English Bond

Wow! Take a look at this then! It is the kind of thing that makes me wake up sweating in the middle of the night! Exciting stuff eh?

What? It just looks like a shed wall to you? Take a closer look at those windows near the top above and behind the recent zinc sheet wall. That's genuine English Bond brickwork there, the kind of thing you see in Victorian factories in Britain. I'll zoom in so that you can see it.

I spotted this in one of the buildings at the back of Chiba Keizai College in Todoroki-cho today. I was about to hurry off to the Prefectural Archive to check out my suspicions when I found that someone had done my research for me and there was a neat little plaque around the corner to confirm that this was a 'Designated Prefectural Tangible Cultural Asset', a "supremely important example of early brick building construction in Japan". In fact the only other brick structure I can think of in the whole of this city is one section of the gaol. Brick structures aren't good in earthquakes and early survivors are rarer than hen's teeth in Kanto. All the brick built shopping areas in Tokyo were razed in the 1923 Earthquake.

Now this part of Todoroki-cho is mainly public housing but back in 1908 the Second Railway Regiment was moved out here from Tokyo and this is the one surviving fragment of that military depot constructed in the Meiji-era. Hard to imagine now but this college hall is where locomotives and equipment were stored and maintained and engineers trained to build railways for the Imperial Army across south east Asia. In 1945 it must have been one of the few parts of this area to survive two big air raids and now here it is coming up to its centenary in use as part of a college

Hop, skip, minuette

Edera was asking me a couple of days ago about classic dances. You know the kind of thing - minuette, bouree, gavotte etc. The kind of dancing John Barrymore used to do in a powdered wig in Hollywood 'B' movies while the 'sans culottes' were fermenting (maybe that's formenting eh?) revolution outside. Let them eat cake!

E is playing a lot of eighteenth century stuff on the recorder at the moment and wants to know how people really danced to those rhythms. I've absolutely no idea - if anyone knows a good book, or maybe even a DVD - please let me know. I seem to remember that they generally involved a lot of bowing, which should suit Japanese audiences of course, but also flourishes with the hands etc. which isn't a local habit as yet.

I blush to mention it but when I was a teenager I used to enjoy Barn Dances which were very popular back then (well, we had just invented barns, the world was young). I have a kind of dark lurking ambition to get some of our choir members here doing some barn dancing one day soon when they have had enough beer (that is, about two cans between the lot of them). I think we could just muster two 'eights' but some of the ladies would have to wear trousers. I need to train a local 'caller' too and Edera will have to come up with some Japanese terms for calls like 'Doh se doh!' and 'backs to yer partners!' Also I need to find some scratchy CD's of THAT kind of toe-tapping apple-pie-munching music. I feel a visit to Amazon.com coming on here.

Back to work tomorrow. Honest.

Singing Sunday

I've just spent all day either singing or listening to others singing - a nice change from my usual current marathon walking routines. This afternoon we had a concert involving a dozen adult and school choirs from the area, but of course we rehearsed all morning and had some rice and coffee together before the event.

The standard gets better too - a couple of other choirs gave us a real 'run for our money' today and one ladies group even sang two pieces 'a cappella' and very well. An elementrary school choir had a two diminuative and mega-cute six year olds in the front row and also a tall black girl maybe eight years old with a sunflower in her hair. Speaking fluent Japanese too I noticed as we were getting ready, she must have been born here. Just how rare this is in Japan you will appreciate when I say it's only the second black person I've actually seen in the leafy Chiba-ken in four years ...

For me choirs at these events tend to fall into two groups - those who pluck up courage to tackle Western music and those who don't. The second group sometimes struggle. When you stop to think of it, there is absolutely no native tradition of Japanese choral singing at all, so most of what is available are either arrangements (often good ones) of traditional songs like 'Karasu' or 'Sakura' or otherwise rather stodgy and 'worthy' Taisho or Showa-era compositions in 'Western-style'. The sun is shining the grass is green, mother is in the kitchen, tomorrow we will go to the forest hand in hand - you know the sort of stuff. Sounds like it should be sung by the Red Army Choir. More interesting are the few with a real element of recent folk memory lurking in there - father is going to the quayside to catch the ship that will take him far away ... when will he return?

