1000 Yen Haircut

Edera back from her travels today - I picked her up at Narita this morning. She was looking tired; no matter how often you make long flights they still take it out of you. But a few hours sleep in her own bed has freshened her up.

I'm seeing a lot of Narita this week. On Sunday morning Julia and her friend Peter arrive from England, but at Terminal 1, not Terminal 2. It is only about 40 minutes from here, a nice drive through the leafier lanes of Chiba-ken. You are always stopped at the back gate on this side of the airport. The police want to see your passport and peer into the boot of your car. I have a slight suspicion that you could smuggle at least two 'baddies' in under a blanket in the back seat - just so long as they weren't hiding in the boot 'cos that's where they will look. Also I wonder what would happen if, as a foreigner I didn't take my pssport along and just had my ID card and driver's licence. In theory no need to take my passport with me as I'm not flying anywhere but somehow I don't think Narita officaldom would find it easy to rationalise having a passport-less gaijin around.

To smarten up for the occasion I had a haircut Wednesday at the 'Very-Q' at the Maruhei store in Yachimata. A thousand yen - £4.60 - why pay more? You put your money in the machine and get a card and give it to the barber. Not bad eh? "Mens' and Ledies" it says in English outside but I never saw a 'ledy' having a haircut there. This time though I was just beaten to the ticket machine by a nervous looking farmer of around my age and his wife who was just there to ensure 'fair play' somehow rather than for a trim. They were real 'inaka' - 'country types' - from the very leafliest of leafy bits of Chiba-ken. Their painful shyness gave that impression of being a bit clueless but they would know more about the skills of cultivating diakon or peanuts or carrots than you could ever imagine there WAS to be known.

Once he was in the chair and the sheet was around his neck she wanted to go across to the supermarket but the automatic door wouldn't open for her. How did she do that? Maybe she was just too small, too slight, for the 'magic eye' to even notice her. She tried at least five times and started to look despairing - I was reminded of those Woody Allen sketches where he says his food mixer and other appliances are out to 'get him'. In the end I walked over and it opened for me first time and she fled out into the car park with many 'sumimasens'. Good grief!

With guests here new 'blogs' might be a bit erratic over the next few days.

Beam me down Pussycat

I think that these two felines are getting pretty bored with my company. I haven't been around that much anyway - I'm either in my study or working outside - and they have been spending the best part of the last two days either sleeping or washing.

Wash and sleep, sleep, wash, sleep. Is that all cats do? I suppose so, and yet when there are four of us here there seems to be muc more 'pace' to life. But I can't complain, I've been hoping to avoid a fight and so far, touch wood, no sign of one. The beefy male that was making Tora's life a misery last week seems to have vanished. Job done I guess.

Now the only interest our two take in me is to hammer on my bedroom door at 4:30 am demanding to be fed and let out. Cats know a mug when they see one.

Pero is always like Houdini. You can rely on her to break out of the house, usually through some 'not quite shut' mosquito screen upstairs. She is a master at traversing every 'cliff face' of the property via gutters, drain pipes and window sills, there is no-where she can't reach now. After lunch today I shut her out in the hall when I retired to the bedroom for a read and before I even got my book open and settled down she'd gone around the other way - out onto the study balcony and across the roof to our bedroom window where she sat on the windowsill demanding entrance.

But it was Tora that really suprised me. When I got back from Yachimata neither of them were around. I knew how Pero had made the 'jail break' but Tora isn't such a devoted mountaineer. I looked around the house and he was nowhere so I sat down for lunch and - there he was in the middle of the lounge!

How did he do that? It was just uncanny. Had he snuck back in somehow while I'd put my soup on the table? But how? All the doors were closed - the original 'closed room mystery' eh? I was reminded of those old episodes of Star Trek when they stood inside that transporter and said "Beam me down Scottie!"

Screech of Brakes

Doing some painting in the car port today when a big blue people carrier came screeching down the lane and three people jumped out as it skidded to a halt on the gravel in front of our house. "Gawd save us!" I thought, as my life flashed before me. It must be either the Chiba Police Gaijin Snatch-squad or the local yakusa mafia - or maybe both at the same time eh?

And I was almost right. It was our local 'Religious Party' candidate and her two 'trusties' wanting to bend Edera's ear (again!) about their policies. We have City Elections coming up soon - or is it Prefectural? Anyway, sinister as 'Religious Party' might sound we have no Mad Mullahs here nor even Ian Paisley. My guess is that this lot probably stand for 'more homework' and 'no holding hands before marraige' and 'being good' generally. That kind of low key stuff. I even know the candidate's husband, I used to meet him delivering papers when I was walking the dog.

Smiles all around but you could see that they were very disappointed to hear that Edera was abroad and not back until Saturday. As I can't vote their trip was a dead loss. Od course, we COULD have discussed that one eh? Why shouldn't I have the vote, I live here and pay taxes? It is a fair question too - why should people born elsewhere but living here permanently and legally not be given citizenship rights? Aren't we a part of the same community as everyone else? It might put a rapid end to some of the extraordinary racist comments that conservative politicians make here. Feel free to ask your own local politicians the same question.

One of these three today was a 'dapper' guy of about fifity with silver hair, a blue silk tie and dressed in an immaculate mega-expensive charcoal grey suit. This wonderful sharp suit was only about a foot away from my 7cm brush, heavily laden with thick white gloss paint. I felt like I was in a dream, or hypnotised, know what I mean? It was like being in an old Zen story. For a moment the whole world stood still, there was just my dripping paint brush and his suit. But the moment passed.

