Election Night Special

Interesting election night eh? If you don't live in Japan maybe you didn't know that half the 'Upper House' seats in Parliament here were up for election last night. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (and when hasn't it been ruling over the last sixty years?) was given a serious beating up by voters to the degree that they now no longer have a majority. But don't panic. In case you were worried Shinzo Abe will, it seems, "continue with his mission of building a new nation and pushing for reform". No change there then. 'No' is a word most politicians find difficult to understand wherever they live.

However I don't want to dwell on the politics of it all, of how Mr. Abe has gotten himself into such a fine mess. What really interests me is how it all stacks up against similar stuff back home, how the TV images compared for example with a British 'Election Night Special'. And it is very, very different. Politicians here are still treated with some formality and respect but not I sense for much longer.

Your average UK politician is a master of ducking and dodging on election nights, of finding endless small reasons to view the world less black than it looks. "So the voters gave you a complete thrashing then!".... "Well, I won't pretend that we haven't had any difficulties tonight John but it seems from the results that the electorate of Kilmarnock South West did approve of our new policy on greyhound racing in the area ..."

Here the contrast could hardly be greater. Amidst the gladiatorial ruins and under the glare of camera lights Mr. Abe still contrived to look just like a dummy in the tailoring store window as he always does. Only a bit more wooden than that. He stood emotionless in front of a board showing the extent of his losses, a living embodiment of the expression 'sang froid'. Around him the 'party faithful' dutifully clapped as if the result was all they had ever hoped for. Yep. 'Wooden' is the one word that popped into my head.

Several other 'gaijin' this morning commenting on it all on the BBC and MSN websites seemed to feel that the whole thing emphasised the fragility of democracy here but actually I don't agree with them at all, quite the reverse. But to hear more of my 'Grand Theory' on Japanese politics you'll have to wait until tomorrow I'm afraid ...

In the 'Beehive'

I love the way academics use this word 'discourses'. Actually until I began studying again I don't think I ever heard it used by 'ordinary people' and I'm still not quite sure what it means. According the 'Free Dictionary' on the internet a 'discourse' is an "extended communication (often interactive) dealing with some particular topic" but I don't think that's the half of it eh? There's a glint in their eye that says it means more ...

Anyway whatever 'discourses' are academics certainly think there are a lot of them about. I have a kind of Monty Pythonesque image in my head. I'm walking down the street and there are various bearded gentlemen (and ladies!) standing on corners droning on with much finger wagging. When you ask someone what it's all about they say "Oh! That's the discourse on neocolonialism, that's the discourse on post-modernism ..." Of course - silly me!

When I was a student during the summer vacations I used to work as a cleaner at Gatwick Airport and one year I got an amazingly 'cushy number' sweeping up and toilet cleaning down at the 'Beehive'. The 'Beehive is and ancient completely circular building that was the original airport in the 1930's. When I was there it was used as a flying school and helicopter pad. Right in the middle of the hub of this building under the old control tower was a round room that the cleaners used to store mops and drink tea.

There were just three of us in there - the two 'regular ladies' and me. They viewed me with deep suspicion and the reason for this was that they actually slept in there most of the day or read the 'Daily Mirror' and the fewer that knew about it the better. But eventually they did let me in for my tea breaks.

Whatever I said to these two, which wasn't much, one would immediately ask the other "What does the boy say dear?". Whenever I read the word 'discourse' in any book or paper now I always think of them.

"Oh! He's only having a discourse! Put the kettle on dear!"

Splintering Urbanism

This last couple of days I've had my nose in a very interesting book - 'Splintering Urbanism' by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. It focuses on change in the way 'infrastructure' is provided in cities - the supply of utilities such as water, gas, electricity and sewerage and also telecommunications and road and transport networks. We tend to regard these things as 'given' not least because so many of them are buried beneath our feet or far above our heads but in a sense they really 'are' the city just as much as buildings are because without them contemporary urban areas simply wouldn't exist.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of 'infrastructure' they describe is the way in which our perception and expectations have changed almost without us noticing. Back in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America the 'city fathers' thought of these basic services as something for the 'public good' to be provided 'as of right', and until around 1960 we had a Keynsian consensus that there should be some equality of service for all public and private consumers.

