Down in the bunker

There's one place that I pass sometimes in Chiba that I'm sure is some kind of secret installation. Probably a 'civil defence' bunker so I guess I'd better not mention where it is but I have a nose for these things. I'm often told that I would have made a good policeman and it's true - I notice even the tiniest detail out of place and often find myself looking twice at something without even knowing why.

But this place is just a bit too discrete. And there are never cars parked outside. You might as well stick a big red sign up saying 'Secret! Keep Out!' No one would read it anyway.

Now it's not widely known that I was once myelf no stranger to such "Holes in the Ground, Radioactive Fallout for the Avoidance of". When I worked as a local government official in Wales in the early 1970's part of my job responsibility was to be the 'County Information Officer in Time of War'. In our bit of Wales we had a bunker out on an industrial estate which had been the site of an ammunition factory in the 1940's.

Not much had changed in there since the Second World War either. Certainly not the mattresses or the cooking facilities. We once had a whole week shut up inside rehearsing what we would need to do if 'The Bomb' landed on Cardiff.

It was like being in one of those old black and white movies. I had to use an old bakelite telephone and get all the latest intelligence from GHQ in Cheltenham. Would the British Telecom network have withstood a sustained Soviet nuclear attack? We will never know but having seen the tools we had I sincerely hoped that they were never put to the test.

The highlight of that week was when our local Chief Fire Officer sneakily sent a few burly and hard knuckled local firemen to see if the army platoon we had guarding us were paying attention. They weren't and later required a few stitches in the local hospital and were very, very cross about it. Very funny though.

I wonder if our civil defence precautions in Britain have improved since then? With all the other risks around in the world now I certainly hope so.

Private Places

At the moment I'm doing a lot of work down in Chiba's Midori-ku. It's an area which has been built up over the last fifteen years and is a much more 'planned' environment than other parts of the city.

In a way it feels a very 'Western' kind of place. Japanese planners have borrowed a lot from the British traditions of town planning and sometimes I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not actually walking around Milton Keynes or Stevenage. The identical leafy walkways and bicycle tracks join places together and this is the only part of Chiba - other than in occasional bus shelters -that I've ever come across benches I can sit down and take a rest on.

All the graffiti is the same as in Milton Keynes too. Same places, same colours, same sentiments.

Most of Chiba, like most of English cities, consists of small private houses in small private gardens. There's a fence or wall around and even if the gate is open everyone understands that once you are off the highway you are on private property. Personally I don't go around inspecting people's garden tools and prodding their sleeping pets just because there's no sign there telling me not to. We know where the boundary is eh?



But in the leafy suburbs of Midori-ku who knows where the boundary lies? Often there are broad areas of grass without fences that lead from a very public path right up to the bedroom windows of ground floor flats. How far can we go before we are intruding on people's privacy? And once people start to become nervous about teenage crime, even though it's a small problem compared with most Western countries ... watch out!

In situations like this I see more and more prohibition taking place. In fact Japan seems to be moving fast towards the American solution of closed 'gated communities' which is something we've largely avoided in Engand - touch wood. But then gated areas were also feature of Edo-period cities so there is a precedent here. To show you what I'm talking about. I've included are two examples I photographed today. Hardly need translating do they? They too are graffiti of a kind.

But who are these signs for? Difficult to imagine the bad guys running scared of them, maybe they are just there to make the rest of us feel better.

The problem with trying to keep the bad guys in some other place as someone else's problem is that in the end it's hopeless. You are doomed. You only have to look at Israel and Palestine to see what a waste of time that approach to life is.

Status in speech

One interesting thing about learning Japanese is how it sometimes reveals huge differences between cultures you never even guessed were there before. I mean really big - like the Grand Canyon for example. What does go on inside people's heads? Hard to imagine sometimes.

Yesterday we were studying talking about 'giving' and 'receiving' again. It was very much 'Part 2' of this topic - we covered the basics more than a year ago.

In Japanese giving and reciving isn't just two verbs, but three. Me giving something to someone (ageru), soomeone giving something to me (kureru) and recieving something from someone (morau).

Fair enough. Oh! But not so fast! That's not the whole story by any means. Yesterday we got a whole new angle on it. For example if you are giving something to someone of higher status than you you use another verb, (sashiageru). And if it's just giving the cat some food or watering the plants then downmarket 'yaru' must be used.

Well, I won't burden you with all the combinations and all the angles on this but the basic point is clear. 'Giving' is different not just depending on who is doing what but also the relative status of people is built into the language too. So you can't avoid making a call as to whether someone is further up the greasy pole without risking being rude. This is one reason why meishi (business cards) are so crucial in Japan. Otherwise how would you know that someone you just met was senior to you?

All this complexity still exists because gift-giving and cultivating relationships in this way is still very important in Japanese society. In England - even in a large company - I had to tell my boss even if someone bought me lunch if I wanted to avoid accusations of corruption and inducement later. We don't approve - in theory anyway - of 'palm greasing'.

Do we have status language like this in English? I'll have to think about it - I guess we must have. To be sure, I probably wouldn't speak to the Queen in the same way as I would to kids kicking a football against my front door. There are many colloquial expressions that imply such relationships - like the 'lovable Cockney rogues'' "God bless yer Guv'nor!" But by and large we have become a status free society in our speech.

In my company even the receptionist would welcome the Managing Director by his given name when he arrived at the office in the mornings. Unimaginable in Japan, I'd be suprised if the receptionist even knew what his given name was.

Where we sleep and where we work

There's a question that's been fermenting in my mind all this week during my walks. I think it's come up because of something I've neem reading recently by the Japanese sociologist Chie Nakane.

In one of her books she suggests that Japanese people's lives - and especially the men of course - are so focused on their workplace because their kaisha (company) has come to replace the agricultural village that was the important group in the lives of their great grandparents. The firm has the same kind of hierarchical structure as the village and, sometimes at least, still offers a degree of security and belonging that Western businesses don't. In return for loyalty.

I think she's right. It explains the other side of the situation too - how for many people in Japan where they live is simply a place to sleep and keep their belongings. As convenient as possible to the office.

This has got me thinking a bit about the whole question of 'where we sleep versus where we work'. In England we fondly imagine that once upon a time in some golden era neighbours were much more neighbourly. In villages and the tiny terrace houses of miners or mill workers you could count on the support of those around you.

