Tic Tac Man

Interesting the things that people have done in previous existences, those big changes of direction in life that some are able to make with apparent ease.

One of my friends at work was a silver-haired and venerable much-respected senior sales manager but in an earlier existence had been a bookie's tic-tac man. Come to think of it, perhaps you don't have those in Japan. In England at racing 'meets' - we love horse racing - the 'bookmakers' who take bets have special assistants called tic-tac men.

They wear white gloves but there the resemblance to anything Japanese ends I guess. They stand on wooden crates and wave their arms at each other across the crowds at race courses. Basically there job is to 'lay off' bets by sending semaphore signals to other bookmakers. If one bookmaker gets a large bet on a horse then part of that bet is passed on to others and the risk is shared. Also the 'odds' you can get for the horse winning get less. It's pretty complex statistics and you have to be good at it.

And fast. That was my friend's problem in the end. One day he got caught out with someone putting thousands of pounds on a horse to win at the last moment and couldn't share the bet around fast enough. The horse won and so his business was bankrupt in just a minute. So he took up a new career in sales instead.

Ever been to the races? I must admit I love the excitement of a good race meeting, the smell of horses and beer and all those loud voices and even louder ties and suits. I wonder if they still have tic-tac men since mobile phones became so easy to use. I guess the need to send semaphore signals over the heads of a crowd is a thing of the past now

Serie Orange

I know us geographers aren't supposed to be interested in maps any more. Actually in our Geography Department at Durham you'd have to look hard to find a map anywhere, just to have one in the bookcase marks you down as a 'positivist' and there's not much worse than that. Now geographers study things like how author's childhood impressions of place can be 'theorised' (a good academic word) and that kind of stuff! Good grief!

Anyway nothing and nobody will stop me getting excited about finding a big pile of maps and so today was a Red Letter Day for me. I went into Chiba University Library hoping to find some of the French 1:100,000 Serie Vert maps to help me plan our September trip to Provence. There was the UK in the cabinet, Switzerland, even Holland and Belgium but no France. Then by chance I poked around in another map chest and - four drawers full of the entire 800 sheets of the much more detailed French 1:50,000 Serie Orange! It must have cost a fortune - I never saw a full set outside France before.

Even juicer was that this set is a bit old - mainly editions from the 1960's. So they still show long closed railway tracks and other interesting stuff. As you might imagine, that photocopier on the second floor was whizzing away half the afternoon.

I wonder how they ended up at Chiba. Maybe a forgotten 'twinning' with a French university or perhaps one of the librarians there just likes holidays in France. In any case, I can happily plan away now.

One Foot in the Grave

Most readers - certainly all the UK contingent - may be very familiar with the comedy 'sitcom' of this name featuring Richard Wilson and Annette Crosbie as Victor and Margaret Meldrew. It features an ageing retired guy who seems to spend his entire life being frustrated by trivia. If you want a flavor look here.

He's forever getting into situations where he says "I don't bl**dy believe it!" He's a parable for all of us and the way we utterly lack any effective power over the ways in which we bump into other people and institutions in our lives. Actually he's a bit of a Don Quixote character, forever hopelessly tilting at windmills, he can't let anything drop.

If you've never seen it, try and find a DVD, you'd probably love it.

Sometimes these days I'm very aware that I'm reacting to something exactly like Victor Meldrew does. I've become that bad - or potentially that bad - myself. Sometimes I even say "I don't bl**dy believe it!" too!

Here's a real 'Meldrew' situation for you. A couple of days ago I had some music from a firm in England (of course!) called Musicroom.com. They charged me GBP 7.99 for mailing it 'air mail' to Japan. It took ten days to arrive not the usual five, and this was because it was actually sent 'contract mail via air', something quite different to and much cheaper than airmail. Airmail rate would have been GBP 3.53 but I doubt it cost them more than GBP 2.00 to send via contract mail. So they made an extra six quid out of me which was more than the actual price of the music.

Why? Why not just charge people for postage? Why the 'rip off''? Its a British disease ...

Some people would just put it down to experience and never use that particular bunch of sharks again but that's not the Meldrew way, nor mine. Like him I tend to think that if you let people get away with that kind of sleight of hand it's not a good thing.

So I've asked for a refund of the difference. Watch this space - or not, as the case may be. And don't hold your breath.

Provence plans

At the moment we are just limbering up to start planning a trip to France - or more exactly a trip back to the UK which will include a rip across to France. First a few days in Paris, and then some time down in Provence where we hope to meet up with friends. While we are in the south we'll stop in a gite - a hopefully old-fashioned cottage in a bit of pretty French countryside with not too many 'boy-racers' zooming past the door.

Of course for me half the fun of trips like this is to travel with military precision. I love to plan in detail - weeks before everything will get logged into a 'spreadsheet' and timings will get re-checked. That's just how I am. One of life's planners.

I'm looking forward to this trip; it's ages since I had time to spare in the French countryside. Once I even imagined I'd retire down there, maybe buy a little house in Drome or the Ardeche and study the countryside deeply. But it turned out to be Japan instead, who could have imagined that? And not the countryside but the city.

In Britain you used to be able to take your kids out of school for a couple of weeks to make family trips (unimaginable in Japan eh?) and so most of my memories of French gite holidays are from May or June. Once we spent Christmas in Burgundy - that was an interesting trip.