This book explains how completely that 'ideal' has evaporated as private investment has taken over in the provision of infrastructure. Of course we are all aware of the general trend of 'privatisation' around us but it shocked me to realise just how far it had progressed in the last ten years. 'Contested discourses' is a phrase they often use and it left me wondering just exactly 'who' it is that so loudly and insistently demanding the right to make a profit from providing basic services to others and why. I guess the same people that consume space in cities building condominiums that most families don't want and then selling them on the strength of being able to arrange 'cheap' 100% loans. Every aspect of our lives becomes an opportunity for profit for someone.

My grandad used to mutter that 'they would make you buy the air you breathe if they could find a way of controlling the supply'. I guess twenty years ago he just meant it metaphorically but now I'm not so sure eh?

Sticky time again

It surely is 'sticky time' down here in leafy Chiba-ken at the moment. I was sitting reading last night when I noticed this guy headed up our 'school room' window pane in search of tasty mosquitoes. Maybe it was him who was sitting on our front door handle when I arrived back home a couple of days ago. I wish that I could walk up glass like this. Might be useful if ... er well, say you worked in a glass factory and there were no stairs anywhere for example ...

As the temperature heads over thirty and the humidity hits 100% I get pretty crabby. This morning I installled - with much heaving and cussing and not a few 'hard words' to my go-fer - a nice new window air-con just above my desk. A 'Koizumi KAW-1865' with a remote control so that I don't have to reach out that whole 30 cm to turn down the thermostat ever more. Now I'm sitting here happily typing in the thermal equivalent of the Arctic night with icicles growing on my nose. Lovely!

Cainz trip

We were at 'Nippon Aerobics' on our day off yesterday, not for the gym I'm afraid but so that Edera could go to her tea ceremony class and afterwards to enjoy ourselves in the all-you-can-eat 'Viking restaurant', surely one of the best in leafy Chiba-ken. Afterwards we called in at Cainz Home at Mobara to buy a new mosquito screen for the shed window but as always there were none in the size we wanted. Maybe all windows should be one size eh?

School is out which makes everywhere extra busy and also that 'busi-ness' is unpredictable. Somehow it really got to me - I won't say 'panic attack' but it was one of those uncomfortable moments when you see the world as it really is, when that inocculation of 'unreality' that we all have to give ourselves a sense of ontological security becomes ineffective for a few minutes and we see the world as it really is. Shocking.

At such times it amazes me that we can kid ourselves for a moment that all this can continue. It is just a matter of time eh? We are doomed - really. There were just too many people there, all busily consuming like locusts. Trolley loads of stuff, so much heat, light and power involved. Where was the stuff that they buying coming from? Where is all the food that they are eating coming from? And all those thousands of litres of fuel we all used just to get there? And this was just one DIY store in one town in one country in the whole world...

I don't think it is hopeless, in theory at least we can get a grip. But as Ulrich Beck points out in his book on 'Risk Society' we still trustingly leave the running of the asylum to the inmates. Who do we employ to come up with answers to the risk of economic collapse and implosion? Economists! This is a much bigger issue, though of course related, to the question of climate change. The CO2 may get us in a few decades but how long do you think it is going to be before rising energy costs provoke massive recession?

Well, don't feel so depressed eh? The solution is in all our hands after all.

Uses of water

Some 'cultural' differences between England and Japan are so subtle that they take a long time to spot. For instance there's an old Zen story about a master who installed a filter under the kitchen sink in a temple so that he could avoid waste by the junior trainees. People thought that he was sneaking in there at night for an extra snack but when they investigated actually he was recovering the wasted rice from the filter after careless washing up and eating it as his 'regular' meal ...

I don't know what if any the link is with the story but all the Japanese kitchen sinks I've used have such a filter. Solids from kitchen cleaning are trapped there and the wire basket is emptied regularly into the garbage. Beware of forgetting it! In hot summer weather it soon starts to smell.

But here is the cultural difference. In Japan all waste from meal preparation and clean up seems to end up in the sink. To the Japanese way of thinking it seems to be the 'clean' way to handle old food, to wash it out under the tap. That way the purity of the water cleans the utensils
This isn't how my Western mind works at all. In England we scrape plates to dump waste into the waste bin dry, and then wash the plates once it is removed. There seems someting inherently disgusting to me about getting waste food needlessly wet, to have it floating around in the sink.