Seeing this lot knocking at doors makes me realise that elections are taken much more 'seriously' here. People 'mean it' somehow. In Britain we hate politicians so rabidly that they have stopped knocking on doors and who can blame them? I think it is really serious issue. "Don't vote, it only encourages them" might sound funny but that kind of cynicism leads in just one direction. That's a trip that Japan has already made there and back.

Citations

I sometimes lie awake thinking about 'citations'. If you are an academic of course no need to tell you what 'citations' are but if you aren't then basically they are those long lists of references that you find referred to in 'serious' books. You know the kind of thing ... "The nineteenth century lollipop industry was dominated by flavourings based on sherbert (see Licker, R.U. (1979) 215 - 219) ..." and then you turn to the list at the back of the book and discover the full citation (Licker, R.U. (1979) 'On the Tip of My Tongue: Capitalism and Modernity in the Chicago Confectionery Trade 1853 - 1987'. Dourville, Extortionate University Press).

Now to be blunt what puzzles me about citations is this. Why do we have them? OK, OK I know the 'theory' of course. Every carefully crafted argument stands on the shoulders of earlier scholarship and peers just a little further on. All these citations show that I'm aware of what people have done before, I weave their arguments skillfully into mine etc. They represent 'authority'.

But it's wierd isn't it?You get five pages into a book and already you have tripped over a dozen of these citations. What to do? Does the author expect me to leave off reading what he wrote right there and go to a university library and look this stuff up? I go and get Licker off the shelf, turn to page 215 and "Oh yeah! He's right! - this guy Licker does support the arguments that he's making!" On with the book then ... Oh! But wait a moment ... this guy Licker has also cited nine references in the pages I had to read, so before I go back to my main text better just look those up too ....

See what I mean. It is like mirrors, like that man on the Camp Coffee label. These citation 'trees' go on forever, an inpenetrable forest. Actually if I was a famous mathematician I could prove that in seventeen generations everyone in the world is related to everyone else - no! That's not what I mean. I mean every book is cited somewhere in a never ending chain. You could play a kind game like "find the quickest route between some reference to poetry from Kamchatka and the Doppler Effect observed from a train" (Hey! I did it in only nine references!).

But how sad if you were the only academic in the world who had written something so bad that nobody had ever bothered to cite it. That will be me eh?

Home Alone

'Home Alone' tonight. Do you think any bad guys will come creeping around? Edera is headed off abroad on a short trip with her dad and won't be home until Friday morning so I'm house and feline-watching all week.

Of course I've stayed here on my own before, but those trips Edera has been somewhere in Japan and we've chatted on the phone every evening. This time she's on a long trip so I'm very much left to my own devices. I dropped them at Narita at lunch time and I've been shopping this afternoon but now it is quiet and I'm thinking that I'm the only English speaking person that I know around here. Even the cats are coming and peering around my study door with a puzzled look on their faces that says "What's up boss? What's the deal then??"

Keeping Tora out of any more fights is going to have to be priority number one this week but I've got plenty of other stuff planned. Sleeping on my rght side, sleeping on my left side, sleeping on my back ... no, only joking. Actually I've got a couple of ... oh! But I mustn't mention that, maybe Edera will read this in her hotel in the internet cafe eh? And then Wednesday there is choir practice.

I happily travel around the world on my own but looking after a house is a bit different eh? At least it is milder tonight and the frogs are beginning to find their voices in the tanbo just behind the house which makes it seem less deserted. Now it is just quiet sociable stuff but a couple more weeks and there will be a deafening chorus out there.

Topiary

I spotted this one in a park along the shore of Tokyo Bay at Makuhari recently. Fun eh? Well, as topiary goes, I mean it isn't one of those things that will normally make you go "Haw! Haw!" is it? There were a few other sea creatures tackled in similar vein around it, including quite a big whale, but I thought that this was by far the best.

You could have fun with it in the median strip of some highway at night eh? Tired drivers approach then suddenly, in their full beam, a monster from the deep appears trying to cross the road just ahead. Much screeching of brakes and squealing of tyres. "Gawd Guv'nor! It made me hair stand on end!"

When you get up close to it it isn't as cute as it looks, in fact it isn't even proper topiary. Someone has created the wire frame and then there is some rapidly growing shrub occupying it as a support and kept trimmed. In fact there are many bald patches as you can see. Some creative artist had the general idea but then the park gardeners got to grips with it and the 'ideal' met the 'actual' at this very spot.

But no complaints. It's neat! More fun than all those 'chess pieces' and 'peacocks' than you find on the Jacobean lawns of English Country Homes. I must think what I fancy making along these lines and maybe Chiba City Parks Department will give me a bit of space to do it in. Any suggestions?

I did once have an idea for a thousand metre high Buddha floating on the oceans on a giant lotus throne and blown along by the winds and tides around the world in the 'Roaring Forties' and I have even seen him floating along in the far distance across the waves and spray in dreams. But that is a story for another day.

Great Survivor

Into Tokyo today to do some shopping. It was a bit of a 'special occasion' for us and Edera was looking for a 'daily wear' kimono so we paid a visit to a shop that specialises in them near Asakusabashi Station. Our shopping over we decided that we would take a look around the Edo/Tokyo Museum across the river in Sumida-ku and get some lunch there.

