Other cultures

We had a 'neat' choir practice last night, running through about a dozen Christmas carols and songs and a few 'quasi-Christmas' items if you can include Mozart's 'Ave Verum' and a couple of 'gospel' items in that list. They really have the 'swing' of Christmas these days, we are singing all the 'regular' repertoire stuff as well as any English church choir. We will soon be up to speed for our Christmas carol concert sessions at the Radisson Hotel at Narita.

But Edera posed an interesting question over breakfast this morning - as a non-Christian myself how do I feel about helping a Japanese choir to learn this stuff? Christmas Day is not even a public holiday here although it features in the stores from early November and small kids certainly know all about Santa.

I'm not sure that I ever particularly thought of Christmas as Christian - after all they only took over the earlier pagan festival of Yule. No one really knows when Jesus was born. In northern latitudes we need something to cheer ourselves up in midwinter and mark the turn of the year. And carols are a 'cultural' aspect of the season, something that you remember from myths you were taught in your own childhood rather than having any doctrinal significance. Actually it really surprises me how, now that we have sung carols for three years, the same sort of spirit creeps into singers' hearts here. People LOVE to sing traditional carols.

And at the same time it's a fair question. Whatever good reasons there may be for singing carols it's not Japanese for sure. Harmony and polyphony are not classic Japanese musical forms. And "Hark the Herald ...!" would not have gone down well with Tokugawa Ieyasu eh? For better or worse I'd better remember that I'm playing my own tiny and unwitting part in spreading a foreign culture

Late November colours

Over to the Nippon Aerobics Centre near Mobara today. No, I've not gone crazy and taken up exercise, actually they have one of the best 'all you can eat' buffet restaurants around here. In fact I was stuffing myself there only last week with my two English friends Penny and Sarah.

But today our objective was a big tower on the hill in the park about half a mile away. It's a kind of resort hotel and Edera had some tea ceremony 'teach-in' to attend there. I was out for the ride, complete with a bag of books to read to pass the time.

We were shown up to a beautiful tenth floor meeting suite with a very impressive view. If the day had been VERY clear you could have seen Mt. Fuji far over the bay. I settled down with a book next to the window. Later, at lunch time, it turned out that as usual I had completely the wrong end of the stick, this wasn't a hotel room but the hostess's apartment. The building was mainly hotel but had some condominium homes there too on the upper floors. Unusual eh? I wondered why she knew where everything was ...


Afterwards we wandered around the park there. An amazing day; in England our colours come earlier and aren't so intense but in leafy Chiba-ken the sunshine was cloudless and blue and the Japanese Maples and the Ginko trees were so intensely bright that I felt like rushing around with a paintbrush. Fleeting things are often the most beautiful, I hadly need to mention it.

Not to be trusted

Marking up maps for fieldwork today, an essentially 'craft' activity. I find that when I'm doing stuff with my hands I start to trawl through unresolved stuff in my mind, sometimes big things and sometimes small.

One small thing that makes a regular reappearace is an incident that happened about fifteen years ago when I was with my daughter Julia on a trip to America. We were browsing around the university bookshop in Albequerque.

A student in her early twenties got chatting to us. I don't know why - perhaps she had heard our English accents - and I don't remember what we talked about. Probably she asked about our trip and told us about some trip she'd made to London. It's always London eh?

As we said goodbye I reached down to pick up our canvas shopping bag and she said "That's MY bag!". It was her bag too - my wife had one exactly the same shape and colour and without thinking I'd somehow registered it as ours and picked it up. I apologised and explained but suddenly she clearly didn't believe me at all. We had ceased to be nice folks and become feckless foreigners trying to steal her property.

That was all there was to it, but it often pops back into my head. After the embarassment I felt a slight sense of disgust, as if someone had touched me in a private place without my permission. Hard to imagine living without some basic level of trust in other people's integrity. Don't I just LOOK honest? But then I don't know where she was coming from of course, maybe she'd had some particular bad experience that way. I guess it might come round for me a few times yet though before I let it drop at last.

