View from the top

I went up to the top of Chiba Port Tower today. Can't think why I didn't do it before as the view of the city and Tokyo Bay from up there is amazing. I was told by the girl who operates the elevator (and who - of course had a complete script to get through in the eighty seconds that it takes to the top but she did give me a nice grin too before she opened the doors and bowed) that from the top on a fine day you could see Mt. Fuji. There's a suprise eh? But sadly not today.

It only costs 410 yen - £2. A lot cheaper than Blackpool Tower and at 137 metres a lot higher too. I'd always thought that this finger-like building housed the port operational facilities, like some kind of marine control tower, but it seems not. They built it for fun - to celebrate the Prefecture passing the five million population mark in the 1985 Census. Basically it's just a load of girders inside surrounded by glass and the elevator goes up the tube to the viewing platform.

Bearing in mind that I've walked just about every street of this bloomin' city now there were about a million familar things for me to look at from a new angle from this eryie. Perhaps he biggest suprise me was how prominent some of the more recent condominium housing blocks were from this angle - viewed from the ground you miss out on how much volume they contain.

I enjoyed my trip heavenward but from the moment I got in that lift I just couldn't get the thought out of my head "if there's a big earthquake while I'm up here we'll be looping the loop this far off the ground". It's a condition of living in Japan of course, I get it in any high building I go in here. In addition to the usual vertigo you just can't help wondering what would happen if the 'Big One' struck when you were so far from terra firma. Sometimes I want to fly like a bird but - hey! - that is just in dreams guys.

What is in your 'bait box'

I suspect that if you asked any Englishman - certainly of my generation - what 'class' he belonged to he would answer you in a moment. I wonder why it is such a strong part of our cultural background. Me - despite an 'education' and a job in managament - well I'm definitely 'working class'. But maybe 'working class' as it was fifty years ago rather than now. It would never occur to me to think of myself as 'middle class' for a moment.

I don't notice this nearly so much in Japan. Until the nineteenth century Japanese society was fiercely segregated by 'rank' or 'caste' but everyone was equally 'Japanese' for sure - well, except for minority groups like the Ainu and Okinawa islanders. Here people from wildly different life circumstances live next door to each other comfortably.

It came into my mind today walking from Makuhari-kaigan up to Makuharihongo. Cross the Hamada land drain and you move from one of the highest tech areas on the planet - where the cream of technology innovators plan the future of the internet in glass skyscrapers - and into a world of pallets stacked in yards, piles of worn tyres and the sound of hammers. As it happened I did this today a few minutes before twelve and arrived at the Sun-kus combi 'convenience store' just as everyone was piling out of the gate of the JR Keio Line maintenance depot looking for some lunch in the sunshine. The expert shop staff made short work of that queue and the men who keep the Tokyo commuter trains in good order were soon sitting on walls and benches along the road with their hashi and bento.

Here was a scene that I could instantly recognise from childhood. Half an hour of peace to eat your 'bait' as we called it in North East England. "What did your wife put in your bait box today?" Corned beef sandwches? Tuna and rice? Lovely - I felt at home there.

'Aida' looms

I'm told that I was singing in my sleep last night. With all the rehearsals we have had recently I'm not suprised. Tomorrow I need to be on stage in time for a final rehearsal at ten, and then we will be singing 'Aida' highlights 'for real' with the band around 2:30 pm.

There's a group called 'Fascinating Aida' isn't there? If they are still going they must be almost as old as me, I'll have to do some reseach. But I doubt they ever sang quite as well as we do just at the moment!

However we had an interesting problem when we finally got to sing with the band on Friday. We can't actually hear ourselves singing. No - the band play so loud that from where I'm standing the world hearing-wise ends just beyond the tympani and the second trombones. Beyond that the only informaton on the rest of the life comes from the tip of the conductor's baton. It's a good lesson in the importance of watching him.

But if we can't hear ourselves singing, everyone else out there can. Each of us is wired to the theatre sound system. That's scary, we might be miles off pitch but would we even know about it? Maybe every syllable od my awful Japanese pronunciation is getting amplified a million times out there too and I just don't know about it.

So keep your fingers cossed for us! This performance 'aint going to be subtle, we'll have to give it every ounce of 'wellie' we possess. But let's hope we can stay in tune eh?

Rain on the roof

I thought when I woke up today that it hadn't rained in the night. I'd been listening for it - I like to hear the rain from under my quilt - but it must have crept up very quietly. It was raining alright and it has been in a soft-spoken way all through the day too.

