Gagaku

Yesterday Edera took a day off and in the afternoon we headed over to Tsurumi to Sojiji temple. We had been told about a concert of ancient 'gagaku' music by one of the players and it's been marked on our calendar since April.

We decided to make a bit of an event of it. Edera wore kimono and even I polished my shoes. I drove across to Yokohama rather nervously on the Shuto Expressway; in some ways I find driving in Japan quite easy as people aren't so agressive, even in Tokyo. BUT those signs!! To a Westerner Japanese highway signs seem hopelessly confusing and once you leave the main highways there are none. You are basically navigating by the number of sets of traffic lights and the names of convenience stores ...

The concert was by the Soto-shou'on-kai, a group that performs gagaku - 'noble' music - the old imperial ceremonial court music that dates back to the Heian era in the seventh century. Amazing to hear such ancient music still being played with such understanding - the sounds that would have been so familiar to Prince Shotoku and the author of the Genji-monogatari brought to life again. In Western terms it would be a bit like hearing the music of the late Roman Empire played once more.

The group was formed seventy years ago and is almost entirely made up of Soto Zen monks who work as 'priests -in-charge' of local temples in the Kanto area. Their manager is an expert in this subject who works for the Imperial Household Agency.

The instruments were so interesting too. There are six - the 'shou' which is the 'voice of heaven', the 'shichiriki' which is the 'voice of earth' and the 'ryuuteki' which is 'the voice to connect earth and heaven'. Then there are three percussion instruments, the 'kakko', 'shouko' and 'tsuri-daiko' We especially liked the 'shou' - a kind of bamboo mouth organ with eighteen separate reeds which did indeed sound like the 'voice of heaven'. I'd love to try playing one.

Gagaku is music to sit still with and experience, it is structurally so different that I can't describe it. But it's often a very meditative sound

The full set and King James

Edera-chan had a Korean lady along this morning to sit in on a class. Now it seems she'd like to be one of our English students. We were rather pleased, not least because this now gives us a 'full set' of the east Asian nationalities in our little language school 'Kotoba no hiroba'! We aleady have students from China, Taiwan and the Philippines and many Japanese of course. And now a Korean too!

She might have been rather confused about one item in the class though. All my fault! One of the things I like to tell our more advanced students about (some might say 'bang on about!')is the beautiful English they can find in the 'Authorised Version' of the Bible. This is often referred to as the "King James' Bible" because it was commissioned by King James I of England (who was also King James VI of Scotland - the first monarch to rule both countries). If you don't have one - buy one when you are in England next!

James wasn't happy with the severe English translation of the Geneva Bible and in 1611 he asked a committee of scholars to prepare a new text to use in the English Churches. For a work written by a committee - not usually a recipe for a 'classic'! - the result was extraordinary. In my view it's the most beautiful English ever written and it captures our language at a crucial time in it's development.

If you can read modern English you'll probably get the sense of the 'King James Version', but there will be words and grammar that will be strange to you. Try reading it aloud - it's pure poetry! It's one of the strongest influences on modern English, it's words have been set to music countless times and even today most Englishmen find parts of it familiar.

Well, this morning I managed to confuse everyone. Haste is always a hazard eh? I wanted students to hear a recording of Psalm 39 written by the composer Thomas Tompkins to show how beautiful the words sounded sung in sixteenth century accents. But I didn't have time to check that music against the photocopy of the text I'd taken from my own old school bible and it turned out that between 1611 and my own version the words had been changed many times!

If you want to read what Thomas Tompkins actually set to music soon after the new bible was published in 1611 here it is ...

"Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days,
That I may be certified how long I have to live.
Behold, thou hast made my days, as it were, a span long;
And mine age is even as nothing as in respct of thee.;
And verily every man living is altogether vanity.

For man walketh in a vain shadow and diquieteth himself in vain;
He heapeth up riches and cannot tell who will gather them."


[Edera and I are going to a concert at Sojiji temple tomorrow evening so there probably won't be a blog entry]

1920 Households

Out for a meal earlier this evening with our French Canadian friend Danielle and his Japanese wife Ayako and their small daughter Yuki-chan. She looks amazingly French - it always fascinates me when such a tiny European looking person speaks perfect Japanese. But that's the world we live in now eh?

Had to laugh - coming out of the restaurant I nipped into the loo for a minute and it seems when they got back to the car Yuki-chan asked "where's the grandfather?" Yes, I'm looking tha old already however much I kid myself.

Today I've been working hard on some employment statistics for leafy Chiba-ken. I'm using data from the first full modern Japanese census held in October 1920. More on that another time but one of the most interesting problems I've had is calculating how many people did what kinds of work. Employment data back then was based on a kind of 'koseki' count. It's a reminder of how much Japan has changed within living memory.

How to explain? Well, today when we collect this kind of information we fill in the census questionnaire individually for everyone in the household. Father, mother, son, daughter, granny etc. But back then it was collected for the whole 'household' as listed in the family register. We have no equivalent of the 'koseki' in England, it's a kind of extra certificate that shows who your whole family is, a kind of inventory of who the senior man in the extended family is responsible for.

We still have koseki in Japan now - I'm listed on Edera's. In fact in Japan we don't have birth and marraige certificates - everything goes onto the koseki.But back in 1920 the idea was much more pervasive. So when it came to counting people in jobs the job of the head of household was the only one that mattered. Then they would ask if he was assisted by his wife - say at running a shop or working the farm - in which case she would be counted as a second worker. Maybe there would be more workers on the koseki too - a younger brother or mother helping with the rice growing perhaps. And then all the dependents would also be listed against farming - the children and maybe an invalid parent would still count against their father's vocation.

For most families in the 1920's this probably still made complete sense - you worked together at the family business and that was your only security. Often household servants and apprentices lived in too. But the system was totally patriarchal - it simply couldn't allow for dealing with a household where husband and wife had different kids of job - a carpenter with a wife as a teacher for example. It's quite a shock to realise just how 'accepted' such a thing was here within living memory.

I'll talk more about how people were living around here back in 1920 some other time. By the way, for those of you who have asked our problem with buying a house in England has been resolved and I'm hoping that it will be ours next week.

Been there and come back

Yes, been to Choshi; it's still there OK and today it was rather warm and sunny. It was a nice trip!

We went in N-sensei's big new Toyota eight seater, a palace on wheels. A combination of the latest shinkansen bullet train technology and a modern passenger aircraft but on four wheels. Like the train it's doors open and close automatically with a little bleeping noise. And up front it has so much navigational equipment you could land it on the runway at Narita on a dark foggy night I'm sure.

Amazing - you just type in the phone number of the place you want to go to and the darn thing displays a map of your route - it even takes account of known traffic jams and navigates you around them. As soon as you need to turn a soft ladies voice says (in Japanese) "Please turn right at the traffic lights in 200 metres".

Anyway, we found Choshi Commerical High Schol OK but there were a few more than those four saxophonists to welcome us. In fact the whole school wind band of about fifty players was taking part in this rehearsal. They were just excellent!