But actually all those situations were also all ones where your neighbours were working for the same farmer or mine or factory as you were. So maybe in terms of 'community' the link to where we work has always been more inportant than to where we sleep.

The big difference was that until recently where we worked and where we slept were usually one and the same place. And if they weren't actually physically the same building they were so close that it hardly mattered.

Now we make our friends over a far wider network, like this one for example. But for most men at least the important 'face to face' encounters are still the ones at the office. That's where most people "lay up their treasure" eh?

Spotted!

I was walking through a back lane in a small village near Kamatori this afternoon when a car pulled up and a nice lady jumped out and started chatting to me. It was the mother of one of our former students. Her mum lived in that area and she'd noticed me walking along in the sunshine and just wanted to check that I wasn't lost.

Whatever could I be doing walking around there, twenty kilometres from home? I tried to explain my method of randomly sampling the urban environment and she looked suitably impressed but I think she understood even less of that than I did her rapid-fire Japanese. But it was very kind of her to make sure I was OK.

It's not the first time this has happened to me recently. Last summer in Narita in a car park someone hooted and waved at me in recognition. But that was more on our 'beaten track', a DIY store neighbours might make a trip to use. This time it was a long, long way from our little community and in a place I could have never expected to have been known.

More than anything else it makes me realise that in a subtle way I 'belong' here now, I'm not a stranger any more and I can never and will never be a stranger again either here in leafy Chiba-ken or in Japan. Where we may end up in future, who knows? Probably back in England one day but it's not a 'done deal'. But wherever I am there will be people here that know me and like me and people here I know and like.

Good!

Blackbirds

Every day I read a blog written by a Buddhist teacher and friend who lives in Canada at the moment. Two days ago she mentioned the 'dawn chorus' in England.


In fact if you go to her page - here - you'll find links to pages on the internet with recordings both of the chorus itself and also the individual bird songs that you can hear in English woods.

Living in Japan I've come to realise just how unique the sound at dawn in an English oak or beechwood is. Even in European forests the mix of birdsong is different and Japanese cedar forests don't transmit sounds in the same way at all.


So I can feel very nostalgic listening to a recording of an English dawn chorus. And I'm always most moved by the sound of blackbirds. It really is the sound of the English countryside in summer.

My favourite poem about bird song is by Edward Thomas. One summer afternoon in 1913 he was travelling by train from mid-Wales to London along the Great Western Railway route through Hereford, Worcester and Oxford. His train was stopped by a signal for a few minutes at a little country station at Adlestop in Gloucestershire. Later he scribbled down what for me is one of the greatest poems in our language.

Perhaps it's especially moving for me because just three years later he was killed fighting in France at the Battle of Arras.


Adlestrop station was closed in 1966 but Edera and I made a detour there a couple of years ago. At the top of this entry I've included a picture of one of the handsome green GWR 'Castle Class' locomotives which might have pulled his train. Also a picture of where the station use to be and of Edera reading a copy of the poem someone fixed to the seat in the village bus shelter. Behind is the old railway station sign that Thomas would have seen.

+ + + + +

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and around him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Looking for a brush

Edera was telling me at lunch that she'd been struggling yesterday to find a calligraphy brush in local shops. If you aren't Japanese you might not know that once they would use brushes rather than pens here for writing. That's how those lovely scrolls of traditional poems are still written and calligraphy is a popular hobby in Japan. But for writing shopping lists or a note to the delivery man a fine point pen or (and now unusual in England where we like ball point pens) a sharp pencil is what you use.

She was shocked that no one stocked them any more. Heh! Heh! I didn't tell her that, along with policemen looking younger, this was a sure sign of old age creeping up. The discovery that shops don't have something that you always thought was one of life's essentials. Like sapphire needles for record players and tinman's flux for mending holes in copper saucepans.

For calligraphy the correct brushes are still easily bought in art shops and kids still - and usually reluctantly - are expected to learn the basics in school. But for other uses they are obsolete and hardware stores sell felt tip pens instead.

This was an interesting example of something I come across so often in my study. What was the real reason people used to use brushes? To write of course. NO - the REAL reason! To send written communications! To be able to communicate without being face to face. Now if you think about it that's something we actually do far more now than we ever used to. The need contiues - but the mode it takes changes constantly.

Here most of the time people still use kanji and kana to write down words - it's "part of the culture". But even those characters have changed a lot too - become simplified and standardised so that maybe a text even from the nineteenth century Meiji Era might be hard to read.

And the method of writing has changed the most. Modern Japanese kids are as skilled and dexterous as their great grandparents ever were but now their fingers move in a different way and they pick out messages on their keitai (mobile phone) keypad rather than with the tip of a brush and black ink. Because that's the way what they have to say will get read the fastest.

Interesting eh? That the same need can be resolved in such very different ways.

Dock Road

I was pounding the streets of Soga today. It's in the southern part of Chiba City and it's still very much 'steel town' - that area where JFE (used to be 'Kawasaki Steel') have their offices and headquarters.

Actually walking in the rather pleasant residential areas there's not much of a clue that you are just down the road from a huge steel plant. That was all built 'off shore' on reclaimed land in the 1960's and it doesn't really impact on the rest of the place at all.

But if you walk west towards the bay you'll come to a main road and across it is a forest of chimneys, factory buildings and pylons. And you can't go there, it's all a forbidden city. That line of landscaped trees on the other side of the highway conceals a big fence. For Soga residents Tokyo Bay has vanished long ago behind barbed wire and an area of industry even bigger than Soga itself.

I'm very used to places like this in north east England and it's interesting for me to notice the differences. There the steel plants were much older, and there were grim areas of Victorian terrace housing right up to the gates of the factory. When I was a child those streets were rather dangerous places but I don't get that feeling here at all. The JFE plant is a modern one and never needed thousands of badly paid beer swilling labourers to keep it running. Just lots of space and money.

On the other hand in Middlesborough you could walk around the quays as much as you liked; there was no high fence to keep you at a distance. Heavy industry might have been a messier, brutal and dangerous business then but it wasn't so secretive. There was no obsession with security and control.