Neither of these two approaches is 'right' - they both work fine. But on a subtle level in Japan water is seen as cleansing in a situation which it isn't in England.

Best solution is probably to leave the washing up to someone else eh?

Comparable numbers

Into Chiba today to chill out in the air-con and piped music of the Prefectural Archives. It must be six weeks since I was there and I think a few of the staff were as pleased to see me as I was to see them. But I didn't have the mental energy to get down to either of the two really big tasks I have in hand so for today I just contented myself sorting out some data from the regular census of businesses going back to 1960.

You would think that there were only so many things that you could count about businesses - how many there are, number of employees etc. But you would be wrong. In fact when you get 'under the skin' of this information it is hard to compare any two years with accuracy. Politicians and officials just can't leave census data alone. Even what counts as a 'business' for example seems to change every time they hold a census. And then what do we mean by 'employees'?

Margaret Thatcher famously amended the way in which 'unemployed' people were officially reckoned and counted no fewer that fourteen times during her time as Prime Minister. Actually even without such deliberate deception change is bound to occur. Back in the 1960's for example there were no foreign employers but now it is an important category of company in Japan. And kinds of business have changed out of all recognition - 'lap-top' manufacture didn't feature in the 1960's so no-one could have included it back then as a class of business.

If you hope to get 'comparable' statistics going back fifty years you will just end up with a bad headache. The trick is to use the changes as something positive to consider, not as a problem to be 'got around'.

The Great White Rock Mystery

During my latest trip to England I bought a few CD's on the - excellent! - CD stall in Fleetwood Indoor Market. We are hovering around the intention of starting a male voice choir here in damp and leafy Chiba-ken after a recent rather successful 'debut' appearance by all the men in the various local choral groups and I was keen to get a few examples of Welsh male voice choirs at their best for them to hear.

This morning to cheer myself up a bit from the sound of incessant rain (is the sun shining anywhere this year?) I thought I'd play a few tracks on my laptop. I eventually got that wretched clear wrapping off my new copy of "Land of Song: Welsh Choral Classics" and being the sort that likes heavy emotional stuff I made a bee-line for Track 18, Ivor Emanuel and the Rhos Male Voice Choir singing 'David of The White Rock'.

'Dafydd y Gareg Wen'. Great choral stuff eh? 'Bring me my harp' says David 'that I may play one more tune before I die'. Lovely traditional Welsh tune too, if you don't know it try here

BUT! ..... IMAGINE MY SUPRISE as they say on the letters page in the newspapers! The Rhos Male Voice Choir were no more, ceased to be. The track supplied was of some brass band playing the melody.

I wonder what happened there. Hard to imagine deliberate misrepresentaion. Had someone in the studio taken the wrong 'master' down off the shelf? Or had there been a legal row with some artists at a late stage? Anyway this is the first CD I've owned with somethng on the tracks that doesn't match up with the description on the label. maybe I can sell it on Ebay as 'rare' eh?

Capitalism at work

I've just been amusing myself watching the last few minutes of an auction on Ebay. It was for an item I put a bid in for myself when the price was still a bargain yesterday but then a couple of hours ago I was outbid and I was curious to see how it all ended ...

Do you go one Ebay? I tend to avoid it these days if I can, it feels potentially very addictive to me. "You've been outbid! Don't let this item get away!" Settling on an exchange value for objects is complicated at the best of times and certainly not something where it is wise to let any element of competition creep in. Often I've seen secondhand books go on internet auctions for prices well above what you can buy them new for on Amazon just because some canny seller describes them as 'rare'. Madness!

In fact I seldom see a real bargain on Ebay. Your best bet is if someone has described an item badly or, even better, set the auction to end at a weird time in the middle of the nght. Usually however the price plods up during the last hours as hopeful buyers can't resist making just one more bid.