We worked on both pieces, and it turned out that as keen regular singers ourselves there was a lot we could teach those students who were singing . Sase-san concentrated on musical interpretation and I worked with them on the English words and how the poet had intended them to be phrased. With an animated gaijin looking like Santa Claus jumping up and down on the rostrum you can't stay stiff and nervous for long! The result was great. They sang with such enegry I thought they'd bring the ceiling down. Anyway, the two photos I've included will give you the 'feel' of the event.

English and American readers of this 'blog' would be astonished by how different schools in Japan are. The general 'ethos' and standards in the country secondary schools I've been in around leaft Chiba-ken is even better than at the grammar school I attended in England forty years ago. School buildings here all look the same because they double up as civil emergency sites and are built to stay standing in the strongest earthquakes. The students themselves organise cleaning and looking after their classrooms, and are often in school (and in uniform!) at weekends doing club and sporting activities

But it's still those cultural differences that strike me - especially the way that every time you make a suggestion fifty teenagers bark back "Hai!" (yes sir!) in unison. "Wakarimashita!" - we understood! And the polite bowing of course, I'll never get used to bowing back to roomful of people bowing in unison to me.

Anyway - good luck to Choshi for their upcoming performances.

The end of the line

Off to Choshi tomorrow. Yep! It definitely exists, once I fell deeply asleep on the train and it was there, the very last stop at the end of the Sobu line (apart from that little tramway that goes out as far as the lighthouse of course).

If you don't live in Japan the name will mean nothing to you, although if you do ever land at Narita International Airport and the wind is in the right direction you'll fly right over it. Choshi is a remote town at the mouth of the Tonegawa, Japan's longest river and about 20 miles from here. If I had to think of an English equivalent Hull would come to mind. The analogy is good - big muddy river and vanished fishing fleet. But to be honest Choshi is nowhere near as interesting as Hull. And much smaller too. Like Barrow without the shipyards.

Why am I going to Choshi? Music of course. S-san and I were hijacked by a bunch of enthusaistic young musicians after we sang at a concert at Naruto recently. They were a group of saxophonists from a Choshi school and boy! Were they good! We were really impressed. Anyway, the result was that we were press-ganged as scace male voices into doing a performance with them. Somewhere in Choshi, sometime soon. I am that bass it seems, and S-san is that tenor! I have to admit it, Japanese can be a bit of a blur for me when people are talking fast and persuasively and being extra polite but I'll work out what's really happening tomorrow. Who cares?

We are doing two pieces. The first is one of those "The grass is green, the sky is blue, how wonderful to study, make the most of your years at school" style songs all Japanese music educators love. But the other is high octane stuff. "Sinfonia Voci" by David Holsinger, a modern American piece I've never seen before. Commissioned, so the score tells me, by the Plainfield (Illinois) Band Boosters. Goodness!

Anyway, I can't practice down here, there's a bunch of Junior High first-graders just arrived who (segoi! hard to believe!) it seems forgot to do their homework. Better head upstairs with my anorak and do some rehearsal. No time to chat to the likes of you lot!

Tom Robinson 12 January 1923 - 25 November 2004

Today is the first anniversary of my father's death. He died of a heart attack at his home in Harrogate, England on 25 November 2004. Although he was 81 he was a very fit man and it was completely unexpected.

His death has been with me a lot over the last twelve months, especially at times of sitting quietly or when doing daily chores. The grief and anger is usually strongest when I'm concentrating on manual work like carpentry or drawing maps. That's usually the way for me.

My parents were married soom after World War II and I was born a year later - one of the post-War 'baby boom'. Their marraige was typical of many at the time. It lasted about eight years before it finally fell apart. My first memories of my mum and dad are as a happy couple but then things got bad, then very bad. However my recollections of him personally were as a loving father.

Life quickly moved on. Others prevented my father and I ever meeting again. I'd still like to believe their intentions were good - that they thought he was a 'bad lot' and that it was best for me. But they took from me more than they could ever imagine. Later, when I was an adult and could look for him myself the trail had gone cold. I looked for him for over thirty years and then thought he must be dead.

In April 2003 I had an email from a lady in Harrogate. She found my name on the internet. She was my father's neighbour. Actually she sometimes reads this diary. Hello Chris!

Through her I began to write to my dad. He wasn't much of a correspondent but a few weeks later on a trip to England I met him again after forty eight years separation. It was as if we had never been apart. He'd never given up trying to find me. He also now got to meet his grown up grand-daughter too.

What is it like being reunited with your father after half a century? Amazing. It explained so much for me about myself. In some ways we were very different but in others so alike. I can't begin to describe it.

I met him during four visits to England and then he stayed with us in Japan for two weeks. He loved Japan, he already had a friend here in Tokyo. Those were maybe the happiest weeks of my life. It gave us a chance to talk about everything that had happened to me since I was a child.

There isn't time or space now to talk much about my dad, maybe I'll have to write a book. Probably I will. He was from Liverpool, a city where people know how to talk and tell stories. He could talk for England! His whole life had been moulded by his years in the army. As a skilled parachutist he was one of the first soldiers to be selected for the SAS - the 'Special Air Service' Regiment formed to carry out sabotage raids. He'd fought undercover in so many occupied countries - North Africa, Yugoslavia, Italy, France and Norway. That experience of blowing up trains and tanks and planes had affected him deeply, often I think in ways he didn't notice himself. There was somehing in it he couldn't put down; for him it was like the years at university he never got. He seemed to rely on it to define who he had become later but actually he was someone very special anyway. Just for who he was, an immensely kind, generous and humorous person. Well, that was my experience anyway. I was very proud he was my dad.

During his time here in Japan he took us to the Remembrance Day Ceremony in Yokohama. As it turned out that was his very last time on parade, he died less than two weeks later. I've included some pictures here from that day.

I'd thought to write something of the desperate consequences that flowed from this unexpected death, but there it is. Let's leave it there. It's still too painful.

In our whole adult lives we only had a very few precious weeks of each other's company and I'm glad we did however much grief it brought me after. Thank you to all of you who read my 'mixi' or 'blog' and who knew him and loved him too - the friends that we have made through him and which we hope we'll always keep.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

The truth, the whole truth

No fun in having kids around the house unless you can tease them a bit. I used to love creeping up outside and then closing the shutters of our school room suddenly and noisily when I brought Kuu home from his evening walk. I could get the students to jump at least two inches off their chairs with the sudden noise. But now this is very kinshi. Verboeten. Too distracting - Edera says so.

Anyway tonight I had a bit of fun with Shinta-kun. His mum was working so I had to pick him and his sister up from their house for their lesson in our amazingly old Nissan Skyline. Most of it's contemporaries have already found their way either to the great parking lot in the sky or fifth-hand to the jungle trails of Laos or Malaysia. Yep! It's that old ...

Well, Shinta was commenting on this, so I told him that actually it was much older than him (true!). In fact it was an Edo era (1603 - 1867) kuruma. This impressed him and he fell silent. Maybe he was imagining the car being driven by some some daimyo with the back seat packed packed with samurai bodyguards armed to the teeth.

Actually this is probably no less accurate than most of the history he's taught these days (oh! I'm climbing on one of my hobby horses again I see!) Today I was looking at the website of the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield, Michigan ( http://www.hfmgv.org/ )and I noticed that they were inviting me to 'celebrate' the 1960's human rights activist Rosa Parks. Hang on there a moment. What is the Henry Ford Museum doing inviting me to 'celebrate Rosa Parks'? Excuse me but I always thought the Fords used to be into building buses, not boycotting them. But that was then eh?

