Green Door

There used to be a popular song written by the pianist Bob Davie back in the 1950's called "The Green Door". It must have made some impression on me as a kid because I can even still remember some of the lines. Although I have no idea where that original "Green Door" was it seems that there was "an old piano and they play it hot behind the green door ..."

I only mention this because yesterday I was painting our front door in Lancashire green. I'm not sure its a popular move, the 'jury is still out' in some quarters and I've already had one definite vote against. "Dirty yellow" was the description I think. Ho hmm ... you can't please all of the people all of the time eh?

Actually I was trying for "North Eastern Railway Locomotve Green". I even took an old picture of a locomotive into the local DIY store and we matched the colour on the Dulux Matchmaker paint charts where it came out as "Tarragon 4" but to be honest it isn't quite right. Well, it's bright at least. You couldn't bump into it even on a dark night but on the other hand if the sun is out maybe 'shades' might be a good idea. The Victorians had suprising ideas about colour.

Painting is always a dodgy business. I like to think I'm a cool dude when it comes to colour but there's always an element of surprise for me when the first splodge goes on 'for real'. You can never exactly judge the effect but then life would be boring if everything was predictable.
Of course you could also play safe by painting everything beige or white.

Anyway maybe I'll share a picture of the green door later. Watch this space. I'll think about it.

Walk in the Woods

Our sense of belonging to 'place' is something that means a lot to me and I must have written about it a dozen times here. For some geographers it has become a fashionable topic for study. How do our childhood memories of place mould our adult lives? And how for example does our experience of weather as children influence us later?

Perhaps there is another aspect of this that is just as important. How is our sense of this 'belonging' linked to people that we love and the places that brought them together? Often the spaces important to us now are the co-ordinates within which they lived their own lives.

One of the most influential places in my life is the little town of Barnard Castle in County Durham and it seems to exercise a pull for me quite out of proportion to the year that I spent there as a child living with my grandparents and my 'direct' experience of it. I was through there Friday evening and with half an hour to spare I couldn't help taking advantage of the late June dusk to park up on the cobbles in Galgate and walk down the path into the woods from Scar Top to the River Tees where it meets Kellet's Beck.

It was a dull, slightly rainy evening and the birds were already silent. Apart from a few rabbits I didn't see a living being. Under the big beeches was already deep in night shadows and the dark river, slightly in spate, flowed swiftly below the little grass lawn with three bench seats known locally as 'the bandstand'. When I was a child I often played in the river here. Later they repaired the weir downstream and the gravel shore of my childhood was submerged for many years under deep water. But now the river bed has changed and is shallow again and a new shore has appeared about a metre above the one I paddled from.

Somehow I was compelled to say it right out loud. "Hello Nana, hello Grandad, hello Dad ... I'm back". Never the least sound ...

Because however that place has moved on ... and it has ... there is something about it not just important as a memory to me but also because it brings together the people I loved as a child. If I need to talk to them, I know where to find them eh?

Garden Party

Over to Durham today to see my supervisor about progress on my thesis. I don't get there more than a couple of times a year so there is always plenty to talk about and today we must have been at it for nearly three hours. Good meeting. Now I need to get my schedule worked out for delivering chapters to him over the next few months.

I chose today because it was the last day of term and there was a garden party in the garden of one of the professor's homes. Actually this annual event - the "Fisher" - is named after our old professor back in the 1960's and I felt it would be good to attend as I'm probably one of the few people around who still remembers him - in fact he was my tutor in 1967.

Nice day, nice walk across the fields to the venue in the rather stomy looking sunshine and a nice party too but somehow it didn't click for me. I never quite got the hang of socialising at these events the first time around as a raw and callow youth and I don't seem to have got much better. But now I realise after years of regular parties at work that it isn't just me.

Generally the people I usually mix with are pretty good at socialising, happy to make small talk and curious to find out about others. But that wan't how this event worked. Somehow most people there were happy to stick in their own little fixed social circles. Academics were talking to academics with similar interests, admin staff talked to admin staff and postgrads talked to their friends, which didn't leave many people around interested in talking to me. I felt a bit of a wallflower and I was glad when after a decent interval I could slip away. It wasn't that it was actively unfriendly, more that most people seemed to have an agenda, their own 'set'. There was something very middle class English about it, not at all what I was used to working in business or what I experience in Japan.

Anway. No complaints! At least I got to go eh?

Cleveleys lawns

Over to Cleveleys today to do some gardening. My mum's old house has been up for sale since March but the garden has been neglected since she moved out so there was plenty of work needed doing there.