This time - I guess the end of wine making. Vines will be getting trimmed back and the place tidied up at the end of the summer. But there should still be some sunshine around. Looking forward to it!

Balloon Debate

Speeding by here tonight as Edera wants me to spend some time with our High School students later. You might remember that a couple of weeks ago I was explaining the rules of debating to them. Well, tonight is a follow-up session ...

This time we're going to have a 'Balloon Debate'. Have you ever taken part in one? The idea is very simple - we all have to pretend that we are some well known person, and we are all up high in the sky in a hot air balloon together.

Unfortunately the balloon is sinking fast, and unless someone jumps overboard soon it will crash and we will all be killed. So, everyone has to make a short speech to explain why they shouldn't be the unfortunate person who makes a sacrifice by jumping out to save the others. At the end we all vote on who should be saved.

I'm very curious to see who the students have chosen to be. Me, I'm appearing tonight as Santa Claus and I think Edera-chan might be Mother Theresa. I think I'm a sure case to win eh? I mean, if I jumped nobody would get any presents at Christmas, there would be a major slump in the toy market with thousands unemployed and reindeer powered flight would be a thing of the past.

Vote Santa and see what I bring you next Christmas!

Country Cameo

One of the first books I bought about this country - when I was a student back in the 1960's - was Trewartha's "Regional Geography of Japan". It's a laughably outdated text now, no self-respecting university library would be seen dead with that kind of regional study on the shelves any more. Regional geography went out of fashion ages ago. But it's really interesting to read - especially as it describes a long vanished version of Japanese life

One picture from it always appealed to me - it's of a village group doing some minor repairs to a road and cutting the verges. It was probably taken in the 1920's and yet around here you could come across their grandchildren doing similar things and dressed in similar ways today. Some things change a lot and others hardly at all.

Here's a picture I took last week at Boso no Mura of some of the maintenance staff weeding part of the grounds. In the background is one of the buildings of the "Kasuza Farmhouse". Timeless Japan eh? You could spot people in their working clothes doing this stuff along any of the lanes between here and Togane this afternoon. Weed season has arrived in a big way and country people are busy keeping the fields under control.

Putting the World to Rights

Interesting how we get good days and bad days. Sometimes I beaver away happily at my studies or some interesting diversion and the whole world seems beautiful. And then that 'real world' always intrudes somewhere eh? Something reaches up out of the pit and through the cracks in the floorboards and gets you by the ankle at last.

One of my regular 'bete noirs' guaranteed to raise my blood pressure is, as many of you know, the BBC. Let me not mince my words here. Personally I think that the Beeb at the moment stinks; that it is one of the most biased, self-serving and self-righteous news reporting organisations on the planet. At what is worse they even believe their own propaganda. Of course this could change and anyway, it's just my opinion, but there you have it. I've said it. I don't like them much.

On the Beeb website there's a 'Have Your Say' section and today they were inviting comments on where you think Britain is headed and what the problems are. How could I ever resist having my two-pennyworth on that one? So I sat down for ten minutes and wrote a couple of paragraphs saying what I thought. I argued that many of our problems in Britain today resulted from a growing lack of respect for others and their opinions and lack of attention to detail.

Pressed 'enter' to submit that and ... not accepted! More than 500 characters. So why not mention that limit in the first place before I wrote it? Anyway I carefully edited it down to 494 characters and re-submitted and ... not accepted! It seems their software was on the blink. Having not liked me once it wasn't ever going to like me.

So I started again and wrote them another contribution pointing out that their site was a pretty good example of Britain's problems in a nutshell. No respect for the v iews they had themselves canvassed - "if you can't reduce it to a "sound bite" we don't want to hear it" - and then their software doesn't work because some lazy programmer never tested it properly.

Don't hold your breath to read it though - the other thing we aren't good at in Britain is taking criticism. Oh! And taking anything seriously too. I see this 'Have Your Say' column has already been dropped in favour of one asking "What did you wear to Ladies Day at Royal Ascot". Good grief!

Boso no mura

Over to Boso no Mura today. If you've never been it is the Chiba Prefecture Building Museum and it is a really fine one too. It's located just north of Narita. There is a 'main street' of Edo and Meiji period houses and also several more rural buildings including three typical farmhouses from the old kuni (provinces) that eventually made up the Prefecture when it was formed in the 1870's - Shimousa, Kazusa and Awa.

Many of these old houses still survive around the area that we live in but of course now often modernised and sometimes rather 'gentrified' too. And thatched roofs are a thing of the past in the 'real world' - the risk of fire is just too great here.

In Britain we often really do put old buildings in museums - historic oak frame, stone and brick buildings are painstakingly moved from locations where they are at risk brick by brick. But here buildings lke this are created from scratch to original designs so in effect they are 'new buildings' constructed in traditional ways.

That's a bit curious eh? If you want to see what buildings used to look like take a look at a new one! And very 'Japanese' too somehow.

Well, I took loads of building pictures for my thesis - about 180 - but inevitably we took to some fooling around too. Here I am in traditional Kazusa hat and raincoat trying to do a passible imitation of something you might have frightened little children with if they wouldn't go to sleep. I can look pretty barbarian-like don't you think?