But of course this is what happens everywhere now. The'heritage industry' writes and re-writes our histories at the drop of a balance sheet; it's our 'post-modern condition' it seems, I've been reading books about it. Re-selling us all our birthrights at a healthy profit. "How's the patient today doctor?" "Hmm ... a very bad case of post-modernism I'm afraid, he just can't stop writing a TV series in which he reveals that Hideyoshi Toyotomi was acually related to George Washington ..."

Honto! Had no one told you already? Well, you read it first on my blog.

Kilts

Huh! See how Japanese I'm getting to be these days! Wednesdays is our 'day off' so of course Edera and I are twice as busy as we usually would be on other days. No chance for a nap after lunch for me. In England days off are for drinking beer in front of the TV with a good video but here there's always work to be done. What other time could we do it?

At least Wednesday evenings we get to choir. Today our conductress, Midori-san is back after a break. I haven't seen her for months so I'm looking forward to it. We are rehearsing carols for our Chistmas 'show' at Narita.

Edera has been wearing her kimono today too - she's getting accustomed to it before a little concert we are attending at Sojiji temple next week. I really like it when she walks around our local stores dressed so beautifully. She looks so nice I can't resist opening the car door for her. Interestingly even though it's rare to see a kimono in such an ordinary setting these days people don't think it's strange.

We were trying to think what the equivalent situation would be in Britain and the best comarison we could make was men wearing kilts. Of course the analogy isn't exact - the kilt is mainly associated with northern Scotland although anybody is entitled to wear the Stewart tartan. Maybe only one person in a million you met in London would have a kilt on but no-one would stare at him, the idea is familiar. No one would confuse it with a woman's skirt. In England kilts usually get worn by Scotsmen dressed up to attend a wedding or a formal dinner. And in England we are used to seeing people in all kinds of ethnic dress in the streets.

I wonder how a man in a kilt would go down in Japan. In Tokyo I guess you could get away with it OK. Come to think of it, last year I DID meet someone wearing one at a formal event in Yokohama! But in Kochi or Matsue or Kushiro the cops in the local patrol car might take a good look at you if you were wandering around the streets in the MacDonald tartan late at night. Don't you think so? Come to think of it, and bearing in mind what Scotsmen wear underneath their kilts, it's probably not a good idea to wear one in Hokkaido in winter in any case ...

Responsibility

Good grief! "It never rains but what it pours" we say in English and it's true! Or as Shakespeare put it "troubles come not as single spies but in battalions ..." Both basically mean you don't just get one problem at a time on your plate. Today, in addition to all the stuff we've been having to deal with around our stalled house purchase we've been trying to sort out some consequences of bullying which overflowed from elementary school into our little juku.

Girls seem really bad at bullying, much worse than boys. With us men it's usually about 'pecking order', a bit like dogs and a few punches and the situation is usually defused. With girls it seems to be more often about power over others of a subtler kind, the real victims of bullying are sometimes, maybe always, those who actually perpetrate it on others. It can often be a sign of much deeper insecurity and responsibility.

This week has an anniversary looming for me, and I've been thinking a lot about parent and child responsibilities. I wish I could remember the name of it but it's gone - maybe fifteen years ago I watched a very powerful documentary programme on the BBC about a German woman discovering the awful truth about her father. It's etched in my memory.

Her nice silver-haired Bavarian mum had always told her that her dad was a brave man who had died when she was a baby at the end of War fighting on the Russian front. But she discovered that actually he had been a Major in the SS who had run a concentration camp in Lithuania and had been executed there for war crimes in 1945.

In the programme the woman visited Vilnius and went to a small old cinema which was the building where her father had been tried forty years before. She saw old film of the trial and met many of the witnesses who had been tortured by her dad and had given evidence against him.

Of course for this woman the visit and discovery of the truth about he dad was deeply shocking. But it was interesting just how those old people who had convicted her father were at such pains to comfort her and say over and over again "You are not to blame, no child is responsible for the crimes of his or her father".

This was an especially powerful message in this programme because what is hard to covey in just writing about it was the fact that the daughter was incredibly like her father, they might almost have been identical twins their appearance forty years apart was so similar. It must have been as hard for the old Lithuanians as for her to be confronted with such very similar 'flesh and blood' again. But this was a different person - a different life with different choices. It raised a lot of questions for me that to my surprise later emerged in my own experience. More of that another time.

Fancy a walk?

In Britain we really love to go on walks. Of course in Japan people walk a lot for pleasure too but it is very different somehow. Around here I see a lot of ladies in aprons walking their dogs around teatime but they usually stick to the lane. In fact there aren't many places to go off the road even in the countryside. Some older forest tracks and the boundaries between tanbo and along riverbanks but that is about it. With my phobia of snakes these are all places that I give a wide berth to in the hebi season!

In Japan there are several long distance footpaths too, mainly in mountain areas. I've not explored those at all yet, nor popular hikes like the summer ascent of Mt. Fuji or the famous pilgrimage around Shikoku.

In Britain it's very different. In our countryside there are networks of tens of thousands of kilometres of old footpaths. These were the medieval 'rights of way' around local areas and between villages and they have been jealously guarded by local people who enjoy a walk in the country. Despite the best efforts of some farmers to exclude people from their fields over the years most of these paths still exist. Often they go through quiet and beautiful country where you can take the dog and tramp through woods or over meadows.

These local paths link with long distance footpaths that cross most parts of England. Many of these follow the routes of disused railways and the towpaths of our eighteenth century canals.

Now all these paths are marked on our detailed topographic maps so it's easy to find and use them even if you are a tourist from abroad. The best maps to buy are the 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey 'Explorer' sheets that show them very clearly. They cost about five times as much as their Japanese equivalents but they cover a much bigger area and they are easy to use outdoors. You can buy them in any bookshop which is some indication of how important going out for walks is for us.

Recently Tony Blair's government introduced a new "Right to Roam" law. Under the new rules all areas which aren't built on or cultivated land are assumed to be 'open access' unless there is a good reason why not. This means that nearly all the mountains and moorlands of Britain are open for people to walk on as long as you follow the 'country code'.

But be careful! In many places land owners can still close off their upland property for up to twelve days a year to allow hunting and shooting. Unfortunately this is most likely to happen just when you are visiting England because the grouse shooting season so popular with our 'landed gentry' begins in the middle of August.

Reading tests

I've just spent a couple of hours doing some 'mock interviews' with two of our students. They are on the university entrance circuit and they have the 'real thing' next Saturday in Makuhari. Good luck M and N-chan!

Interesting! I think they will both do OK but it's certainly a nerve-wracking process and inevitably depends on the 'luck of the draw' as to which text they get to read and answer questions on. It's all very well being good students out here in leafy Chiba-ken but when you get matched up against the sons and daughters of striving middle class Tokyo parents who have had the benefit of expensive home stays in America or England it becomes, as we say in English 'a different ball game'. But they are well prepared.

