Carp Streamers

I'm so busy that 'Golden Week' seems to have crept up on me this year. It is one of those rare moments when many Japanese allow themselves the amazing luxury of taking more than one day off at once - sometimes even as many as four or five together eh? This happens because a lot of public holidays come together at the same time. It is actually quite relaxed travelling into Tokyo from here during the holiday period as so few are commuting - but keep off the long distance trains and motorways!

5th May is the 'Boys Festival' and the general idea is that if you have young boys in the family you fly koinobori or 'carp streamers' on the day. In Chinese tradition carp are supposed to have the strength and courage to swim up waterfalls - characteristics you hope for in your own children. When carp swim through the 'ryumon' or 'Dragon's Gate' against the stream they become transformed into dragons.

I don't think koinobori are that ancient a tradition here - certainly not earlier than the Edo Period. But the big ones - three or four metres long - are very beautiful filled with air swimming in the wind against a deep blue sky. Many people have aluminium flagpoles in their gardens to tether their carp to (and achtung! typos there eh? But the moment is safely past ...)

Maybe it is time we started flying carp in Britain, I'll have to tweak Julia's nose and see if I can get a flag pole in our garden. I think they might be popular in Lancashire - perhaps we can launch a whole new fashion. It's down to Cainz Homes for me tomorrow and I'll buy a couple of big ones to take back to Blighty ...

Cold Front

It is interesting how very different the 'same' weather can be here in Japan compared with England. I belong to a generation of geographers that had to study simple meterology for my GCE 'O' level. I even had to do my stint of burrowing into the departmental Stevenson screen to take daily temperature readings as an undergraduate studying human geography - so I know what I'm talking about!

Today for example we had a 'cold front' rumble through leafy Chiba-ken mid afternoon. In Lancashire it might have been worth a short if nasty shower but here it was like a scene from the 'Ride of the Valkyries' complete with scuds of hail and lightening. At one point I even stopped working and switched my lap-top off and unplugged it all until it had passed - I've heard of too many people having laptops 'fried' recently and I can't afford to lose mine. Later, as I was driving down to Naruto after dark, spirals of steam were rising from the fields and road where the cold rain had fallen on the warm earth and tarmac. It was suddenly bloomin' cold.

Why is the same basic weather condition so different here? I'm not sure. We get some exciting stuff off the North Atlantic in Britain but basically the temperature differences between Norway and the Bay of Biscay are modest. Here we are talking at this time of year a much bigger difference between a still ice-bound eastern Siberia and and an already warm and muggy Yellow Sea. I guess that kind of 'turns the volume up' when the two air systems collide eh?

Anyway, it is fun to watch. But somehow it feels very 'foreign' to me. Getting used to our 'own weather' is something that we do in our childhood.

Declining Population?

I keep meaning to check the latest supplements to the 'Japan Statistical Handbook' to see if the Japanese population total is actually headed down at the moment. All the forecasts were that it would start to show a net decline this Spring but has it happened yet? Perhaps I've missed it in the news bulletins.

Japanese 'Officialdom' and politicians have been very concerned about this prospect for years, but I can't see why. Their argument runs that there will be an insufficent tax base to look after the numbers of elderly, and that the economy won't grow, but surely that shows a complete lack of imagination. If we have to rely on 'growth' to live satisfactorily where will it all end? That approach has all the credibility of a bus load of people headed down a steep mountain road with no brakes arguing cheerfully that a steep hill is a great idea and just what we need because there isn't much petrol in the tank.

Someone told me last year that the population of Akita Prefecture is declining so fast now that the bears are taking over abandoned mountain valleys again but who cares? The weather is lousy in winter up there anyway, at least the bears have the sense to hibernate. If people are worried about the safety aspect of it we could build a big fence and let them get on with it on the other side, no need to disturb them eh?

Part of the difficulty seems to be that without 'growth' there are no jobs for all the people that er ... there are no jobs for. But that doesn't convince me either. Most of us already work in jobs that don't actually produce anything really essential. We could all pay each other to take part in haiku competitions and the like, as long as there were still a few farmers.