Haircut Required

As you can see, I need a haircut. A philosopher's 'mop' of silver and distinguished-looking locks is all very well for fooling around on breezy beaches but in sweaty Chiba today I thought that I would melt. The hot and unbelievably humid summer is certainly here now, time for leisurely hours in air-conditioned libraries eh?

Tomorrow on the way into Narita I'll drop into the Maruhei, a supermarket chain famed for it's car park attendants specially trained to leap fearlessly out onto busy main roads with a fusilade of bows to flag traffic in and out of their shop car park. Only in Japan ...

In Maruhei they have a '1000 yen' clip joint. You put your 1000 yen note in the machine, get a icket and then hand it to the next available barber. I always just say 'mijikai' ('short') and point to my parting on the right and hope they get the message. As a rule they don't try to strike up conversations with me.

A fiver for a haircut 'aint bad. In Britain now I usually pay around seven pounds. When I first came here I used to pay 3200 yen to a barber in the village (about £16) with a groan. He'd never heard of 'market forces' - seems he just took the amount he needed to live every week and divided it by the number of customers. But then I realised that if you shopped around in not-so-leafy places you could get a cut for a third of the price.

At one time I used to use a 1000 yen joint on the Keisei Narashino station platform. They guaranteed to get you cut and back on the platform in time for the next train (ten minutes!) and they did too. But now this supermarket barber just suits me fine.

So time for my early summer 'shearing' tomorrow - and the shorter the better.

Save the Whale?

I see that 'whales' are spread all over the BBC Website tonight. Seems that those Japanese went and won a vote on something that may happen sometime somewhere in the distant future if lots more people vote for it too. But 'conservation agencies' (by which I think they mean 'Greenpeace') are 'dismayed'. Weeping protestors just can't believe it. Yep, there's that "Save the Whale" weeping protestor photo again.

The longer I live in Japan the more the whole International Whaling Commission thing puzzles me. What the heck is going on? I just don't ever pick up on it being an issue here. I never saw - as far as I know - a piece of whale meat in a supermarket in my life. Nor have I ever seen anything on TV here about whaling - though I don't watch so much.

And believe me, I detest Greenpeace as much as the next man, a bigger bunch of half-truth peddlers would be hard to find.

On the other hand if you asked any child in the UK what they know about Japan I'm sure that the first thing 90% of them would say is that Japanese people kill whales. It's not a formula for a good press - something to inspire popularity, is it? Murdering those cute musical mammals of the deep.

Pro-whalers here (at least as reported on the BBC) argue that whaling has become 'sustainable' (how I dislike that word!) and anyway it's "just the same as killing pigs or cows" (which is surely true) and so, according to the ancient principle that 'two 'wrongs' do seem to make a 'right' after all' Westerners are a two-faced bunch of hypocrites to protest so loudly against it. Which may be true too.

Is it even about 'economics'? I certainly detect a more subtle "Who are you to tell us what to do and thrust your values down out throats?" and also vaguely neo-colonialist agenda in progress here. On the other hand, why get execrated for something 99% of Japanese don't really care much about? And how would you get anyone to listen to you here even if you did think it was a bad idea? Well, we all have that problem wherever we live...

Routines

It's been pretty quiet down here in leafy Chiba-ken today - well, apart from the incessant drumming of rain. Edera had a trip up to Tokyo to sit her French exams and I was left 'holding the fort'. There have been occasional interruptions from bored or hungry puss-cats but that's all. Lots of reading.

I've lived on my own but only when I was working and had a busy diary. I don't know that I'd be very good at putting routine into my life if I was left completely to my own devices. People here in Japan are very good at being busy with small, regular and probably often deeply unnesscessary routines, but I'm bad at it.

In my study I've come back to noticing routines a lot. I've prefered to use the word 'rhythm' because most routines are actually daily rhythms. About 98% of our lives are rhythms, if we didn't have that regularity most of us wouldn't cope with time passing.

When my grandfather worked as a signalman sometimes he 'stood in' for the regular signalman at Richmond in Yorkshire when he was sick or on holiday. Richmond was a small country terminus with about four trains a day, the other twelve hours on the shift you just 'waited' there on your own. That guy had such a rigorous routine to cope with all those hours of nothing - he must have been in the army before he did that job. For example all the sixty-odd levers in the building were polished so highly you could only touch them with a special oiled cloth. The windows were spotless, cleaned every day. It was like a palace; he was so proud of it.

What we don't usually notice about rhythms is that they change ever so gradually, in fact no two days are ever the same. MacBeth says "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time ". But it doesn't. It can seem like that for a long time and then one day everything is very different. The trains have long vanished and where that building with its polished levers and clean windows that filled in so much of someone's life 'time' stood is a woodland now.

Cloud-watching Society

It might be hard to prove this but I'm sure that clouds in Japan are often quite different to England. Some kinds - for example the cumulostratus just before or after rain in Spring - are very similar. But other common cloud types - the cirrus we associate with 'mackerel sky' for example - can be very different.

I suppose if you wanted to prove this definitely one way or the other you'd have to set up a random sample and take photos. Oh! But let's not go there today eh? Too much 'sampling' going on in my studies as it is.