Funny place Cleveleys. If you don't live in England you won't have heard of it and I should explain that it is a small seaside town on the north west coast near Blackpool. As a resort it is pretty well 'third division' if not actually 'fourth division'. Many of our older, smaller seaside resorts don't see much of holiday makers any more since package tours to the Mediterranean became the norm but Cleveleys has a hint of holiday archaeology about it. Back in the 1890's when a week off work became the norm here people headed for the seaside for cheap holidays to places like Cleveleys and often specific resorts had links with particular areas - Bradford with Morecambe for example and Leeds with Scarborough. Well, Cleveleys had links with the West of Scotland and amazingly people from Glasgow and Ayrshire still head there like their grandparents and great-grandparents did. Goodness knows why! But the cheap 'bargain basement' shops are full of Glaswegian accents on both sides of the counter.

My main job today was to cut the grass and I'd forgotten what a labour it could be when it had grown so long. First attack with a strimmer and then with a mower and finish the edges with shears. I was soon sweating in the sunshine. Lawns are a particularly British form of torture I guess, I've never picked up a mower in Japan. It will need another going over before I fly back but at least it looks neat now.

Half way around I spotted a black and white stray cat laid out under a bush, just like our old and still missed cat Barry. For a moment I thought he was dead too but just asleep it seems because he suddenly started up and ran away. He must be a bit deaf to let me get so close or maybe just not expecting company in the deserted garden eh?

Blackbird songs

With these long June summer evenings and early dawns I've found myself lying in bed in the half-light and listening to blackbirds. It really is the sound of the English countryside in summer, along with the soft dripping of showers on hedgerow foliage. Lovely

In Japan the uguisu - the 'Japanese nightingale' or 'Japanese bush warbler' - is the counterpart of the English blackbird at this time of the year and there too its song is often accompanied by the sound of rain on leaves. If you have never heard one singing in the forest you should. Try the WAV file here ...

There is something magical about the presence of sound in a world not filled with all the usual stuff we create ourselves - the sounds of traffic, aircraft and the rest. And at dawn bird song has a whole geography of its own, it adds distances and dimensions that are invisble and inaudible at other times of the day.

It would make an interesting study - our awareness of the character in space of natural sounds. I've sometimes seen travelling in the English landscape as like being always on the edge of a forest that never quite arrives. The hedgerow trees give an illusion of woodland all around - just at a little distance eh? But of course if you go to the next hedgerow you will discover another field beyond. Actually this is ninety-five percent grass and crops when seen from the air. However the birdsong travels from boundary to boundary, the blackbirds really do sing like this was all forest ...

The uguisu - well, that sings in the tall bamboo on the edge of forests and it really is a forest bird. Hedgerows are not a part of the Japanese landscape.

Kenneth Williams

One of the nice things about being back in Britain is that I can watch TV and actually understand what's being said. Oh! And also for a while every other 'soap' episode doesn't involve scenes where grandmothers stare meaningfully at their offspring which seem a staple of NHK programming.

Yesterday there was an arts programme where Melvyn Bragg (and doesn't he look old eh?) interviewed the Welsh actor Michael Sheen about his portrayal of three very different British people - our Prime Minister Tony Blair, the TV host David Frost and the actor Kenneth Williams. And a very interesting programme it was, because as an actor he made a very subtle study not just of mannerisms - which are the focus of mimics - but also of the dynamics of speech and the motivation behind it. I've decided that before I go back to Japan I must get the DVD of his film "The Queen" where he plays opposite Helen Mirren

But the one that really absorbed me was his characterisation of Kenneth Williams. If you aren't British maybe you don't even know his name, but I'd guess his voice would still be very familiar to most people here although it is almost twenty years since he died. Born in London he learned his trade as an actor and comedian in the army and then appeared in almost all of that long series of 'Carry On' comedy films made at Pinewood Studios and also several legendary comedy programmes on BBC Radio.

He was a complex and educated person, with a unique kind of genius. In most of his comedy work his latent homosexuality wasn't far under the surface. But what was so fascinating about him was his astonishing use and understanding of the power of the English language, his love of words and the many ways in which he could use them. I'm still riveted by his work when I hear it. If you never heard him at work the first time around, try listening to some of the many tapes of his works published by the Beeb ...

A really sunny UK

Just crawling out of the darker corners of jet-lag. Actually it's not too bad at this time of year is it? I'd forgotten how long the days are in northern England in mid-June. The last light of the day isn't out of the sky until after eleven at night and by soon after two it is already getting light again. Down at the latitude of Tokyo - which is the equivalent of Morrocco - it is still dark by eight even in June ...