At my mother's last house in Cleveleys there was a conservatory at the back and a couple of times recently on visits I went out there to listen to special sound of rain falling on the glass roof. Now there's a conservatory in the house Julia and I have a half-share in each in Lancashire too, but since we bought it I've never had enough time to sit down anywhere in that house yet it seems.

Still, it is definitely on my list of things to do; one day soon I'll find the space to just sit in a conservatory and listen to the rain on the glass. It will become my shumi (skill). I think if you listen carefully enough it would stop being one general quality of sound and dissolve into the separate impact of all those tens of thousands of raindrops hitting the glass one by one, that would be something good to hear eh? You could know it but never describe it.

When I was a young child suffering from a weak chest days of sickness spent in bed were often be brightened up by watching raindrops having 'races' down the bedroom window pane. So I've grown up to love the rain, and walking around in it. Just so long as I've got good waterproof clothes on.

Gates and cameras

Well, the end of this 'marathon' spell of field work really is in sight now - maybe another five days walking will see it complete and then I can blog about something else!

Today it was across the Hanamigawa and into Makuhari Bay Town. 'Makuhari' is the north west tip of Chiba city and there are four distinct parts to it. The oldest is the original village near Makuhari station, a very important fishing port until forty years ago but now totally landlocked more than two miles from the shore. Then there are the Makuhari areas of public housing built on the reclaimed foreshore in the 1970's. And north of there the Makuhari Informational City located on new land in an area that was once deep water in Tokyo Bay - the 'state of the art' international computing and business centre built fifteen years ago. And finally Makuhari Bay Town, just being built now to the south near the sea and providing expensive housing for rich salarymen working in the Informational City. Benri ne? Convenient eh?

I first 'walked' Bay Town four years ago and there wasn't much there except grassy building lots but the population now is over 30,000. It is all so unlike everywhere else in Chiba, it feels more like the jazzier bits of California. There are a few areas in Tokyo, like Shinagawa, with a similar feel but in Makuhari wide boulevards run from nowhere to nowhere and none of it is TOO 'high rise'. There are a few twenty storey condominium blocks around but most are five or eight with internal courtyards and they bear a curious resemblance to modern Copenhagen or bits of Paris.

What did shock me though - and 'shock' isn't too strong a word - is the degree to which architects and planners have made this a 'secure' place. All the areas built recently have restricted gated access and constant surveillance. Why? This is an place with a miniscle crime rate even by UK standards let alone compared with North American cities. But somehow the 'fear' has been imported anyway despite the reality. It's an industry now eh? Like selling cigarettes. Great for the salesmen of cameras and alarms and locks and bolts but not good for any future sense of 'civil society' for sure. You can't buy safety by shutting the 'unwashed' out - ask the Romans.

Sleeper service

Scanning through a recent copy of 'Tetsudo Fan' (Japan Railfan Magazine) I noticed an article on the 'Naha Akatsuki', the sleeper train form Tokyo down to Kyuushu from where, I guess, most passengers once embarked on the steamer for Okinawa. I dread to think how much it costs to do that now, but for most passengers today the journey must be a luxury holiday option and the rail part must take around eghteen hours. It's a heck of a long way down Japan by train. Of course ou can fly to Naha in about ninety minutes from Haneda and it will cost you less than £100.

Maybe this article suggests that the train is not for much longer, my Japanese isn't up to spotting such hints in the text. I'd like to travel on at least one JR sleeper service though while they still operate.

I think in Britain now we only have one sleeper service left - the 'Caledonian Sleeper' between London (Euston) and Inverness. This has nothing at all to do with the vision and foresight of UK 'transport strategists' and a lot to do with the dogged determination of the people of Inverness to dismember any Scottish politician who dared to support the withdrawal of the train some years ago. So it still lives and breathes, for now.

I love travelling by sleeper. I've used the service to Inverness several times when I worked in the north of Scotland. At one time you could even take a sleeper from Preston down to London, dozing off in your berth in Lancashire and then getting coupled up to a mail train in the middle of the night and dumped in London in time for an early breakfast. I've never seen any history of British sleeper services but it would make an interesting read eh?

North American readers used to have an incredible choice of Pullman sleeper services. What was your favourite trip?

Chilly and Damp

We had a sudden change in the weather today and the temperature plummeted to what you would expect for February. My 'beat' today was not the most interesting either - a big area of danchi ('housing estate') in Asobe and then along the shore to the mouth of the Hanamigawa.