Uh! Must be the time of year I guess. I'll sleep on it. Count yourselves lucky that I haven't been put in charge of the world ...

When Adam delved ...

History tends to get presented from the viewpoint of the 'winning side', and that is certainly the case with the reports of the "Peasant's Revolt" of 1381. But that's a moment in history that I wish we had a more impartial record of. If Wat Tyler and Jack Straw had played their hand more carefully we English might have followed the Swiss and become one of the great early republics.

I can still remember my excitement as a teenager when I first read about the events if that rainy July when the farmers of Kent, driven to extremes by Richard II's Poll Tax and hunger, marched on London. And especially I admired the priest John Ball, that tireless spokesmen for labourers who preached to a vast crowd on Blackheath Common to the text "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" It is a phrase that can still stir my blood. We might think that if we had lived 'back then' we would have been educated folk, but chances are we would have been hungry men and women in John Ball's crowd eh?

In Japanese history too there are a whole series of 'peasant revolts' and like John Ball and his friends the 'ring-leaders' here all usually met a sticky end too. And for the same reasons.

Common men lacked the skills and education to negotiate. Initially they might have had some success in securing better conditions, but then their gains were thrown away in some tactical mistake which played into the hands of the rich and powerful. Often that tactical mistake was simply to trust to the honesty and sense of fair play of their 'betters'

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote - in his novel 'Cancer Ward' I think - something like "you only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again." It is the history of 'peasant rebellions' the world over.

Seed Merchant

With so much data to prepare for my studies my world seems to be increasingly limited to the view out of my study window. It is a good view and I must write about it some day. But at the moment I'm finding that my imagination is beginning to ferment with lots of odd snippets of information that appear in my note books, or in the pictures I've taken over the last few months of field work. I must learn to concentrate better, do one thing at a time, be mindful.

Today for example I struggled to identify a small warehouse building from a photo and my eye fell on the kanji for 'tane' which proved to be a good clue. 'Tane' is Japanese for 'seed' and it seemed that the Mikado Company were in fact farmer's seed merchants. I don't know much about the seed business but this place must be some kind of minor 'Suttons Seeds' in UK terms.
Of course it didn't take me long to follow that thought out of the window and back into childhood and days spent in Barnard Castle. At some stage of the year - it must have been in February or March - a big brown parcel used to arrive at my grandfather's house and we would excitedly open it on the old dining table and there inside would be - lots of smaller brown packets full of seeds! Amazing!

This 'bulk buy' involved purchasing a Postal Order for around seven shillings (35p) - half a day's pay back in the 1950's - and somehow that parcel held all the promise of the new season and a new year. Some of the seeds were easy to recognise just by looking - peas and broad beans for instance. Other's were more mysterious - carrots and lettuce. And some were even exotic, like the small fragments of cork that would grow into beetroot.

Of course now you can buy Suttons Seeds in any supermarket or on garage forecourts and they have nice colour printed poly-sealed envelopes too. And I suppose small kids get just as excited As I did at the prospect of opening them and planting them out. Maybe soon I'll start an allotment myself, I could lose some weight eh?

Snail Trails

I have to admit that I'm pretty 'slow' in the mornings if not downright crabby, it takes my blood sugar a while to start ticking over I guess. And for some reason this morning as I crawled around the bedroom looking for some socks, any socks, I was reminded of snails - and those tracks of mucus that they sometimes leave around the place. Am I really that bad? Probably.
Anyway - there's nothing wrong with snails eh? In one of those little 'memory leapfrogs' that the mind makes I remembered being a child of around five or six back in Barnard Castle. In those days my grandparents heated the house with a coal fire in the kitchen range and after it had died down late in the evening - long after my bedtime of course! - the place got pretty chilly. Downstairs at night. A scary world occupied only by the dog.