This Edo Museum has been on my 'little list' for some time and I enjoyed it. It is a large and very modern bulding and the top two floors cover the history of Edo/Tokyo from around 1600 to the present. They have some excellent early maps of the city and some beautiful models too, especially of the big daimyo mansions that existed before the Great Meiriki Fire of 1657 burned out about 60% of Tokogawa Ieyasu's original capital. So much street detail is recorded from that period - you can really access, or perhaps have the illusion of accessing, the daily life of those times. No wonder Western visitors were amazed at the sophistication of early Edo.

The rest of the museum I'm not so sure, it is a bit 'theme parkish' if you know what I mean. Ever since I read Don Mitchell's "Cultural Geography" a while back I've looked much more cautiously at this kind of stuff and what story it it is trying to tell. From 'Wigan Pier' to 'Boot Hill' instant folklore is afoot eh? And here in Sumida-ku too. "Whose past is this supposed to be and why?" is a question always worth asking.

A nice treat down at Ryougoku Station though. The present station building where we caught the train back to Chiba dates from 1960 when the JR Sobu Line was extended over the Sumida River and across town to Ochanomizu. But nestling next door and now a restaurant for fans attending the adjacent National Sumo Stadium is the original Sobu Line terminus building dating from 1897. Amazing that his structure has survived everything thrown at it and dropped on it over more than a century but here we are - a genuine Meiji era railway terminus! A 'Great Survivor' in its own right believe me.

'Happyoukai' done

Phew! Happyoukai over for another year. I'd forgotten what hard work it was - last March I missed it because I was in the UK busy selling the house in Dunstable. Piles of pictures and kit and visual aids to struggle upstairs to the room at the kominkan with.

If you are not a Japanese reader you should know that happyoukai are a particular kind of 'open day' when we polish our shoes and put on our best performances to impress our parents or friends with what we have learned. Of course we have 'open days' and 'parents' evenings' in British schools too but in Japan, like so many other things in life, it all seems to get taken so much more seriously.

By teachers and parents at any rate. I'm not sure that students take happyoukai quite as seriously as they used to. And of course the older they get the less they are inclined to 'it in' with the wishes and desires of adults. Younger kids really learn the things they are asked to do and give it all 110% but as soon as students reach Junior High if not the last year of Elementary School they are already corrupted by the cynicsm of their peer group. I've seen a big change in this area myself in just eight years in Japan. When I first got involved with this event students actually sweated over learning their lines, but now they often just read them, not always fluently either. I don't sense any 'midnight oil' being burned over rehearsals at home.

We can't complain though, most of our students were really good. It interests me how, although the different groups who turn up at our house never usually meet each other except on thisone day and at the annual hike, they all have the same 'family feel' to me. You can see the teacher reflected in them I suppose, in the kind of confidence and good humour that they have with English even if some are no 'scholars'. They are a confident lot too, good at expressing themselves. When you see the same kids every week for years there's inevitably a tie grows in the heart, at least for me. You think of them a bit as yours. Very nice kids - I love the lot of them.

Bruiser

I mentioned the 'cat fight' season some days ago but it doesn't seem to have subsided much around here yet. As soon as the front door is opened in the morning our two felines seem to head straight for their respective bunkers to guard the property and get a good 'line of sight' down the lane and across 'no man's land' into enemy held territory.

Here is Tora by the front gate guarding the fort as usual. He has a fine tenor voice and we all know when there's a strange cat in the vicinity by the amount of cursing and 'name calling' he comes out with. Strange, because most of the time and to everyone else except cats he is such a placid and friendly character. In fact despite his square-set appearance as a big mature alpha male he has a rather timid streak, scared of bouncy ping-pong balls and bits of wrapping paper that make unexpected noises.

I notice this year though that he's not winning confrontations like he used to. Other younger male cats keep 'coming on' despite all his curses and feigned lack of concern. When his bluff is called it is him that takes a step or two backwards.

Well, I know how he feels eh? I don't win them like I used to myself. Don't worry puss-cat, there is more to life than being Number One Bruiser on the Block. I think ...

Runing Repairs

Tension mounts around here. Tomorrow is the 'happyoukai' - the day when we put on a bit of a 'do' at the end of term for parents. Our students have been practicing for weeks already. But as the hour approaches there always seems to be lots to do and it doesn't help that I'm nursing a 'frozen shoulder' this year. No chair-humping around the hall for me.

Today in preparation we put the roof rack on the car. We have really had out moneysworth out of this - about half of my shed came back from 'Cainz Home' and 'Joyful Honda' tied on it. But it hasn't been used for several months so of course we had the usual 'where have the rubber pads gone?' crisis. It has four loose square pads that go between the rack and the roof and every time we need them we can never remember where they were put away. In the car somewhere? Shed? The tin store in the car port? Somewhere in the genkan?? This time we eventually tracked down three in the shed but in place of the fourth we had to use an old towel.

It all looks strong and firm enough, and we are just using it to transport the joke plywood 'TV screen' box that I made for students to stand in and recite lines, only a couple of kilos. But it would be just our usual luck to run into the Chiba Police Roof Rack Inspection Unit on the first day of 'National Roof Rack Inspection Week' on the half mile up the road to the kominkan in the morning. "Konnichiwa! Konnichiwa! Konnichiwa! What's going on here then? This bit of towel is a very serious offence ..."

Someone I know in England was once speeding on the M6 motorway in rural Cumbria when he was suddenly pulled over by - I think it was six police cars and around twenty policemen. Seems it was the first morning of using a new speed radar system and representatives of about half the UK police forces were there to observe the first 'bookings' of unsuspecting drivers. So - keep your fingers crossed for us tomorrow eh?