You might think that I should be grateful for anywhere 'along the shore' eh? Better that sitting in a bloomin' office any day you say. Indeed I am but in truth this bit of coast is entirely man-made and about two miles further out into the Bay than it was forty years ago. It is straight, scruffy and littered with a forest of "Thou shalt not" signs. Dog owners, fishermen, men with putters and golf balls, kids with footballs, youths with skateboards - if you are one of these Chiba City Office wants to pick a bone with you.

Just got my fourth map done and the drizzle set in, coming in soft silver sheets across a chilly Tokyo Bay. Time to head for Kemigawa-kaigan station and shops and find somewhere warm that sold hot coffee.

All this reminded me of other cold drizzly places by the sea. What is your favourite? Once I got a soaking while camping at Loch Torridon one cold June and the only way I could get the time was to walk to a phone box about a mile away. Some humourless operator in a warm exchange in Inverness insisted that I had to put four pennies in the slot before he told me that it was 4:51 AM. Then we struck camp breakfastless and hiked along the sea shore to a Youth Hostel at Craig, literally in the middle of nowhere, not even a road. I think it was burned down since.

Anyway we had a hot coffee when we got there too, and a bucket full of bacon and eggs probably.

Chiba concert

Five of us from the choir headed into Chiba this afternoon for a concert. Interesting stuff - a choir 'juku' ('cram school') was putting on its annual 'do' in the city art gallery and their programme was a long one - in the first half a lot of shorter choir pieces and in the second half two Bach canatas.

The Bach I really enjoyed. It was a 'professional' performance with good string and harpsichord support and the singers themselves were enthusiastic. There were about the number of muisicans that Bach himself would have in mind and although no-one there was earning a living from music-making it was clear from the standard of solo singing that most had had professional voice training. It was all nicely 'crowded in' too as eighteenth century music should be, we were almost sitting in each other's seats. Maybe the only thing I would fault was that their pronunciation was too 'English' - German is a gutteral language that can't be represented in katakana and they would have benefitted from help from a native speaker getting their tongues around those old German biblical quotations.

The other items I'm not so sure. The performance was very polished - too polished for me somehow. There is a definite knack to singing polyphony well, something to do with how you listen to each other's voices, and they didn't have it. Also - and for me annoyingly - they had some kind of instrumental accompaniment with everything, like that old Python sketch about 'spam'. Even a 'cello with Byrd's "Ave verum corpus" which for me was hardly better than using a Jaws Harp or kazoo. What an old Tory I am eh?

I realise that I find it hard to sit through a choral concert, to be prepared just to sit there and listen. Music wasn't written by listeners, it was written by the people who performed it. But there's something here about being willing to be on the 'receiving end', learning to be a good listener. I'll have to 'sit' with it.

The Dead shall be Raised

I came across this spot today a few minutes walk from the Hanamigawa. It is rare to find a neglected graveyard in this part of Japan and the reason here seems to be that very soon it will have to go to make way for a road. A new bridge has gone in across the river and this is the line of the approach on the north bank.

I wonder how they will sort it all out. In 'Corinthians' in the Bible it says "The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptable and we shall be changed" But my guess is that one of Daiwa Engineering's bright yellow bulldozers will be doing the raising here long before then. Will the graves be moved to another nearby site? At least it is easier in Japan, just some monumental masonry and jars of ashes to move. Not like England where moving a graveyard involves exhuming remains and coffins.

We assume that when we are dead and 'planted' that our remains will be undisturbed but it must be common to get 'moved on' in just a decade or two. I never checked it out but I think that in Britain you usually only get a lease on a grave plot.

Long ago when I worked at the brewery in Blackburn we demolished the old place and the bottling store site (maybe the ugliest brick building ever constructed!) was dynamited to create a supermarket site. Under the yard they discovered some human remains that, the police established, were from a 'fever cemetery' dating from the 1830's. Not only had these people died of infectious disease but for most of the years since drays and delivery vans had been parked over their unmarked graves. I'm glad to say the company paid for their reburial somewhere more peaceful.

Let's hope that both they, and these deceased farmers of Makuhari, find somewhere to rest in peace at last.

Gladiatorial ambitions

The last two weeks at Wednesday choir practice we have been 'warming up' to singing some Aida 'highlights' to sing with our local brass band.