When I was at University in 1968 - my last year there - I had a beautiful open view west from my room in the old castle we lived in. I actually got this room by arguing that it was useful for my studies. In those days I had to study meteorology (and I can still spell it!) as a part of my course. But really I just wanted to watch the sky for the fun of it and I did, a lot. Sitting in an old chair looking west in the evening you'd often get a beautiful 'mackerel sky'. Was anyone watching but me? Sad to think of skies like that not being noticed.

I also always wanted to do experiments with weird friends - impossible then but the kind that would be easy now with mobile phones. Get some old theodilites or even just protractors and measure the angles to the 'big bump in the third cloud from the left' from two places a few kilometres apart at the same time. Then we could say "It's 5.8 kilometres away and 1780 metres above the ground". That's knowledge. Not sure what you could do with it but fun to know. Also you could measure how fast those clouds moved.

I tell you what - let's all form 'The Cloud-watching Society'. To be a member all you have to do is pay me a lot of money. No, seriously, you just have to promise to look out of the window for at least ten minutes every day and admire the clouds.

Think you could do that? OK then.

ps. the 'mackerel sky' in the picture is from Wikipedia and was photographed in Edmonton which is where my friend Rev. Mugo is at the moment

Rubbish Collection

One of my routine jobs, Wednesdays and Saturdays, is to take the rubbish (Sorry! - 'garbage') to the local animal-proof 'pick up' point a bit further along the lane. I struggle up there rain or shine usually with two bags of the stuff, although lately it's been a bit less, sometimes just one.

Garbage collection is a twice weekly business here because of the hot sticky summer weather. It's a totally different process to England. In Japan you have to buy the bags form the supermarket. They are smaller than our British black bin bags and cost around 40p each, so you pay for garbage collection as you throw it away. People are amazingly skilled at filling bags, they could pack an entire baseball team into one around here. Also you have to carry it to one point, the lorry doesn't come to you.

And not only does it have to be in a proper paid-for sack but there are four different kinds of plastic sack in use depending on what you want to want to get rid of. This twice weekly collection is just 'burnables' in a red bag but there is a separate monthy collection from the 'recycling' point too. Getting rid of stuff can be quite a business here. And if you started slipping PET bottles into the 'burnable' bag you would soon be pounced on.

In Britain until recently we only had a once a week collection. You dumped the all the rubbish outside the gate in the morning and hoped that no hungry seagulls or cats would rip the large (free) black bags open before the bin lorry showed up. But in these enlightened times I've discovered that in Lancashire we now have three different coloured "wheelie-bins" and a blue box. The big grey bin is for general stuff and emptied once a fortnight. The green 'garden and cardboard' and black 'paper' bins get emptied every other week and the blue box - hmm... not sure what that is for but I think cans.

Of course back in England having cottoned on to recycling about thirty years after the rest of the world we like to talk big as if we invented the whole idea. That's the kind of people we are I'm afraid.

Vertigo

My daughter Julia gave me a Swiss railway calendar for Christmas and the 'June' page has got a picture of a small train going across a very high viaduct. Behind is the Matterhorn - it's a nice photograph. Could only be Switzerland.

But today I took a closer look at this railway bridge photo and noticed those fearsomely high ladders used by maintenance engineers for the first time. Good grief! Once I used to have a good 'head for heights' and I even went rock climbing but now ... phew! It's the very stuff of nightmares .

Actually I do sometimes have a recurring nightmare about the Cliffs of Moher shown in this picture. They are in the Burren area of County Clare in Ireland and I visited the district some years ago; it's an amazing place and very beautiful. The cliffs are more than 200 metres (700') high, and the paths go so close to the edge and of course there are no fences or railings.

In my dream it's very foggy evening and I'm close to the edge - there's lots of cloud below but suddenly it clears and .... oh! good grief! I'm only centimetres from the awful abyss and I never realised. I'm frozen with vertigo, one wrong move and I'll fall forever.

Well, not forever of course, that's the thing eh? Sooner or later I'll hit the ocean with a fearsome splash. And that will be the end of me.

I remember a time too in Yosemite National Park standing with all the tourists rubbernecking up at the huge vertical cliff of Half-Dome across the valley and then ... eek! ... I saw what they were all looking at. How did those climbers ever get that high up there? They were mere specks on a vertical wall of rock.

So far I've not come across anywhere in Japan where I've experienced this same sense of vertigo. There must be lots of big cliffs somewhere, but I've not stood on the edge of any yet.

Lewisian Gneiss

This has to qualify as one of the most obscure of my blogs so far, but I wonder if you have ever looked down a polarising microscope at a thin slice of rock like this. If you ever get the chance you might see something as beautiful as in the picture.

I first got to use a polarising microscope when I was sixteen and studying geology for 'A' level. I haven't forgotten the thrill of it - the amazingly pure and intense colours of the minerals. People sometimes think that geology must be a dull subject but actually it's full of magical things to see.

Lewisian gneisses are the oldest rocks in Britain and they are exactly the same rocks as you will find in Labarador and north-east Canada because back then these two places were joined! 'Lewisian' comes from the 'Isle of Lewis' off the north west coast of Scotland although you find these rocks on the far north of the Scottish mainland too. 'Gneiss' - well, that's the kind of rock. Ancient, twisted and formed by unimaginable heat and pressure deep inside the earth, on the surface gneisses form beautiful lumpy hills quite unlike others. You'll know when you see them.