The flight was OK - a nice chance to rubberneck out of the window at the Siberian High Artcic at this time of the year. All those places that you will never see on the ground, like the mouth of the Ob river, with open water now although the snow is still thick on the ground. But my favourite bit of the journey is always crossing the Stanovy Mountains over in the Russian Far East near the Amur River. Still wild tigers over there and the range is similar in size to the Alps but far from tourist trails. Maybe I'll get there 'on the ground' one day from Japan, catch the ferry over from Hokkaido.

Japan has been unseasonably cool recently so maybe I made my escape at the right time. I've heard the weather forecasters here already talking of 'muggy weather'. Huh? You don't know you are born mate.

Anyway, it will be almost 'business as usual' here at LHIP except that I'm out of circulation from Tuesday to Saturday this week. Talk to you soon!

Time for bag packing

Bag packed? No, of course not, I never get around to packing my bag until around 10:00 pm. But anyway - tomorrow I'm on the plane back to Manchester and I'll be in Britain for around five weeks ...

It was early January when I came back to Japan and Lancashire never looks its best around that time of year. I had a terrible cough too - bronchial asthma as it turned out. Now, a lot of study later, I'm westbound again to see family and friends and tutors and teachers - and to enjoy the best of the northern English summer. Long, long hours of daylight.

A special trip in many ways this one. In July I have my sixtieth birthday. Of course it's a mistake, I'm really around twenty four years old - maybe not even that old - but somehow the calendar has got all speeded up. 'Out here' in 'The East' sixty is recokoned to be THE special birthday - the end of the big cycle of five times twelve years at which point you are allowed to go back to being a kid again.

Anway that is all in the future still. My next blog will be from sunny Lancashire. Better get that bag packed. Talk to you in a bit.

Third Floor Day

Japanese class this week was up on the third floor, and not in our usual second floor rooms. I could see that it was going to be 'one of those days' the moment I pulled up in the kominkan car park. it was too full and people were parked in the wrong places. We get these upheavals once every couple of months, a meeting of the local Fire Brigade Union or the AGM of the Ballroom Dancing Society. Us gaijin students get shunted to the top floor on such occasions.

The trouble with the top floor is that it is a big tatami room. No shoes, no chairs. I'm starting to think that despite the alleged 'cultural' angle to all this the Japanese themselves are much more fond of tatami rooms in theory than in practice, especially in public buildings. They look nice and for everyone over seventy years old it is just a case of ducks and water. But for younger Japanese used to sitting on chairs they also present a challenge.

Not such a challenge as they do for me eh? I struggled upstairs with my big bag of books and got my shoes off to find that the room was pretty full. There were already six in our class so no more space for books on the low table, I had to empty my pile on the floor and get a cushion from the cupboard. As I opened the text book my photocopied exercises from last week drifted off in one direction and my verb table book in another. I must have made a sad sight.

My ankles have got so bad now that there's no chance at all of sitting in seiza, the 'legs folded under you' posture normally used. I have to splay my legs around and keep fidgeting to have any hope of ever standing up again after. This week 'verb' -to ori ni - 'you do as I do'. To reinforce the grammatical point the origami paper came out and hey! I couldn't even do that wretched folded duck origami, let alone answer the bloomin' questions ...

Looking around the room Neale and I were the only western gaijin in town, almost everyone else was Korean or Chinese. Somewhere deep inside I started to laugh at the jokes forming in my head about the All-Ireland Underwater Origami Championships. Sensei asked me another unfathomable question and the bored Chinese teenager in our group helped me out as usual by pressing the 'pronunciation' key on his Chinese to English talking dictionary. An American voice inside the machine said 'fold', 'fold', 'fold' .... 'fold'.

Maybe I'll have a go soon at writing a sitcom about all this.

Chiba done thank goodness ...

Our big day at the 'choir festival' yesterday and I got home so tired that I wasn't tempted to come 'blogging'. This annual event is held in Chiba's large cultural hall and goes on for just days and days but ours was the last session. Twenty four choirs - we were at number eighteen - and we all had seven minutes to get on stage, do our stuff and depart so that was six minutes singing. Nearly three hours of non-stop almost mechanical music-making - definitely what my grandfather would have called 'savage amusement'.