One other thing we didn't have in Yorkshire was Mt. Fuji. On the train heading down this morning there it was across the bay, pink in the morning sun and so far away. Lucky I got a glimse of it when I did because from Soga it's now hidden forever by the steel rolling mill sheds.

The perfect parabola

I was watching some kids chucking snowballs yesterday and it reminded me of something that must have happened when I was around eight years old. Where do these very precise memories of small acts emerge from I wonder? Where do they dwell through your whole life before they pop up again ..?

It must have been about this time of the year and perhaps when I was eight years old - So probably the winter of 1955-1956. Oh yes! Yes it was! I can remember my mother worrying about the possibility of another war over the Suez Crisis in that place.

We were living in a house in Middlesborough in Yorkshire. No.79 Woodlands Road. It's a grim part of town now, what is left of it. But then it was an area of rather nice terrace housing. Outside my bedroom window the sky to the north was shone firey red about midnight as the big Bessemer converters at the steelworks were blown off into the night.

This one winter's day it had been snowing hard and our little front garden was carpeted deep in snow. A boy who lived somewhere nearby - I think his name was Michael - came around to play with me and we chucked snowballs in the garden. He "got me" a couple of times and then started pelting me with snow from behind a big holly bush.

I carefully pressed a big soft ball of snow together between my woollen gloves and just let it fly. Like a bird.

As soon at that snowball left my hand I knew there was something incredibly special about it. It was a 'once in a lifetime' perfect pitch - effortless, precise and true. I stared as that living snow went up, up against the grey sky in an exquisite parabola and the whole world held it's breath. Like something out of the books about Zen and the art of archery.

And then, as gravity took a gentle hold it went down, down towards that holly bush but just beyond it too - a pitch of such precise length that landed directly on top of my victim's unsuspecting head.

Afterwards I found time to be scared. Scared that I could have thrown it. Scared becasue of his grief because I made him cry. But I'll never forget the timeless exhileration of watching that perfect parabola. Never.

Another snowy day

Well, I thought yesterday was snowy but today takes the biscuit! There must have been 15cm (six inches) out there when I went to take Kuu for his walk this morning - the most I've ever seen around here. And cold and frosty with it.

So I had a bit of a struggle driving down to our meet-up for choir practice. We were supposed to arrive by ten and it being Sunday I was one of the first on the road. Between us and the village there's a little level crossing quite close to the station and another car had got there before me.

Just across the tracks is a short but very steep little slope up to the main road and he was stuck there - in fact he kept sliding back onto the rails! Nightmare scenario eh? The stuff of suspense movies! I was just waiting for the wigwag bell to start bonging and I would have hit that emergency button in a minute. But luckily no train came.

At last about a dozen guys from the driving school over the road rushed across to help him out with a big push. As soon as he was clear I was over the tracks like a rocket myself. But I didn't pause for the halt line, I shot up that slope as fast as I could and made the main road first time.


Today was the first of three Sundays that I'm singing in concerts. How did that happen? If your grip on langauge isn't so good these things loom up without warning. But I don't mind, I can think of worse ways of spending winter weekends. After a morning's singing and a bite of lunch we shot off for our twenty minute warm up on stage and then after our own slot we listened to nine other choirs doing their stuff too.



Of of the performances was by a local Junior High school and I have to say they were exceptional - the kids were really good and it was lovely to see them enjoying singing so much.

AND it felt very competitive to me. Even rather stage managed. A pity.

Lately I've realised that I really don't like people singing to win. You are going to tell me that it's just a way to improve standards and give people a sense of achievement aren't you? Ho hmm...

Well, I don't agree. If you want to compete why not take up athletics or chess? Making music is ... well,making music. If I had my way in this increasingly competitive world music would be reserved for the angels along with stroking cats and watching sunsets. At least those aren't competitive. So far.

Thinking in the box

Loads of snow today down here in a for once not-so-leafy Chiba-ken. I even missed my Japanese class this morning. Hard to imagine eh? Edera had to hold me down of course, tie me to the main mast so that I could resist the siren calls etc. but I grudgingly settled for doing some revision at home instead.

Now that I'm reading much more 'social theory' I find even the idea of 'language' stranger and stranger. It's a real 'box' isn't it? A container we dwell in like a dog in a kennel. I mean - we just can't think outside of it, if we want to consiously think of something then it involves 'concepts' and we can only know those by 'putting them into words'. So words define pretty well exactly the limits of our conscious thinking.

That's a bit spooky. Is there anything 'outside' of words or is it just that we can't express it eh? Well, for sure, everything that we think of as 'subconsious' is exactly that - stuff outside words and which we just can't 'know' it intellectually at all. But it's there in, around, under everything we do. There are ways of 'knowing' that don't use words.

Sometimes to me this language business feels a bit like the Big Bang and the expanding universe. Astronomers tell us that we just can't see beyond the limits of the universe, light doesn't travel fast enough and gets bent. Similarly we can't 'think' outside language because words don't go there.

Langauges themselves are rather 'thin ice'. There were the Romans banging away with their tenses and cases and in Europe we thought that was all there was to it but of course you only have to look at Japanese to see that the idea of a 'future' tense is a nebulous one - you just don't have one on the same way. Or articles. Or cases. So just through speaking a different language already your whole mode of thought is subtly different.

Edera and I bump into this all the time. Something simple we thought was completely clear wasn't clear at all. We both meant something different. Interesting though.

Waiting around

I seem to have been probed, poked and pricked pretty well everywhere today. It was my regular blood test and diabetic check-up and then for good measure sensei sent me off upstairs to have my eyes checked too. And for dessert this afternoon - a trip to the dentist to get a filling fixed.

So I seem to have spent a lot of time sitting in waiting areas for something vaguely unpleasant to happen. Usually I can read something suitably studious but today I fet restless. For my eye test I needed dialating eyedrops too and after that reading was impossible.

At least down here in leafy Chiba-ken you can generally just go to the dentist and walk in off the street and be seen straight away. In England that's unimaginable - usually you have to book appointments with dentists weeks in advance.

I've had diabetic blood tests and check-ups for about ten years now. When I first started going I always used to feel like I was there by mistake - all the other patients were obviously quite elderly and looked like they had nothing better to do. But recently I can see that I'm starting to fit in with the scenery the same as everyone else.

