. What the heck was that all about?

I'm usually at a slight advantage with people 'in authority' here because in Japan most people don't want to tangle with any older peppery-looking gaijin who might not understand a word they say. But in truth I often find these people in uniform very scary myself. If I was Japanese I'd always want to ask them just what they thought they were doing. That's assuming they know themselves.

Yet another 'impulse buy'

Now how did that happen? There I was this morning with my nose in a philosophy text book and Edera was wandering around with a tape measure. She was checking up the size of our teaching room (OK - actually it's other end of 'our room'!). A kind of warning bell of the "if you don't pay attention to this now you'll be sorry later" kind started ringing in my head. Once I'd got involved in checking dimensions it was but another short step to climb into the car and set off for Cainz in Yachimata to keep an eye on the choice of carpet quality and colour.


And that was when I said "Maybe before we lay this new carpet we'd better decorate the room first."

How did that happen? Amazing eh? Just like that, my mouth opened and out it popped. You would have thought that with a lifetime of experience behind me I could avoid that kind of thing but it seems as if "speak in haste and repent at leisure" is my koan - or at least one of them.

But in truth I couldn't just do nothing; how could we put a nice new pink 8-mat carpet in that area and do nothing about those dingy boring walls. Even British hospital waiting rooms have brighter and more interesting decor than our teaching room does, usually a kind of brown.

One of the really interesting things for me in Japan is just how different the DIY scene is to England. I did an awful lot of DIY in England before I came here and I'm doing an awful lot of DIY here and believe me, you could write a whole book just about the differences. Even the actual tools are different. For example, in England if you want to cut wood neatly you buy a tenon saw which cuts on the 'push' - because it was designed for use with pine which has lots of resin. Here you buy a folding deep-toothed saw which cuts on the 'pull' - designed for dry crisp Japanese cedar. In fact there are no tenon saws here in Japan. The list of differences like this is endless.

But perhaps the biggest contrast is the lack of decorative supplies in Japan. Most people's walls seem to be decorated with a kind of off-white wall covering, a cross between woodchip and embossed paper. You buy it in the shop by the metre and just stick it on. And that's it - you just have dull grey walls forever - or until the cats decide it's time to peel it off for you.

Ranges of paints are equally uninspired, few have more than a dozen colours and there are no colour charts in the shop to bring home. Our two felines are professional wallpaper strippers.

In England on the other hand around 20% of any DIY shop will be dedicated to ranges of wallpaper and paints. There are hundreds of choices on offer and we love to make our houses really colourful. Before we even start to remodel a room we bring home armfuls of free colour charts with lots of ideas on colour combinations you couldn't begin to buy in Cainz

Well, eventually we've come home laden with a tin of 'parchment' for the ceiling and some 'soft pink' for the walls and a roller and tray. I've just spent an hour emptying and moving book cases so that the grand work can begin! Watch this space for progress.

The Sky at Night

Driving back from our local Yacs drugstore yesterday evening I noticed the full moon rising. Beautiful eh? And something that I seldom get to notice these days. Even though I live out here in the country where there isn't too much street lighting my life is mainly indoors. It was just chance that the moon and me were both out together.

If you live in the city your chances of seeing the sky at night must be slim. I remember years ago listening to the American astronomer Carl Sagan talking about his life on a well known UK radio show called "Desert Island Discs". It seems that as a small child in New York he'd already been fascinated by the stars he sometimes saw over the roof-tops and he asked his family what they were. The answer came that they were "little lights in the sky"! Yep! That's about the limit of my knowledge of astronomy too.

I felt a bit disappointed, what with all the cultural stuff in Japan about the moon and the work of poets like Ryokan, that there's not more goes on here at full moon time. In my copy of Weatherhill's "Essential Kanji" under the verb 'miru' ('to see') I was fascinated by the entry 'tsuki o miru hito' ('a person who looks at the moon'). I expected when I first came here to find such people at every street corner here at this time of the month, scribbling haiku on the evening breeze. I even vaguely wondered if this was some kind of a job description, if people were being paid to keep an eye on the moon (and actually with the number of private security guards lurking around Japan this could be true, nothing is impossible). But I haven't seen many poets outdoors on summer evenings - too many mosquitoes I suppose.

When I was a child, perhaps four or five years old, I have powerful memories of playing out in the street in our small country town in the evening. I was being watched over by the Man in the Moon shining brilliantly in a clear dusk sky over the moors across the river (in Japan it would have been a rabbit watching me). Do those evenings remind me of the nursery rhyme, or is it the nursery rhyme that reminds me of the magic evening?

"Girls and boys come out to play
The moon doth shine as bright as day
Leave your supper and leave your sleep
And join your playmates in the street ..."

Beautiful as the moon is perhaps my most profound memories of night skies are all about moments on moonless nights when exceptionally clear air and a dark landscape has made the cosmos suddenly and powerfully visible. One night in Burgundy near Beaune when I got out of the car in a frosty field and suddenly discovered that I was standing on the edge of impossibly deep and infinite space. Nobody had warned me it was there - only gravity holds us on here you know. A March evening in Northumberland during the week of the jukai ceremonies at our temple when the winding sange procession stepped barefoot onto cold damp stones outdoors and Orion was straight above me. Every time I see the jewels of his belt now I remember that solemn moment. And a walk with my wife in a misty lane near Kirkby Stephen one Spring night when you could see a million stars above the mist along the banks of the River Eden.

I must make a point of trying to see more night skies. And I wonder what your recollection of them is?

So very many roads

There's a poem by the English writer Rudyard Kipling that I really like. It begins ...

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods ...

I wonder where that road was he had in mind. I'd guess maybe in East Sussex, near his family home at Batemans.