Often when you see pebbles of gneiss in a stream they are subtle greens from the olivine minerals they contain. Pick one of those pebbles up and you can sense the incredible age somehow - these rocks are more than half the age of out planet.

Well I only mention it - but if you get a chance to go up to Ross and Cromarty or Sutherland or over to Lewis - go there! There are few places more beautiful than those made of Lewisian gneiss.

Croaking

In English we say that people who have sore throats 'croak' and we also use the verb as a euphenism for dying which is a bit strange. "Oh! Did you know he 'croaked' recently?" is not a comment on someone's poor singing talents.

But until I came to Japan I'd never really heard frogs croaking much. In northern England we are a bit short on amphibians. We do have a few frogs and toads around but not a lot. They are kind of middle sized but undistinguished too.

I've not got the Japanese frogs and toads clear in my head yet. There are some pretty big toads around here for sure - kind of cat-sized and lazy looking types. But most of the frogs down in leafy Chiba-ken are very small, cute and amazingly noisy. Also intrepid climbers with their suction feet, it's not unusual in summer to find them on our second floor balconies.

At night there's about a million of these little guys meet up down on the tanbo (rice paddy) behind our house. It sounds like there's a hundred million there but that's just because each one croaks so loudly. If I make a trip to the loo in the 'small hours' it's like the "Hallelujah Chorus" in progress over there.

But here's the interesting thing, and I must find out more about it. They are very prone to all stopping at the same moment. It's as if someone said something rude and the rest thought "Uh - huh!". Sometimes I lie awake wondering what they are doing out there and why they do all shut up in unison.

Sometimes I'm even aware of being the cause of this myself. When I finish taking a bath in the ofuro late at night for example and switch off the light it usually goes from mega-babble to total silence in less than a second. And then after a little while someone somewhere will croak, like in that Budweiser TV advert, "Hey guys! Who switched that light off ...?"

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Regular readers might like to know that this is my 300th 'Blog'! I'm thinking of publishing a (free) CD of "Little House in the Paddy - the first year" when I reach 365. If you would like a copy drop me an email +Iain

The Debate

Interesting! Some of our High School students fancy trying some 'debating' and I might get called into their class tonight to give them some basic 'coaching'. As far as I know nobody here debates at all, not in school and not later in life either, so this could be an inteesting cultural experience for us. A 'debate' would be about as un-Japanese as you can get eh? Not enough 'sumimasens' and bowing and being polite at all.

At school and university and also later in life too I used to take part in formal debates. It used to be a very familiar form for us. First a speech to propose the motion, then one against. Then someone would second the motion and finally a second speaker against the motion would get up. Questions would follow and finally the two main speakers would summarise the debate before a vote was taken.

Generally the topics would be fun "This House believes that we should have two birthdays every year". But sometimes they were very serious - there was a famous Oxford University debate around pacifism I remember. "This House would not fight for Queen and Country".

Of couse there were always a few around debating societies at university who were aiming for political office - in my time usually rich young men with loud voices who were studying law. But for the rest of us it was a chance to have a go at the 'cut and thrust' of argument without getting mad and it certainly gave me some confidence to speak in groups.

These days I feel that real debates have become few and far between, thanks mainly to politicians who seem to give everything a bad name. In a real debate you have to be prepared to be persuaded otherwise - to change you mind in the light of argument. Today 'argument' often means not much more than abuse and nobody changes their minds about anything any more, it's considered a sign of weakness. Debate has become a "dialogue of the deaf". That's a pity - the world has certainly gone backwards in some dimensions.

Anyway - let's see what the High School bunch can make of it!

Kitchen tables

I've had my nose to the unyielding grindstone of some housing statistics today. One of the statistical 'tables' I was loading into a spreadsheet included quite a lot of information about kitchen layouts and I realise it's not something I've thought much about yet.

Important though eh? Where would we be without kitchens? I'd have to camp outside the ramen shop or something. Edera says I get very bad tempered if my meals are irregular but I find that hard to imagine. How about you?

There's more to 'kitchens' and the wider topic of 'change' than meets the eye. If you you go back to the days of old Shimousa farmhouses the kitchens and living areas were far apart. Kitchens usually had earth floors for safety while living areas were inflammable tatami mats. People would eat sitting on the tatami a long way from where the food was prepared.

Now about half the kitchens in leafy Chiba-ken are either DK or LDK format - that is, combined with a dining area or living room and dining area. That's a much bigger change than it seems because you can't sit on the floor in a DK or LDK - the combination of rooms implies wooden floors which means a table and chairs and other, western kinds of furnishing. And you can be sure that internationalisation of diet and produce will soon follow that.

These days there are many former carpentry firms here that make their business the design and fitting of kitchens essentially to western concepts. Around here most of my friends seem to have the same as us - the typical old 'beaten up' two ring gas burner for frying and boiling and no oven (except perhaps a microwave). That's Japanese-style eh? But if I look in showrooms in Chiba I see fitted kitchens that I'd see in London, and the prices are similar too. Good grief!