What still always surprises me about Japanese teenagers - even after years of falling into them - are the huge blank areas in their knowledge in respect of recent Japanese history. Ask them about the distant medieval Kamakura or Tokugawa eras and their eyes light up but the Taisho Emperor, who or what was he ...?

One of the test pieces I used today was a paragraph on the founding in 1911 of the Seitosha - the 'Blue Stocking Society' formed by educated women to campaign for reform of womens' legal status and right to work in professional roles. Not only had neither of them heard of it but neither could even tell me that the Meiji Emperor was still ruling in that year. The figuehead in the process of Japan's modernisation. It would be like British kids not knowing about Queen Victoria, or American kids not knowing about Abraham Lincoln.

Actually 1911 is one of the most important - and I suppose depressing - years in modern Japanese history. The year in which many socialists and political reformers were imprisoned and even executed following those 'treason' show trials engineered by right wing politicians and a conservative judiciary. And around that time there were so many interesting links and connections between Japanese university students and young intellectuals in other Asian countries - especially China.

I have the feeling that even now - perhaps especially now - to start actively presenting some of this material in schools here might be explosive stuff. Better and safer to learn about what merchants were allowed to wear in the 1620's or read excerpts from Genji Monogatari. Do you think so?

Oh well! At least I try and do my bit where the state school system at present leaves off, even if it is only in using reading tests like this. I think modern Japanese history makes for truly compulsive reading. And apart from the undeniable darker bits (in truth we all have those somewhere - with us British for example in Cromwell's invasion of Ireland) there are so many people of vision and principle to be found in it's pages too.

It's quite a remarkable story about a nation that against all odds industrialised and developed into a modern state without getting colonised - in fact the only non-Western nation that succeeded in doing so. People ought to study it a bit more closely - and especially Japanese teenagers. Well, that's what I think anyway.

SUREE EFU

That looks wierd written in romaji (Roman letters) doesn't it? But on my trusty laptop - which I bought last year in Akihabara, I can't type Japanese katakana. So it's the best I can do.

We have a 'suree efu' convenience store not so far from here and I drove past it today on my way back from my weekly Japanese class. For non-Japanese readers 'suree efu' is a close as you can get writing in Japanese katakana to "Three F's" and it's the name of a convenience store chain here. I wonder if there are any in other countries - is it originally an American brand name? Can anyone tell us?

It's unusual for a Japanese convenience store brand because the sign is actually written in katakana. Most big chains here have English names - like 'Lawson' and 'Seven-Eleven' and they are signed in Roman letters too. I don't know why but it definitely seems to add something to your branding - an extra 'coolness' of some kind - to have an English shop sign. So it's the exception for a large chain only to have a Japanese sign.

I mention all this because I've always meant to check up what the "Three F's" actually are. Feline, furry and fierce? No, that would be a tiger. Fun, fat and famous? No, that's me of course.

Come on. Someone out there must know. I already have a sinking feeling that two F's are going to be 'fast' and 'friendly' but I can't imgine what the third one is. Faroese? feathered? Four dimensional?

I feel an old joke coming on here. My grandfather would split his sides laughing every time he got his pipe out and his tin of pipe tobacco out of his pocket. He used to smoke the English 'Three Nuns' brand. "We used to smoke 'Three Nuns' in the trenches in the First World War you know" he would quip. "None Yesterday, none today and none tomorrow!"

Yes, the old ones are the best ones...

Not a good day

Oh dear! It's been one of those days. In fact it started very badly - a call from my daughter Julia to say that the Nationwide Building Society - the special kind of lender that we use in Britain to borrow money to buy houses - had turned down our loan.

I'd thought in my innocence that all this was sorted out three weeks ago, when we signed all the paperwork and answered all the questions and handed over a lot of cash. It feels like a typical English-style cock-up. Lots of errors made in the application by careless people working in understaffed branches - and then at the end of the daisy chain some underwriter at head office decides he doesn't like something after all.

This time it seems it was the fact that I lived 'abroad', that it is 'too risky' to lend to someone normally resident in Japan. I wonder what they imagined I would do. Scuttle off to Buenos Aires and spend my wad on wine and women? I mean, it was hardly a secret that I lived here - all the paperwork they completed themselves weeks ago had my address on. Yes, I'm REALLY brassed off. I spent the whole day writing a fairly savage complaint listing all the errors they've made and now I'm tired. But already I'm having to look at other possibilities to get the cash.

Even that can be a problem. So many customer service numbers in the UK now are '08457' national or '0800' toll free numbers - which thanks to British Telecom you can't dial from abroad. Don't these people ever think that they might have customers someplace else?

Usually I really enjoy the 'difference' of living in another country but there are times it isn't fun and here is one. Japanese banks are even worse I'm told, they'll never lend to gaijin in case we vamoose. And doctors can never agree on methods of treatment betweeen continents; my doctor in England prescribes something for diabetes that I can't get here because it's not on the list. Why?

Times like this make me realise just how bad we are at understanding the new world we are all living in. We think we live in a shrinking world - actually we DO live in a shrinking world - but conservative institutions often dn't see past the end of their noses.

Better luck tomorrow eh?

Car park collision ...

No, don't worry. No-one hurt and no damage done. Nothing to get concerned about at all. But it's been on my mind all day.

This morning I drove up to our JA ('Japan Agriculture') 'Green Shop'. There are dozens dotted around Kanto and they are very good. In Britain so-called 'Farm Shops' often do sell produce from the farm but usually the stock is supplemented with lots of stuff from wholesalers. Here the local JA shops are much more professional operatons and they sell a big range of stuff grown only on local farms. One of the many benefits of living in a fertile area in a warm country ...

Well, I was about to pull out of the car park and started to reverse very slowly out of my parking space. I could see a lady of about 50 coming out of the shop and walking to the adjacent white Toyota pick-up (sure sign of a farmer in this area!) so I stopped and waited.

Somehow - in clear weather and with 20/20 visibility and in a large and almost empty car park this lady just walked straight into the back of my stationary car. How could she do that? It was as if she was on auto-pilot, no-one inside was looking out for unexpected obstacles - like a large green car straight ahead.

And her reaction was interesting too. In Britain - irrationally - most people would I think immediately get angry with either themselves or the driver. Here in Japan most people would apologetically bow and shuffle off muttering sumimasen, sumimasen. But she just re-adjusted her course and walked on as if this had just been a breeze ruffling her hair.

What was happening here? Dunno. Of course we can all be distracted and preoccupied but it felt like something much deeper which I've often noticed around this rural bit of leafy Chiba-ken - and especially from farmers and their families. People DO move differently. In car parks - walking along roads - people are aware of different things to me and move in a different way at a different pace. I'd not realised before what a culturally determined thing the way we move is.

To a Westerner the way groups move along roads can seem almost agressive - when the train pulls in people spill onto the highway with no apparent concern at all for safety. But it's not people being bloody-minded; it doesn't occur to them to get out of the way. In Britain this would be a sure passport to a hospital bed - drivers expect pedestrians to actively avoid their cars.