I don't know the exact history but when our choir was first formed ten years ago it was an offshoot of the 'Nogiku Plaza Brass Band' and so our official name in full is the 'Nogiku Plaza Brass Band Chorus', and once a year we clebrate this historical link when we perform with the band at their annual concert.

It is actually a 'wind band' rather than a brass band because it includes several 'desks' of wood-wind and I have to say that they are VERY good. It's a pleasure and an honour to sing with them and we like to give it our best.

Singing with a big band means giving it a lot of wellie and the Triumphal March from Aida is a certainly piece that you can give a lot of wellie to. I'm still feeling my way with the music because we are singing it with a Japanese libretto but on the night the boys in the back row will be louder than the trumpets and trombones in front, rely on it. Verdi knew how to write a tune that you can do more than just hum along to. I went to Egypt once too; well, to be honest just walked a mile across the border at Eilat but it still counts.

Seems that we are going to be wearing 'kuroi-kuroi' (black shirt, black trousers). An opportunity wasted there I think. For myself I fancied a golden gladiator's helmet and a red toga holding a spear and with the ladies all dressed up in those Tutenkamun head dresses. But I guess I'll have to go with the flow. Can't go dressed as a gladiator on my own eh? It might seem strange

Tea Ceremony

Over to Mobara this morning in a very gentle early Spring drizzle. Edera makes the trip a couple of times a month to study tea ceremony with two friends from the choir and today I tagged along as we had planned all to go out to an Indian restaurant in Tokefor lunch afterwards. We had also hoped to do a bit of plum blossom viewing too but 'rain stopped play' on that one.

As it worked out I ended up kind of joining in on the tea ceremony myself. My ankles are well past sitting in seiza on the tatami for more than about ten agonising seconds but I pulled a chair up to the entrance to the washitsu and they brought me my bowl there.

I'm no expert on the intricate movements of preparing and serving tea but I like to watch. If you are used to being in a meditation hall it all feels very familiar.

Afterwards I was asked if we had anything similar around serving tea in England. I think we do. The way afternoon tea used to be served on fine china with neat sandwiches and oodles of politeness isn't really that different from the spirit of the Japanese ceremony although the forms are. Bowing isn't something most British people do often but you wouldn't get far in Japan without it.

Keisei Bus

I had to catch the bus this morning between Sakura JR and Keisei rail stations. It isn't much more than a mile but there's a steep climb up past the museum park and as I had a heck of a lot of walking planned for later I thought I'd use 'wheels' while I had the chance.

There were about a dozen of us sitting in the sun outside the station waiting for the bus, and two ladies in their seventies were examining the timetable on the stop carefully. However the twenty-four clock seemed to have passed them by and they were happily looking in the '19:00' panel rather than the '9:00' panel further up the board. "What's the time now?" one asked the girl in front of me who it seems had also spotted what they were doing because she muttered something polite along the lines of "There's one in two minutes."

And indeed there was. I remember how we all struggled back in the 1960's when "Continental Time" - as we loved to call it with a hint of sarcasm in our voices - was first introduced into Britain. When these two lasies were young timetables were in kanji, not Roman numerals, so I guess they weren't doing too badly.

I've been using Keisei buses a lot this last couple of weeks. Using buses in Japan is easy - as long as you don't get it wrong of course. When you get aboard you must remember to take that little paper ticket offered by the machine just inside the rear entry door (unless you get on at the terminus when you won't get one). It's proof of the place you got on. Then, in the front of the bus, is a kind of rolling electronic 'scorecard' which shows how much it currently costs to alight for someone boarding at your stage.

You have to put the correct money in a box next to the driver but as there's a change machine that will even change 1000 yen notes that isn't a problem. I naively thought that people here were extraordinarily honest as the driver never bothers to take a look at how much you put in, but last week ours picked up one passenger for only dropping 160 yen down the hole and not the required 170. It was then I realised that underneath the simple box is an incredibly sophisticated coin counter and accounting machine that displays for him what you paid. This bit of kit also sorts the coins given as fares and loads them as change for later passengers too.

Neat.

Omikuji

I managed to make a mistake in my work this morning which cost me an hour but in the end it proved to be a mistake worth making. I'd just completed the last map east of the Hanamigawa River and crossed over to start the next section in Amado-cho when I realised that I'd missed a whole chunk off the final map I'd completed yesterday. There it was, visible over the tops of the bamboo across the river, and more than a mile of 'dead time' to hike back there. I muttered a few words to myself about carelessness.