We definitely weren't 'good'. I mean we were OK, I don't take the wildly pessimistic view. No fatal 'fluffs' or grinding to a halt or the likes of that. But not 'good' in the sense that a few of the choirs put on an excellent 'performance' - and not just the music side but the way they took to the stage and used it. 'Performing' is hard, actually almost brutal sometimes.

Also we weren't good within ourselves. I'm getting to really hate these 'big events' and especially the competitive ones, which this wasn't thank goodness. Probably I won't sing in an adjudicated competition again, why the heck should music ever be competitive? Even so there was something I didn't like about so many choirs in one place. However hard we try - and a lot of people do - there is something distracting about trying to make the offering of listening appreciatively to the best efforts of others, especially when you are due on yourself later. It fries my brain. And few people just seem to turn up 'for fun', for the benefit of a free concert. In fact even less than in Britain. Back in Blighty the family usually gets 'dragooned' into attending this kind of 'do' but here families don't do things like this together.

But the main reason we weren't good was ... we weren't good. We've gone backwards, got stale, a bit smug. We get on OK as a bunch of friends - it is our forte - but we don't 'have it together' musically like we used to. And I can see lots of reasons why that is so. If we want to keep going, giving each other energy, something needs to be very different eh? I'll have to think about it.

Two 'Quake' Day

Two 'quakes' today within five minutes of each other just before three o'clock. They were both centered near the lakes in Ibaragi-ken abou thirty miles from here where they clocked in at Shindo 4.3 and 4.6. Around here they both registered just under Shindo 3.0

If you want to see how we get the details of local quakes take a look at the JMA English site here for today's details

I'm pretty superstitious about earthquakes these days. The last I can remember here was a small tremor in April and I'd been thinking during the last couple of weeks "it's a long time since we had a quake eh?". But of course that's something you would never say to anyone or write on your blog - that would be tempting Providence too far.

Shindo 3 is pretty mild for Japan, the world capital of earthquakes. Maybe we feel around twenty a year here and three or four might be that big. The Japanese 'Shindo' scale differs from the more familiar 'Richter' scale because it measures the local movement at each place rather that the total energy of the event. It's the difference between measuring local wind speed and the lowest atmospheric pressure of a storm. If you have as many as we do what you are interested in each time is the risk of damage at each place, not the big scientific picture.

At Shindo 3 the local horizontal movement of the ground is a couple of centimetres a second. It will wake you up in the night and rattle the crockery and make the blinds sway but there's little risk. The real damage starts with horizontal accelerations of ten or more centimetres a second. Up and down movements are neither here nor there but horizontal movements puts a force of many tons on building structures.
Some West Coast American readers will be familiar with quakes but in Britain few have experienced them. Initially I was fascinated but now I find them as scary as most Japanese do. They are absolutely unpredictable and there's nothing you can do. With our quest for 'ontological security' we subconsciously assume that all the really big quakes happened in the past long ago, our senses deceive us because 99.999% of the time the earth doesn't move. But that is just an illusion of course, in the 'bigger scheme of things' we can reckon on the biggest still being to come eh?

Quality of buildings

Spent an hour first thing this morning with a nice young guy from a real estate agency and one of their craftsman supervisors. They were a really helpful pair and the carpenter in particular answered lots of questions I had about the technicalities of referring to parts of buildings and also dating them.

There were still a few surprises for me though. Many of the 'prefab' properties I'd assumed were typical of Japan in the mid-1950's he confirmed were actually built ten years later. Even after four years of study it still comes as a shock to me to realise just how poor Japan was so recently. The 1960's are known here as the 'income doubling decade' - in fact average incomes more than doubled in eight years and that made a big difference to how people lived and the style of housing they could afford. Cheap and cramped dwellings gave way to something a bit more spacious and usually with two storeys as families stopped sleeping on the tatami in one living room and children started to get their own study bedrooms.

This picture for example shows some 'nagaya' tied housing - the kind of home that manufacturing companies might have offered workers forty years ago when it would have been a pretty desirable proposition for most. You can see why history even this recent doesn't survive much now in the built environment eh?

The average life span of a typical wooden detatched house here though is still about thirty years. A few strongish 'quakes' to loosen up the foundations and structural timbers and the effect of the humid summer months of plywood walls soon start to take a toll on the building. In practical terms that means that even if you don't 'move' you will certainly have two and perhaps three houses on the same plot during your lifetime. Japanese homes are really much closer to our concept of 'mobile homes' in Britain, in fact perhaps don't even last as long because they don't have an aluminium skin.

In Britain the 'nastiest' of modern brick houses is expected to last sixty to eighty years. But of course at a cost.