The Fortress

A couple of weeks go I came across this project in Makuhari under construction behind some pretty high screens. Nothing sinister in that of course - in Japan building sites and the like are usually kept well screened from view out of a kind of sense of 'politeness'. Whenever anything is being changed the idea is to keep it from offending the public gaze. Even vacant lots are often screened by green plastic mesh in case they appear untidy.

This picture you are looking at is part of the marketing 'blurb' painted on the screen, if you look carefully behind you can see the walls going up.

I've sounded off about condominium developments before and here is another one. Until a year ago this was the site of a private school but with falling attendance rolls selling out to a development consortium must have seemed quite attractive. Anyway, it is done now. The plan is for a fourteen storey complex of 896 apartments that will sell at around £200k each here - that's about £180 million pounds on this scheme, say £60 million profit if they all sell quickly. And if it all comes tumbling down in a 'quake' you can point up to a passing cloud and say "That's mine folks!" Always assuming that you have a finger left to point with eh?

What I wanted to mention about this one was the format - it's a good example of something that has only begun to creep into Chiba in the last few years. Does that shape remind historians out there of anything? How about a medieval 'motte and bailey' castle? Except that we don't keep cows in the middle any more, just cars.

The idea now is that you can only enter sites like this at one or or two guarded points. In effect the whole place comes with a big 'KEEP OUT' sign. It has got so bad in Japan recently that in the 2005 Census the government enumerators in Tokyo and other large cities had huge difficulty even gettting let into places like this to deliver the census return forms.

Do architects know something we don't I wonder? The rich do get richer and the poor do get poorer but this is Makurari, not Los Angeles. The fear is being imported even though the crime hasn't arrived - yet.

'Yacs' ointments

Not a good week in the 'pain' stakes so far. First a couple of trips to the dentist with a disintegrated tooth and a couple more in prospect to get a crown fitted and a filling at the back on the other side ("...looks bad Robinson-san tch! tch!") and now my 'frozen shoulder' is really giving me a hard time too. It has been a problem since December but now it seems to have become more of a 'frozen left bicep' and much more acute too. So if my writing becomes more erratic over the next few days it is because it has become such a painful process.

This evening we took a trip down to 'Yacs' drug store to see what creams and ointments they had available for painful muscles. I had distant memories of various 'oldies' at different times of my life and their collections of bottles of lineament and bits of cotton wool but all that kind of stuff is long gone now. They don't do creams for those kind of aching muscles these days it seems - they are all for 'sports injuries' now. That's me eh? A 'sports injury', I hadn't thought of it. Must have got this bad playing too much badminton or maybe it was that last marathon I did. So I'll leave my 'trainers' in the shoe box in the genkan and just apply a bit of this super-gelloid in solution. Looking at all the stuff they sell now for people with problems caused by sport it feels like keeping fit is a pretty unhealthy business.

At least I had an althlete's high protein fitness diet. Today was Edera's birthday so I cooked the dinner last night and made a bucket full of lasagne which lasted us two days. It is the first time I made lasagne with the pasta you can buy here and I had a couple of nasty moments of hesitation during what us social theorists refer to as "the cusine preparation process" but my memory served me true and though I say it myself it was delicious. And after we both dozed off in front of the paraffin heater with a good square and heavy meal inside us

Saying 'sorry'

I've been reading some correspondence on an academic mailing list with an increasingly glum feeling this week. It is about the recent comments by the new Japanese Prime Minister Abe on the cases of women across Asia forced into sexual service by the Japanese army during the War. No point in summarising the discussion here but basically it circles around what one side does or does not consider to be 'slavery' and what the other side does or does not consider to be an 'apology'. No resolution of course, how could there be? There has been no resolution in this awful case for over sixty years.

Whatever the merits of it all what really strikes me about it - and about a million similar issues - is the assumption behind it all that somehow there is an ideal 'justice capable of being done'. I suspect that this is mainly a Western cultural assumption. We like to think that when a crime takes place justice will be done. If only there were enough judges and juries in the world eh? Then the bad guys would all be punished and the victims would be compensated. Somehow things will get 'put right'. Westerners can get pretty excited if this principle is questioned but you only have to look even at what happens in courts in the most law abiding and democratic societies - say Denmark or Switzerland - to see that this outcome applies maybe only 2% of the time. The poet W.H. Auden wrote at the end of one of his plays "Acts of injustice done, between the risig and the setting sun, in history lie like bones each one". Unburied bones.

I remember when my kids were small how they would bring me broken toys and the like and leave them on my work bench and I would make sympathetic noises and sometimes even get the tube of glue out with good intentions. But the truth is that when things are broken they are broken. Maybe some things can be repaired but they can never get to be quite like they were before. And I suspect that a painful truth is that the only peace most victims can find most of the time is the possibility of 'letting go and moving on' under their own steam. If you make that release dependent on the remorse and actions of someone else probably it is a peace that will never be yours. Then they will have wronged you not just once, but twice

That doesn't mean of course that the converse doesn't often happen. People often really do bitterly regret something and say 'sorry' and mean it with their whole heart. And if that is how you feel it is so important to say it while you have the chance. But of course in turn their apology may never be accepted by the victim, they can't expect it or depend on it.

Contemplating translation

Chained to the desk today helping Edera with a translation job. Grrr. You never know what you will get when they turn up but this one is quite interesting - a paper about facilities for handicapped people. It is in a style of language is also quite difficult to get from Japanese into English too.

People who aren't involved with it often think that translation is a rather mechanical task that one day might even be automated if some clever computing types could just make a bit of progress with software. And at the "the cat sat on the mat" level this is partly true. But if you want to convey what is in the author's mind it is much more than that. For example at a slightly deeper level you have to take into account idioms too - the fact that a 'picture of a cake' in Japanese becomes a 'pipe dream' in English for example.