I get boring around this topic but the more I sing the more I feel that the more choirs there are in the world the better kind of place it might be. If you aren't in one, join one.

Big Boy's Book of Sociology

At the moment I have my nose into "Inroduction to Sociology" by Giddens, Duneier and Applebaum. Anthony Giddens' name is the clue to my interest here - I've been using him a lot as a source of ideas about social theory recently. Clever guy, I just wish that I could occasionally understand a word of the stuff he comes up with ...

Luckily this volume isn't 'hard sums' though, it's a helpfully dunned down book for first year sociology undergraduates and so for once I can follow the thread without reaching for the dictionary. It's a good book, written for American college students and covering pretty well all of sociology in just 672 readable pages.

The authors try hard to keep the text nice and academically neutral but it's impossible to keep up this illusion all the time of course. You just can't step outside your own cultural assumptions no matter how hard you try, your petticoat hem will show somewhere.

For example in one chapter I drew breath when I came across the statement that Western individualism was built on the principle of 'working hard to get on'

Really? Was that around 1860 then? Sounds like a place called 'Fantasy' to me, a country I don't recognise. I have a feeling that ethic went out of the window in the UK in my grandfather's day. And more recently here in Japan too. Of course people DO work hard to be successful but I'd say 'winning' rather than 'working hard' was the basis of most ambitions now. What we really want to find is the 'fast track', the 'escalator' up to that next level of success (and happiness!) eh? Cruise past all those plodders in the slow lane - the sky is the limit! Who wants the big pile of greasy dishes to wash on the way to becoming a successful restauranteur? Better to buy Egon Ronay a beer any day, don't you think so?

Running for trains

I once saw a book of cartoons that all had the theme "You know that you have lived in Japan too long already when ...". One of the entries was "You know that you have lived in Japan too long already when you run up escalators to catch a train because you know that there won't be another one for two minutes." It is true too.

This kind of obsession with timetables is almost unknown in England where we would be in our cars or, if we WERE using public transport, it would probably be cancelled or late. In Japan of course you can literally set your watch by trains and usually buses too. So you start to build your day around the relentless pressure of departure times.

Today my studies took me far out into the 'boonies' to the east of Chiba and I had to bus back into the city to get the train. By 14:10 I was already at the bus stop with a sense of unease. Could I get into town, grab some lunch at the Mosburger near the station and make the 15:10 Sobu Line train?

The 15:10 is an almost empty venerable old cream and blue eight car 113 Class - like a comfortable old coat. The later 15:40 is a new five car 211 Class packed with shoppers and rowdy Junior High kids full of attitiude sitting on the floor amongst bags and satchels. Which should it be? - now let me think...

Forty five minutes on the bus, two minutes to buy a ticket, ten minutes to buy and eat lunch and - I just made it onto the platform! But wherever did I learn to worry about running for trains like that? Or to eat so fast?

Yakusa spotting

Covered four map sheets to the east of Chiba today, near to Highway 51. Sunny but a cold one - a raw north westerly wind straight off Siberia. It's a real hazard at this time of year.

Luckily there was a Denny's to retreat to for lunch just where the monorail crosses the 'drag' and as I was headed towards it with my head down against the gale there was a loud honking in my ear and a car swished over the pavement in front of me. He was making for the car park of a pachinko parlour and slot machine hall.

Yakusa! He was so like the stereotype that I almost burst out laughing. I had a glimpse of a dark shock of greasy hair, an expensive pair of 'shades' and several gold rings through the smoked glass of his big black saloon car. I didn't spot any missing finger joints but I'm sure that there must have been a couple. Probably he was 'The Management'.