Actually it's rather rare for roads to be shut completely like that and slowly vanish. Parts might get disconnected, and become stranded with no particular purpose due to some change in the geometry of a place, but it's unusual for them to completely disappear. In fact, in the original poem, you discover that more remains than you might guess.

When I was a teenager we used to travel once or twice evry year from Sussex up to Durham - a long and adventurous journey by car back in the 1960's. For about 250 miles we would use the 'A1' - the main highway north from London to Scotland. At that time it was being widened to a dual carraigeway (what Americans call a 'four-laner' I think) but there were still long stretches of the earlier road improved in the 1920's and 1930's. And in many places you would notice nearby short dead-ends of much narrower road that had once been parts of the original Great North Road used for centuries by horse drawn stage coaches. Frequently the route of the modern road swept around small towns and villages that had once made a living from catering to travellers on horseback and on foot.

I often thought what an interesting trip it might be to explore all those old 'loose ends' of highways and lanes that were once part of the old Great North Road, and to lodge in little pubs that were previously coaching inns used by famous highwaymen like Dick Turpin. But it's a journey I haven't made so far

I was reminded of this in Hiroshima last week when I went out to do some exploring. I took the train one stop further out of town to Aki-Nakano and then walked back down the valley towards the coast at Kaitaichi.

At first I struggled to find a small lane by the railway that I'd noticed on the ride out, but once I'd reached it, it provided a pleasant and direct walk back into town and I soon realised why. This narrow and humble looking tarmac was the line of the first San'yo Highway - the original ancient route from the capital to Western Honshu and Kyuushu.

So it was actually the Japanese equivalent of the Great North Road. For centuries this little lane alongside the railway was the route Japan's great daimyo lords and samurai retainers took to travel the length of the country between their provinces and Kyoto or Edo.

In this small valley east of Hiroshima there are now four parallel road routes. This original San'yo Highway was by-passed by a new road about 1920, and then a newer and wider one on the other side of the river about 1960. A faster link to the toll highway into Hiroshima has just been finished.

Actually if you add the JR San'yo railway line, the San'yo shinkansen rail route which crosses high above the valley here and the San'yo Expressway which you can join further up there are now seven routes here where once only one existed.

This is very typical of the way places change not only in Japan but in Britain and America too. New parallel routes are added to cope with heavier traffic and enable higher speeds, and suddenly the old route has a new and usually purely local function serving homes or businesses.

In most places in Japan if you look at a map or prefectural road atlas you can easily spot 'early modern' road lines from the Taisho era wich bypassed many of the narrow residential lanes of the Edo era, and then newer additions in the late Showa era built to handle the heavier traffic of the 1960's and 1970's. Next time you are looking at a city plan, try to spot which the are.

Oh! If you'd like to read the rest of that Kipling poem, here it is:

+ + + + + + + + +

THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

Shopping in Hiroshima

I'm not a big shopper. Clothes stores induce such catatonic boredom in me that I can even fall asleep standing up if taken within a quarter mile of one. But OK, I have to own up to a tendency to search out book stores and map specialists wherever I go. Hiroshima has a very good map shop just off the main shopping arcade. On Sunday I combined a trip there with a visit to the city library to photocopy some statistical yearbooks and old 1:25,000 topographic maps. Seems I just can't get enough excitement these days.

From Kaitaichi it's a short train ride - three stops - into the city centre and then a short hike across town to the library which is a couple of blocks from Heiwa Koen ('Peace Park') and the A-bomb Dome.

I visited Hiroshima as a tourist back in 1997, on my first trip to Japan. We arrived in after dark on the shinkansen, heading for the small Youth Hostel at Miyajimaguchi. I had a real sense of foreboding that time about coming to a place with such an awful history. What would it be like?

Actually Hiroshima is one of Japan's friendliest and most pleasant cities; even on that first trip when I knew no-one there it was once of the places I liked best. Last week they commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing and walking through town on Sunday I made a detour down to Aioi Bridge. Just across the road is the A-bomb Dome, the old Industrial Promotion Hall which was almost directly under the exploding bomb back in 1945.

This is somewhere you have to visit for yourself, no-one can do it for you. And you should. There are a hundred things that need saying about it. But having been here before what really struck me this time was just what it had to say about the subject of my thesis. How do we experience and observe transience in the environment of Japanese cities, and what is it that endures in the longer term?

Take close look at the pictures. Here is a place which within living memory has suffered perhaps the ultimate aspect of destruction and which has now become a carefully preserved ruin in a sunny park, a kind of 'theme park' at last, somehow oddly out of place in a modern bustling city all around it. It is as if it has been deposited there from another age and time, which indeed it has. Families walk in the park by the river. Just across the pavement and past the trees is the city's main shopping street and over the road a large Sogo demartment store. In a way the transformation here is almost more extraodinary than the original act of destruction.




This is all an aspect of Japan's urban history that I know much more about now. Some cities - Sendai for example - were completely incinerated by 'conventional' fire-bomb raids. In my own study area - Chiba - 86% of buildings were destroyed in two air raids. Once large fires start in a completely timber-built environment the result is inevitable. What's unusual (in fact I think unique in Japan) about Hiroshima is that one concrete structure has survived and been left as a physical reminder, something much more real than whole shelves of books full of awful sepia photographs.

One of the things I was looking for on Sunday were early copies of city topographic maps and I tracked down one from 1937 and one from 1950. Even five years after the war most of the ashes of old Hiroshima had been built over with makeshift timber shacks and sheds. A 'master-plan' was available - ironically planners had drawn up a city development plan in 1940. But although some opportunity was taken to re-align and widen roads it's really interesting to see just how faithfully original patterns of plot ownership and rights of way were reproduced across most of that new shanty city emerging like a phoenix.