I can come up with odd-ball academic theories with the best of them so for what it's worth here is my two-pennyworth. I think at a subtle but pervasive level Japanese culture and experience emphasises AREA much more than the LINEAR. Maybe it starts with writing kanji with brushes rather than roman script with a pen. You see this difference in lots of things - compare a Japanese manga with an English comic book for example. Or the way you name blocks in cities and we name streets.

So maybe this lady was just taking in more stuff from the whole car park area at the expense of looking where she was going. Who knows. Or maybe she was just asleep eh?

I'm sure this issue of movement IS as significant a cultural difference as hashi vs. knives and forks but how could you ever prove it? It might take an awful lot of following people around with clip boards before you could measure the difference.

Sorting out some Japanese maps

If I was famous for just one thing amongst my friends (apart from my intelligence, good looks and humility of course!) It would be my collection of maps. Sadly this isn't all in one place at the moment (will it ever be again I wonder?). The mass of it is currently living in a garage in Bedfordshire, England but there's a substantial 'Oriental Collection' here with me in leafy Chiba-ken.

It's a long time since I counted this collection, which I've been adding to for nearly 50 years, but even in the mid 1990's it was over 5000 maps. I've not given any away since so I'd guess it's around 7000 now, it seems I can't go anywhere without buying the local sheet. I've got detailed maps from around 50 countries, some very unusual such as Oman, Uganda and Belize

Good topographic maps are like books to me - in a way better that books because each is 'written' by an infinite number of people and processes. When I was younger it was the physical processes that seemed most interesting - even a map of a remote area of Alaska or Finland whispered of so many natural changes. Just why had that river taken that course? Underlying geology? Why was that slope forested and that one not?

Now it's the way that people have transformed the landscape that interests me most. Animation artists present to us their fantasises about cities of the future or of some other planet but in reality they can never be more remarkable and amazing than the stuff we see every day on our way to the supermarket. Did you ever stop to think what a supermarket REALLY is? What you would make of it if you had just landed from Mars? Try walking through the door of yours and taking a good detailed look at the first bay of shelves on your right and I'll guarantee there's already enough there to write a novel or a doctorate about.

Anyway, I just HAVE to sit down and catalogue my Japanese 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 maps - I can't buy any more these days because I don't know what I've already got! They are lovely maps and very cheap too.

But I can tell you what the first and latest maps I bought are! The first was a British 1:63,360 (inch to the mile) Seventh Series Sheet 84 - "Teesdale" that I bought in 1958 when I was 11 years old. I looked at it non-stop for days! And I still have it. The latest was a copy of Japan 1:50,000 "Yokosuka" that I bought two weeks ago. Yokosuka is a town down the Miura Peninsula, the 'Dartmouth' of Japan and the likenesses don't end with the navy, the geology is a bit similar too.

So if you have any unwanted topographic maps in need of a good home ...

Where do the flies go in winter?

When I was young this was the question that all intelligent and observant children were supposed to ask. So where do flies go in the winter? There they are buzzing around in November and then they vanish until March. Well, they used to,in our warm kitchen there always seem to be a couple of them airborne no matter what time of the year it is.

I mention this because for the last couple of days I've had my nose in a 'hard book' - the "Condition of Postmodernity" by David Harvey. A couple of years ago I had at least three tries at getting to grips with Mr. Harvey but every time I got to about page forty that mountainside had become almost vertical and I couldn't find anywhere to put my feet. When I find books THAT hard I end up dozing off.

I must be getting cleverer because this time I'm already more than half way through and its really interesting. It also ties in with some statistics I've been working on about employment in Chiba-shi.

So, where do those flies come in? Well, I have a kind of updated version of that question - if I was a little boy today I would be asking "Daddy - who actually MAKES things?"

It's a tough one. Even twenty years ago I could park up at our supermarket in Garstang and next to it was a low building known as the "wool factory" where real women made real sweaters. Now I can't even remember the last time I saw THINGS being made.

Assembled, distributed sold, marketed, financed, regulated, researched - oh yes! ALL of those. But manufacturing now seems to be an almost invisible activity, either hidden in some high-tec plant behind barbed wire or more likely in Guangdong or Brazil. We don't make things any more do we? Someone else does it. Saves us the bother.

It feels very spooky to me. How come we get all this cash in England and Japan just for 'managing' things?

There used to be a comedy Sci-fi series on BBC Radio 4 called "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" and I remember in one episode all the REALLY IMPORTANT people in the world like hair stylists and telephone disinfection operatives got sent off to a new and unexplored planet first and everyone else was supposed to be sent the following week but somehow they never made it. Ho hmm ...

This saith my Cloris bright ...

Last Saturday our choir sang two pieces in a concert at Naruto. Two pieces? Good grief! It feels like we've been rehearsing them for half our lives. That is one big difference I notice between England and Japan - here people like to do things 'properly' somehow. If we are going to sing then we'll want to get it right eh? We nead to rehearse and rehearse. And rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.

But I've got into the swing of this approach now, it doesn't seem odd to have rehearsed a two minute madrigal for twenty hours. In fact it's quite enjoyable because after a while the music becomes really 'internalised'. You can literally sing it in your sleep.

Also, choir here is a very social occasion too. To make really good choral music you have to be in harmony as friends. On Saturday we spent the whole day picking over the two items again, but paused for some lunch and to enjoy the lovely warm weather before we headed down to Nogiku Plaza.

In England the choirs I used to sing with rehearsed very intensively but we didn't get so much time to chat. One of the choirs was a very good church choir and there we might learn two or three new items every week, including an 'anthem' that we might be performing after less than an hours' rehearsal. Unimaginable in Japan.

Whenever I can I like to share with everyone anything I know about the pieces we are learning. It's easy to forget that early music was written by 'real people' who had interesting lives of their own which deeply influenced their composition.

Our two pieces on Satuday could hardly have been more different, although they were both love songs written in England within ten years of each other at the end of the sixteenth century. The first - 'Come Again' - was by the famous lutenist John Dowland and we were accompanied on a lute for the performance. Dowland was a kind of 'John Lennon' of his day, a suave performer who travelled Europe performing to royalty and seducing the ladies of a dozen courts. Somehow we could hardly sing this piece without making 'sheeps eyes' at each other and laughing at the slight hint of vulgarity discretely hidden in every verse.

The second piece was a madrigal by John Wilbye "Thus saith my Cloris bright ..." from his book of madrigals published in 1598. He's someone not really known here in Japan - not quite as famous as those 'first rank' composers like Thomas Morley and Orlando Gibbons. But I've sung a few of his pieces now and actually I think he's easily the finest poet of the whole bunch. He wrote all his own lyrics in beautiful Elizabethan English and he took great care to match the music to the mood.

"Thus saith my Cloris bright when we of
Love sit down and talk together.
'Beware of love dear, love is a walking sprite
And love is this and that and Oh! I wot not what'

Oh no! These are but bugs to breed amazing ...
For in her eyes I saw his torchlight blazing"

Who was his 'Cloris' I wonder? John Wilbye came from a blacksmith's family in Norfolk and was a servant and the family musician for an influential local noblewoman. He never travelled further than London, wrote only two books of madrigals and never married. No picture of him has survived for us. Did he have a secret relationship with his employer or one of her friends? A lifetime affair that their different social positons made impossible to admit to? We'll never know. But some clearly inspired him over many years to write beautiful music. In my experience music and love are never far from each other.