Megaphone diplomacy

I've mentioned this topic before but it really interests me just how many signs here in Japan feature some kind of animation or cartoon. I guess that it is related to the love of manga comic books here. In Britain officaldom always feels an urge to quote the law when they ban something "persuant to the Public Order Act 1956 section 4(1)" but here in Japan a picture is thought to be worth a thousand words.

This is one I spotted near Soga today. The site contains some vast and ancient water storage tanks once used by Kawasaki Steel and now by their successors JFE. It would certainly be a pretty dangerous place for adventurous kids and it is well fenced off.

It seems that the man in charge here is using old fashioned megaphone diplomacy to underline the danger of the place to the two brawling boys outside the gate. That is a formidable piece of kit he is using - maybe in his leisure time he is the coach for a 'rowing eight' on the Miyako River just down the road. He looks pretty cross eh? Maybe we had all better behave ourselves.

This sign does puzzle me a bit though. If these lads are merely fighting outside the site what is Mr. Authority getting so heated about anyway? In fact what business is it of his? Surely a bit of fisticuffs doesn't mean that they are about to conspire to trespass? What exactly did the artist have in mind?

Of course in England you could never use a megaphone that close to a minor's ear'ole. It must be against at least a dozen Health and Safety regulations and as for that fist in the air - well, that's technically assault for a start. And in the USA the kid would have an army of lawyers persuing a million dollar claim for eardrum damage, this guy would need to be well insured against litigation before he put his helmet on. Only in Japan would authority really use a megaphone to make its point.

Daniel in the den

Yesterday the choir had an unusual 'gig'. Some months ago we were asked if we would like to sing in a church in Yachimata and we've been looking forward to it as a 'fun event' on the horizon ever since. Being from England and used to singing in medieval churches with nice echos I had little fantasies of us all in hassocks (hmm ... no that should be cassocks eh?) lined up in the choir stalls.

Not in Japan of course. In construction and size the place was more like your average British Boy Scout hut, a single storey wooden place in the garden of a retired airline official.

We weren't the only 'act' either. There were five altogether and we followed on from a very 'happy clappy' Christian teenage rock band of four lads from Yotsukaido. They were fun - and LOUD. Their electric guitarist looked just like Cliff Richards, same specs, same suit, same tie. Maybe it WAS the young Cliff Richards ...

Our contributon of eight items went well enough, luckily four of them were carols anyway so even if the madrigals left some a bit puzzled folks could sing along to "Joy to the World". Christmas is coming. Our programme was in Japanese but as it turned out about a quarter of the audience were Westerners, mainly from a 'Kiwi' evangelist place in Tomisato. I ended up doing some rapid translation back into English for their benefit. We skidded through our party pieces without audible accident although to be honest there were a couple of places where we nearly came off the rails. Singing complex music in new places and circumstances puts you under the cosh and I was proud of how choir members coped with it. You learn by doing something different.

After us came a 'turn' involving a very 'born again' jazz player and her crum-horn playing husband. She introduced each of her six pieces (was it really only six?) with a long and blow by blow description of how she came to be moved to write the stuff. To be honest it really gave me the creeps and I could see N-san in front of me staring at his toe caps too but others in our group really enjoyed the novelty of it. It takes all sorts eh?

Don't it all just go to show ...

Took Penny and Sarah to Narita Airport today to catch the flight back to the UK after their holiday in Japan. They will find it pretty cold and grey when they get back to Harrogate eg? It's been really nice having them around; together with Penny's husband Peter and our friend Tetsu they constitute a particular kind of small family for us all related to my father; I coun't them more as family than friends. Those relationships that came out of and survived the short time Edera and I knew my dad. The ones that have taken root.

Today is the second anniversary of my father's death. He had a heart attack and died suddenly at his Yorkshire home on 25th November 2004.

My dad and I were separated when I was seven years old and because of other people's choices we never met again for forty eight years. Then, sixteen months before his death, he located me again and we had a short time to know each other as adults before he died. It's a very strange story, actually even stranger in reality than the 'bare bones' that I have described here.