So there's one aspect that endures in our world. People and posessions and buildings are utterly transient and may vanish in the blink of an eye but institutions of power and legal title to property are parameters that endure. They are a kind of template to reproduce and replicate our world and some of the dimensions of our experience. And what does this say about the actual processes of change I wonder? Oh! But that's a topic for another day.

O-bon

Back from Hiroshima 'safe and sound'! It's the first time I've driven right down to the far west of Honshu, and there were times on Saturday when I began to wonder if we would ever make it. As a lover of traffic horror stories I can't resist boring you with the details ...

For starters it was one of the worst days to choose to travel, we must have been mad eh? The first Saturday of the main O-bon holiday when half Japan was heading home by every possible means. And baking hot too, the worst kind of damp sticky tropical weather.

Hirohima is a long long drive from here, and starts with getting through Tokyo. Even before 4:00 a.m. it was already crowded. Then down the Tomei Expressway 250 miles to Nagoya, struggling around Mt. Fuji and along the Pacific Coast through endless traffic snarl-ups. The next 100 miles down to Osaka was so congested that at one point we abandoned the motorway in despair and made our way from traffic signal queue to traffic signal queue through the northern part of Aichi-ken.

After this came the Kyoto and Osaka motorway box - the real low point of the day with around forty miles of standing traffic. It was like the M6 at Birmingham on a Friday but ten times worse. By the time we'd crawled through it was 6:00 p.m. We'd been driving fourteen hours already and we still had more than two hundred miles to go.

I was beginning to think we might not make it. But we had to get lucky at some point, and that last leg down the Sanyo Expressway was an almost traffic free sprint through the hills and forests of western Honshu.

Eighteen hours to drive 600 miles. Wow! Some trip!

My 'in-laws' live in Hiroshima's Aki-ku but so near the city boundary they are only a few minutes walk from Kaitaichi station. Their home is just one alley back from the original medieval San'yo highway, now just a narrow lane through this old corner of town. It was built by Kodemari's great grandfather in 1933, and it must be rare now for an urban property to be in a family so long. Any surviving urban homes from this period are unusual here. It's a traditional style with a big ten mat reception room and two other tatami rooms. There were seven of us spread out on futons around the place, but it worked out fine.

On Monday we all drove across to Kure to visit Edera's mum's and dads's family graves. They are both in cemeteries high on hillsides above the city but on opposite sides of town. It's the first time I've visited graves here at O-bon and it made me wish we had a festival like it in England.

In Britain graves are now generally individual and often people are cremated and ask that their ashes simply be scattered with no marker at a place they loved (this can even sometimes be on the pitch of their favourite soccer team!) Couples are often buried or have their ashes scattered together. Family tombs were common in Victorian times, but it's uncommon for children to be buried with their parents now unless they die young.

In Japan cremated remains are interred in pots and graves are usually for the whole family - on Edera's mum's family grave the inscription actually reads "all together as one family". In large families a whole kyodai - generation - of sons, wives and unmarried daughters - will have their ashes in one family grave.

At O-bon is a time of year to look up your ancestors. It's the period when graves are visited, cleaned and decorated with paper lanterns in honour of those they commemorate. The living members of the family go to offer incense and pray there. It's a kind of visit to relatives I suppose, it has that kind of feel, and it's good that there's one time of the year to do it. In the West we celebrate individual lives but the dead are rather quickly forgotten once those that cared about them are also gone. In Japan there's more of an opportunity to reflect on where you came from and how you are a part of that ceaseless flow from generation to generation.

Well, of course, when it was my turn I also took a rosary and paid my own respects, up on a sunny hillside above the city. I wonder what these people who lived their lives in back Showa, Taisho and Meiji times would ever make of me. "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh". We never know where things might lead in the future do we? Who can ever imagine it? For better or worse they are now my adopted family here in Japan, now at last my ancestors by marriage; I'm sure they were kind and sympathetic people who could accept me for who I am.

Off to Hiroshima in the morning.

OK - it's time to get the suitcases down from the top shelf in the wardrobe. We are all off to Hiroshima early on Saturday morning - very early - to visit Edera's parents for the O-bon holiday. I'm hoping to get everyone into the car by 3:00 a.m. so that we can get through Tokyo before the morning rush hour starts in earnest. So probably this will be the last 'Little House in the Paddy' entry for a some days. We are planning on driving back up to Chiba-ken on the sixteenth.

Our trusty but rather ancient Nissan Skyline has been checked over and in preparation for the trip I've invested in an 'All Japan' main road atlas. I've also borrowed the Hiroshima-ken detailed atlas from the local library. I just can't travel anywhere without a good map - I'm famous for it.

I do a lot of local driving but I've only ever driven further than the boundaries of our trusty and dog-eared Kanto road atlas once before and that was to travel up to Iwate-ken in northern Honshu, quite the opposite direction to this trip. From here we head through central Tokyo and then down the Tomei expressway to Nagoya, about 250 miles. After weaving around Kansai a bit we take the Sanyo Expressway right through to Hiroshima, a further 300 miles. Edera's parents live at Kaitaichi on this side of the city.

It's a long trip - if the roads aren't too bad - and maybe that's a big 'if' around the O-bon holidays - it will be around eight hours solid driving.

But I'm looking forward to it. Apart from seeing my 'in-laws' (in Britain we commonly make this kind of trip to visit relatives much more frequently than the Japanese seem to do) it will be a new aspect of Japan to see. Foreigners here - and most Japanese too I suppose - usually only make this kind of long journey by shinkansen. In Britain and Europe we are accustomed to driving long distances as a matter of routine.