But it did give me the opportunity to make a loop through Hanashima-mura - 'Flower Island Village' - and take a look at an old country temple there. It is a very pretty place by the river surrounded by tall vivid green bamboo and home of the Hanashima Kannon, a wooden carving of Kanzeon dating from 1256. I didn't see the Kannon today though, she is only shown once every thirty three years, presumably so that people have just one opportunity to see her. I wonder if the next time will be in my lifetime.

Near the entrance I noticed one tree so covered in omikuji that it looked as if it was in blossom. Omikuji are part of the Japanese tradition of fortune telling. You buy the sealed paper at the temple, sometimes even from the ubiquitous vending machine, and then open it to see what is coming your way in terms of love, money and happiness. For many - and always if the news isn't so good! - the tradition is that you leave it tied to a tree at the temple in the hope of softening some of the consequences of karma coming your way. If the future isn't so good, make an offering of it to Buddha ...

Of course we only buy omikuji for fun eh? Like reading your horoscope in the morning paper ...

Terrace Houses

Out in Kotehashidai today and the weather was bloomin' gorgeous, if a bit windy for carrying maps around. I'm as red as a beetroot already and I'm going to have to start wearing sun blocker and a hat with a brim soon. Sorry you guys up there in the snowy north!

In one area I came across these houses whch are the closest I've seen in Japan to English terrace housing. OK, they aren't THAT like the streets of Salford or Byker; as far as 'terrace houses' go they are pretty Japanese eh? But very rare, it is an unusal find. And they did remind me of some housing in the older parts of Crawley New Town which I knew well as a teenager back in the 1960's.

I haven't been back to Crawley for a long time, but forty years ago it was socially a very interesting place. People really believed in the 'New Town' ideal then and families were moved from the slums of Lambeth and Battersea down into the fields of Sussex and given decent housing. I seem to remember it all 'working' - Crawley was a nice place. Nobody took a cynical view of taking families from inner cities and putting them in a pleasant community. It was a good place and time to grow up.

A very similar thing happened in Japan when Tokyo's central wards began to empty out in the 1960's, although there it was rising property values and the change to commerical use that drove the process. People arrived blinking in the bright sunshine of places like Kotehashidai. But here that 'New Town dream' mght have persisted a bit better and perhaps because people were poorer. A lot of the families that moved here then are now living in the area as a second or third generation and the older people who made the move haven't been driven out by rising rents and problems on the streets. Nothing wrong with new towns ...

Surgical masks

Catching the bus back down to Shin-Kemigawa station this afternoon our driver was wearing a white gauze surgical mask, and it struck me that it was probably at least the fiftieth I'd seen today. If there are colds or 'flu around Japanese public places soon come to look like an episode of 'E.R'. or, in British terms, 'Holby General' or (and this is showing my age!) 'Emergency Ward Ten'.

I realise that over the last few years I've come to think of it as entirely normal for people to wander around the streets wearing surgical masks but of course it doesn't happen in Britain, we rather make it a virtue to drag ourselves to the office sick and then happily sneeze over everyone. In most places except Japan people would think it was weird if you wore one. We generally restrict surgical masks to hospitals.

I'd always thought of this surgical mask thing as an act of kindness and consideration done to protect others from your germs when you are sick yourself but lately I've become a bit suspicious of this. Masks seem to be a lot commoner on shop and office staff and people like the driver with contact with the wider public. It might be that they are just more prone to get sick but I detect a healthy slice of self-interest at work here and that most of them are simply taking care not to breathe everyone else's used air just in case they catch something. In Japan people are sometimes just a bit obsessive about cleanliness and health eh? It's a cultural thing but I'm not sure I like people wearing surgical masks to avoid contanination by me when I'm not even sneezing. It says something about me I feel I don't want to know. That's my cultural thing.

I'd like to know where and when this habit started too. I have a feeling that it goes back a long way before the introduction of surgical masks from the West 150 years ago.

Friendly Places

Up around Miyanogi-cho today, a little cluster of suburbanised villages near the Higashi Kanto motorway interchange. Not much comfort around there so before I harnessed up the huskies I nipped into the loo in the Perie food store at Inage station. To my alarm as soon as I sat down a soft female voice murmered something encouraging in my ear and I was unexpectedly deafened by the sound of some sylvan waterfall. Must have been one of those 'modesty sounds' but it sounded like Niagara to me. It's the first one I've encountered in Chiba. Then, when I stood up, this toilet thanked me and flushed itself. All very alarming.