I've thought a lot this week about the time he spent with us in Japan just before his death. I remember him happily reading at our table during the evenings with a cat on his lap while I worked away on my computer. If only I'd known what would suddenly happen eh? All those questions that I could have asked him instead that now I'll never have an answer to, all the things that might have been said. It's like the chorus from that Joni Mitchell song ...

"Don't it all just go to show
That you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone ..."

Maybe it would be impossible to live in a world where you really DID now what was going to happen next, where you had the opportunities to know what the future would bring you. Premonitions are one thing but copper bottomed certainties would be something else.

But as I get older I find that I realy DO work a lot more on the basis that maybe the chance I have today might well be the last chance and that I should always act with that in mind. It's not good to leave messy endings.

Golden Road to Samarkand

MERCHANTS
(In chorus)
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

HASSAN
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

ISHAK
We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

MASTER OF THE CARAVAN
Open the gate, O watchman of the night!

THE WATCHMAN
Ho, travellers, I open. For what land
Leave you the dim-moon city of delight?

MERCHANTS
(With a shout)
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand!

(The CARAVAN passes through the gate.)

WATCHMAN
(Consoling the women) What would ye, ladies? It was ever thus.
Men are unwise and curiously planned.

A WOMAN
They have their dreams, and do not think of us.

(The WATCHMAN closes the gate.)

VOICES OF THE CARAVAN
(In the distance singing) We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.


James Elroy Flecker

To move is 'home'

Another gorgeous day for fieldwork. I was covering a part of the north side of Chiba and my sweater was soon in my bag and I roamed the streets in my shirt sleeves in the sunshine. Delicious. I'm lucky to be doing this kind of study in this kind of place and in this kind of weather.

I've found recently that I'm sometimes dreaming about fieldwork and I wake up thinking "now where was that corner?" and realise that it is somewhere on the other side of town that I visited months ago. When you have been to so many specific points at random in a city you know it in a way that you will never know anywhere else. Most of the time we follow patterns, there's a logic in where we go and what we do. But my experience of Chiba isn't like that at all, it is becoming much more intimate. I know it like a bird knows it.

I'm slowly getting to know the city in my body. It's the only way to desribe it. We accept easily that some skills - like ice skating or violin playing for example - we know through the skills of muscles and balance and touch. I notice something similar now in my time on the strrets - legs and eyes and ears are all 'in tune' to relate in a very physical way with the places I pass through. I know these places in a way that isn't just about the way that I take notes, that is why I dream about it so vividly. I suppose it is how native Americans or Australians begin to relate to place, to move is 'home'.

Things that go bump in the night

My turn to make tea so up to our local supermarket to buy some frozen lasagne (only joking!). It's at the top of the hill and at the end of the 'new road' opened last year and this pristine stretch of highway acquired two brand new sets of traffic lights last month. Can't for the life of me see why as I use this road almost every day and I never even once saw anyone waiting at the previous very servicable halt signs at the junctions.

I hate to say it but I do wonder sometimes if the highway engineers here actually have a quota of new traffic signals to install. Does the chairman of Nippon Traffic Signals have some deal with the LDP politicians? This IS Japan after all, once famous for pork barrel politics and bent contractors. Let's not go there ...

Anyway, when I came out of the store into a dark and rainy car park an 'altercation' was in progress. Two rather old vehicles - a van and a 4x4 - had reversed into each other coming out of parking spaces. From their position it looked like it had been a classic 'Keystone Cops' knock, neither had seen the other beause of a van parked between and they had taken opposite locks. Bump! Collision speed must have been all of one mile per hour, maybe less and there was no damage that I could see.

That didn't stop the two drivers having a good blast of course. They were both very much of the "my country right or wrong" school of incident management and you could hear them at it from inside the shop. Seems that they were both incandescent that someone could be so careless as to reverse into them reversing. The rest of us vaguely wondered whether it would end in fisticuffs, rare these days between grown men although when I was a kid I seemed to see brawling all the time. Looked like it might but the rain came on harder and it fizzled out with many cries of 'baka!' (fool!) etc.

On the way home I spotted an ambulance with red lights flashing and loudspeaker blaring stuck in that new queue at the traffic lights. Huh!