Incredible as it seems to me now, for several years I had a working routine which most Japanese would find it hard to imagine. It involved getting up at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesdays, leaving my home in Lancashire and driving 250 miles to an office in Bedfordshire. I had to get there before nine and work a full day, managing a team of a dozen analysts. Thursday nights I'd do the same in reverse, leaving the office around seven and getting home around midnight. As I often drove to business meetings on other days too I'd usually clock up around 800 miles every week.

We British also love to drive to distant destinations for our holidays in Europe. From the Channel ferries we think nothing of setting of on a 1200 mile hike down the 'Autoroute de Soleil' to the south of France or heading for one of the Alpine tunnels into Italy.

But my all-time favourite drivng holdiay was a visit to America I made with my daughter Julia about ten years ago. In two weeks I clocked up around 5000 miles criss-crossing the West. That was the original 'road movie' trip.

Well, hope that you also have a good break too this O-bon and please don't forget to surf over here to 'Litle House in thePaddy' again next Wednesay (17th) when I'm sure I'll be back with lots more to talk about. See you then.

Limestone Brae East

We've got the house full of musicians here today - it happens from time to time. If you like making music, well, this is the place to be. To be honest we are not especially 'professional', but that wasn't our plan anyway. We do this just for enjoyment really. There ought to be much more of that, don't you think? Having fun and making harmony.

The world of high quality recordings has meant that we have become accustomed to listening to the 'perfect' performance, not giving our own best one. Sometimes when I used to interview people for jobs and noticed they had put 'music' down as an interest I discovered that what they had meant was that they listened to CDs. Good grief! If you are interested in music you make it!

Today has been ringed on my calendar for a few weeks and actually I've been using it as a 'deadline' to get several things finished around the house. And now it's time to let the few of you that haven't been here or don't know it already into the "Secret of the Shed".

I began digging the foundations for this on 1 January, and it has been designed as a workshop for woodwork, metalwork and various other arty and crafty activities. But on the other side of my shed is 'the model railway'. It's a big one.

I've been shaping up to build this for the last forty years and collecting or making various items to run on it for the last twenty. Now at last it is there in real 'fesh and blood' - or at least wood and metal.

Railways are actually the first thing I can remember as a baby, and my grandfather worked as a railwayman so I guess they are in my blood. He was a wonderful craftsman too, and he showed me how yo use tools. So now I build railway models, and I've also collected them in many parts of the world on my travels.


In May afer the shed was built I started on 'part two' of my project which was to extend the railway in a big loop around the garden. I can use this in fine weather and watch trains sitting out amongst the flowers. I was determined to get the carpentry for the extension completed by today and one 30 metre circuit of track (eventually there will be three) laid so that we could watch trains running. It was a close run thing but the gap was closed at 5:05 p.m. yesterday evening and my trusty 15 year old Southern Pacific SD9 did the honours by making a faultless first circuit.

As you'll see from the picture, my shed carries a nameplate just like old British signal boxes - "Limestone Brae East". The original "Limstone Brae" is a tiny place in Northumberland, England, where the Buddhist temple I have helped to build for many years is located. So, here's the new Limestone Brae - east! It serves a different purpose to the other one but I hope it won't only be pleasant for me. I'd like it to be somewhere to meet people with similar interests and where young people with an interest in cutting, shaping, machining and soldering metal can learn some craft skills of their own.

Lots more on this topic later!

Oh goody! A General Election

So we are going to have a General Election in Japan. No one told me, I only found out by accident on the BBC website when I went to find out the cricket score (we're playing Australia and - hey! we won!). There it all was. Nobody in this house ever finds time to watch TV or listen to the radio or - if they do - to tell me anything. Huh!

Goody! A General Election! I love elections. Of course I don't get a chance to vote here but it will be fun to watch it. If the various Prefectural and Town elections I've seen over the last couple of years are anything to go by we should be in for an entertaining month.

Of course there are many things that are different in the way elections are run here. Compared with Britain you seem to be incredibly polite, even deferential, to politicians, a group of people we now seem to universally despise. And even if you aren't exactly bubbling with enthusiasm I also don't notice much of the terminal cynicsm and lack of involvement that is sadly characteristic of most British people around politics.

One thing that has already caught my eye as being very different in Japan at election time is the use of posters. In Britain candidates go in for rather boring posters, often with no picture at all. They come in red (Labour), blue (Tory) and yellow (Lib-Dem) basically with the words "Vote Bloggs your Labour candidate" on. Usually they only get displayed in supporters' front windows, but occasionally some Tory landowner will put a whole line of them pasted to hardboard sheets on poles along a hedgerow. Tories seem to believe that if you repeat something often enough people will do it (which might be true).

In Japan it's quite different. The town office puts up lots of temporary blank white billboards. These are neatly divided into about 24 poster-sized squares - and that's where all candidate posters get stuck, in one of those squares next to everyone else's.

This arrangement would never work in England, we would immediately and unsportingly stick our own poster over a rival's, or some bad children would draw moustaches on all the candidate's faces. In France they 'fly post' posters everywhere, hundreds on every wall; if you stand still too long someone will even sneak up and stick one on you.

I love the photographs on Japanese posters. How do you get all your candidates looking so smug? I guess there must be some special training course they have to attend to develop those skills. And where do they buy all the sharp suits? Some would-be politicans are looking earnestly ahead as if aiming to convice me that they are my wise, strong friend. Others are looking upwards with rapt attention as if they are hoping for divine guidance (which might be true too!). Occasionally some right wing eccentric 'Mr. Clean' is dressed in a karate suit to show us what he plans to do to that bunch of 'chancers' down at Ciy Hall.