That's one of the interesting things about 'change' - an apparently modest change actually brings about over time a huge difference in the way people live. And no-one ever intended that to be the outcome at the time.

Pails of Water

We were doing the 'causative' in Japanese classs today. Tatsu - Tataseru ... hmm, how did it go? 'The teacher caused the bad boys to hold pails of water'. (Someone supply the Japanese please!) In picture number one the bad boys are fighting in class and in picture number two they are standing in the corridor outside holding pails of water.

Us gaijin students were all a bit puzzled by this. Were these bad boys going to do extra floor mopping duties or what? It seemed in line with what we already know about Japanese pre-occupations with cleanliness. But then our sensei explained that this was once a popular punishment in schools here - to have kids standing around with heavy pails of water in each hand. For a long long time; until they fell over.

We were impressed. One of my friends there, who teaches in a local university, said he planned to re-introduce this subtle torture again from Monday! In Western Schools our obsession used to be beating and flogging kids to produce results but a bit of arm stretching could be an interesting alternative. Like a vertical form of 'the rack'.

Up in the north east of England staking students out on frozen soccer pitches and using jars of Gale's honey to attract armies of savage worker ants up their nostrils was always a popular alternative in my day. We have a hard streak in us up there - it comes from seeing off all those Scottish raiders over the centuries. And our science teacher used to give out a hundred lines just for blowing your nose. But of course it was never "I must not blow my nose", it would be "In future, if I am wise, I wll respect the wishes of my science master and not blow my nose in the classroom." "Watch out everyone! Old Chalky is coming!"

Kids these days have it very easy eh? All they ever get is a good talking to and not even one of those very often. They surely don't have to dodge the kind of psychopaths that used to wield absolute authority when I was a kid.

Moving around - again

I've written about this before but it's one of the most subtle yet strongest behaviour differences that I notice between Japan and England and I'm really fascinated by it. Somehow we move around quite differently and I can't see why it happens.

A while back I wrote about a woman who walked into the rear of my stationary car in a car park. It wasn't that she wasn't looking, somehow her 'awareness' wasn't 'switched on'. I can't describe it any other way.

It's on my mind now because yesterday evening on the way back from Chiba something similar happened. I'd got off the five o'clock train with the usual pack of Junior High kids and I was walking up the road when two girls of fifteen or sixteen, one wheeling a bike, came out of the a gate across the road and started to cross over in my general direction.

How to explain? We were walking in almost exactly the same direction, but on converging paths, light two flights headed for the same airport. In another twenty metres we'd arrive at the same point at the same time. I could kind of sense this wasn't going to work properly from the moment they showed up.

They could have speeded up slightly and joined the path I was on in front of me, or they could have slowed slightly and joined behind. That's what would have happened in England. But somehow these girls didn't see me at all, I mean just didn't even register I was there. It was as if I'd become the invisible man. They walked to exactly the same place I was. I ended up about a foot behind them and if I hadn't been in step we'd have all tripped over each other. In the end, as I was 'boxed in' by them in front and the bike to the side, I had to 'slow down' and then 'overtake'.

What's going on here? Edera thinks this kind of thing happens because Japan is such a 'safe society' and people can usually wander round in a daydream without any consequences. It could be partly that but I'm not so sure - I think there's something more subtle about either people's social relations with each other (so enjoying each other's company they didn't see a third person) or even different perceptions of both space and 'personal space' involved. It would make a heck of an interesting research project though.

Streams

This seems to be 'Nostalgia Week' for me. Hey! Don't say that too loud, if you do someone will designate one for sure. "National Nostalgia Week". It would be popular in England. Who approves that kind of stuff? The United Nations? With them it would have to be 'The Year of Nostalgia' at least and someone important would need to make a keynote address ... good grief!

No! That's not what I wanted to mention at all! Yesterday's blog got me around to thinking as I lay awake about all the fun I had as a kid playing in running water - rivers, streams, becks, burns, sykes and all those other northern words we use to it.

Our rivers in the north of England are generally user friendly. Clean, apart from the occasional dead sheep, with lots of oxygen and small fish in the clear water. No risk here of hydro-electric dams opening upstream, no lurking alligators in the undergrowth. Lovely. Just sit on the bank and make a daisy chain. I spent years paddling in these places, building dams of stones, playing 'ducks and drakes', trying to sink floating sticks with well aimed pebbles and generally seeing how loudly I could get the dog to bark.

I've realised now that I made some kind of a subconsious promise to myself back then and last night the young child was reminding me of it. When I got to be a big boy and didn't have to go to bed at 7:30 even in summer I'd stay out there and play forever, for every last minute of the sun filled evening.

Do you think I qualify as a big boy yet? Maybe it's time soon. I don't want to splash in the wider rivers so much - like the West Allen pictured here. I'm thinking more of the smaller becks up on the moors where you can watch 'dippers' and the heather turns purple. That wonderful chuckling sound of water bubbling under peat banks and welling up out of springs in the limestone. Heaven.

Footprints in the snow

Somebody mentioned 'ghosts' to me recently and later an image came into my head of something I'd forgotten. Interesting how pictures in the mind sleep away there like seeds to emerge in thoughts or dreams and we suddenly find we meet up with old friends again.