I'm not sure about over friendly toilets. What if one suddenly 'took against you' eh? But I have been thinking a lot recently about how places often feel friendly - or not - and been wondering what the difference is and why.

Better name no names here but there are bits of Chiba where dogs wag their tails and people smile and say hello and there are other bits just along the road where the dogs snarl at you through the fence and no one ever gives you the time of day. To be clear I'm talking about the older bits of town here - places that fifty years ago were farming villages that got absorbed into the bigger place. Obviously the larger new danchi - housing estates and public housing areas - are often more impersonal although usually friendly enough.

For the life of me I can't see any difference between friendly and unfriendly areas. In England I lived in a friendly village and out in leafy Chiba-ken I live in a very friendly village and my theory now is that how these places turn out depends on a relatively few important 'opinion formers' at a crucial time. When those new houses were first built and when the first new faces showed up if the key people in the old community said "nice to meet you" then the place continued to have strong social bonds. But if those key people said "we don't want anything to do with newcomers" then the whole community developed a 'bad taste' that hasn't gone away.

Well, that's my theory. Anyone got a better one?

Stand and Deliver!

I make some effort to 'sit on my hands' with opinions when it comes to blogging but something I read this evening on the BBC News website had me knawing my desk. British Airways are about to start surcharging their customers for checking in a second bag, even if it is within the 20kg limit.

When they say 'surcharge' they mean £240 (five hundred dollars!) for a long haul round trip. Let me make that clear in case you didn't understand. This isn't if you have excess weight - this is simply for checking in a second bag. So if, for example, you are elderly and struggle to carry one heavy case - don't take two!

I wonder what the actual additional cost of checking in and handling that second bag is? Maybe a fiver, I can't believe more. And of course there's no extra weight on the plane. There are destinations to which this new charge will not apply, like the USA and Canada, where 'local government regulations' don't permit surcharging. In other words they can't 'try it on' with such an outrageous policy in America. But where they can get away with it, they plan to dip into your wallet in a big way.

Personally I can't imagine why anyone would be so daft as to even consider travelling British Airways if they had a choice. I used them in a dire emergency to fly to the UK in December because they were the only one with vacant seats left - and I could see why. They haven't mellowed since I stopped using them more than ten years ago. The good airlines to use to Japan from Europe are SAS, Luthansa and KLM.

Am I alone in seeing something really terribly wrong here? Surely not. This isn't just a question of money is it? Here is a large corporation to which the UK government have given monopoly rights over routes and landing 'slots' simply abusing their power. There is no justification for this charge at all, it is simply a new way of getting a lot more money from some hapless passengers.
Not so long ago 'entrepreneurs' who held pistols to their client's heads with a hearty "Stand and Deliver! Your money or your life!" met a sticky nemisis at the end of a rope but now I guess they are rewarded with management bonuses.

This is not uniquely a British thing of course. But I have the impression that thanks to a spineless government - Heck! They have even been having a 'go' themselves with their own £80 extra airport tax! - we are probably the worst at it. We really do richly deserve that label 'rip-off society'. What has gone so wrong? People are very aware now of just how often they are abused like this and I think it could all come to a very bad end.

At the doctor's

An 'extra' day off today for some eye tests. Purely routine - my doctor wanted them checked in case my diabetes was affecting my retinas. It turned out that my eyes are fine, but it is an annoying test to take involving drops to make your irises dilate which means being half-blind for a couple of hours afterwards and avoiding bright lights for a while. Inevitably today's weather was piercing sunlight and shirt-sleeve temperatures but who is complaining eh?

The optician is in a corner of the doctor's surgery building and for all I know might even be his cousin. Sitting in the waiting room I couldn't but reflect on how different, how very different, it all was to the life of our own dear British health care system. No 'group practices' here.

I like our local doctor and not just because he speaks good English. His surgery is on one side of the the yard of a large Shimosa farmhouse which is S-sensei's family home which I guess his family still share with his dad who was the doctor here before. Old S-sensei Senior. Just through the farm gate is another building - the local pharmacy - which I guess S-sensei has a business interest in too. Around here his family IS medical care. The sunny waiting room is usually packed with village people, who today were happily discussing how LDP politicians should spend some time in the wilderness for a change. Outside the window there is a row of ceremonial rice-straw stooks and a replica haniwa figurine.