If you aren't Japanese 'yakusa' are the local mafia. Like the mafia everywhere they ride in big black cars and wear 'shades' and fund politicians. In Japan they alse have dodgy links to right wing political groups and like to cheer the Emperor, much to his embarrasment I expect. The yakusa are rather thick on the ground in leafy Chiba-ken, not just in the very large red light district of Chiba-shi but also in the bar areas of towns like Narita andTogane. Or so I'm told, ho hmm. In Japan it is sex and alcohol and gambling, rather than narcotocs, that keeps them in business.

With a lifetime working in a brewery I've more than a few gangster stories I could tell. One of my friends was once area manager for a group of 50 pubs in east London and he had a tough patch to manage there. On one occasion he stopped off in the afternoon to pick up the rent cheque from a pub out of hours to find the manager opening the door with a sawn-off shotgun cocked in hs hand. When he saw that it was only the 'brewery rep' he just muttered "Oh! Good afternoon Mr. M - I've got the rent cheque by the till ... just a mo!" This kind of stuff is not common in the working day of, say, librarians eh?

Chishirodai shopping

Out at the very southern tip of Chishirodai today in some nice sunshine. Way down yonder it is 'Ultima Thule' for sure, beyond the last lamp-post only onion fields. But that's the LAST map in that area done, there's always a big sense of achivement when you can cross off a whole section of town at last.

Walking down there I was fascinated by the local shopping, I've seen nothing quite it anywhere else in Chiba and I'll have to think about it - why has it turned out that way? The area was first built up in the late 1960's and I guess it was just before the general decline of local merchants so many independent traders opened new stores here before retailing changed forever. Later it was just too remote to interest bigger retailing groups much so these businesses have continued to thrive although they are extinct most other places in the city.

Whatever the reason there are loads of colourful small shops with traditional tin covered board-walk style pavements with goods stacked outside. Early Showa tenor ballads - the Japanese equivalent of the likes of Bing Crosby - were being played loudly though tinny speakers in the street. Lovely! A fast vanishing Japan still alive and well in Chishirodai.

It all put me in mind of walks 'down the street' in Barnard Castle with my grandmother and her big leather shopping bag in the 1950's, dodging in and out of shops such as these but not so colourful. 'Peats the Butchers' and the CWS ('Cooperative Wholesale Society') for groceries. No supermarkets around then, nor fridges to keep the loot in when you got it home neither. I realised that I couldn't remember where we bought vegetables but then I remebered we didn't, my grandfather grew them all on his allotment...

I wonder if the little kids in Chishirodai shops today will have similar happy memories in the future eh? Hope so.

Glasses are useful

Spotted this one today at the southern end of Mitsuwadai. It was a big poster too, up on the roof. In fact it took up the whole of the width of the optician's store and as you can see it is illuminated at night for extra prominence.

I guess the manager suspected that there might be something strange about his new advert when he spotted me through the window rolling around on my back on the pavement across the road laughing so much I had to clutch my ribs eh? Why DO people do this to themselves? Surely to goodness someone back at the agency has a native English speaker that they can run things by? Can you imagine sticking a big poster in Japanese outside your Preston shop without making sure what it meant, if anything?

I'm still puzzled as to what the artist had in mind here though; you could set up a little sketch to explore the 'hidden meaning' of it all. Here we are 'on tour' with the band and it is such a sophisticated daily scene now that I'm wearing this cool pair of glasses to cope with it. And there's another hidden, inner truth for you here. Whatever your 'daily scene' is, glasses are going to be useful at getting a good gander at it.... or something like this.

On the other hand perhaps I'm over-complicating things here, it could just all be an eye test card gone wrong, that guy is taking a pretty serious squint at it. Japanese eye test cards - now THAT's a story for another time ...

Linden Lea

An extra choir rehearsal to squeeze in last night. We have three pieces to sing in a concert a week today and we can never resist the call for a few of those extra 'Stakhanovite' rehearsals somehow, it's the Japanese way eh? "We're not going home until we can sing this right" might be our motto.

One of the pieces is 'Linden Lea' - the setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams of the poem by William Barnes. I suggested this last year but it has been a real surprise to me just how popular it has become with choir members. It is a beautiful a cappella setting of a lovely tune of course but I sense that what REALLY appeals to the singers is their growing understanding of the words - the original poem written in the 1860's by the Dorset poet.