This was in February 1960, a very cold and wintery month in England and my grandmother died. Rather young - 60 - and suddenly. On, I think, the23rd. I always remember the date of her funeral because it was the 29th and even as a teenager it struck me how unusual that was. To have your funeral on Leap Year Day.

We were living in the south of England then, in Sussex, and were called back to Barnard Castle by telegram. We came on the overnight train. A friend collected us in his car at Darlington station and took us that last fifteen miles to my grandad's house.

It was a gloomy and snowy morning and I was asked at some stage to take Shiela the dog out for a walk - a job my grandmother usually had done. The two of us headed off wrapped up against the cold down the footpath into Kellets' Wood. It was a lonely and beautiful place then as now. Gloomy on that overcast winter day and yet with a soft white carpet of snow.

At some point along the path it dawned on me that the footprints we were following were my grandmother's. She'd been the last person there before me - walked the dog that way just thirty six hours ago on the evening before she'd died. A neat line of her boot emprints with the dog's paw marks alongside. Shiela was sniffing along that spoor with me and wagging her tail.

It was an intense moment and I don't think I ever felt so near and yet so far from anyone. And perhaps that was one moment when an intuitive sense of 'the transient' really touched me. I guess we really learn from these moments eh? Learn with our whole bodies and not just our heads.

Planned by a Committee

I wonder if there is a similar phrase in Japanese? Maybe not - in Japan I'd guess that almost everything is designed by a committee of one kind or another. Somewhere I was reading a book or article on the way a particular engineering company in Tokyo worked a while back and I was just astonished at the sheer amount of paperwork and form-filling required by 'procedures'. Everyone's hanko ('official seal') seemed to be needed on everything, amazing that anything ever happened. We find it hard enough in England to 'corner' the boss for long enough to sign our expenses.

In Britain we seem to dislike anything designed by committees. In our culture committees repesent 'talking shops' and the worst kind of compromises. We fondly imagine that if we give an individual responsibility for something then he'll make a good job of it but a committee will just end up making silly decisions.

We also love jokes about this topic. I remember hearing a 'sketch' on TV once about the new 'Eurofighter' aircraft project. The French designed the fuselage, the Germans the left wing and tailplane, the Dutch the right wing and undercarraige and the British the engines. The Spanish were responsible for designing the trunk and painting it white! (in other words it would be a useless 'white elephant' before it was ever finished)

It's something on my mind today because the choir is shifting towards its tenth anniversary and we need to start planning a programme. No one has volunteered of course, that would be FAR too pushy in Japan eh? Eventually after an avalanche of humming and hawing and 'sumimasens' we'll get a committee and they will make a good job of it.

But tonight I was working with the Japanese 2003 Housing Survey and I have to say it - as a piece of statistical work - is truly awful. It is carried out by the Prime Minister's Office statistical unit and it's a bit of numerical tat of the worst kind. It's obviously planned by a committee of senior bureaucrats with no knowledge of statistics at all - fistfuls of questions they want to ask and about as much idea of data model design as my cat, maybe even less. I doubt there was a specialist there amongst them. If there was, he or she had a soft voice.

So, sometimes committees work and sometimes they don't and how important or otherwise members are doesn't seem to matter at all eh? The relly important thing is to see that they include at least somebody that knows what they are doing.

Edge of Reality?

I often get the feeling these days that the world can turn a tad too surreal without warning. Know what I mean? Kind of half a blink and it's right there creeping up behind you ...

Like today for example. At one point I felt that I was already wandering around in the first chapter of a science fiction novel. Maybe as we turn over the next page a strange cigar-shaped object will appear in the sky. And what will our hero - me - do then?

Pay attention! No, even more attention! ... it happened like this. I was wandering in the darkest part of Mihama-ku - that big park alongside the sea. Of course until this bit of Tokyo Bay was filled in during the 1970's this was all a couple of miles out to sea. It's a very big park now and during the week it's usually completely empty except for a few guys with fishing rods perched on the breakwater. Why? Surely there are no fish still alive in there. Uh-huh! Got it - they are 'the watchers' eh? Read on!

This bit of the park at the east end is pretty wild. Maybe there are bears here at night. But in the day time there are certainly cats. Many wild feral cats that don't trust anyone and that is why they are still alive. And no golfers. Absolutely no golfers. They have had the warning. Golfers are a verboeten species here it seems.

As this is a Japanese park there are also many loudspeakers of course. If there were to be a big earthquake thousands of people would head for this area so the park has loudspeakers. When there's no earthquake they play a tape of a nice lady with a very soft voice all day long. As a piano plays in the background she gives advice. "Please be considerate to others; park only in designated places within the white lines. If you have a keitai (mobile phone) why not switch it to 'manner mode' now? Ball games must only be played in playgrounds ... help to make this a safe and happy place ..."

The cats lie in the sun like only feral cats can. Languid, cruel; a feline mafioso. They are the only other living beings around here apart from me and they are definitely not part of any parking within the white lines society. That's just an illusion here. Heh!heh! You left all that behind back at the big park gates. You heard of 'Jurassic Park but ... Hey! Maybe these cats are 'the watchers' too ... Good grief! I'd better be careful....Fore!