A hard moment.

Here is something that might cheer up a few readers here who I help with English practice from time to time ... it happens to us all! I had a rather hard moment myself with Japanese class this morning. It was a combination of stuff finally got to me I think.

Our teacher is an enthusiastic volunteer but she hasn't got the art of presenting language clearly and when she gets herself confused too she can't stop 'digging the hole'. To make matters worse she's focusing a lot on conversation practice at the moment rather than teaching.

Second point; two members of our small class are Chinese and Korean ladies that have been here and spoken Japanese for years. I'd guess they struggle with grammar and pronunciation but they are basically fluent speakers with loads of vocabulary.

When I arrived for class this morning I discovered that we had been turfed out of our usual Western-style room for the day because of some Boy Scout event. We were upstairs in one of the Japanese-style rooms and my heart sank at the prospect of two hours sitting cross-legged on the floor. Even worse - at the entrance to the room when I arrived were only three pairs of shoes - sensei and the two fluent ladies!

Yep! I couldn't do it. The idea of two hours worth of so much mental and physical discomfort was just too much. So I went and sat in the sunshine outside on a wall in the street and waited to see if my English friend Neale turned up for the lesson.

After about half an hour he did and we went in together and of course it wasn't so bad after all. In fact it was a point of grammar I was already quite confident with. Things are not so bad as you think eh? Sometimes anyway - other times they might even be worse ...!

Neighbourhood Parks

One of the many myths about Japanese cities is that they have no green spaces. They might not have as many large central parks as their European or American counterparts but actually I think that in some ways built up areas are much better provided for here.

Whenever I'm walking the streets I'm always interested in the little 'neighbourhood parks' provided by the city. These are about the lowliest form of park life you might ever find but there will probably be at least one within a five minute walk if you live in a residential area.

By Western standards these parks are tiny. There are 619 in Chiba City covering 1.2 million square metres so that works out at about 42 metres square per park on average. They are beautifully looked after, I'd guess the council employs at least five times as many gardeners and maintenance people than your typical UK parks department. In spring flowers get planted and in autumn leaves get swept and the place gets cared for all the time.

Who uses these parks? Hardly anyone. Maybe 95% of the time they are completely deserted. If someone is there it is probably the gardener because they are too small for adult ball games and young mothers seem not to take toddlers to the play equipment much. People don't sit on benches much either - if there is one! In summer it is too humid and anyway 'hima' - 'spare time' - is considered subversive in Japan. Better to keep busy.

Are these community parks a 'good thing'? You bet! They are like a secret archipelago. I love their 'sameness' and their neatness. Maybe I'll start a pilgrimmage around the 619 community parks of Chiba-shi next. A bit like the one around the 88 temples in Shikoku but more intimate and private. How long do you think it would take? Maybe two months of walking I guess ...

Another trompe l'oeil

A while back I was writing about trompe l'oeil - those paintings on buildings that you often see in France that are intended to deceive the eye and create an illusion that there's something there or some scene visible that isn't. At the time I said that I'd never seen one in Japan.

Well, now I have. Walking around Sonno-cho in Chiba today I came across this neat painting of an artist painting on a wall on a concrete wall near a factory gate. Unusual eh?

Actually it made me laugh because my first thought was that there was somene doing zazen on the street, sitting in meditation outside a tofu factory. But looking closer I see he has a piece of chalk in his hand.

I have several Buddhist friends who count themselves as artists so here's a bit of a challenge for them all eh? How about a few walls with people sitting in meditation about the place? It would add a touch of interest. Bodhidharma was said to have spent seven years facing the wall in meditation but here would be a chance ... oh well! You get my drift anyway ...

Seven Three Five

A couple of times in the last few days we've bumped into kids involved in the Shichigosan ("7-3-5")celebrations held around 15 November. Girls aged three and seven and boys aged three and five get dressed up and go and get blessed somewhere - usually a shrine but sometimes the temple. Often the family has a meal together after.