At our local hospital the crowd of outpatients is even older than their English counterpart. And they are often pretty deaf too. I had to smile today - they called one lady over the tannoy seven times before a nurse went and tapped her on the shoulder. I think she'd probably switched her hearing aid off.

But here was an interesting thing! At one point - trying to listen for my own call - I realised that someone had turned on some 'piped music' - something I've never heard before in either a British or a Japanese hospital. And then - an even bigger surprise. It wasn't piped music at all but a lady playing an electric organ on the balcony. Around the central waiting areas on two floors dozens of little groups of patients were treated to a repertoire of popular songs and tunes.

It felt like we might have been in some church or maybe a funeral home as the sweet melodies floated around the building. Or perhaps on some strange windowless cruise ship on a calm ocean headed for a destination we could not even guess at. A kind of magical mystery tour of unknown dimensions in which we were discreetly serenaded by the crew even as they drew out the blood from our veins.

Good grief!

Hanging above my computer is one of those little plaques you can hang on a door handle - the sort of thing you get in hotels with 'Do Not Disturb' on. Mine has a picture of Snoopy on it and I think it came free with a large bottle of Diet Pepsi. One one side it says "I'm Eating Now!" and on the other side "I'm on A Diet!"

I wonder if you can guess which side is turned to the front? Ho hmm ... you've guessed eh? But it ought to be the other one! Into Naruto for my two month diabetic check-up in the morning and no doubt I'll get another shed-load of wisdom from sensei because my weight is still up at 79.5 kilos.

I've always liked Snoopy cartoons. I first came across him while I was studying in Denmark back in 1968 - I had a friend there who had every Snoopy book going. Later he got a golden retriever puppy and of course the dog got called Snoopy. It fitted OK when the dog was young and boucy but it seemed strange to me later to be hollering 'Snoopy!' at a 40kg mountain of adult canine crashing through muddy undergrowth.

This cartoon strip seemed to get just a bit TOO wistful and sickly sweet in later years, especially after the animators got to it. But there were always two things in it that I really liked.

One was the sign over Lucy's stall that read "Psychiatric Help 5 cents". How often do I find myself inclined to put that one over my own door? "The doctor is in".

But the one that has really stuck with me and I use myself often is Snoopy's "Good grief!" When the kerosene heater won't light, when the dog is barking for a walk, when I forgot to post a letter, when my finger joints don't work as they should in the mornings; it sums up the whole world in two words. The fable goes that the wisdom the king of old decided to have inscribed on his ring as a constant reminder to him was "This too will pass." But for me "Good grief!" does it much better.

And a cuddly toy

Day off today so Edera and I headed out for lunch. It was 'kimono day' for her so we thought that we'd go for something a bit more traditional and ended up in a sushi bar.

Yes, it was one of those with the conveyor belt and the plates of stuff that went around and around. If you don't live in Japan and haven't seen one basically you sit at long counters and the plates pass you by on a conveyor and you take what you want. You get charged according to the number and colour of plates you have at the end.

I can't see this ever working in England. They would end up with no crockery left in a few days as customers used their initiative to keep bills low.

Anway, watching all this food go by reminded me of other conveyor belts and especially the one that there used to be in a game show on TV in Britain years ago. The lucky contestant got to see lots of goodies fly by on the belt and then had thirty seconds to remember what they had seen so that they could win it and take it home.

It was a kind of mix of consumer goods that was popular in the 1970's. Now it would just be boring. "Toaster ... fool mixer ... bedside lamp ... canteen of cutlery ... alarm clock ... yawn!" But back then people got excited. There were some things that were on the conveyor every week - including the legendary 'cuddly toy' which was usually a Teddy Bear.

Maybe all of life could be arranged in this convenient way - a long conveyor belt that passes us by and all we have to do is reach out and pick off what we fancy. Every few hours - food! When we are young, toys and playmates. Later a choice of attractive life partners, and lots of things to amuse us. Then some serious status symbols; a suitable car and house and all the other stuff. Around now I feel I'd want the belt to have lots of things to make me a bit wiser and a bit less dumb but sometimes hard to imagine what they would be.

At any rate I don't need another toaster or a cuddly toy at the moment.

Attention aux radars!

Tonight I was tempted to write an entry along the lines of "One hundred and eight ways to improve the Japanese school system without using bulldozers or high explosives". But hey! I'm a peaceable person;lets leave that one for another time ...

When Edera and I were driving back from Naruto this afternoon we spotted a police car up in front so we proceeded at the usual thirty nine kilometres an hour that we always drive at (heh! heh!). Sure enough at the lane end near the toll road junction they pulled off to man the speed trap that another dozen or so other officers were already setting up. It's so nice of them always to go there, all us locals know we won't get suprised anywhere else. In Britain our police are deeply unsporting - they hide up in pairs and try and catch us speeding unawares almost anywhere. I seem to remember that the American Highway Patrol like to do the same.

But Japanese policemen are like the French and Italians in that respect at least. There's always at minimum of a platoon of them around a speed trap, preferably a whole regiment if one is available.

Once I was driving on the old main road from Beaune to Dijon. The flashing headlights began almost as soon as we turned onto the highway. Every car we passed for miles was flashing away - you would have thought that France had just won the World Cup. We kind of got the message eh? It's an international language.

And then we arrived at the actual spot - it was a small village, maybe Gevrey-Chambertain (everywhere around there is a name that appears on expensive wine lists). Near a tree were the three policemen in charge of the radar equipment. We drove past at a suitably slow speed. And then around the corner - in the village square - perhaps two complete bus loads of policemen in their kepis. Motor cycle outriders in their leather uniforms stood by their steeds and several senior officers in the statutory 'shades' were shouting at everyone.

You might have thought that the President of the Republic was about to arrive. Maybe he was. I did for a moment wonder if it was somehow a set from some comedy film about France. Maybe Peter Sellers was filming a new 'Inspector Cluseot movie - "The Revenge of the Pink Panther" or something like that. But no, it was for real. The French can sometimes do a pretty good imitation of acting like Frenchmen themselves, they don't need anyone else's help.

Psst! Wanna buy a rare map?

One of my friends (hi Dave!) has got me playing with Google Earth. It's fun isn't it? But it seems it doesn't work with Japanese Windows so if you have a Japanese PC - so sorry! But if you have English Windows - load it now! It's free and you'll love it.