Barnes was the orphan son of a poor farmer and in his childhood knew what it was to eke a living from the land. But later his amazing talent as a linguist led him into teaching and eventually after a 'part time degree' (one of the first in England!) into work as a country parson. He never strayed far from Dorset, a county a I know hardly at all, and wrote his collections of poems in local dialect. How come such a man appeals to singers in leafy Chiba-ken?

I think it is something to do with the pure lyricism of his writing and his passionate love of the country and the subtlety of his experience of natural beauty. Verse in Engish and Japanese works completely differently - in English we rely on rhyme and in Japanese it is the rhythm of the language that matters, the number of syllables. But actually in terms of love of nature William Barnes and a poet like Miyazawa Kenji write from exactly the same place and understanding.

Fire wreck

A couple of days ago I walked past this dismal sight in a lane in Tsuga. Although house fires are rather common here it is the first one I've come across in walking around the city. I'd guess that usually the insurers move quickly to sort out the mess but probably that there are problems here. Maybe the place was uninsured, maybe an elderly owner died in the blaze or perhaps whoever lived here was just too poor to do anything except go away.

In Japan there are lots of neighbourhood volunteer fire crews who man tiny engines intended to deal with just this kind of situation. With so many houses built with timber frames and covered in plywood once a fire starts if you don't get there in a few minutes the situation rapidly beomes hopeless. In Britain we build masonry walls and structures to 'contain' fires; usually most of the structure survives. In Japan the traditional method of firefighting was always to get the burning building isolated and demolished fast so that the fire wouldn't spread. Actually someone did a good job here because neither of the adjacent wooden homes was damaged at all.

Here it looks like the fire happened a couple of months ago. All the roof and upper floor has collapsed in and the furniture and belongings have ended up as a charred wet pile of debris about waist deep. Stuff that represented the accumulated memories of somebody's whole lifetime destroyed in just a few minutes. Sad, really sad. If you don't see it with your own eyes it is hard to imagine how sad it is.

Corgi Express

Out in Oguradai today - part of that long finger of Wakaba-ku that folllows the Chiba Monorail line out to ... well, 'the end' I suppose. This is not where the rich and influential of the city live. It's the kind of neighbourhood that would have gone to the bad in Dagenham or East Kilbride but here it's just genteel and kind of 'the Boonies'.

This bit of the city edge dates from the late 1960's but whereas in Britain such planned communities would be homogenous and built to conform the practice in Japan was always to create the plots and then let people build what the heck they like - or could afford -on them. So there is quite a lot of diversity, no two houses are ever quite the same.

But that's not what I wanted to mention. Passing a small park I noticed two people in their sixties putting a Corgi pup through his paces. Someome has been watching too much of the Japanese equivalent of "One Man and His Dog" here eh? But he was a cute operator this corgi, taking the little hurdles they had set up on the grass in a single bound and jumping through all the hoops. He was really excited and so were the couple. The three of them had such energy on a cold bright winter morning.

Here was some fun that cost them absolutely nothing. I guess this canny canine is never going to appear in a movie, let alone attend royal garden parties. Who cares? "Look at me - I'm dancing!!" he was barking. And the man and woman were dancing too.

Rice Cakes

One of the very nice things about this time of year in Japan is that we get to eat a lot of delicious seasonal 'mochi' or rice cakes. If you don't live here it is a taste that is probably going to pass you by in life and that's a pity, but I can't think of anything that has an equivalent flavor in the UK. Diet-wise it fills the same little corner on winter days as porridge.

Traditionally the stuff was made by pounding rice in a mortar and then making balls from the dough. Then you have to cook the dough on a grill over a low flame until the outside becomes hard and crunchy and a bit burned and the inside is sticky and warm. You eat it with soy sauce or maybe floating in a kind of miso soup or even with sweet beans.