I say 'kids' but so far I've only seen girls. On Sunday in Hodogaya there was a slightly fractious seven year old in the restaurant where we had lunch who was 'champing at the bit' about enduring wearing a hot kimono ("now wear this lovely obi that granny bought you ..."). Then yesterday at Narita when we were in the temple we hovered at the back while a little three year old girl got blessed out on the mat near the bowing seat along with her mum and dad and big sister. Cute

I didn't feel cheeky enough to ask if I could take her picture afterwards. Just nice to watch, you don't need images of everything that's around in this saha world after all. But here's a picture from the temple park at Narita to remind us that autumn is here. Acer leaves turning red over the lake, another year gone, time flies like an arrow as we all should know ...

Hodogaya

Over to Yokohama this morning to the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Hodogaya for the Remembrance Sunday ceremony.

It's the second time I've made this trip around Tokyo Bay. It is about 70 miles and in today's clear air Mt. Fuii seemed close enough to reach out and touch.

My first visit was with my father two years ago just a few weeks before he died. My dad was very much an 'ex-soldier' and also very active in the Harrogate Royal British Legion. Hodogaya turned out to be his last parade. He was so excited about the day, meeting and talking to servicemen and veterans from many Commonwealth armed services. Memories of him were strong today as we stood out in the autumn sunshine while the familiar prayers were read and the 'Last Post' was played.

It was especially good on this trip to have two of his friends from Harrogate there with us.

Hodogaya is the main, maybe now the only regular Remembrance Day ceremony in Japan although there are other Commonwealth war graves aound. And so it is quite an event with representatives of many Embassies laying wreaths and also The Japanese SDF, government the City of Yokohama and Japanese veterans.

Hodogaya has turned out to be a significant place for our family because of my dad's visit. And also in a wider sense. As someone who loves and lives in Japan and knows a fair amount of both Japanese and British history I hardly know where to begin writing about what this ceremony brings up for me. So I won't even try

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

Epitaphs

We were chatting over dinner tonight about inscriptions on tombstones. How we got onto that topic I can't remember but it's interesting how in Anglo-Saxon culture we can sometimes accept and add humour to epitaphs. Was it the comedian Spike Milligan who wanted "I told you that I was ill!" engraved on his memorial?

As almost all Japanese grave markers are family affairs shared by several rather than personal stones, I'm sure that in Japan you wouldn't find a single example of a humorous tombstone. It must be a dying tradition in Britain too as not so many people have graves with headstones these days.

One inscription that I like is on the tombstone of William Lenthall in the churchyard of Burford in Cotswolds. Lenthall was Speaker of the House of Commons during the English Civil War period in the seventeenth century and he left instructions that his epitaph should simply read "Vermis Sum" - 'I am a worm'. He died 444 years ago yesterday.

I used to live in Bridgend in Wales and one inscription in Coity churchyard used to fascinate me. It was of a young man who had died in Calais in the 1820's in what were, according to his epitaph "... very unfortunate circumstances." But just what these were the stone mason omitted to mention! I'm sure that it wasn't his intention to tease posterity but what passer-by wouldn't wonder just what the circumstances were?

Top of the tower

Our area is famous for its tower. OK - let's just say 'well known'. Alright, well, we have a tower in our park anyway, near the library. It's a lot cheaper than Blackpool Tower or Tokyo Tower - in fact a return trip to the top will cost you only 100 yen (50p) and it reaches a big, big 50 metres into the sky. At New Year we hang lights off it, but being an environmentally consious bunch we switch them off at 10:00 pm.

It is a long time since I was up the tower so today I was looking forward to getting up there with two friends visiting from England. We boarded the lift for the rather short journey to the top around 3:30 pm so the afternoon light was already starting to fade a little as we emerged into the observation room at the top.

Once when I was up here on an exceptional winter day I could see Mt. Fuji far to the south west. Most places around the middle of Japan like to bill themselves as 'places that you can see Mt. Fuji from' and we are no exception. Well, it's a big mountain and to be sure you can see it from a long way off if the weather is clear.