Basically the software accesses world wide satellite coverage over the internet, The actual quality of coverage depends on where you want to look at - the detail for Baffin island or the Weddell Sea isn't as detailed as downtown Tokyo. But if you live in a fairly densely inhabited bit of the world the chances are that you can see your car parked on your drive. And it's very easy to use, like spinning a globe.

So I was in the mood to have a good chuckle at the map depicted here which hit the news headlines this morning. It's Chinese and is said to have been drawn in 1763. But here's the funny bit. A note on the map says it was copied from one drawn by the admiral (and eunuch!) Zheng He in 1419 ...

It's true then eh? The Chinese discovered America, it must be right!

Of course to a geographer the details are interesting. Not only did Zheng He get the shape of America correct, he did a pretty good job of Latin America too. And I see Hudsons' Bay and the Bering Straights are reasonably accurate. And the Cape of Good Hope. And New Zealand is there - he was a well travelled man. Have junk will circumnavigate - several times.

What really caught my eye though was that big island more or less where Baja California is. Could that be the 'Islas Amazonas' that Spanish explorers used to draw on maps of America about er ... um ... 1760?

But I guess someone will make a bob or two speculating about it all. The book comes out next week it seems.

Family values

We were talking over tea tonight about families here in Japan and how they differ from my experience of British families.

As it happens I've also just been reading the proverbial 'good book' about this very topic - "Perfectly Japanese" by Prefessor Merry White. She's American and a feminist too but she certainly knows what she's talking about. She's done a lifetime of serious academic research on families here. I found myself agreeing with almost everything she said, it matched exactly my exeriences and impressions.

Of course we have some problems you fortunately haven't got - yet. Most British secondary schools have some drug and alcohol issues from time to time and we have a minority of dissafected kids who make a lot of trouble and get involved in anti-social behaviour on the streets. It's because we don't show a respect for others that is often inherent in Japanese culture. I don't notice behaviour problems that often in Japan, at least down here in leafy Chiba-ken. But it's creeping in - recently I even yelled at some kindergarden boys in Chiba-shi who were happily throwing lumps of earth at passing cars over their school fence.

But the one thing that really strikes every Westerner who lives in Japan is the total absence of fathers. It's as if a bad fairy has put you under a spell. I've heard every excuse in the book there is to be made about this - neo-Confucian values, employer expectations, cultural differences, the old 'samurai retainers used to be seldom home too' stuff et al. Basically it's because trade unionism here was undermined in the 1950's and now no-one even knows how to say 'boo to a goose' any more.

Believe me, if you don't get a grip on this issue - you are doomed! Professor White argues - and I agree with her - that many Japanese families have now become collections of people that happen to have the same postal address and sometimes meet each other on Sundays. But I guess you don't need me to tell you that.

Our little flood

January in southern Kanto is usually a very dry month but we've really had a soaking down here in leafy Chiba-ken today. This morning I dragged myself off to the first Japanese class of the new term and it seemed an ordinary enough day. But by 10:30 it was raining hard.

Around lunch time it eased off a bit but then this afternoon it 'set in' with a vengeance. I was working indoors with the shoji closed so I don't think I realised just how heavy the rain was until we had some rather dramatic peals of thunder around six.

Now it's eased off and the wind has got up. In England we have a proverb ...

"If the wind is before the rain
Soon you may make sail again
If the rain is before the wind
Tie your sheets and halyards mind."

If anyone knows what this means please let me know. Well - approximately - it means that if you are a sailor wind before rain won't be much, but wind after rain might be a storm ...

Anyway I just took Kuu out for a late walk and to my suprise our little River Sakuta had flooded. It often does this during the typhoon season but it must be very rare at this time of the year. Kuu and I ventured on our route as far as the vacant lots near the river but then there was just a big dark lake ahead where the lane should have been. About 50 metres away one of our neighbours houses was a little island of lights - they are always getting cut off but luckily their house is on rather high foundations and the property itself stays dry.

The irony is that only yesterday two apartments in this area were demolished. In a few months a new road - and flood protection - will run along the river so maybe this is the last time that the Sakuta will be visiting us on this side of the valley. Improvements. Hmm ... well, I don't wish flooding on anyone but I'm always sorry to see rivers and streams turned into big concrete trenches.

Sorting Out

I've had a rather satisfying day today organising my study stuff and putting it away. OK this might come as a suprise to many of you but actually I'm sometimes not a very tidy person. You never suspected it eh? Hard to imagine I know. Yes, Im good at doing things and going places but tidying up after myself is something I have to work on.

Edera isn't so good at it either. In a way that's an advantage because she can't shout at me about it. But in a way it's a bad thing too because when we both don't tidy up it's not long before the room disappears under a glacier of books and papers.

Things reached a low point last night when I simply couldn't find the maps I'd been hoping to use today to get them marked up. Time to pause for breath and spend some time filing completed work away. Actually I STILL haven't found the missing maps but I can't get out again before Sunday so I still have time to look again.

When I go back to England in a few weeks time to move my belongings there to a new house I have a whole double garage filled with stuff from floor to ceiling to sort out. Goodness! I suspect a lot of it can go straight to the tip, there's probably piles of old Company paperwork lurking there - filing on Health and Safety policy for managers that I never quite got around to putting away in 2001.

To make matters worse my neighbour Dick has been storing stuff in there too over the last couple of years. He's an even worse hoarder than I am but he collects second hand machine tools and car parts. The last time I looked most of my dining table chairs were hidden behind a lathe and some hub caps. Well, it will keep me busy and out of mischief for a day or two. Good grief!

Wingfield Castle

I'm still playing with my scanner, and here is a picture that will appeal to at least two regular readers (hi 'Tetsu' and Dave!)

When I was working in the Brewery's tied trade deparment I once had a phone call from a man using a pay phone in a Chinese restaurant on the Isle of Wight. He wanted to sell me a paddle steamer.

Well, eventually we bought it, planning to turn it into a floating pub. It was tied up on the River Thames very close to the Tower Bridge in London and wes towed it down to Swansea.

That scheme didn't work out. But later it went back home to the town where it was built - West Hartlepool in County Durham. It became a floating conference centre. I'm still rather proud of my role in saving the ship from the scrapyard. Lovely old ships don't come cheap and only one or two get to survive. This one deserved to.