Oh! And the other bit of fun you have here are those minibuses full of self-consious pary helpers in fluorescent green or yellow jump suits that patrol the streets waving at everyone and shouting at them through megaphones. Those megaphones! Around here non-stop dawn to dusk haranguing for days and days. I have to say,as someone who once organised an election campaign, that if you tried either of these things in Britain you'd be at serious risk of being attacked by old ladies and shift workers trying to get some sleep and most local dogs.


Well, let's see how it all progresses, I feel a role for myself as an unofficial correspondent coming on here. Don't worry, I'll get some pictures of all this later. But one bit of free advice I can give Japanese voters up front is that if (hard to imagine!) any politician happens to tell you that it's time to transfer a number of state monoplies (like post offices!) to the private sector to 'circulate assets' and to 'release capital' etc., then there's always a possibility that what he really means is that he wants to sell them off at bargain basement rates to his mates in big business. After Margaret Thatcher us Brits. know a thing or two about 'circulating assets' believe me. If you want to know what a 'more efficient' post office feels like ask the pensioners who have to travel an hour or more on unreliable buses to get to their nearest one, or join us to sit around and wait a week for the important letter you are expecting to be delivred.

Risshuu

Looking at the calendar I see that yesterday was Risshuu. By the old Japanese way of reckoning based on the Chinese calendar, it was the first day of autumn already.

As if on cue the fine weather we've enjoyed for the last week broke this afternoon and we had a sharp thunderstorm about 4:30. I was not a happy bunny, I was working flat out at carpentry in the garden and had to scramble to get tools and timber under cover.

I was not best pleased at my enforced rest. It only lasted about half an hour but I didn't really get back into my stride before dark.

After the storm it's turned cooler and much damper. Mist is rising from everything - the lane, the gardens, the tanbo and the forest. Yes, autumn is surely in the air tonight.

I've noticed this exact moment in other years too. Sometimes it's been associated with public firework displays. I also vividly remember one Saturday evening years ago in the garden of a country pub in Lancashire, sitting outside drinking in a short sleeved shirt on a warm August night. And yet autumn was suddenly already there in the same subtle way, creeping in the dark. A slight damp chill and a soft mist in the meadow beyond the hedge. And with it that slightly surprising insight that we are moving towards the end of the year now. In six weeks the equinox will be here and then nights will draw in.

Interesting that this moment arrives in such a warm season. We commonly think that 'autumn follows summer', that's the usual way of rationalising it eh? And in England we often think of the other end of autumn - the falling leaves and stormy days - as being typical of the season. But our experience is more complex, seasons are at best a kind of tapestry and the palette is all mixed. Our poet John Keats captured this glimpse of the beginning of autumn too.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

In England we used the Julian calendar until 1752 and then at long last - about 150 years after the rest of Europe - moved to the Gregorian Calendar. We skipped 11 days, going from September 2nd to the 14th. There were riots in the streets of London as the people demanded that the government give them back the eleven days they had 'stolen'. We were just as suspicious of 'Johnny Foreigner' then as now it seems and no new fangled notions from Europe were going to change our way of doing things. Hard to imagine how people could be so silly over something so fundamentally inconseqential eh? - thank goodness we don't do stuff like that any more.

As I get older I like to believe that I'm still in the 'late-ish summer' of my years, who would ever want to describe themselves as 'autumnal' until life is positively blowing a November gale around their ears? But there are moments in which I suspect I've arrived at that rather delicious experience of autumn that Shelley described.

The day bcomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past - the is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been.

Sound of the Ocean

As many regular readers know I'm a bit of a railway 'buff. In fact, to be honest, not just an ordinary railway 'buff but a truly hopeless case. I love everything that runs on rails. So one of the many things I enjoy about taking the trip into Tokyo is the sheer variety of trains to be seen.

JR love liveries - I've never seen a railway system with trains painted in so many different colours. When I was a young 'trainspotter' long ago on Darlington station in England all engines were either black or (if you were very lucky!) green. Coaches were 'blood and custard' - an odd combination of crimson and yellow. But in Japan there must be hundreds of different colour schemes in use.

Around here the country trains are turned out in a smart cream and blue. The kaisoku semi-fasts have an aluminium finish with cream and blue stripes. And the NEX - The 'Narita Express' that runs from the airport to Tokyo - has an impressive red, black and grey paint job.

But my favourites are the tokkyu - our ordinary expresses. They have a kind of tan and Indian Red livery that goes back to the JNR national railway system of the 1950's. I think these colours were first used on expresses on the old Tokaido main line, before Japan got it's new high speed shinkansen network in 1964.

When I first came to Japan in 1997 these colours were still a common sight drawn up at the platforms in main stations. But this kind of thing can vanish almost un-noticed. Now they are getting scarce as more modern trains are introduced with new designer paint jobs.

Out here in leafy Chiba-ken we don't have many expresses, and the few that we have are hardly the stars of the JR express fleet. But of those we do have my favourite is the 'Shiosai' which runs on the Sobu Line between the coast town of Choshi at the mouth of the Tonegawa River and Tokyo. The whole journey is only about eighty miles, which the train completes with half a dozen intermediate stops in about 100 minutes.

In this short journey you can see two very different Japan's from the window. The first half involves smart working along long tangents of single track through rural Japan as the train speeds south from Choshi to Naruto across miles of rice paddies, and then turns inland to cross the Shimosa Plateau calling at Yachimata and Sakura. From Chiba the train makes a non-stop sprint for downtown Tokyo along the busy four rail track artery through dense urban Kanto.

The Shiosai is currently operated by 183 Class EMU trains, immaculately maintained but now more than thirty years old. From next Spring the tan and red livery will vanish in this part of the world as new up to the minute stock is introduced on the service.