Next door to S-sensei's estate is a country Buddhist temple and I was idly wondering if he had an interest in that too. That would be the perfect arrangement eh? If you didn't cure them at least you could pick up some business on the funeral.

Hanamigawa

I was up in the very north of Chiba-shi today, a part of the area I've never visited before. I hesitate to say "a part of the city" because those outlying suburbs and villages are far from what I would count as 'real' Chiba, separated from the rest of the area by the Hanamigawa River and a few kilometres of open country. The natural orientation of the place is more east to west, and the Keisei Railway running through it heads into Tokyo by a quite different route to Chiba's JR tracks.

Hanamigawa - 'Flower-Viewing River' - is a rather mysterious river to me because it avoids roads and so is out of the public eye. Until the 1930's it was rather small too, but then some vast land reclamation works further north led to the river being made into a canal to drain Imba-gun marshes. This added several square kilometres of new rice growing land to the Prefecture. People had been trying to complete this project for three hundred years and in the end it involved digging massive trenches to re-route all the rivers in the area. Now water that once ran north into the Tonegawa - Japan's largest river - usually flows south into Tokyo Bay through the widened Hanamigawa. I say 'usually' because when there are big floods following typhoons it actually runs both north and south, that was part of the engineering solution.

We tend to think of big civil engineering projects as a post 1960's thing in Japan but of course they have been at it since the first spade was invented. The Tokugawa shoguns probably made more and even bigger changes than the current Liberal Democratic Party. In Britain we have had our moments with this kind of thing - and especially draining the East Anglian fens - but nothing on the scale attempted around here.

Cubicle Queue

Whenever I head out for field work I always make a point of using the 'facilities' at stations before I go out through the barrier. JR stations are well provided with loos but you have to be on the platform side - once you are outside you are reliant on shops, restaurants and the occasional park WC. Over two years of pavement slogging I've become a real expert on this topic believe me.

Nearly all JR stations have toilets and they are usually spotless, thanks to a dedicated army of cleaners. Even the lowliest suburban station has a lady dressed in blue overall and forage cap with a whole armoury of buckets and mops and the results are very impressive compared with the usually disgusting facilities on British stations. Time was long ago when it used to be the foreigners who had the dirty toilets eh? But let's not get too morbid, we will just end up blaming Tony Blair for that too.

As in France, but somehow even more so here because their blue uniforms make them so 'visible' - the JR toilet cleaners are always mopping briskly around your feet while you are trying to concentrate on the job in hand. I wish my Japanese was better because they must make an interesting bunch to talk to, they take their work very seriously. I sense a few genuine philosophers there ...

Tsuga station seems to have been the site of a few lavatory-related happenings for me recentl.y Two weeks ago I was standing there when a lady of about seventy came striding in, banged on the cubicle door just behind me and shouted "Are you in there husband?" "I'm NOT your husband" replied a voice and she wandered off happily. If only it was so simple to dispose of spouses in real life eh?

But last week two plumbers with drain rods and a big bag of wrenches and the cleaning lady herself were all busy in there together as I checked in before heading off. Some hapless customer was in the cubicle as they rodded and banged and mopped outside his door and a second guy was already waiting his turn. "He's taking a long time" commented the cleaner to her small queue "I'll go and check if the ladies is clear". "No it's OK, I'll wait here". "No problem, there might be no-one there" ...

I hurried off before this surreal conversation reached any conclusion. Different cultures eh?

Isle of Omiyadai

Quite a 'red letter' day in terms of making progress with field studies today. In one mighty walk I completed the last three remaining maps in the south of the city - out on the eastern margin of town - and then walked across to an 'island' of urban land in Wakaba-ku and completed five sheets there too. So now work is complete right up to Konakadai and next week I can start beavering away at the northern side of town towards Narashino.

This 'island' has been in my sights for some time, a place with a certain mystery to it as I'd never been there. It's not really an island of course, it is an area of 'new town' about two miles by two miles surrounded by open fields and woodlands but it is sufficiently urban to qualify as a fragment of city in it's own right - what in Japan they call a 'densely inhabited district'. It is called Omiyadai - 'Omiya Heights'.

Did it live up to expectations? Well, it wasn't Hawaii for sure, it looked pretty much like a lot of other danchi housing areas around Chiba. But it did have a feel of 'being somewhere different' that pleased me. Places always have some capacity to suprise. Only having seen aerial photographs I'd expected somewhere rather like a British 'New Town' but it wasn't like that at all.