But I'm thinking of something even more fundamental still, much more 'cultural'. The writer of this piece for example talks about some work that was 'building respect' for public officials. The idea as he put it would just make most Engish readers laugh because most of the time most of them have little respect for most kinds of public offcial. How quaintly Japanese! 'Respect' in the way he means it is a Japanese experience, how to put what he is trying to say in a way that won't mean something that he didn't intend? It is a particular problem with Japanese to English compared with say a European language because there are a lot fewer shared cultural building blocks once you get below the superficial. One the other hand 'professional translators' would argue that it is not their job to go beyond an idiomatic representation of the original work.

Edera and I are developing an idiosyncratic approach to all of this and I don't know if it makes us very good or very bad translators but I have my suspicions eh! She does a first 'rough cut' into English and then we discuss (or argue!) it through sentence by sentence and then finally I re-work the English for flow and readability.

Once piece - a biography - that we have been doing in bits for over a year is especially difficult because it is written in a style that just doesn't fit Engish at all, but with care we will get there.

Shelfspace

Amazing how every time I go to that cash machine at the Post Office there is always some money spending opportunity burning its way down the fuse towards my wallet. I dropped by today on the way to Yachimata and within thirty minutes, blow me down, I'd spotted two books there that I had been "looking for, for years". No, honest, I really had. One was on the Keisei Railway and the other on JNR 113 class trains. Gripping stuff; I'll have to post something about them over on my 'Railway Roundabout' blog.

I've learned my lesson often about buying books when you have the chance. If you don't they are gone, you will never find another copy. I read somewhere recently that 96% of all published books are now 'out of print' but I don't believe it - I would have said that 98% was nearer the mark. And the days when you could find treasures for a few bob have long gone, especially in Britain where we all seem to make livings selling old junk, sorry, 'collectables', to each other on Ebay.

Studying the evolution of Japanese homes over the last fifty years I can tell you that they have more than doubled in size. And it isn't because people have got bigger either (though they have.) There are still a few old ladies around here that put their futons out to air and sweep the bare tatami with twigs before settling down cross-legged to a bowl of rice contemplating a single flower tastefully arranged in the tokonoma. But usually the additional forty square metres of interior space every family has is packed with books, video games, DVD's, clothes and the like. If we didn't have all that extra interior space we couldn't do our work as 'consumers' eh? There would be nowhere to put it all except straight out into the garbage. That's against the rules.

Living simply without things always seems an attractive option to me, it's just that there are so many nice little 'essentials' along the road to that destination. Someone I know never buys a new book but what he disposes of two and maybe it's time I contemplated doing that too or I'll be leaving a library for someone to chuck in the skip one day.

Sartorial Doubts

Edera was having a bit of a wardrobe 'sort out' yesterday. Those empty hangars on the bed, it all made me feel a bit guilty, or maybe as this is Japan I should say 'ashamed' eh? Loss of 'face'. I have a few drawers stuffed with old clothes here and hangers full of the things. And in England ... oh! Good grief! Don't even think about it.

Why have I never been able to take clothes seriously? At least a lot of the 1960's leftovers have at last bitten the dust now, I will never know their wasp-like waists again. Occasionally I pull something out and realise it has measurements that I left behind in my mid-twenties but recently the problem has rather gone the other way. Just before I finished working I peaked at 90 kilos and now I'm down to 80 so a lot of stuff bought in my forties just hangs off me. Stick a pole up it and you could camp in there.

It used to be said that if you hang onto things they would eventually come back into fashion but hardly anything I ever wore was in fashion in the first place. Also I have the bad habit of just going on wearing them until they get worn out and holey. Let's face it, almost everything I have is basically good only for gardening or mixing cement.

After I retired I DID discover the delights of charity shops in the UK and I have a couple of tidy tweed jackets from Oxfam, low mileage garments with one deceased owner. We have 'recycling shops' here in Japan, too specifically the redoutable 'Hard Off!' Store (achtung! Spoonerisms ...) and I have cast an eye along the rail in the Yachimata branch. But I'm a bit larger than your average Japanese male, here I weigh in at XXL or even worse. Maybe I will find myself a nice tail coat there like those worn by local politicians here to attend school speech days. It would be smart, but it might draw a few glances back in Lancashire.

Mangles

This being 'National Nostalgia Week' - which inevitably isn't as good as it used to be! - Edera and I got around to discussing over lunch today how washing clothes was done when we were kids. I'm sure all my friends out there imagine that when I was a little old washer-women still used to pound garments with stones on the banks of the river singing traditional songs but it isn't true eh?

Actually maybe my memories are of a key stage in the great and continuing saga of washing machine technological progress. My 'nana' had an early electric washing machine which she must have bought about 1955, and the thing I remember about it - which was so unusual - was that it still had a 'mangle'. And no ordinary one.

If you don't know what a 'mangle' is, it is those big rollers that used to squeeze water out of newly washed clothes before spin dryers were invented. They still use them in commerical laundries, I saw one through the open doorway of a laundry in Hanamigawa-ku a few weeks ago behind a huge pile of unwashed sheets.

But what was special about our 'mangle' was that it was electrically driven. No tiresome cranking of those rollers, a complex system of cogs linked the 'device' to the main washing machine motor. You could even wash and wring clothes at the same time. The acme of 'Progress'.