Rice cakes feature a lot in East Asian culture. There's the famous Zen story about being satisfied with with a painting of a rice cake rather that the 'real thing' ("Who, me?"). And there is a darker side to them too, a kind of "wet Bank Holiday" urban legend aspect. Around New Year the news organisations love to report on the number of fatalities recorded over the holiday period of elderly people choking to death on inadequately chewed rice cakes whose sicky dough has stuck in their windpipe unawares.

It gives a whole new dimension to chewing your food thoroughly before swallowing eh? I'm not sure how that would look on a UK death certificate ...

Psst! Wanna buy 'Clean and Security Town' house?

Out doing some 'real time' fieldwork today for the first time in a long time. I ran out of steam by mid-afternoon but not before I'd crossed off three maps from my rapidly shinking list ...

I thought that you might like this classic piece of Japonica though, spotted by the Tsuga - Yotsukaido road and advertising some new chipboard hutches (sorry, 'real estate'!). Who's for a new 'Clean and Security Town house' then eh? Roll up!

Seems that wise and ambitious okaa-san (or should that be maman?) and her happy, studious but also soccer-playing son will be at the centre of life down here in Printemps Avenue. But we can also expect to wash baby's hair with solar heated water and the kitchen will provide an opportunity for daughters to learn Western-style cake making.

I'm still puzzled with that elderly white-haired gentleman about to hit the cat with a frying pan at the bottom of the sign but it could be a magnifying glass he has in his hand and related to the Dalek-like security camera fitted to every home (Why? The actual crime rate around here is almost zero).

There's something missing here eh? Let me think. Well, with 44 houses on a plot about 60 metres by 40 it could simply be 'space' but that's not what I had in mind. I was thinking more of 'man' as in husband. But once you have a child or two to realise your dreams and ambitions with who needs one of those hanging about the place, much better for him to be consigned to the busy office. Some things don't change much. As the old Japanese proverb goes "The ideal husband is healthy and out of the house."

Midwinter sunshine

I've spent so much time zonked out in bed these last few days that I made a special effort this morning to get out for a short 'constitutional' walk around the area with no particular plan in mind. Lovely to see that bright midwinter sunshine after a month of Lancashire gloom and short northern winter days even if it was cold.

On my circuit of our little Sakuta valley I bumped into W-san. His white Toyota pick-up was parked in the lane opposite the big polythene tent he grows grapes in and he had already been foraging in the forest for mushrooms this morning. Of course he gave me some to take home in a plastic bag. W-san's English is a lot better than my Japanese - he worked for a time as a young man at the Indian Embassy and later taught English. Now retired he farms land that has been in his family since the Edo era and lives in a big old Kadzusa farmhouse that must be pretty chilly at this time of year.

On the way back I noticed this little scene that says a lot about the differences between England and Japan. On a small patch between the lane and the Sobu Line track someone had just finished working with a mattock, preparing this little bit of 'free land' for planting out some vegetables. This is 'growing stuff to eat' eh? Who in England would bother cultivating a roadside pocket handkerchief like this, and how long would it be left unmolested if they tried?

Back in Japan again

So, back in Japan at last. I landed at Narita on Wednesday after a pretty tough month sorting out family affairs in the wake of Bill's death in December.

Mu mum is moved to a residential home that I hope she'll like; the staff there seem very kind and it is close to our house in Lancashire. Probably the hardest work for me though was starting to clear her former home so that it can be sold. Not just emotonally taxing stuff but physically hard too and very cold at this time of year.

The consequence was that I got a cold that led to bronchitis and so at last to bronchial asthma and arrived back in Japan with a pretty spectacular cough that was just going on and on and on. Lucky that I didn't take it a step further and get pneumonia. Dodgy coughs don't endear you to Japanese people in confined spaces like areoplanes and I was wondering if I'd get pulled aside for a health check at immigration but I managed to stop hacking long enough to squeak through.

Since I got home I've just slept; what a treat. Seventy two hours big zzzz's was just what I needed and the antibiotics prescribed by my doctor here have now kicked in and I can breathe again too. Bloomin' cold for the time of year but at least it is sunny here eh? When I'm awake to notice.

Let's hope that I can settle down to some regular blogging again!