Not today though. There were a couple of sad little photos of a very distant cone cellotaped to the wall up there but out of the window only murk towards Tokyo Bay. Actually when I thought about it I realised that usually from this tower you couldn't see much in any case. The Otis Lift Factory test tower at Shibayama, some big white hangars at Narita and of course nearer to home our local Landrome supermarket car park and some fields of carrots. And lots and lots of cedar trees.

If you were going to build a tower like this to look at the view you would think you might put it somehere where there was .. hmm .. a view eh? Something like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. On the other hand maybe it is fun to have one like this from which you can see nothing much out of the ordinary. It appeals to me anyway.

The right position

On Saturday we are singing in a local concert, and last night was our final rehearsal before the day. Not QUITE the final reherarsal of course - we get 20 minutes on stage on Saturday morning at 9:20 and then we'll head off somewhere for a couple of hours to run through at least another dozen times. But it was our last 'regular' rehearsal night.

We are singing two pieces which are very different - Ralph Vaughan Williams' song 'Linden Lea' and some Palestrina polyphony 'Sitivit Anima Mea' and last night (at long last!) we got around to discussing how we were going to stand on stage. Somehow for me this doesn't get the attention it should, people fondly imagine that it's OK just to stand in a semi-circle. I think not.

Well, interestingly last night (I think!) we decided that the same position didn't work for two such different pieces. 'Linden Lea' is quick, flows like a stream and the important thing is for us all to SEE each other so we are going for a long line across the stage with me as 'anchor man' on the right. Then, a bit like the Royal Ballet, we quickly form into two lines in centre stage because the most important thing in polyphony is that you can all HEAR each other.

Lets' hope that it works OK and that we all keep our nerve. I feel that, poco a poco, I'm becoming a much needed corrupting influence around this kind of artistic stuff in the group. We are avoiding the usually Japanese choir approach of all 'standing at ease' and opening our music folders in unison anyway. That's OK in the Self Defence Force Military Band but not around Renaissance a cappella music eh?

The weight we give to words

Our day off and out for lunch. We tried a new Japanese-style family restaurant a few miles from here - it was OK but Edera wasn't THAT impressed with the food.

Most of the staff seemed new to waitering and waitressing and ours was definitely wearing her 'L' plates. In fact she actually was wearing a badge warning 'atarashii hito' ('new person'). Everyone had obviously just been through intensive training and 'irashaimase' and 'arigato gozaimasu' ('welcome!' and 'thankyou!') were bouncing off the walls like gun-shots. It's difficult to avoid this barrage of gratitude in any shop or restaurant in Japan but here they had obviously been told that anything less that 120 Db didn't count.

This prompted us into a conversation about the use of words like this and how they get completely devalued. 'Arigato' for example means 'thanks' but the original word comes from expressing how precious and rare something is for you. It's the same in English. How many people really mean 'have a nice day' when they say it? Or think that something is REALLY 'wonder-ful'?

But would we be better off not saying this stuff? Would the world be a better place? It's an interesting one eh? There's a kind of 'Tibetan Prayer Wheel' debate here. At least if we say and hear the words 'thank you' a million times we might actually feel more grateful that if we hadn't.

At home we say the Buddhist 'Five Thoughts' before meals and Edera sometimes thinks that I rattle through them perfunctorily and that maybe it would be better just to think them carefully through in our heads rather than recite them aloud. I'm not so sure. At least if you say them the words have some weight of their own. As with so many things, I guess it is what we do with them that counts.

Parrez vous Flancais?

Spotted this sign the other day and it made me smile. In Japan advertisers love to use 'romaji' (Roman Alphabet characters) because it looks 'cool' but often the proof-reading isn't all that it might be and there is no distinction between 'l' and 'r' in spoken Japanese. It's the sound they are most likely to make mistakes with.

That said I'm not sure that the English school for kids that advertises on Chiba station with a happy bunny saying "Herrow!" could ever represent good value for parent's money ...

This topic came up after Japanese class in Togane last week when we were all looking out of the window at the second-hand goods on sale in the 'free-marketo' in the park over the road. When I explained that it was really a 'flea-marketo' everyone looked a bit doubtful. Why have a market for fleas?

Mind you, I always thought that many French people struggle with their glands a bit too ...