'Mangles' used to have an awesome reputation for very nasty washing day accidents (lowered voices - "they found her other ear in a pail of potato peelings ...") hence the idiom ('been through the mangle') What I especially remember about ours was that it had an 'emergency release' on the top that you could hit and which would spring open the rollers if someone's fingers were disappearing along with the pillow cases. Great fun, I had to have a go every Monday.

The Music Hall artist Harry Champion had a song about this very topic. I've heard several versions of it but the one that we sang used to go

"Never let your braces dangle, chum,
Never let your braces dangle.
One Old Sport, he got caught,
Went right through the mangle.
He went in like chewing gum,
Came out like linoleum,
Now he's up in Kingdom Come
Singing never let your braces dangle!"

'Black Art' of classification

I've been staring into space this afternoon thinking about how the buildings I've been looking at in Chiba ought to be 'classified' in my research. It isn't just needed for adding them up - 'big buildings' versus 'little buildings' and so on. It is much more fundamental than that because it affects the whole way that things get thought about.

You might imagine that I should have done all this long ago and not when I've just spent a couple of years looking at them. Every time I start on a new database I think the same thing too but it never quite works out that way. Until you have 'got your hands dirty' looking at stuff you can't come to firm conclusions. Or I can't. I often find that IT specialists get very impatient with me because they think that all information relationships are 'either - or' and 'one to many' ones and that it is about time I shaped up and got serious. Like those awful systematic tables you find in botany books. "Margin pinnately lobed go to p.27, else see ciliate". Huh? It's er ... green and cute. Has anyone ever found a flower this way? By the time you know what it all means, you are an expert botanist already.

I feel more of a friend to writer of the ancient Chinese encyclopedia quoted by Michel Foucault in the "Order of Things". That long dead scholar classified all animals into categories that made sense to him and which included (1) belonging to the Emperor, (2) embalmed, (3) tame, (4) sucking pigs, (5) fabulous, (6) stray dogs ... through to (12) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (13) which have just broken the water pitcher and (14) that from a long way off look like flies.

You might laugh at this but which makes the most sense I wonder? Do I know 'more' about a building because I describe it as 'steel framed' than I do by saying that 'from a long way off it looks brown'?

You thought that you knew better than the Chinese scholar eh? So you tell me.

Plain and Easy

A little parcel arrived for me yesterday from America - it was a book that I'd ordered via one of the Amazon registered specialists there. Most of my books come from America now - they charge about half the postage that UK Amazon demands to mail items here to Japan and the book prices in the USA are usually lower too. Oh! And they arrive in a week, not a month or more after you order them.

It was a second hand copy of a 1970's edition of Thomas Morley's "A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music". If you don't sing it won't mean much to you, but if you do you'll already know the name "Thomas Morley". He was one of the great Elizabethan musicians and madrigal writers. When the first edition of this work came out in 1597 it was one of the earliest practical music text books.

I first came across this book when I was in the Ifield Grammar School madrigal choir in the 1960's. Not only is it an excellent student text - in fact if you love the music of that period absolutely indispensible - but it is also a very witty book too. From the first page the full force of Tudor humour and scholarship really grabs you. People were so well educated then, they could speak and write with passion and enthusiasm.

At the beginning of the first chapter text two friends meet in the street. One asks the other how he got on at a dinner party the previous evening, but it seems that it had all been a bit of a disaster. Not only had he been asked his opinion in a debate about music, which he knew nothing about, but the hostess afterwards had pulled out the part-books and he had to admit that he couldn't sing anything either. Other diners whispered to each other "What kind of sad upbringing had this young man had that he couldn't sing after supper?" Now he was on his way to a music teacher ...

As they didn't have instruments at home and of course no DVD's or CD's, that's how educated Tudor people got their entertainment - eat and drink and then get out the music and sing. Nice to imagine eh? If you couldn't sing you were considered a bit strange and ignorant, lacking in social graces.

Sitting Room

These last few years I've found certain times and places from my childhood becoming more vivid in my memory, and in particular a period of a year that I spent as an elementary school child living with my grandparents in Barnard Castle.

"Barney" is a country town in north east England and nowadays I generally drive through there at least two or three times a year on when I'm back in the UK and making a visit to Durham University. I haven't lived in the town for fifty three years and yet I still think of it as my 'roots' more than any other of the many spots I've lived in. Why is that?

It's an often windy place at the bottom of Teesdale where the grouse moors and sheep country meet rather rather softer dairy and beef farming pasture. Somewhere recently I saw a spoof headline from the Teesdale Mercury (one of England's oldest newspapers!) that read "World Ends: Barnard Castle not affected" and it made me laugh because it exactly sums the place up for me. During these coming weeks when I have my nose pressed to my laptop dealing with little else but raw information I suspect Barney will appear in this blog more than once.

Today it came to my mind because I was trying to remember what my grandmother called the 'other downstairs room'. In the terrace house that my grandfather rented from the railway there were only three downstairs rooms - the 'scullery' at the back where there was the only cold water tap for washing, the 'kitchen' with a coal range for cooking and our dining table and ... I think what in our house was the 'sitting room'.

Why I'm in doubt is because of course we hardly ever 'sat' in there. Working people in my grandparent's generation nearly always had such a room with a three piece suite - the 'parlour' or the 'front room' - but as most people hardly ever entertained anyone it was very seldom used and the fire got lit in the grate maybe half a dozen times a year. If you went to church - we didn't - maybe you sat and read the Bible on Sundays and gave the vicar a cup of tea in there. We only used it when my great aunt from Keighley visited.