The ship is called the "Wingfield Castle" and it's an old-style paddle steamer. It was built in the 1920's to be used as a ferry acrossr the River Humber between Hull and New Holland It was a very old design even when it was built to relieve unemployment in the North East - the original plans dated from the 1880's

Lovely ship eh? I was given this picture by someone from Hartlepool and I think it must have been taken during sea trials about 1925. That definitely looks like the North Sea in winter, you wouldn't want to go paddling in it yourself would you?

Marton Road Infants

Amazing. Our old printer 'died' on us this week - just after we'd bought a new ink cartridge too of course. We did toy with the idea of getting it repaired to use up the ink but heck, whoever does that any more? So today we went down to the 'Million Volt Store' at Togane to see how much a new one would cost.

We just couldn't believe our eyes! All those high tech printers at such amazingly low pices. They weren't asking us 50,000 yen ... they weren't even asking us 40,000 yen. Oh! Sorry! That was yesterday's piece ...

We came away with a Canon MP 500 which isn't just a printer but also a high quality scanner too. I see that it even prints jazzy labels for DVD's and CD's for when you want to send recordings of your karaoke to friends.

I just can't get my head around all this wonderful scanning capability - I'll be playing with it night and day copying maps and pictures of old Chiba. But here's one that might interest a lot of you as a foretaste of some of the delights to come ...

This picture was taken when I was seven - so it's fifty one years old this year! It was shot in the assembly hall at Marton Road Infants School in Middlesbrough. This was a tough school between the docks and the steelworks - what today would be labelled 'inner-city' but almost everyone lived in industrial towns then.

I wonder what this picture was all about. Maybe there was a brochure being made because the Queen was coming to town that year. A bunch of us were hauled out of class and arranged around this bench with some tools and pieces of wood. Then a photographer with a big old fashioned plate camera took the picture. Of course we never usually saw anything as exciting as tools and workbenches in our school - that would have been an unimaginable luxury. They arrived on a lorry and got taken away afterwards. Then as now it seems that educators wanted to give a 'good impression' of their facilities.

Can you guess which one is the seven year old Iain? That's correct! The handsome and intelligent looking doe-eyed child second from the left. The boy next to me on the extreme left is, I think, my friend Fred Binns and to my right is a boy called Roy. Can't remember his second name but he was a big handkie user, maybe he had hay fever

At the front on the right, giving the camera a very hard look, is Lawrence Coleman. He was even tougher than he looks, he beat cissy boys like me up regularly. Come to think of it he beat everyone up regularly, it was his metier as the French say.

Real Selling

Last night I got onto the topic of haggling over prices and I was saying that it wasn't much of a British custom. Well, of course we do haggle over price like everyone but our heart isn't really in it.

The one thing we do like in Britain though is a bit of old-time real street trader selling. Walk through any market and there are always a dozen stall holders 'crying their wares' and one or two really slick salesmen selling something of doubtful quality at 'rock bottom' prices.

One of our most popular TV comedy series - 'Only Fools and Horses' - was about the lives of one such Cockney salesman - Derek - and his brother Rodney. You'll find DVD's of it on the Amazon site. We have a soft spot for lovable rogues - except when they have just sold us a pile of junk of course. We all want to get rich quick eh? It's our national dream.

Back in the 1960's I worked in Glasgow in Scotland for a couple of years and on Sunday mornings I'd often head for the 'barrers' ('barrows') on Glasgow Green near the cathedral. It was a pretty tough market back then, but there were a couple of salesmen who were grand masters of the craft, the best I ever saw. 'Happy Harry' was one name I remember. These guys never needed microphones - you could hear them from the next street and it was an education to see them working the crowds

"Now in a department store you would be asked twenty pounds for this ..."

"I'm not asking you for twenty pounds! No! Not even ten pounds!"

"Put your money away Missus! I won't even ask five pounds for this! Not even three pounds! It's your lucky day - as it's my birthday the first ten people to put their hands up ...! Just two pounds ten shillings!"

And people would even be fighting to hand over money for the seeming bargain of the moment.

Now that's real selling.

Not so dumb as I look

Ho!Ho! Edera thinks I'm a bit dumb eh? She just mentioned that she wants me to play a game with her students later where I have to ask "Kiite-nai pan ga arimasu ka?" ("Do you have any unsliced bread?"). But of course she thinks I will pronounce it in my foreign way "Kitanai pan ga arimasu ka?" ("Do you have any dirty bread?"). Then they can all have a good laugh. But the last laugh will be on them, I'm not as dumb as I seem. I've been practising that long 'i' for an hour!

I remember a comedy programme in England where someone was writing very dodgy advice to include in a guide book for visitors to London. There were several items on the list that made me hoot but one in particular still makes me laugh when I think of it. It read something like ...

"London taxi-drivers like to send time with foreign visitors haggling over the fare and may be offended it you just pay what it says on the meter. But they prefer to do this at the end of the ride. Start off by offering them only a third of what they demand,and then after about ten minutes, make them a final offer of around half the charge. Whatever you do don't tip them, it is considered very rude in England."

I still have visions of some unsupecting Japanese tourist taking this advice seriously.

Bartering is something I still haven't really got the hang of. In my job I'd often have to negotiate contracts and I was quite good at it but it wasn't my own money. When it comes down to haggling over a few yen or pence on the cost of some sad looking trinket or a tee-shirt who cares? Apart from one trip to Israel and one to China I've never travelled much in serious bartering territory though. It's an un-Japanese pastime just as it is un-English too. We are both basically a gentlemanly lot.

Dondoppi

What a beautiful day today was - such a clear blue sky and so fresh - it was a joy to be hiking aound the streets of Toke with my map box. In the nice weather I got a lot of ground covered too.

I came across one interesting thing down there - "The Hundred Hills". A genuine American-style "gated community" - one of those places that mega-rich people live with a man in a cap in the "guard's lodge" on the entrance road checking out strangers to keep the crooks at bay. But I slipped in the 'back way' along a footpath and had a good gawp at all the big houses.

They really did look like something out of California - big 'mission-style' mansions with huge gardens. Interestingly these houses were SO big with SUCH big gardens that the estate actually fell outside the DID (Densely Inhabited District) area of Chiba simply because there weren't enough people per hectare living there to qualify as 'town' any more!