In the mornings on the rug at the bottom of the stairs there was often a couple of little slime tracks left by the nocturnal snails that had been wandering around the place when the moon was up. I never saw these beasts of course - they had returned again under the cold stone flags in the pantry where they lived during daylight hours long before I woke. But there was something a bit magical about it all to me. How did these mysterious creatures of the night make their living? Where did they go and what exactly did they look like? Why were they on our rug anyway?

There was something a bit scary about it all too. Looked at out of one eye those trails looked like silver webs and looked out out of the other they were uncomfortably like snot when you have a runny nose.

Well, slow I might be but I haven't started leaving trails of mucus around the place when I get up in the mornings yet. But there is always time ...

Rice Planting

The rice planting is seriously underway in this corner of leafy Chiba-ken and maybe I'll go out and take some photos over the next couple of days. It amazes me how skillfully farmers can do it. Over the last three weeks all the tanbo (rice paddies) have been rotivated with the special tractors they use. Once the soil is ready the basins are flooded from the centre of the valley back outwards up the slopes so that the highest come into cultivation last. Finally the seedlings go in, fed on planting machines from the back of small tractors that wade up to their hub caps in the ooze. I can't imagine how they even manage to steer straight, let alone get all those seedings in neat rows.

The amount of back-breaking labour all this took before tractors came on the scene in the 1950's must have been incredible. Literally back-breaking too - around the Japanese countryside you see a lot of elderly people suffering from spinal deformities caused by years of bending to sow and weed. If you look at local census returns from the pre-war period it was often the women that did the hardest of the farming while the men worked away from home in Tokyo or in factories in Kansai.

Not so much further back - in the Edo period - villages were pretty much a law to themselves in terms of how things were organised for farming. The bottom line was that a certain quantity of rice had to be returned to the government tax assessors by the community. Provided that was delivered the community governed itself in small things and I have the sense that people kept well away from 'authority' if they could.

Around here if you half close your eyes up some of the local 'yato' on hot sunny mornings or listen to older people chatting in the lane it doesn' take much imagination to feel what rural Japan must have been like under the Shogunate. Things don't change so fast as you might think.

When David heard ...

It seems to have been an impossibly busy day today but I still made some space to get along to an extra choir practice tonight. Our preformance at the beginning of June is starting to seem scarily close and there is nothing worse that getting up on stage in front of a thousand other singers and not knowing what you are singing not only by heart but also 'in your bones' too ...

Our main platform piece will be an anthem by the seventeenth century Welsh composer Thomas Tomkins - "When David heard ...". The text is from the Second Book of Samuel in the Old Testament and tells how King David wept when he heard the news of the death of his son Absalom. Maybe I'll write more about this soon, I think that it is a quite exceptonal piece of music and something that is capable of being sung in many ways.

Just a few of us there tonight, rehearsing in a tiny circle S-san's little shop amongst the racks of garments from Vietnam and Cambodia. I say 'shop' but I think it once saw service as a delivery van body and is just a couple of metres from the JR Togane Line so trains rumble past the rear wall from time to time. The frogs out on the nearby tanbo sing along with us too. I smile to think what Thomas Tomkins might have made of this venue compared with his choir stalls at Worcester Cathedral, but at least we don't have problems with roving bands of Puritan soldiers breaking up organs here ...

I wish that I could remember where and when I first heard "When David heard ...". I seem to have known it all my life. Perhaps I learned it in the Ifield Grammar School choir back in the 1960's, I can't think where else it might have been. It is in my mind because it interests me how music, like scent, is something that appeals to a part of our memory that isn't always consiously accessible. We remember the circumstances around it in a deeper place eh?

Watching JEF

A couple of weeks ago I went to my first Japanese J-league football match (somehow I just can't bring myself to use that awful word 'soccer'). It was the JEF Chiba - Yokohama match at our local stadium at Soga, and I really enjoyed it.