These days most of that kind of terrace house has had the two downstairs rooms knocked into one but it's a pity I think. I still like to think of that quiet place with the ticking clock and the rose coloured settee, perhaps the first 'sitting place' that I experienced in my life. Today a 'sitting room' has a slightly different meaning for me.

Cat fight

It's that time of year again for cats to have a really good 'set to' outdoors eh? Every night I seem to be woken up by the sounds of battle in the lane. Is it fights for females or hunting territory? I'm not sure. Probably both, one must follow the other. I guess the men fight first and the women after.

Cats are such good fighters, don't you think so? It all reminds me of watching sumo on TV, all that hovering around ominously and then the sudden pouce. But unlike sumo there is so much abuse and name-calling that goes on as a preparation for the main attack, it's the best bit and you can tell the cats enjoy it too. You don't need an interpreter do you? "Come over my side of the lane and see what happens fancy-paws!". "You don't scare me you mangy weakling, any second now you will be sorry you were ever born!" etc, etc.

We had three guests at lunch time and were just settling down to it when there was a major battle broke out just behind our kitchen. I headed out onto the decking to break it up when our Tora and a grey cat bowled by in a ball of fur and claws and cusses. Round Two took off a few seconds later in front of the neighbour's house and then the combatants vanished into a garden up the lane.

Tora - my hero! He's a real old warrior for sure. Fifteen years old and he still takes his jacket off and enters the ring like a professional. Actually early last month I was really worried about him, thinking that he was on his way out, that he might have had a stroke. But it seems it was just a virus and after some nursing and sleeping for three days solid he is back to his usual cheerful and wheezy self, hammering on my bedroom door for his breakfast around 4:00 am and lounging in every available shaft of sunshine.

A sharp pencil

I've been working on some large scale maps today, adding some grid lines and old boundaries. It's not as easy as I'd hoped. Not only have boundaries themselves changed a lot since the 1960's but often so have the things on which boundaries are usually based - the position of roads, rivers and the like. And you can't just trace them either because the quality of cartography at that time wasn't the same and also photocopying often slightly distorts images. But we'll get there eh?

It was pleasant wielding my pencil on a warm sunny Spring morning and it reminded me of all those periods of 'technical drawing' in a wooden hut at school in the 1960's, where I learned a lot of the basic skills of being a draughtsman. I even have an 'O' Level to prove it! There's a real pleasure for me in using the right hardness of pencil, an emery board to get the right drawing edge and using tee-squares and set squares and protractors. These things work well in my fingers somehow, I was lucky to learn some ancient skills before computers and CAD-CAM came along and made them all redundant.

In my big map chest back in England I have a several copies of locomotive drawings from the late nineteenth century from the National Railway Museum Archive at York, originally beautifully drawn on linen in pencil and signed by their designer. Once the design was finished the drawings would be passed to other skilled draughtsmen who would draw the separate components and then on to the tracers who would prepare working copies for the foremen to supervise the machining of parts. That would have been the job for me if I'd lived a century earlier! No photocopiers nor even dye-line machines to speed up the process.

Actually when I was at school my grandad wanted me to be a draughtsman. "Get a good job on a drawing board!" he would say. It just a matter of how the dice fell that I didn't take that road, I would have been content to if I hadn't got a university place. Probably I would have ended up in an engineering company somewhere making the move to computer aided design.

But it is still fun to feel the real 'tools of the trade' in my hands. We use pencils a lot in Japan because of the way that kanji get written. In England even pencils themselves are almost obsolete now.

That Green Shirt

It has suddenly become a lot milder down here in leafy Chiba-ken. Today I even heard the occasional frog croaking down by the stream behind the house - can that really be true already? Last week we were huddled around the paraffin heater at nights but this morning I caught myself checking through my short sleeved shirts.

Looking at those shirts I found myself wondering if one particular greenish one was that greenish one. It can't be I guess, that shirt must long ago have gone to the great wardrobe in the sky. But it could be it ...

About fifteen years ago I had to head down from Lancashire to Gloucester for a 9:30 pre-Christmas sales meeting with one of our more important directors. I left home late the previous evening and arrived at the hotel near Tewkesbury two hundred miles away after midnight. Unloaded the car and ... that was when I found out that I'd left the hangar with my suit and shirt on it at home!

What to do? I only had the green corderoy trousers and denim shirt I was wearing when I got in the car. But I thought that it wouldn't be TOO bad if I went into Tewkesbury and found a clothing store and as soon as they opened I bought a shirt and tie. If I was really fast I could drive to Gloucester in twenty minutes. So that's what I did. At nine I was hovering outside a shop where I'd already spotted a shirt and tie through the window. As soon as the door opened I grabbed them and then drove fast down the motorway to Gloucester where I pulled into out office car park, jumped out of the car with moments to spare, ripped off my denim shirt and tore open the package to find ... a nice new casual short sleeved shirt.

Lucky the guy had a sense of humour eh?

Soga Wave

While I have been travelling over to Makuhari recently I'be been taking a train 'the other way' towards Chiba from our local station and changing to the Keio Line at Soga, a junction for no fewer than four routes a few miles south of the city.

Unlike British railway stations which often have a long history and come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, bigger Japanese stations are more or less all to the same design, often rebuilt in the 1960's. There are always at least two bridges or subways connecting platforms, sometimes three and these are built for crowds of 'soccer stadium' proportions.

If you'd been on the 09:02 from Naruto that I've been using you would see why! This eight coach train starts off pretty well empty, but three stops down the line at Ooami-shirasato it really starts to fill up and by Kamatori there must be at least two thousand people aboad crammed into every corner.