Pepsi o nomitai

While I was cooking lunch today I was listening to Edera teaching a student the use of 'want to' which roughly corresponds with the '-tai' form of Japanese verbs. So 'Pepsi o nomitai!' is 'I wanna drink Pepsi!'

Sometimes - OK often - I just can't resist poking my head around the blackboard and having my own two pennyworth and this time I just had to tell the student about little kids in England saying 'wanna wanna wanna'

But it's funny how just a phrase can bring back a whole avalanche of memories and in this case not especially happy ones. When I was a child of around six or seven I spent nearly two years living with my grandparents. They were born in the 1890's and I realise now that I was probably one of the last children in England to suffer a genuine 'Victorian upbringing'. Often these days right wing politicians harp on about the benefits of traditional famiy values but I was there, you can't fool me. In those days I just thought it was what happened to everyone.

One of my grandmother's favourite proverbs used to be " 'I want' never gets." And believe me she could spot an "I want" when it was still far over the horizon. You couldn't even say "I want to go to the toilet" without getting your ear tweaked. I want never gets. It never did get either! Everything had to be prefaced by "please may I?" Please may I have another slice of bread grandma? Please may I read a book? I still find it slightly scary to hear children say "I want a XXX for my birthday" - to express so strong a wish for me would have been the end of all hope.

These days though I love to hear little kids saying "wanna wanna wanna". They might not get it of course but isn't it a bit refereshing to hear good old fashioned attachments and desires being vocalised so directly?

There are limits though eh? Ho! ho! Some of my best friends are Americans BUT - sorry guys! - the worst I ever heard was two blue-rinse American ladies in the street in Copenhagen trying to cope with a toddler in the middle of a mega wanna wanna wanna tantrum. The biggest threat they could come up with was "Janine, if you don't stop this we won't take you to the opera tonight!" Wow! Big deal! Why couldn't I have had relatives like that?

Why poppies?

A reader of the Mixi version of this site (hello Lily!) has asked me why we use poppies as a symbol of remembrance in our Armistice Day ceremonies. It seems like a good time of year to write about this topic, so here goes...

Until I came to live in Japan I didn't realise just how different remembrance is for us in Europe. As a tourist you might not notice, but if you travel around England and look in almost any town or village you will soon find a war memorial. I don't think I've ever seen one here, but maybe I don't know where to look.

Often for us it is in a corner of our municipal park, or a churchyard, or even just beside the road at a central place in the community. Sometimes you even find them in workplaces. I once worked for a Welsh County Council ('prefecture') and there was one in the entrance hall to our offices.

Nearly all of these memorials were erected after the 1914-1918 War - to Europeans the 'First World War'. They have bronze plaques with the names of local men (occasionally women) killed 'in active service' as soldiers and sailors. Usually there is a later, additional plaque with the names of servicemen killed in the 'Second World War' (for us 1939- 1945) Now sometimes there may be another plaque for soldiers killed in the Falklands in 1981.

But look carefully. What is always most shocking to me about these memorials is just how many names are listed there for the 1914 - 1918 War. Usually it is at least five times as many, maybe ten times more, than in later wars. Because it is now beyond living memory and was fought on distant battlefields we forget what a terrible war it was. A whole generation of young men was lost in those years.

During the second battle of Ypres in May 1915 a young Canadian military doctor called John McCrae was struck by the millions of poppies he saw growing on the battlefield, and in the makeshift cemeteries where he buried so many of his comrades. In Belgium and France poppies are cornfield weeds that flourish when ground is disturbed and everyone fighting that summer was amazed at how the whole battlefield was suddenly carpeted in blood red flowers growing in 'no-mans land'. He wrote a poem that begins:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scare heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved. Now dead we lie
In Flanders fields ...

John McCrae was later killed himself in the fighting in France in 1918.

A young American university teacher called Monia Michael read this poem. She was doing work to help wounded soldiers reutrning to New York, and she decided that she would wear a poppy in her buttonhole. Later blind ex-soldiers began to make silk and paper poppies to raise funds to help the families of men killed in the fighting and that is how the poppies we wear today began to circulate.

Armistice Day

Today is the date on which, in Britain and Europe, we remember those who died in all wars. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - it was the moment of the armistice that at last marked the end of the 1914-1918 War.

When I was a small child remembrance ceremonies always fell on this date. It's that time of year in England when the sun never shines, I always recall the eleventh as being cold and grey and sad. But always one striking touch of colour - the beautiful red paper poppies pinned to everyone's heavy damp overcoats. As 11:00 a.m. approached factories and shops came to a halt, cars pulled to the side of the road and as the hour struck on church and town hall clocks the world stopped and we stood in silence together for two minutes. I suppose back then almost everyone had someone they knew personally in mind - a lost friend or relative.

More recently 'Remembrance Day' has been moved to the Sunday after the eleventh, but it's still an important public moment for us. If anything I feel it's taken on more subtle meaning over the years, as there has been a wider and deeper understanding of the tragedy of war. Maybe one thing that has encouraged this is the number of children who do history projects at school and realise for themselves something of what their great grandfathers and grandfathers experienced. For Europeans too the scale of suffering is very visible in the vast War cemeteries of Northern France and Belgium; it's easy to travel there and see those things for yourself.

In Europe there's also been sixty years of very deliberate reconciliaton - today we remember everyone who died in War and not just those who happened to be on our own side.

You can go to a Remembrance Day Ceremony in Japan. There's one held at the Hodogaya Commonweath War Cemetery at in Yokohama.

Just a few moments before 11:00 a.m. someone will read the last few lines of a poem by Laurence Binyon

"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."

Yes. We will remember them.

Transience

As some of you already know, what interests me most about my studies is the chance to look at exactly how things change. It's sometimes not easy to notice.

This afternoon I popped off a photo just a couple of minutes walk from our house - in fact it's the area I often walk Kuu around in the rain hoping he'll "do his duty" so that we can all get home. Here it is with it's 'twin' taken in July below.



This is the kind of 'before and after' view that us students of transience love. It's like those 'spot the differences' drawings that you used to get in the "children's corner" of newspapers. Spot the ten things that the artist has changed! - the knot on the bootlace, the number of whiskers on the cat etc.

Actually this pair is a bit of a 'cheat' because my winter 'before' picture was actually taken after my summer 'after' picture, but you get the idea.

This is a small area of housing plots set up by what in Japan is called a 'land reajustment scheme'. A few farmers pool land together, the fields are leveled and turned into building plots with road access and the plots are then sold on to people who want to build their homes.

That's the theory but in this case the plots were finished just before the 1992 price crash and the farmer has been trying to sell them ever since. Every November he comes and clears the land so that prospective buyers can admire the sites but then in April the annual cycle of growth begins again and the house plots vanish under a new sea of perennial herbs and shrubs (can anyone help me by identifying some of the species here please?)

It's impressive isn't it? In Japan this layer of transient weeds makes over two metres growth in the fifteen weeks between the start of April and early July. In Britain waste land plants only grow at about a third of that speed. In Japan if you don't keep the weeds down your house would vanish in a couple of years.