To be honest I was somehow never that interested in football in the UK. When I was a child we used to live just a few streets from the Middlesborough ground at Ayresome Park - close enough to hear the roar of the crowd on Saturdays. But I never got to attend a match and so I didn't catch the 'bug'. Later I just never lived anywhere that had a team that my friends supported. Then at university I did get the rugby 'bug' and a taste for watching rugby internationals when Wales used to regularly scoop the championships. That shows how long ago all THAT was eh?

The game at Soga was pretty neat though, I might go again. In Japan the crowd is as good as gold - it is a real 'family event' and lots of good humour and the chanting for the home team would be worth going for irrespective of the match. In this game though the passing and tactics of Chiba were quality stuff. Their 'killer instinct' for scoring goals was pretty poor but they still managed a '4-0' victory.

Perhaps what I liked best was the new stadium itself, built on land that was a rolling mill until a few years ago and hard up against the JFE old Kawasaki steel plant fence. 'Rust belt' Japan at its best and it all reminded me of my childhood on Teeside long ago when our night sky would be lit up bright red when the Bessemer converters were 'blown' on the night shift at 10:00 pm. I guess Chiba kids watched similar 'fireworks' back in the 1950's too. I have a kind of soft spot for the sight and smell of rusting steelworks.

My 500th 'Little House' blog today

Mug Shots

I don't seem to be able to write about anything except elections this week. It's partly that I spend my entire day listening to crazed politicians bellowing through megaphones as they circle the area in cars, but mainly because I'm deep into 'data' work on my thesis. At the moment that is stuff I can hardly explain to myself, let alone anyone else, and most of it would send you to sleep in a minute. Relational databases are like caraway seeds, you like them or you don't. I was ever thus, a great 'collector of numbers' even as a child.

Anyway, here's a collecton of a different kind. It is the temporary notice board at the end of our lane sporting all the local city council candidate's posters. There's a board like this in every district and I think there are spaces for 44 candidate mug-shots. Of course, this being neat Japan, no one would dream of fly-posting political posters, still less of defacing them with drawn on moustaches etc. The shame of it eh? And you have to put your poster in the right square of the board too, there is no room for individual interpretation or shows of creative thinking here.

Looking at boards like this I'm sure that most people get elected here not because they are the most talented or the most experienced candidates available, but actually because they conform the most precisely to the expected model. Male, fifties or sixties, dark suit, white shirt, sober tie, bright eyes, expectant smile, short hair-cut. Only two women here and one is a kimono-clad Religious Party candidate. But they all look like God has just whispered a GOOD IDEA in their ears don't they?

Sometimes you get a cranky one of course. In Chiba recently I spotted an elderly candidate wearing a karate suit in his poster picture, presumably ready to zap all the baddies he could find. Also one had a big hinomaru ('rising sun') flag like a halo behind him - I don't think he was from the 'Be Nice to Foreigners Party'. Enough said on that one in the week when the Mayor of Nagasaki was assassinated by a right wing yakusa with a grudge about who knows what. Politics can take a sudden violent turn here in a way it doesn't in Britain. But out here in leafier Chiba-ken we get a pretty peace loving and conventional lot of older wannabes seeking public office. Very much like rural England - it is something we have in common.

More Megaphones

A cold rainy evening here, not the kind of weather to make you feel cheerful. A frog hopped across the road just now on the way back from the supermarket and I'd swear he was wearing a raincoat. I like frogs, they have a capacity to be cheerful in most kinds of wet climate but even they don't seem to appreciate this unseasonal chill. Still, we can't complain - at least there are no mosquitoes today.

All the local candidates around here seem to be working up a bit of a frenzy this week. City elections are on Sunday and last week the hoardings went up for them all to paste their identical posters on in the appropriately numbered box. So far there are no less than thirty three posters on the hoarding at the end of our lane. All very neat and organised - very Japanese. Huh! - sorry! And today there has been the constant buzz of politician's "battle buses" - usually shiny clean people carriers full of waving supporters in luminous jump suits - passing up and down the lane. One woman in particular puts up such a frenzied performance on her megaphone I seriously worry about her state of mind, you can track her progress around the village most of the day by the constant auctioneer-style babble. If it wasn't that every other phrase ended in 'arigato gozaimasu' I'd say that she was having a furious argument with her husband in the back of the van. If she ever had any support she will hopefully have lost it all already.