'Shiosai' means, roughly translated, "Sound of the Ocean" I don't think there's any point on the entire Sobu line where you actually can hear the Ocean, even on the windiest of days. But it's a good name for a train serving the small towns along the Pacific Coast and I for one will be sorry when those familiar colours no longer hurry through the village when I'm walking the dog early on frosty winter mornings.

A trip to the temple

Over to Sojiji tomorrow - I'll need to catch the 9:07 because on the way I'll meet up with an English friend and reader of this Blog (Hi Neale!). The arrangement is that we meet in the front coach of the kaisoku ('semi-fast' train) at Chiba and travel the rest of the way together.

Once I arranged to meet two friends at Tsudanuma using the same foolproof plan. They live in Wales now and read this Blog too (Hi Jeff and Emily!). But I didn't allow for the possibility that they were dumb about trains and didn't know which the front was! Those kaisoku are 15 caoches long; it took them all the way to Funabashi to walk the length of the train to find me.

Sojiji is one of the two head temples of the Soto Zen sect and I get over there once or twice every month for Sunday zazenkai (meditation). It's at Tsurumi in Yokohama-shi. That's a long trip from here - more than two hours each way - but the changes are convenient and on Sundays you can use the 'Holiday Pass' ticket - a snip at 2300 yen.

At one place or anoher I've done zazen ('Serene Reflection Meditation') for more than twenty years. In England we have a lovely monastery and retreat centre up in Northumberland and also many good local groups. So even before I came to Japan it was very much a part of daily life for me. The 'transmission line' of our Western teachers comes from an Englishwoman who trained for some years at Sojiji and was recognised as a roshi (master) here in Japan.

In some ways going to Sojiji feels like making a trip home for me. Despite a long, long list of those famous 'cultural differences' the practice is basically the same here as in England and the lay people who go on Sundays to meditate are very like the people who do it in England too. It's all deeply familiar.

Apart from the three periods of zazen we also get a lecture. Occasionally a sentence or two leaps out at me in a sudden burst of clarity, but for the most part it's a dark and mysterious ocean of Japanese. Occasionally I can't even work out what the talk is about. But that doesn't mean that I don't "get anything" from it, no indeed. When you hear the dharma spoken you get the teaching whether you understand it or not.

Uually there's about eighty people turn up for meditation. Looked at in relation to the population of greater Tokyo that runs at around two per million so actually it's commoner now for people to meditate in this tradition in England than it is in Japan, strange though that may seem.

Zen Buddhism is such a part of Japanese culture and history that Westerners assume it's widely practised here. They don't realise that for the vast majority of Japanese their only contact with the temple is for family funerals and memorials. From what I see that "culture and history" angle is a big part of "the problem". Young people here struggle to find a serious spiritual context in their lives and the institutional side of Zen just can't let go of "all that stuff they have always done". It's a shame. In a way we were very lucky when this practice was introduced to the West forty years ago - we could let go of a lot of the 'tradition' and focus again on what it was really about.

But that isn't to criticise people who practice Zen here, they often do it with great energy and sincerity.

Tora

Maybe all the feline friends I've had in the past have been a bit dumb, but I have to say how very impressed I am with the ability of our two cats have to communicate. Pero - the young female - well, I'll tell you about her another time. It's our older male cat Tora that I want to talk about today.

'Tora' - it's not a very original name for a cat eh? In Japanese the word means 'tiger' and maybe 80% of the cats you meet in the street here are known by this name. He was already called Tora when he came into my life but it really suits him. He can really look like a tiger sometimes, a fat, tame, ageing and rather chicken-hearted miniature tiger.

I see lots of cats featured on Mixi and most of them are almost incredibly kawaii ('cute'). But no-one could ever accuse Tora of being kawaii. He's just a large brown happy mild-natured cat. Actually he's probably my best friend in Japan. We are a pair of gentle hearted aging males, we got on together from Day One. I love him and he loves me. When I'm low he comes and sits on my knee, a big hot sweating furry ball in the summer heat. And licks my hand with his rough tounge affectionately to say "Cheer up! And then I'll go away!" The first cat I ever lived with back in England - Barry - was a pretty tough stray who also loved to be stroked but soon gave you a nip to say 'enough already!' Tora is so placid he doesn't know what a nip is.

If you stay at our house you'll get a midnight visit for sure - he's an expert at silently sliding open shoji in the dark to sleep with new arrivals in their futon, a sort of feline droit de seignieur. When you wake up his big yellow eyes will be examining you carefully. In winter he spends his days sitting on our paraffin heater.

But the thing that really strikes me about him is what an excellent communicator he is. Open a door for him and you will get a grateful 'meaow' of thanks as he passes. If he wants something and you are dumb enough not to work it out he'll find some paper or plastic bag and sratch it noisily while staring at you meaningfully until you get the message. Humans! We have such a poor attention span! But we can be trained - it's all done by kindness you know!

One of Tora's many, many bad habits is to demand food while we are eating. I've never seen a cat that begs at table before, I thought only dogs learned this particular badness. He won't take 'no' for an answer either - if you try to ignore him a large paw with very sharp claws will soon touch your knee gently but meaningfully as if to say "Hey buddy! I'm your cat - feed me". He's pretty omnivourous too - today at lunch he enjoyed some corn on the cob with butter.

It dawned on me recently that this begging at table is another of those subtle 'cultural' differences and a consequence of Japanese lifestyle. Here we eat miso soup and rice for brakfast and in preparing the miso soup small dried fish are added to the water to create the stock but removed before the soup is eaten. So if you have a cat it gets a morning treat of fish just as you sit down to eat yourselves. Over the years Tora has worked out that if the fish is worth hanging around for , then the other stuff on our plates is worth his attention too! In Britain moggies don't get such a pleasant start to their day - I guess a few left over cornflakes is all they can hope for.