So for your consideration here are three important aspects of transience that I've spotted in my study so far and that seem to apply in all areas of human experience.

Firstly, most change happens gradually and cumulatively. The grass grows longer, the tin roof rusts, the tyre wears down, we get older.

Secondly, it never happens just at one speed. Plants grow faster on warm sticky days, tin rusts faster in wet weather, tyres wear down faster when we drive on the throttle and brakes and we age faster when we are unhappy and stressed.

Finally, decisive change happens very fast. Along comes the farmer and chops everything down in a day, the rusty roof is blown off in a gale, our tyre gets a puncture, we have a heart attack and die.

So that's a few of my reflections on the characteristics of transience so far. What do you think?

Kimono

Some of you who were curious to see what Edera looked like wearing a kimono. Well, this is the one she wore yesterday.

Nice Painting

Our day off today and so Edera had a kimono class this morning while I shoveled snow, dug ditches and cleaned out the barn etc.(only joking!) Afterwards we went into Togane with her still in her full gear; she needed various bits and bobs for a trip over to a concert in Sojiji later in the month. Wearing kimono seems to be like that - like fly fishing or golf there's always some expensive new bit of tackle you need.

It was interesting going around town with her wearing kimono. It's not the first time we've been out together like that but it's not an everyday thing and usually it's for a special occasion like New Year. It's certainly the first time we've been shopping with her looking so nice.

Interesting to observe people's reactions, or actually lack of them. Back in April on my trip to China I got stared at all the time and wherever I went but people in Japan are far too polite for that kind of thing. Here the sight of a kimono is rare but easily explained - perhaps a family event at the shrine or a wedding. A bit like seeing a vicar on the street in England - not something you see often in cities but it's no surprise. However a few older people, who could probably remember when kimono were worn by everyone before the War, did gaze rather appreciatively.

I'd include a picture of Edera looking so nice, but maybe she would be embarrassed and I'd be in trouble. Again.

Instead I've included a copy of a picture painted by a local elementary school kid that I spotted. It was in a big display set up by the local UNESCO club on a wall in the Jusco department store. It's really good eh? A JR class 103 train somewhere along the Togane-sen between Naruto and Ooami-Shirasato. This has to be one of JR's least glamorous routes, rumbling through dead flat ordinary Japan where tanbo and vegetable fields stretch from horizon to horizon behind the Pacific coast. It's a line that almost takes pleasure in hiding in the long grass, as you can see in the picture.

When I was a kid I'd have given anything to have been able to paint pictures like this - come to think of it I would still be rather proud. I was always surrounded by well meaning adults who would say "That's very nice; what is it meant to be?" and a few not so well meaning ones who would say "You can do better than that!"

More about Kuu

Kuu and I have been spending a lot of time together since the start of the month on our morning and evening hikes. It's half a year since I regularly walked him so it's interesting to notice how he's changed in that time. Unless I've got a lot stronger - unlikely - he's not pulling and tugging as hard as he used to. Last winter I was seriously thinking about harnessing him to a sledge.

But other stuff hasn't changed so much. One thing that always really makes me smile is the way he walks around puddles. I've never seen a dog so reluctant to get his feet wet.

It really interests me to notice how suddenly he can be impulsively attracted to things. A new scent on a tree, a nice looking bit of soil to have a pee on - as soon as he sees it he makes a bee-line in that direction. But then some extra kind of energy gets involved, he 'accellerates' towards the object of his desire. Hard to describe it exactly but it's just like iron filings headed towards a magnet - the closer they get the more irresistable the attracting force becomes. At the start of one of these lurches you can check him with ease, but once he's built up momentum nothing would apply a brake.

I suppose this is a very visible case of 'attachment' and it's a big part of the canine personality. Edera was telling me today she'd been reading about someone living near the sea whose dog kept coming home wet. It seems he was swimming four kilometres to get to a bitch in season. Such dedication - it deserves a medal!

Do you think we are the same eh? I might not lust after some sweetie a child has dropped in the lane or head out to sea in search of females but let me loose in a book store or map shop and see how quickly my Visa card comes out of my wallet! There's nothing like a good 'impulse buy' to make me happy!

Years ago I remember reading something about the Australian Barry McKenzie. In his student days he and his friends would go into stores in Sydney and buy packets of butter and then just leave them on the counter. When challenged by the shop assistant they'd say "Oh! I only wanted to buy it ... not to take it away!" Well, at least it saves carrying stuff home and circumvents the obsolescence process - maybe I'll try it sometime.

Take me back to dear old Blighty

An American friend (hi Jim!) has asked me if I know the origin of the word 'Blighty'? Ho! Is the Pope a Catholic?? Here at 'kotoba no hiroba' Edera-chan and I are walking etymological encyclopedias you know! We talk of little else day or night ...

'Blighty' is a word persons of a certain age (by which I mean mine) and older use as a synonym for England sometimes, usually in the context of going back there, of 'going home'. Perhaps many younger people wouldn't know the word now, I'm not sure.

Well, like so many other words in English, 'Blighty' has a military origin, it was originally a soldier's name for their home country. It comes from the Urdu word 'bilati' meaning 'foreign' which in turn came from the Arabic 'wilayate' meaning 'distant government'. During the years of the British Raj in India it came to mean far away England. "To get a blighty" meant to get a wound serious enough to get shipped back to England early.

Oldies like me probably still use the word because their grandfathers, who fought in the 1914-1918 War, used to sing a popular Music Hall song by A.J. Mills in the trenches. This had the chorus ...

"Take me back to dear old Blighty!
Put me on the train to London town!
Take me over there, drop me anywhere!
Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham,
I don't care!
I should love to see my best girl,
Cuddling up again we soon should be! Whoa!
Tiddly-iddly ighty, take me home to Blighty!
Blighty is the place for me!"

I can clearly remember my own grandad singing this as he worked on his garden allotment in Barnard Castle digging over a potato bed on a chilly November day fifty years ago.

These days this tune usually pops into my head somewhere between the Urals and Helsinki as our 747 or Airbus slowly dips south west at last on that GIS map and lines up for Frankfurt or Copenhagen with all their promise of stretching legs on European soil again and a short onward flight to sunny Manchester.

A hundred 'not out'.

Well, I just thought that I would mention it! This is the hundredth post I've published here. Actually it's the hundredth I've published on my blog site but there were several early entries I made on the Japanese 'Mixi' site that never got as far as my English readers.

'100 not out'. That's a very cricketing term. We always say 'he scored a fine century for England' and the like - getting up into 'three figures' is seen as a bit special. Come to think of it when I played cricket in school to get into two figures was pretty rare for me.

But when I thought about it a bit further I realised that '100' is not that common a number in daily use. It's a rather 'metric' measure, we tend to use the standards of our bodies much more, we think in tens and dozens. In Japan we have 100 yen coins but in England there's no 100 pound note. Is there a hundred dollar bill in the USA?

I wonder when someone first travelled at 100 mph? Apart from falling off a cliff of course, that doesn't count. In May 1904 the Great Western Railway locomotive 3440 'City of Truro' is supposed to have reached a maximum speed of 102.3 mph coming down the bank below Whiteball Tunnel near Taunton (oh! Taunton ...) but this claim hangs on a single stopwatch observation over a quarter mile and has always been challenged. Could such a venerable engine have gone so fast? We'll never know eh? Must have been some time around then though.