And half of these need to change to the Tokyo-bound kaisoku at Soga!

To make this even more exciting, the Naruto train rolls in at 09:38 and the Tokyo train departs from two platforms away at 09:39. You have to be fit to travel on JR sometimes! As soon as those doors open everyone is off like lemmings, up and over the footbridges at each end of the station at a sprint. The noise of a thousand pairs of running feet is tremendous. It reminds me somehow of those 'Mexican Waves' that you see at soocer games. It's not just to clamber aboard of course, everyone wants to be there first to get a seat too.

Sixty seconds later both trains pull out at the same time and the two platforms are empty and silent. The 'Soga Wave' over for another morning!

'Hamlet' minus the Prince

Yep! Today was Chi-chan's 20th birthday celebration so we were all due to don kimono and suits and head for a restaurant and stuff. But it didn't work out that way. She got back from Tokyo late last night and then this morning she was feeling sick and had a fever so no party for her. But the rest of the gang was already headed down here on the train so we ended up dressing up anyway and going out for lunch ourselves and leaving the patient tucked up in a futon at home.

You have to see the amusing side of it. "Hamlet without the Prince" we used to say in England. But maybe this idea of holding events without the 'star of the show' might catch on. In fact I can see many positive benefits to it all. The Scots celebrate Robbie Burns on Burns Night and everyone celebrates Christmas so why not hold a few more parties for absent, or even deceased, friends and relations.

Or maybe we could even celebrate things we wanted to happen but didn't or which might happen at some stage in the future eh? I always fancied one of those Citroen DX15's the kind that Maigret rode in racing around the streets of Paris in persuit of criminals with his side-kicks hanging off the running boards shouting "Hold onto your hat Patron!" Well, I haven't got around to affording one yet but why should that stop me having a "Got my Citroen at last Party!" once a year without the expense of making the purchase? Come on, give me one good reason. Huh!

Well, there you go. Anyway the rest of us ended up having a very nice celebratory lunch so it just goes to show that it is better if you don't get too attached to expectations eh?

Fieldwork Finished

Well, there we are. I've finished walking Chiba at last. Today I completed the last eight maps and ended up in a small park by the shore at the mouth of the Sumidagawa and then there was no more little yellow marks on the map that needed visiting any more. I climbed over a fence saying 'Strictly No Entry' and sat on the little pier that protects the river from Tokyo Bay.

This is the kind of moment that as a statistician I should be able to produce some statistics for but sadly I haven't added up yet how far I have walked.But it was a long way and I think probably that I started in earnest around March 2004 so it has taken three years to do it. Not every day of course - perhaps 90 days. I can't even remember where I first seriously started note taking but my guess is in Tsuga 3-chome or around Keisei Inage. My last records relate to Toyosuna, 88 hectares of land reclaimed from the sea in 1980 and mainly comprising a sewerage treatment plant and a moutain bike trail in a totally empty park (except for the woman in the little hut guarding the totally empty car park). I finished my walking on 2 March 2007 at 13:35 after which I treated myself to an ice cream at Benskins at Makuhari-kaingan station.

How do I feel about all this? I don't know. I think I will be very restless over the next few weeks and in any case I'm sure there will be areas I'll need to re-visit because of missing data and the like. But I do know that I don't have to do it twice, maybe now I need to do something completely different. Now I know a heck of a lot about how Japanese cities are put together for sure. But the journey was the thing eh?

At my old school we sometimes said Sir Francis Drake's prayer at morning assembly and it is advice I wish I had taken more often in life.

When thou givest to thy servants
to endeavour any great matter
Grant us also to know that it is not the beginning
but the continuing of the same unto the end
Until it be thoroughly finished

Many Mansions

Just down the road from Chiba Minato station I spotted two new condominum blocks going up today on plots that it seems were just vacant lots a couple of weeks ago. A quick 'back of a fag packet' calculation suggests that 'condos' are going up at the rate of around 10,000 housing units a year in Chiba at the moment. These two involved an eleven and a fifteen storey building, the first with 250 and the second with 400 flats. Really big schemes - like the one just finished at Inage - can be up to 700 homes. That is the equivalent of a good-sized English village. Two thousand lives.

Condominiums (it must be 'condominia' eh?) or to use the Japanese term 'mansions' are common in the USA but not in England, we have very few. Basically they are blocks of apartments where you buy your own place from the builders and then contribute a service charge to the general upkeep of the whole building. They have got rather cheaper in Japan recently - in the block shown here you can buy a small three bedroom pad for around £130,000 including one parking space.

I find this craze for 'mansions' here quite amazing - who the heck wants to live in one of these? Don't people stop and think before hading over their life savings? What are they buying - a bit of air? It is a classic case of 'ontological security' - 'smoke and mirrors' - you can 'fool all of the people for some of the time' as the saying goes.

In Kanto there's a big - a REALLY big Shindo 8.0+ - earthquake every 80 - 100 years and the last one was 1923. Until the late 1970's bulding regulations didn't allow any new dwellings over five floors - 20 metres - but now they build four times as high because - as the engineers who build this stuff tell us often - modern technology enables us to build more earthquake resisitant buildings. How do they know that? And who are these engineers? - Oh! The same ones that build and sell these apartments to you of course. Well, they should know eh? It must be right then. And the politicians - the ones in the LDP funded by endless back handers and slush funds from the construction industry - also think that 'mansions' are a great thing too.

When the 'Big One' does arrive I guess we'll all pay these same construction companies twice again to knock the wrecks down and start over. Who else could do it? Good grief!