When I got home this evening there was a big bonfire in the field behind our house - what's known around here as the 'dondoppi' but elsewhere in Japan I think as the dondo or dondoyaki. It's a kind of party where all the old New Year decorations get burned. Once pine branches and bamboo used to be used to decorate house entrances at New Year. It's a kind of sacred fire I suppose, a chance to get rid of stuff that you wouldn't want to just throw away.

It was a nice party too - lots of mochi and sweet beans to eat and negi (leeks) to eat. We are very lucky to live in a place where people still enjoy a good time around this kind of event. I don't think they have as much fun in "The Hundred Hills" somehow.

So with the decorations all gone we really are embarked on 2006 now!

Snow

I was planning on doing fieldwork today and when I woke up there was bright sunshine too. But when I came to look out of the window ... it had been snowing in the night out here in leafy China-ken. So I decided to postpone my trip for a day. I'm not as steady on my feet as I used to be when there's ice around and I have leather soles on my shoes. I guess I'm not likely to make the skating team at the next Olympics! But no point in risking a sprained ankle just to get another five pages filled up in my notebook.

This minor excitement reminded me of a day almost exactly twenty five years ago when I lived down in South Wales. We had a family party about this time in January - I can't think why we would but it was a big one and about twenty relatives and friends drove over from Swansea.

It was a 'good do' and around seven in the evening I went to let the dog out into the dark garden and noticed that it was snowing. Hard! The climate of that bit of Wales, so close to the coast, is mild and it was the first time I'd ever seen so much snow. I told everyone and we opened the curtains and watched it drifting down the road in heavy white sheets.

"Well, we'd better get back home!" some said and I think maybe two cars left while everyone else went on chatting. But within fifteen minutes they were back! All the main roads out of town had been blocked by the blizzards; even the motorway was closed.

So that was one of those nights out of a folk tale - twenty travellers stranded in a house. But we got out pillows and blankets and sat around the roaring fire and told stories and there was plenty of food. And the next morning the sun shone and we got our shovels and spades and soon everyone was on their way.

But that's not how it was here this morning. We don't get that kind of snow down here in leafy Chiba-ken, not in a hundred years I guess.

That lot next door

I was having a laugh earlier tonight. I was listening to a radio comedy 'sketch' from the BBC Radio 4 show 'Dead Ringers' that a friend had sent to Edera.

The essence of it was that someone, doing a very passable imitation of Prince Charles' voice, had phoned the council office in the northern town of Gateshead to ask about an art exhibition being held there. The girl on the other end of the line - who had a Durham accent very like the one I had as a child - was trying to answer his questions without bursting out laughing at this anonymous guy with an impossibly silly southern 'toff' accent and vocabulary.

The 'north-south' divide is still often a wide one in Britain, a bit like between Kanto and Kansai but maybe even stronger.

This programme 'Dead Ringers' makes a bit of a speciality of this technique. Bemused people on the phone struggle politely to deal with very strange questions and situations that arise. And often very wittily too - it makes me realise what a wonderful sense of fun most people have.

Well, the crunch came in this interview when the Prince Charles sound-alike, obviously shocked at the idea of going so far from London and civilisation, asked if he was likely to meet cavemen and woolly mammoths on his visit to Gateshead. Quick as a flash the girl remarked "Oh! No Sir! ... they all live over in Sunderland!" Sunderland is a town about ten miles from Gateshead with a completely different culture and football team.

It's interesting how towns that are so close together often end up as major rivals to each other. We call football matches between such places "Local Derbys" - an opportunity for some serious displays of tribal loyalty. People who live a long way away from us we can usually rub along with but that lot next door ...

One of the oddest manifestations of this I ever came across was between Wick and Thurso, two small towns (in fact the ONLY two towns) in the far north-east of Scotland. About 15 miles apart and 120 miles from the next place of any size. You'd think with that geography they would get along but as far as I can see the people of these two places have never had a good thing to say about each other. Weird eh?

Does any one else know of pairs of places like this?

Watch out!

One thing I notice when I'm tramping the streets here is the completely different nature of warning signs in Japan compared with England. Actually I think that this is a pretty strong 'cultural' difference - perhaps public signs are a good indicator of our values and attitudes. I photograph them a lot.

Prohibitions in England almost always quote the law at you. There's the text, pure and simple. "Take Your Litter Home. Offenders will be prosecuted under section 7:4 of the Civil Amenities Act 1997. Maximum penalty 100 pounds". That told you eh? Now you know what might happen if you chuck your empty sweet wrapper in the street. Watch out, a policeman will take you to court and we'll have your cash.

We like the law mainly because we like arguing back. "Oh! Says you! But does this biodegradable wrapping qualify as litter within the meaning of the Act then? Prove it! What's the case law in this area? Pass me my law books!"

Here on the other hand warnings always seem to be deeply personal. Take a look at the two examples here - a real person (OK - well, a cartoon anyway) is represented.

Just look at that silly little boy charging around - lucky we aren't like him! He's foolish but fortunately a big benevolent hand in the sky is reaching out to protect him from the consequences of his actions. A bit like a school teacher. Or maybe the government eh?


I love this little professor too. Tell us what we ought to think sensei. We need to be taught some simple rules and then we will know how to act. Actually I've seen him sneaking into a lot of places recently. Last year when they were re-organising local government in our area he popped up in leaflets from the Town Office with his "no-nonsense here are the facts" smile. He's obviously on our side."You may have wondered why we want to raise your taxes ... well, here's a big wedge of numbers for you ... you can trust us ... don't you agree with my reasoned conclusions?" Here people trust academics - after all it's not just some politician or public official with an axe to grind telling us all this stuff is it? He's got a mortar board on his head so it must be OK.

I will return to this topic ...

My grandfather's clocks

My grandfather started his working life at fourteen looking after horses on a farm in North Yorkshire. But within two years he'd begun working on the railway and that was his job for the remainder of his life - first as a porter but soon as a signalman.