A 'Hundred' used to be a division of an English County responsible for raising a hundred soldiers when the king needed an army. You still sometimes find it in place-names. For example you can't resign from our British Parliament but if you want to quit you can apply for the office of "The Chiltern Hundreds". As you can't legally be an MP and have "an office of profit under the Crown" this has always been used as a crafty way of getting yourself disqualified from being in Parliament.

One of my favouite Christian hymns is "All people that on earth do dwell ..." which is known as 'Old Hundredth'. I wonder which ancient hymn book that refers to? It was a very popular hymn with Oliver Cromwell's troops, they would sing in as they moved forward in battle

In Buddhism we prefer the figure 108 - the 108 kinds of delusion that offer us the chance to do something about ourselves.

Oh well! Hope you enjoyed some of my first hundred posts! Wish me luck with the next hundred please!

Evangelists?

I work outdoors a lot these days, often with a box full of tools and a pile of timber in our car port. So many projects eh? - but time at last to do things with a bit of thought and just to take as long as it takes. It's almost the nicest part of not having to work to earn a living any more - that freedom to move around working with my hands for a change.

Working out in the car port not only do you see everything happening in the neighbourhood but you are also the first line of defence when it comes to strangers calling at the house. And here I have a confession to make - I'm starting to notice that one of the pleasures of being a foreigner in a different culture is the fun you can have acting a bit dumb. Maybe this is especially the case in Japan where most people are already a bit nervous of unpredictable gaijin.

Usually this harmless sport involves salesmen. Whether they want to sell you gas or a new phone service or unblock the drains Japanese salesmen always seem to approach the house as if they already had a court order to demolish your property in their possession. Sometimes they even wear overalls and a helmet to emphasise their official status as - hmm, well, sales representatives. But a gaijin lurking with tools in his hands is not what they expect at all, isn't the lady of the house at home? Sadly it seems that however hard I try I can never understand a word of what they are saying. In fact lately I've succeeded in looking so dodgy that most just give our place a wide berth and go and knock on Ishikawa-san's front door across the lane instead.

So far so good, but today I had a particular treat. When I went out to work after lunch there were no fewer than half a dozen smartly dressed women hovering across the lane and admiring our washing on the balcony and the colour of our paintwork. I've never seen six such smartly scrubbed and polished ladies in faultlessly ironed blouses. Maybe they were all heading off to a nearby wedding but I think not. The array of expensive shoulder bags and clip boards somehow said "evangelists" to me.

The sight of me emerging from the house carrying a big power saw was not at all what they expected. I don't think they would have been any more surprised if I'd been a polar bear or a large tiger. With a brief "konnichiwa" I made for my Workmate bench while they all made a strategic withdrawal down the lane admiring houses and checking their clip boards as they went.

Well, they circled the neighbourhood three times after that, casting hopeful glances my way. But they were a chicken-hearted bunch and I never did find out what they were selling. I last saw them headed for the station. It must be a hard enough job telling people about your God on the doorstep without encountering the likes of me.

Around dusk ...

It's often the very ordinary things in the day that have a quality of magic around them. Again, walking Kuu this evening I just couldn't help but stare in wonder at some of the sights we came across on our stroll down the lane towards the river.

On fine evenings I leave this walk until the day is almost done. This far south the light fades rather quickly even in November. Dusk deepens into darkness in only a quarter of an hour. The days are still hot but as soon as the sun dips behind the cedars it's already cool.

Once the sun has gone the sky becomes a deep pink and the forest a jagged black outline. The air is very still but there are a thousand scents of fruits left hanging there by the heat of the afternoon. Somewhere a bit further up the valley a wood fire is smouldering and the smoke drifts in a soft veil across the vegetable plots and the damp rice stubble on the tanbo. The only sound is my footfall and Kuu panting as he tugs against the lead. Soft colours, deep shades.

This hush is sometimes broken by the voices of pupils cycling home together from their after-school club activities. Their headlights twinkle along the lane in the gloom like the lanterns of dwarves returning home from some jewel mine. They are watched by a brown cat that washes himself as a kind of meditation.

This time of day is quite unlike any other isn't it? It's the quality of the light - we expect things to be lit from above but at dusk it comes from quite another place. So the world looks different.

Bunka no hi

The third of November is bunka no hi - Culture Day - and a public holiday here in Japan. Maybe we should have put on a Beethoven CD this morning, or a bit of Brahms to chew over as we chewed over breakfast. But it's as much as I can do to pull my trousers on and get that pesky dog harnessed and in any case Edera is glued to her French lesson from 7:25. She's a sad case.

But don't worry, we still did our bit for culture. After breakfast we headed up to the park next to our commuity hall where there was the usual crop of farm produce stalls. No doubt somewhere in the main hall there was all that flower arranging and tea drinking stuff going on but we had our orders - a commission to buy some of the new season's local peanuts.

We were out of luck - it seems the crop is later than usual this year. If you are an investor maybe here's your chance to make a 'killing' in peanut futures ...

The trip wasn't wasted though - our friend Wada-san was there with an amazing variety of preserved fruits of every variety and we did some happy tasting on his stall before coming home with tubs of delicious sticky brown goodies that will send my blood sugar count into orbit. Don't worry, it's another three weeks before the next dreaded blood test.

Last year I took my dad to this event - one of the first days out he had during his visit to Japan. He also tasted Wada-san's produce on such a sunny morning. Strange to think that's all a whole year ago already. Time really does fly like an arrow doesn't it?

Walking Kuu

Yesterday was Day One of the Dog Walking Season for me. Edera does the long hot months of summer but as of 1 November I'm I/C ('in charge of') leads and it's my turn to respond to all canine promptings for attention to bodily needs and functions.

In leafy Chiba-ken 1 November is reckoned by Edera to be the start of the 'Snake-free Season' so dog walking is over to yours truly for the colder winter period. Me, I'm not so sure - it may be the start of the "Virtually Snake-free Season" as advertising agencies would say but in my limited experience November is one time of the year when you are likely to come across occasional drowsy hepteroptera either stirred up by a day of warm sunshine or not quite commited yet to a winter den. I'll breathe easier when we get to our first frost.

But it's nice getting dragged along the leafy lanes by Kuu. He amazes me - 13 years old already and still so strong and fit, he's a very tough old dog with a heart of gold. We seem to head out just as the sun hasn't quite made it over the trees and when last night's dew is still heavy on the undergrowth. Out here in the country all the kids are already heading for school on their bikes, chattering away and always ready with a cheerful "Ohayou Gozaimasu" (Good Morning!) for sleepy looking gaijin being taken for a walk by their canines.

In Britain almost everywhere seems to be part of urban living these days and so I notice how much this isn't the case here. In Japan there's a clear distinction between town and country living. By and large wealthy and influential people don't buy a 'pad' out in the boonies - they live in Shinagawa or some other city centre des.res. That leaves the contryside free for people who drive around in battered white pick-ups growing things, ride to school on bikes or walking dogs on misty mornings. Long may it stay like this.