All the live-long day

I had an e-mail yesterday from my daughter (hi Julia!). She's just got a promotion at work and from September she will be her company's European Sales Representative. She'll get to do a lot of travelling to all parts of Europe she hopes. She earned it.

Most of my own working life was also spent working for a dynasty of hyperactive Sales Directors, and in this e-mail she asked me about something on her mind. "If I am writing up reports and forward planning at nights in hotels and may also travel on Sundays can I expect any time off?"

That's an interesting one eh? Time off. As in not actually working. Like Oliver Twist with his "Please Sir! Can I have more?" In Britain we're still rather old-fashioned about those things; we expect some time off from time to time. We also get a lot of paid holiday - though not as much as the French - and we take it too.

As it happened this topic was already on my mind. I'd just been reading a book that arrived from Amazon last week - "The State of Civil Society in Japan" by two Harvard scholars Frank Schwartz and Susan Pharr. It has a lot to say about the way people here don't get much time outside of work except to sleep. They argue that civil society - associations, charities, local voluntary groups etc. - is very weak in Japan. One reason for this is that managers and professonal people just haven't time to do that kind of stuff in the community. In Europe and America they do.

For the benefit of non-Japanese readers I should say that here many people - and especially salarymen - (managers, usually men, working in larger companies) - work huge amounts of 'voluntary' (and unpaid of course) overtime. Actually 'overtime' is a bad term because it suggests a choice and also that it is time worked in addition to your 'regular' hours. But of couse these guys never work 'regular' hours - their whole lives are given to their employer. Often they literally do work themselves to death - there's even a word in Japanese for it - karoushi. Not 'Death by Chocolate' but 'Death by Exhaustion'.

There's something profoundly cultural around this isn't there? I've not the slightest doubt that it goes back to those days of samurai service. This kind of unquestioning personal sacrifice is seen by most Japanese as perhaps a bit regrettable, but rather virtuous. When you start to quiz people about it they will tell you that if you don't play the game you'll be fired - which may be true. Certainly a large percentage of your income comes as a bonus - which of course only is awarded to the 'worthy'.

But it's assumed and accepted here that working every available waking hour is simply unavoidable, as if it is a kind of 'natural law' - a bit like gravity perhaps. There's also something even a bit dodgy about the very idea of 'free time' - 'hima' in Japanese. It has a kind of empty feel to it, why would we want to do 'nothing'? - as in 'the devil makes work for idle hands ...'

I have to tell you that us professional social science researchers have a specialist technical term for this kind of opinion, it's what we describe as 'b*ll*cks'. This obsession with giving your life to your employer doesn't even produce much real benefit. From what I've seen in Japan as a consumer and client many businesses here are over-staffed, delegation to and empowerment of junior employees are almost unknown and work is frequently managed in deeply inefficient and unimaginative way.

It's also even often a myth that people work hard, they mostly just work at a pedestrian speed for an interminable time. Ho hmm .. well, all this is just a personal opinion of course.

I really notice since I retired the way that the processes of 'capitalism' - whatever that means - mostly demand our time. Towards the end of my working life I wanted more time to myself, not more cash, but this was a deal 'the system' was incapable of offering me. But it's not just time is it? It's our lives eh?. With life, once it's gone - it's gone. Even if you are Bill Gates you can't buy more.

Wow! There's lots I want to write about this one but the clock is against me, we'll come back to it later. If this doesn't provoke some reaction from my Japanese readers I can't think what will.

Well, if you wonder what advice I gave to Julia it was something worthy along the lines of - 'negotiate , get some ground rules agreed and get the expections clear on both sides'. Huh! Work should be productive and profitable AND fun eh? But that line from Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' did pop into my head

"Twenty years at school and then
They put you on the day shift -
Look out kid! They keep it all hid."

World's worst drivers? Your vote please!

Wednesdays is our 'day off' so today the pace should have been more leisurely but we seem to have used up a lot of time and energy anyway. Teatime and already I'm on my fourth shirt - the others, and my working shorts, and two sets of underwear are all wringing wet with sweat and dumped in the laundry box. Time for yet another shower before going out to choir. It's August eh?

Interesting how the animals cope with this seriously hot and humid weather. Poor Kuu - he's getting on - thirteen is a good age for a dog. He just crashes out on any bit of shady soil or concrete until sundown. Tora - well, I haven't seen him all day, he's holed up somewhere. Our younger cat Pero loves the o-furo - not the bath area itself but the small utility room next to it where we change and the washing machine lives. She's lying in there now on the carpet tiles next to the vaccuum cleaner - I can't see what the attraction is but maybe it's marginally cooler.

I was sprawled on the floor in there yesterday having water poured in my eye. I'd been using a power saw on plywood without safety goggles, how dumb can you get? Especially when you just made numerous expensive trips to the Takase Eye Clinic about four months ago for treatment resulting from exactly the same thing. Actually I'd just that microsecond thought "Oh! Lot's of dust ... better wear my ..." and there it was!

I should grow up eh? People keep telling me. Lunchtime we were out in Togane and there at the traffic lights one of those big white Toyota 'Merc lookalikes' with smoky windows pulled up next to me in the outside lane. As the lights changed to green I could detect just a bit too much application of gas pedal in progress as we took off together. How childish! And I didn't even have a sentient woman to impress, she was already snoring in the passenger seat after her lunch.

Actually it's very rare to even be in a position to burn anyone up in this part of Japan, that's the only bit of dual carraigeway (four-laner) I can think of anywhere around here. Not that Japanese truck drivers don't show calculated agression along with the best of them on turns and such but it's usually a bit subtle. And of course jumping all red lights by up to ... hmm .. maybe eight seconds? is a Japanese national sport.