However he had many 'sidelines' too. In the 1920's he made some extra cash by building radios - not just the receiver and amplifier circuits which consisted then of valves the size of light bulbs but also the cabinets too with fancy marquetry work in birdseye maple and cherry wood. The tuning 'dials' had all kinds of exotic names on - places like 'Athlone', 'Hilversum' and 'Droitwich'. Perhaps those radio dials were one of the things that got me started on geography. If you don't know where these places are consult a gazetteer on the internet!

But when I was a small child my grandfather's main sideline had become repairing clocks and watches. He had an arrangement with a local hardware and jewellry store and every week my grandmother would take back completed repairs and return with more watches and clocks in need of attention. Of course in those days everything was driven by clockwork and most watch 'movements' were Swiss.

The main repairs was cleaning and oiling - a watch not working because it needed maintenance. My grandfather woould carefully dismantle it, clean all the components in a special machine and re-assemble the movment. It took about 90 minutes - and cost around 35 pence (70 yen!) Sometimes a balance-staff might be broken becasue someone had dropped the watch. Occasionally an old pocket watch or clock might need new bushes, quite a skilled job that meant rebuilding the bearing of each drive wheel. The house was always full of clocks and watches.

I still have many of my grandfather's tools in a box back in England and perhaps one day they will get used again for all those engineering crafts he taught me. But in my case it is more likely to be for building model locomotives than for making watches go again I'm afraid.

Paris five leagues?

Yesterday one of the readers of my 'Mixi' Japanese version of this site (hello 'Lily'!) suggested that I ought to recommend our bit of leafy Chiba-ken to movie makers as a nice area of natural scenery in which to make historical dramas etc. A rural bit of Japan with no jarring modern inconsistencies to spoil the view.

Well, I guess if you were making an intense art film about the Tokugawa-jidai the occasional Narita-bound plane passing overhead might be a distraction. But she reminded me of a couple of silly things that made me laugh.

On TV in England long ago there was a serial dramatisation of 'Robin Hood' on children's television. Does anyone remember it? In the opening title sequence each week Robin fired an arrow from his long bow and it kind of 'whizzed' across the screen against a blurred background of countryside and - zwack! - it stuck into a tree trunk.

It wasn't long before the letters started arriving at the TV studio. Many viewers were sure that in that blurry part the whizzing arrow went past a telephone pole. The producers said not, but everyone was sure it did. People used to watch the programme each week to check, in fact it became the only thing most people could remember about an otherwise rather dull production.

In desparation those producers insisted that it was actually a particuarly straight pine tree and one day they even played the sequence in slow motion so that we could all check. But it was still blurred of course and convinced no-one; we were all sure that it was certainly a telephone pole. Someone said it might be in Leicestershire ...

+ + + + +

My other favourite silly sequence was in a 1940's black and white Hollywood production of the French novel "The Three Musketeers". It was the usual awful 'B' Movie stuff; they tried sticking to something like the story for a while but then came the bit that everyone on the production set REALLY understood at last - the chase! I'm not sure I can remember a chase in the novel but anyway, they had one in the movie. The three musketeers raced across the Californian desert waving their Colt 45's and gunning for the stagecoach with the French king in. Of course they wore cloaks and wide-brimmed hats like Zorro (well, we are talking costume drama here you know) but the characteristic 'Western' aspect wasn't so easily hidden. I'm sure that stage-coach had 'Wells Fargo' written on the side in that shot where it screeched past a large saguarro cactus and a sign that read 'Paris 5 leagues ==>'

Good grief!

End of a rainy day

It's been a rainy day down here in leafy Chiba-ken but around 4:30 p.m. it stopped and I took Kuu out for a short walk. He really hates the rain, you have to reach into the kennel with both hands and winkle him out like a cork out of a bottle. Hates getting his feet wet too, he'll do anything to walk around a puddle rather than step through it.

Well, by the time we'd got down the lane it was a beautiful evening but almost dark already. The water vapour still hung heavily around the cedars and a thick mist was rising from the cold tanbo too - it all looked like the setting for some historical drama. No one was around to give any 'scale', any clue as to the 'real' time or place. If Tokugawa Ieasu had come riding out of the forest with his hawk on his wrist I wouldn't have been suprised at all.

I remembered a time when I was in school back in England and we went on a camping expedition to the Lake District. We camped up Borrowdale, never a place to go long without rain, and sure enough we had a week of it. In the end the tent flooded out and we slept in a barn thanks to the kindness of a local farmer. Now I'd guess that barn is either a tea room or more likely a studio for some software consultancy business but in those days it had real cows.

Oh! And a real billy goat with horns too. It didn't like me much, or maybe it liked me too much. Who knows? - I'm no goat psychologist. On our first day it charged after me when I was there on my own and I spent about an hour holding the barn door shut as it butted away outside trying to get in. I guess it was just looking for hay but when I see two big horns approaching fast I assume the worst.

Anyway I mention that trip because one damp evening there was just exactly like on my walk tonight. Then the mists clung low over the Cumbrian fells and tonight they clung low over our famous local cedar forests but both are equally beautiful in that magical damp late light, just the last ten minutes before darkness. It reminded me of that hymn Eudoxia I used to sing at school as a child

Now the day is over
Night is drawing nigh,
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.

Ichigatsu tsuitachi

Happy New Year everyone!

Lovely! Today is turning into one of those "The Martians Have Landed!" days already! A gloomy afternoon outside, bitterly cold and rain (or worse!) threatening. Not a soul moves out there in the dark streets. It's as if our species has vanished in the night ...

The girls have certainly vanished on bikes to some distant shopping mall and now here Edera and I are, dosed up on mountains of mochi and nut roast and cheese, dozing in the warmth of our paraffin heater. Not a fly moving aywhere, not a cat's ear twitching. It's like Christmas Day afternoon on TV in England but without the added drama of the Queen's Speech to listen to after lunch. I hear that this year she made an impassioned plea for the legalisation of cannabis and demanded a British military invasion of the Ukraine. Something to do with lebensraum and national destiny I think. (OK - you spotted it - only joking! But you never know ...)


We saw the New Year in this morning with a visit to Shibayama. It's a country temple about eight miles from here and EVERYBODY goes. But I've taken to drumming our lot out of bed early so that we've been and gone before the big crowds arrive. We ring the bell of course, get covered in incense smoke for good luck and as usual I bought a little pottery animal to put on our altar. This year a doggy. In a few years I'll have the complete set of twelve.