Doing it for free

One thing I really notice tramping Japanese streets is the degree to which these days there's almost nothing to do and nowhere to go without spending money.

I mean without spending ANY money, without 'consuming' cash in any form at all. So by definition we are talking about something very 'local' here, it doesn't include getting into a car and uisng petrol to drive to the beach and buying an ice cream.

Walking has to be the main possibility if for argument's sake we ignore the cost of shoe leather involved. But where to? In fine weather the local park would be an option, there are lots of little 'community ones' in Chiba and I reckon that even on a nice day they are around 98% uninhabited. If it is raining there's the public library.

Older people often enjoy just watching things and I can really understand the attraction now. 'Hey! Just look at that kid on a bicycle - he's moving that way! Interesting eh?' And we can always talk to strangers in the street but they may not stop. Or we can just actually look at things - 'Hmm, a pretty flower there'. On a recent walk I spotted someone doing their claps and bows at a small roadside shrine. Talking to the Eternal is also free of charge. Well, in money terms anyway.

The more I wander around the more serious I can see this problem is. Even our language is bound up with it - we talk about 'spending our time profitably'. Good grief! Why?

We ought to give a lot more thought and attention to this business of finding things that are free and spending a lot more of our time with them. Going to the shops gives me a headache.

Get my kicks ... on Route 66

Well, in this case not in the deserts of the high South West which I guess is where Bob Dylan originally had in mind. Today I was tramping Chiba Prefectural Highway 66 which, apart from the number, doesn't look much like it's American counterpart.

Our little old Highway 66 runs from somewhere I've not found yet near Yotsukaido station to somewhere I'm not sure of with a lot of rusting old factories near Funabashi. I think; road numbers are not consistent in this very unleafy part of Chiba-ken.

It's fun though. Back in the 1970's there was a lot of new manufacturing businesses started in this area but most of those jobs were 'off-shored' to China and the Philippines long ago. It kind of reminds me of my childhood home on Teeside in north-east England; in American terms think Akron.

Interspersed with all the rusting sheds are lots of houses and areas of the original 'hatake' farmland that never got used for town with crops of tobacco, vegetables and peanuts. They don't do in for 'zoning' much in suburban Japan, they don't see anything wrong with mixing ochards, steel foundries, farms, plastic moulders and apartments. Actually this kind of urban mess can work very well in practice, you never see vandalism here.


Sanno-cho along Route 66 is a pretty workaday area and the restaurant I stopped for lunch at was packed with families talking cheerfully surrounded by mountains of dishes and bowls of noodles, miso and rice. Just to give us something to look at the management of the Nittobo factory over the road had painted a nice mural of Mt. Fuji on one of their sheds.

Do you like it? I love those sinister birds, just like something out of a Van Gogh corn field painting eh? Don't worry though, I still have both my ears ...

Why endure this humiliation?

There are times when I wonder why I even go to Japanese classes and this morning was one of them. The slope gets ever steeper and the cross-fire heavier it seems. At least last year we had the text book to cling to but now we are forever making sorties into the uncharted territory of 'conversation practice'. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Why endure this humiliation??

Last year too I had the luxury of four other Westerners in the room all struggling like me - if not quite so deep in the quagmire. But now my classmates are three Chinese and two Koreans and they all seem to speak Japanese pretty perectly already as far as I can tell. What happened?

'Shopping' was the topic of the day today. I ought to have this territory better staked out but somehow I wasn't even sticking to basic rules. "Never volunteer" was my grandfather's motto which he learned the hard way in the 1914 - 1918 War but for all struggling linguists it ought to be "Keep it simple" stupid!

Oh! And don't sit immediately to sensei's right or the questions will land on your head first before you even have your dictionary open ...

Today for example when asked what shops were in our village the first thing that popped out of my mouth was 'kanamonoya' (hardware shop!). Where did that come from? Why not just stick to safe and borning 'convenience store'. 'Hardware store' immedately opens up a swamp full of unknown vocabularies to make you look dumb eh?. What is the Japanese for 'self-tapping screws'? I should know better. And the more you look dumb the more rapid-fire advice comes your way.