It made me think of all the different standards of driving I've seen around the world. Who are the world's worst? - your votes please! In America people are usually rather restrained, I think they often find the speed we Brits drive at on our sinuous roads scary. France - well, they love honking at cars with UK licence plates that don't pull away at lights a microsecond after they turn green. Once I drove along the coast of the Dead Sea at night in a hire car with faulty headlights that wouldn't dip properly. I think every irritable Arab and Jew in the world having a 'bad hair day' was there to flash me angrily. I didn't drive in China but I did often get to the stage of just not looking out of the taxi window any more. If there's nothing you can do about it do you really want to know? But in my humble opinion the scariest drivers in the world are the Portugese, their ability to overtake all the time on completely blind corners and live is miraculous. Oui! Le Portugal - douze points!

Uguisu in the forest

Yet another day of sweaty carpentry for me. We are working up to a 'big one' here but of course, as a lover of suspense and surprises, I'll have to keep you guessing a while longer.

It got so hot and sticky that I just couldn't keep my spectacles on my nose and I 'parked them' several times. The inevitable happened. Towards the end of the afternoon, when I needed them, I couldn't find them. REALLY couldn't find them - I was looking for almost an hour and getting VERY cross! In the end they turned up in a big box of screws which were almost the same bronze colour. I must have put them there when a shower arrived and I scrambled to get stuff into the workshop before it got wet.

I'd not realised until I was groping around to find them just how dependent I am on spectacles these days. But the episode made me smile because it put me in mind of singing on the bus on various school trips of yesteryear. I'm sure kids now never do anything so utterly uncool. A favorite on such occasions was a song called "Quartermaster's Stores" which had about a hundred silly verses. The chorus, sung for some reason with a Welsh accent in our school, went

"My eyes are dim! I cannot see!
I have not brought my 'specs' with me!
I have not brought my 'specs' with me!"

As I was tidying away my tools outdoors around dusk an uguisu ('Japanese Nightingale)' began to sing a solitary song up in the forest behind the house. It's a very distinctive and beautiful spring and summer evening song. It has some of the qualities of the blackbird's evening song in England, but has a quality like water.



Back in May I heard another uguisu singing in the dusk in the forests of eastern China. We had come at last to Tiantong - a monastery up in the hills in Zhejiang. Really it was a bit of a miracle that we ever made it there, I wanted to go for a long time. This temple is in a small valley and surrounded by mountains clad in thick forests, it has the feel of those brush and ink paintings you see in Zen scrolls. Nothing here has changed much since the Japanese monk Dogen came in 1226 and took the teaching he found with Tendo Nyojo back to his own country.

That was a still evening too. Not quite dark and the warmth of the Spring day was still in the flagstones. Very very quiet, there was a hush over the whole world - it was the time of evening meditation. But not completely deserted, some of the elderly lay Buddhists living there stood and waited in silence in the cool air. Saffron walls reflected the last of the light and the perfume of the big incense burners in the courtyard gently filled every corner of the place.

It was already too dark to make out individual trees on the slopes above - just an azure skyline at an unimaginable distance and beyond that - if only you had the wings of a bird and could rise up and see it - the ocean of course.

And out in that forest a single uguisu sang too.

Strange Weather Day

I was up early this morning to make a start on the next bits of carpentry I need to get finished. And it was just as well - a little before noon we had a short but quite intense thunderstorm here, which kicked off just as I was tightening the last few screws in a new bit of decking alongside the shed.

Strange weather - very strange weather! Unless you are scared of them, and a lot of people are, we enjoy the spectacle of a good thunderstorm, one of nature's best free shows. Almost my earliest memory is of one, maybe when I was two years old. I recall playing in the sand pile in the corner of our little Nissen hut garden at Croft areodrome and then feeling afraid as the sun was blotted out and large raindrops began to fall.

When I was around five there was a heck of a storm one Whit (Whitsuntide) Monday when I was at the fair on the desmesnes at Barnard Castle. I have a vivid recollection of the chaos that descended on that field as big hailstones suddenly drummed down on the canvas stalls and squally gusts blew everything away. The band stopped playing, children started screaming and the many horses on the field began to panic as the thunder suddenly pealed overhead. My grandmother and I ran for cover in the nearby Bowes Museum gardens - but not under a tree of course, that would have been risky.

On my first trip abroad - to Austria around 1960 - I was impressed to see the Alps around Innsbruck lit up by a distant thunderstorm far to the north over Bavaria. It was at night and completely silent, just a continuous flicker of distant lightening. I was told that this is common in the Alps and is known as something like 'wetterloeschen' (help Neale/Julia! What's the real spelling?).

Also flying back from Texas once the whole of the eastern United States was stormbound and we had a very bumpy detour far to the south out across the gulf of Mexico to miss the worst of it. The bit we did find was bad enough - but interesting to see from above.

By far the scariest storm I experienced was actually in Lancashire. We don't think of the UK as having exceptional weather but when it comes to thunder storms it can compete with the best of them. It had been looming up the whole of a summer afternoon, with grey tornado like clouds over the Forest of Bowland , and then really got going just after dark. I've never seen so much forked lightening around in my life, we switched off the lights and opened the curtains to get a good look. Then suddenly there was a loud bang that was much, much too close. The next morning I discovered that a big oak tree in our garden had been struck, and one large bough was comlpletely dead.

Lightening, like earthquakes, is one of those things you can't avoid but at least you can take some sensible precautions. I've seen a lot of storms in Japan, but so far nothing that's impressed me. Better not speak too soon eh? The next one might give me a real scare!