What do people think they are achieving racing around the tanbo hectoring the frogs for days on end? Hard to imagine. Maybe it gives them some kind of 'Dutch Courage' - that illusion that to succeed you have to be doing SOMETHING. If only they shout through megaphones at enough citzens for long enough success must be assured eh? Stands to reason ...

This combination of cold, rain and megaphones is making me a bit depressed, I need to pull myself together. But it does make you think that there must be a better way. I wish that I could think what it was.

New glasses

Last of the 'big spenders' today - I finally took that plunge at last and went and bought a new pair of glasses. My current pair is around twelve years old and has been looking more and more disreputable recently. Back in 2004 the ear pieces corroded through and fell off on the plane to England. After a spell involving the creative use of sellotape and sticking plasters an optician in Blackpool kindly fitted some new ones for free. This time though they had gone too far - on Thursday I noticed that during my trip to Kyoto one of those little nose-rest bars had vanished. Nothing to do except visit the 'hole in the wall' at the post office and withdraw some cash for a new pair.

We went to the opticians next to Nagasaki-ya and checked out the frames there. The all looked pretty much the same to me but compared with England there seemed to be relatively few gold plated ones. Last time I bought some I was in my late forties and silver and metallic frames made me look a bit old but now of course I AM old so grey ones match me pretty well anyway, a kind of camouflage. In the end we picked some brownish-grey ones and I ordered lenses that darken up when the sunlight gets bright too, just like last time. This time though I gave the 'vari-focal' lenses a miss, I never wear them when I'm reading anway so why pay the extra eh?

I think I was probably the first 'gaijin' customer that the young guy in the shop had dealt with and he seemed a bit panicky about giving me an eye-test but we got along fine. I felt more than a bit ashamed of the ancient ones I went in with - I guess he was probably in elementary school when I bought them and he hadn't ever seen any so old and decrepit before, except maybe in a Kurosawa movie or a museum dedicated to some Meiji-era author.

So there we are. My new glasses arrive next Sunday and I can go along and pick them up after lunch. Looking forward to seeing how they look on me? Me too.

Back to Japanese

Back to Japanese class this morning - our first lesson of the new semester and the new academic year. In Britain the academic year begins in September after the long summer break but here it is in April, like the tax year.

To be honest I suprised myself a bit that I even got back there. Just before I left for England in December my self-confidence around Japanese had plummeted to pretty well zero and I've missed all lessons since. But no choice eh? If you live in Japan you have to speak Japanese, so this week I asked Edera to have a word with the organiser and got myself 'back-squadded' a year. Now it is back to the familiar landscape of "Minna no Nihongo" Book 2 lesson 31. It is the third time I've worked my way through the last half of this text book.

How did it get so bad? Partly bad luck I think. My teacher last year was an enthusiastic volunteer but sometimes her explanations were twice as complicated as the original text that I didn't understand. That might have been OK but then two other students joined the class who spoke very fluent Japanese and I was on that slippery slope of complete incomprehension. Once you start loosing your way in language classes where you are expected to respond meaningfully rather than just nod in the background it can only get worse. I had the experience already with Latin in my 'teens. There's a line in Kafka's "The Trial", one of my favourite books, where the author declares of his hero "only hard work could save him now" but actually when new langage is presented at twice the speed you can digest it not even hard work can save you, the ship is already filling with water quicker than you can ever pump it out.

So, wish me luck for the new year of study. Lots of 'gambatte kudasai!' ('chin up!') from other teachers and fellow students this morning and I won't let this language beat me eh? One day I'll be fluent.

Tokyo Tower

Having family staying with us over the last couple of weeks has meant many trips for me. Most were visits to familiar places not seem for a while but a few were to new places, amongst which was the Tokyo Tower.