Chiba Choir Festival

Phew! Just a short one tonight. I'm just back from Chiba where we were taking part in a choir festival this afternoon.

Did I say this afternoon? Nothng is so simple in Japan eh? Of course we'd want to get an extra rehearsal in first so we clacked in for a warm up at 1:30 pm. Then on the (small) bus for the big city lights. It's a thousand seater auditorium in Chiba so no time for nerves and you have to 'sing up' too.

You'll laugh but the first time we went to this festival I thought it was a competition. The place was so big I couldn't even see where the judges sat. The fact that it was just for fun hadn't got mentioned in Japanese that I could understand.

Well, today we were relaxed and I enjoyed hearing the other choirs too - all the 'talent' from around our leafy Prefecture. We sang a piece by Palestrina and also 'Sweet Days' - a modern setting of George Herbert's poem by Kentaro Sato. i'm told it's the first time that it's been sunbg around here, maybe even in all Kanto

We are a funny looking crowd eh? Would you let us on the bus if you were the driver??

The "Wonder Book of Ships"

Something that has been very seldom preserved over the years are large ocean going passenger ships. There are a some quite large vessels of a few thousand tons still around as floating museums - the JNR train ferry 'Mashu Maru' at Aomori for example or 'HMS Belfast' in the River Thames. But they are not really BIG ships. Like the woolly mammoths, those have all become extinct. Well, except for that notable exception - the 'Queen Mary' which still survives at Long Beach in California.

I still have a copy of the "Wonder Book of Ships" that I used to love to read as a child. It pictured all those vast ocean liners that used to tie the world together before air travel became cheap and safe, and I wanted to be a captain! Even in the early 1960's travel around the world still meant ocean voyages and long train journeys most of the time.

Those big ocean liners were a reflection of the societies of their time. Perhaps four or five 'classes' on board every ship. We hear of the luxury enjoyed by 'First Class' clientele at the captain's table but in truth even on the biggest and most famous vessels the poorest passengers had a rough ride.

After their last voyages liners generally went straight to the scrappers yard to be cut up. Ships like that were really 'events' rather than 'objects' only kept afloat and working by the skills and labour of thousands of workmen and crew members. Ships have to have a purpose, they are not objects to 'preserve'. You can't keep tens of thousands of tons of steel afloat and safe other than by spending a lot of money.

So now all we have left to remind us of most of these very biggest of machines is photographs and images and models. That's strange eh?

Histories of ordinary things

I often wonder about writing histories of 'ordinary things'.

I suppose that with Chiba, which is a pretty ordinary place, I'm already involved with this. But I'm thinking more about the millions of items of 'knowledge' that get lost all the time.

Most of you know that I'm more than a bit of a 'railway buff' and areas like railway history, vehicles and military equipment and the like are usually well recorded for later generations to read about (although there are many surprising exceptions). But how about, for example, water supply? Or electricity or telephones? Do you know when these services were connected up in your area? How were they supplied, who paid for the work? What was it like to use a phone where you live in 1930 or 1950? International calls took hours to set up back then and cost a fortune.

Or something like the humble stapling machine. There must have been thousands of designs, stapling machines cover the whole globe. But already most of this history will have vanished over the 'edge of the cliff' in long discarded office equipment catalogues. You can never get it back.

This came to my mind tonight because someone mentioned minestrone soup. I can remember that product coming to a local grocery shop in our area of Middlesbrough about 1954. It was one of the Knorr packet soups - and we talked about it with excitement. A new exotic taste from far away Italy! But fancy trying to trace the history of minestrone soup in the UK now. Maybe you could do it in part through newspaper adverts and recipe books but I'm not so sure.

So before you have that next 'clean out' at home or in the office just remember - you could be throwing out some history there!

A corner of their yard.

I was out in Mihama Port area today - pretty well like any modern port area you can find anywhere in the world. Endless untidy roads of timber importers, a big engineering works and all kinds of motor agencies, depots, warehouses and cold stores. It was hot too; I'm tired.

In the whole of Mihama-ku so far I've only found two religious sites, a small Christian church in a house and a kind of 'outpost' of Inage Shrine across Highway 14 from their main building. It must have been on the foreshore when the sea was there around 40 years ago, now it's in an estate agent's car park. Edera says there's no shrines because there was never anything but sea bed here, no 'spirit of place'.

So imagine my surprise when I spotted the 'Shinto shrine' symbol on my very detailed property map and realised that I was walking past one in the middle of a factory estate! I knew that I was just a few steps away from it and couldn't see anything at all. But eventually I leaned over a car park hedge and got this picture ...

Can you guess why it is here? No, I don't think so. These are the premises of a big Chiba taxi company and they have this shrine in the corner of their vehicle yard. Well, I suppose that running taxis is a risky business, all kinds of danger of accidents and incidents. So it makes sense to have a shrine on the property as 'added insurance'.

I like this idea very much, it's really set me thinking. What would ours be? We Buddhists tend to have altars in our homes and in Japan they are usually pretty laden with family stuff too. But this kind of 'family business' shrine - I'll have to think about it. Maybe a peaceful Shakyamuni figure in meditation near the front door or Kanzeon to smile encouragement at the kids when they arrive eh? Be cool ... take your time ... enjoy studying here, we like having you around.