On islands - and I speak fom real experience having once lived for a year on a very remote one - it is possible to be very isolated from the rest of the world. I have a feeling that Omiyadai was like that, you would have to make an effort to catch a bus to get out from that place. Otherwise you would just, well - 'be there' eh?

Rip-cords at the ready

I've been so busy this week that the last couple of mornings I've caught an earlier train into Chiba to get a head start with fieldwork. At Sakura, the junction with the line down from Narita, our 'all-stations' stopping train arrives just ahead of a kaisoku - a 'semi-fast' that then runs a few minutes behind us into Chiba before continuing on to Tokyo and Yokohama.

If you want any hope of a seat into Tokyo a change at Sakura is a 'must'. Stay on the earlier train into Chiba station and you would stand more chance of getting a seat on the space shuttle than on the following kaisoku. And of course us 'regulars' know exactly where to sprint to on the adjoining platform, it's a 'dog-eat-dog' world out there when it comes on travelling on JR at busy times.

Today I didn't need to change myself and I really had to laugh at the spectacle. As we rolled into Sakura platform 4 about a thousand anxious commuters were edgily lined up at the doors rip-cords at the ready and poised to jump. When the 'green light' was on and we were 'over target' they went out into the blue yonder like old newsreel of the paratroopers over Arnhem.

All this put me in mind of my next big money-earning idea - the 'commuter harness'. It's a bit like a standard parachute harness but instead of a 'shute you hook it over one of the white hoop handles that we all strap-hang from on JR trains when there are no seats. It then supports you hanging from the carraige roof like a sleeping bat as you doze your way into the Big Smoke. All you need is an alarm clock to let you know when you are near Tokyo eh?

I had this idea from an old photo I have of a former college friend - who often reads this blog - who we once hung up in the wardrobe to sleep with a coat hanger through his vest armholes after he came back from the pub. Ingenious way to save on space eh?

Japanese Driver's Licence

Wednesdays is supposed to be our 'day off' but lately we seem to have had an endless stream of 'things to do' and yesterday turned out to be the busiest day of the week. During the time I've been in Japan I've been driven on my UK licence and an International Driving Permit but just how technically 'legal' it has sometimes been I'm not sure. I was determined this month to get a full Japanese licence in any case.

In Britain we only have one licence centre - the DVLA down in Swansea - and everything is done by post, phone or over the internet. Applying for licences here has to be done at the Prefectural Licensing Office, a bit like the old County Council offices that existed in Britain years ago, and of course you need to go along in person. In leafy Chiba-ken the office is a big building near Makuhari-kaihan. As 'foreigner exchanging licence from other agency' you have to be there at Window 10 between 8:30 and 9:00 or 1:00 and 1:30 with a sheaf of documents and translations of documents and a fistful of cash.

When we got there just before one there were maybe five hundred people milling around but most were Japanese renewing licences and lined up at lone of the seven 'eyesight and aptitude test' booths at then end of a hall the size of an airport. I find Japanese officaldom pretty stressful and you definitely have to get the right sort of mind-set for coping with it which is basically that you check and re-check that you have absolutely everything they are likely to ask for and - more importantly - that you then just let them do all the thinking for you. It's hard to explain but there's always a kind of minor conspiracy in progress between you and officialdom here. They are the strict though loving parents, you are the children. They have your interest at heart and despite your carelessness they care for you and somehow together you will muddle though all this stuff that the 'powers that be' have thought up. This is very unlike going to a British government office.

At one stage - someone wanted to see my previous cancelled British passport now gathering dust in a drawer in Lancashire to check that I'd not been living sneakily in Japan for the last 34 years - I thought that I was going to be seeing a lot of Makuhari over the coming weeks. But then - suddenly - the eyetest machine and a photograph and to my suprise I was sitting near the exit waiting for someone to bring me my crisp new Japanese Driver's Licence. No test! - they liked my face it seems. 'British licence - no problem sir, that will do nicely!' A 'driver with experience'. 'Jozu' ('skillful') was the word he used ...

Heh! Heh! Don't want to gloat you guys but it seems that they do give you Americans a hard time in Chiba, make you come back and take a full driving test and it really does all take forever. The American waiting next to me had not only been thoroughly tested and disinfected but also had to put a 'New Driver' sticker on his car for a year so that the police could keep a special eye on him. Shame eh?