Towers are a bit of a Japanese thing' - there must be at least a dozen well known ones and then a whole raft of smaller efforts to encourage civic pride. In the UK - perhaps because we are lacking a bit in the civic pride department - I can only think of a few. The best known is the Blackpool Tower, a 1930's miniature of the Eiffel Tower which is so expensive to visit that I've never been to the top. One day when I'm rich eh?

Tokyo Tower is a slightly uncharacterisic 'swizz'. In Japan you are seldom 'ripped off' but here it turns out that your ticket only takes you half way up and a second purchase is necessary to get right to the top. But as it was dusk we contented ourselves with the first viewing floor and actually I felt no need to go higher. We were already well above most of the surrounding buildings. Back in the early 1960's when it was built it must have been a dizzying height above surrounding Tokyo which was generally limited to 20 metres then.

Worth a trip? I would say so. I'm a student of cities and I increasingly see something awesome and unfathomable in them underlying the physical form. On the level of the purely material form Tokyo from above is a pretty mind blowing sight - how has all this happened in just a few decades? But if you half close your eyes and move beyond the form and contemplate how it relates to the millions who live or work here it is truly something beyond imagination

Training cats

I wonder if anyone ever trained cats to bring their slippers when they settled down by the fire. When I was a child it used to be a common idea that your puppy shoupld be trained to bring his master's slippers to the hearth rug door with much tail-wagging whenever his 'significant other' human returned from work but actually I haven't even seen THAT one aired much recently, let alone a parallel scene featuring felines. I wonder why that is? Contemporary post-femininist standards? Or is it simply that so many dogs these days are not up to the job, what with so many miniature breeds on the market? Or no fireplaces?

I only mention it because I was eyeing Tora today asleep next to the window as usual and wondering if there was something more economically productive that he could be doing other than snoring or hissing at passing enemies outdoors from the safety of the lounge. There was once a wonderful advert on TV in the USA about 'herding cats' - can't remember what it was about or for but it included some amazing footage of felines running in herds like steers. Must have taken years to make with all that clever camera work and film superimposition and editing.

Anyway I won't push the point. I can't imagine any self-respecting four-legged friend wanting to take my slippers in their molars. I think I had this pair since about 2001 and they have just got comfortable at last. It's a pity about the holes in the toes but there you go eh? I do have a more respectable pair to put in my hand luggage on long haul flights but fortunately life isn't one long catwalk

Back to Nikko

It has been a pretty hectic couple of weeks with Julia here and no time for blogging. I don't lead a particularly sedentary life but neither do I dash around much so the trips to several 'must sees' in Japan have been a pretty busy time. I'm looking forward to a retreat into what I realise is my rather 'introvert' shell for a few days.

Last week we took a trip up to Nikko - one of the few really big 'must sees' north of Tokyo. You take the shinkansen up to Utsunomiya and then it is an hour up a rather pokey branch line and then a short bus ride. Actually I'd guess that it is so far from Kyoto and the other standard sights in Japan that relatively few foreign visitors make it on their first trip. This visit there seemed to be lots of Russians, Chinese and French

Off the beaten track - that's the curious thing about Nikko of course. If you are English you'll know what I mean if I say that the town is a bit like Keswick, but even pricier and quieter! Every time I go I have the impression that most 'locals' would be happier if everyone just went away - they never asked for a World Heritage Site on their doorstep. Or did they?

You go to Nikko to see the Toshogu Shrine, a wonderful collection of seventeenth century buildings clustered in the pine forests beneath the grave of the greatest of all shoguns - Tokugawa Ieyasu. His memorial is about as far as you can get from the old Imperial capital and far enough even from Tokyo. Generations of royalty and aristocracy must have muttered under their breaths as the struggled to make the long journey north to pay their respects on a windy mountain. In life with his system of 'alternate residence' to prevent plotting and civil way he made every daimyo's life a pretty peripatetic one and in death too you have to travel far to see him. But it is worth it.