Don't worry, I won't crack. I can take humilation as well as anyone! Us Robinsons are famous for keeping our nerve under fire. And anyway next Saturday I have to be somewhere else.

Depends how you use it

Tramping the streets on the Yotsukaido side of Chiba today - somehow I 'needed a rest' from Inage. You can have too much of one bit of town and it pays to ring the changes a bit.

To my surprise at one point a passing policeman on a moped (that's what the urban traffic cops use here!) gave me a smile and a wave. He was a young guy and actually it was as much a salute as a wave, very polite, and had me thinking "Who? Me? Did he mistake me for someone?" But it was nice.

Some of my friends are policemen and yet somehow they usually make me nevous and prone to start libetarian arguments in my head. Am I really such a venerable figure now as to command respect? Good grief!

I suppose it's how they get used. Heck, it's the same with everything. You can beat someone's brains out with a priceless Ming vase or a sculpture by Henry Moore and ballpoint pens write both beautiful poetry and racist propaganda. Yes, it's all in how you use them.

For some reason it all reminded me of a rumour that swept our old offices in Whitbread some years ago that our much hated IT Department had introduced some e-mail spy-ware to find obscenities in our e-mail. Immediately the whole place was flooded with mail containing stuff like "We have some blue tits nesting in our garden at the moment" and "I think he lives in Sus sex somewhere near Brighton .." as otherwise normally mature manages rolled around laughing on the floor like out of control six year olds trying to think of lines that would waste some vigilant techie's time downstairs.

Platforms in Poetry

I had an entry today from someone (hello Chris!) who picked up my reference to Edward Thomas' poem 'Adlestrop' way back. He's recently written a poem himself about railway station platforms but sadly I don't have a link for it to share with you.

Considering their part in human affairs over the last two centuries it always surprises me that there aren't more poems about station platforms. Can you think of any? Maybe we can get a short anthology together. Often references are rather tangental. W.H.Auden for example wrote an excellent poem 'Gare du Midi' about the arrival of a stranger in the city but hard references to good old trains, tarmac and wrought ironwork are limited.

Some stations I've caught trains from have an awesome sense of history about them. Hard to walk under the high iron roof of Budapast Keletipalyaudvar on a misty evening for example and not get some sense of Hapsburg ghosts and of Grandes Expresses Europeens long departed.

Here in Japan Tokyo Ueno always strikes me like that. It's the old terminus for trains from northern Japan and it is no architectural gem, in fact Ueno is four bits of station stitched into one. It has been rebuilt twice within living memory after major national disasters - the 1923 Kanto Earthquake and in 1945 - and almost ceaselessly ever since by JR East management. But for me it doesn't take much to imagine the army of people that have arrivied here down the years without two yen to rub together in their pockets. Poor farm boys and girls from Tohoku gambling on finding work in Tokyo. Today their children and grandchildren must be the commuters struggling to get onto evening trains back to Saitama or towards north west Chiba.

Someone must have written poems about Ueno, but I never saw any in translation.

To the doctor

"Turned myself in" to the 'sheriff' today again - or at least to a new doctor for a regular diabetes check. It's months since I've been for one here in Japan; the hospital where I was being treated before has stopped doing outpatients work and I've been using up medication that I've stockpiled on two trips back to England.

All very irregular I guess. Getting effective health care if you have a long term condition is one of the really difficult aspects of having a foot in two countries. Actually I was starting to despair about the quality of help in Japan; some months ago I was complaining bitterly here about becoming a 'file' of 'test results' rather than a patient.

Well, the good news today was that the practice we went to about four miles from here is run by a doctor with excellent English who actually listens to what you say, doesn't reduce the entire session to a lecture on loosing weight and who really knows his stuff about diabetes. I must have had about half an hour of his time and as a 'new boy' he gave me an EEG and a couple of other tests too.

In fact he was a nice guy.

Having a doctor that I can talk to makes a huge difference, you cant imagine how hard it can be in another culture to have all communicaton about problems with your health going through even the best interpreter. I suppose this underlines that fact that healing relationships are in fact - well, relationships.