Probably I shouldn't say this but then if you have used Ebay you must have worked it out for yourself anyway. The best way to get a bargain is not to bid until the last few seconds and then make just one bid at the maximum you want to pay. That way the competition have no time to get back in and raise the stakes again. That's exactly what happened today - a skilled buyer with more than two hundred transactions to his credit swooped in the last ten seconds and the guy who had patiently bid for the item over a week lost it. Positively Darwinian!

Windmills

One thing that is a bit of a feature of our (at the moment - extremely) leafy part of Chiba-ken is the presence of many small 'windmills' around the place. I've heard that someone local makes a hobby of their construction and I must research the topic a bit, find out who it is.

All these windmills have a very similar construction. An old spokeless bicycle wheel is mounted vertically on a post and then six or eight cut down PET soft drink bottles are fixed to rotate horizontally around the circle. The top and bottom of the bottle are mounted on a spindle and the body of the bottle is cut to create propellor blades so that the whole thing looks like a circle of old-fashioned plane engines that spin fast in the wind. It is pure recycling, using junk to produce something beautiful and interesting

A picture is worth a thousand words eh? I promise I'll take one and publish here in the next few days.

I'm not sure if these windmills are supposed to have a practical function. Perhaps they are intended as 'bird-scarers' as I usually spot them around hatake open fields. But to me they feel like prayer wheels whizzing around on bright windy days. The world would be a better place if there were a lot more of them about. Maybe I'll have a go at making one ...

Watching "The Queen"

I don't get to watch TV much in Japan, I can go weeks without it. Partly it is inclination but also it usually isn't very practicable with students working just a few feet away in the room next door. Every trip I make to the UK I bring back a small pile of DVD's to watch with Edera but getting her nailed down to spend time sitting in front of the TV is no simple task either and these opportunities have to be eked over months. Usually we have no idea what is new or interesting by way of UK productions.

This time I brought back a copy of last year's film "The Queen" starring Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen and we watched it last night. Have you seen it yet? If not you should plan to do so soon. We were deeply impressed. Most of the 'rave' reviews on the internet centre around Helen Mirren but actually I thought that Michael Sheen's portrayal of Tony Blair was even more powerful. His genius as an observer and actor is outstanding.

Perhaps - in fact probably - this film does offer some insights into those days following the death of Princess Diana. But with my increasingly 'professional' interest in the academic analysis of events I couldn't help but feel uneasy somewhere. All acting productions involving 'real' events depend on an act of imagination and an interpretation of evidence but somehow when they involve Julius Cesar or Napoleon they don't have the impact that they do when they portray recent events and people that are still very much alive. A film like this inevitably stands for most in the audience as a 'real' representation of 'what actually happened'. But at the end of the day it is primarily a work of fiction in the sense that we just don't know exactly what was said. It isn't a documentary eh?

Monkey Puzzle

When I took a walk in Barnard Castle on my way home one day during this recent trip to England I stopped to admire the Monkey Puzzle Tree in the ground of the local tourist information office there. In my childhood this large Victorian mansion building was the local council offices but this magnificent tree in the garden must have long pre-dated that use of the bulding. In fact this particular tree must have been one of the first in England becasue the species was only introduced to Europe in the 1850's.

Araucaria araucana. Now I know it comes from Chile where the seeds are often eaten, and is othewise known as the 'Chile Pine' - a confusing name because a species of pine it isn't. Are there many in Japan? I can't ever remember seeing one but they love warm maritime climates so perhaps it thrives down along the Seto or in Kyushu. In France they are known as "désespoir des singes" or "monkey's despair".

As a child I could certainly see why any self-respecting monkey would be puzzled. Every time I walked by my eyes were searching those branches hoping for a glimpse of a confounded simian. But then I should have realised that no apes would be roaming any trees in draughty County Durham without a good thick anorak and wooly hat to keep out the cold.

Monkey Puzzle trees have been on my mind during a week of worries about the welfare and well-being of certain trees I count as friends, but that is another story eh?

Niigata quake

A big earthquake this morning just off the coast of Niigata Prefecture. Up in the mountains around Nagaoka and Kashiwazaki it was recorded at Shindo 6.8 and sadly there are reports of at least three fatalities and many casualties and hundeds of houses destroyed. Down here in southern Kanto more than a hundred miles distant it could still be felt quite strongly and I guessed it was a 'big one' somewhere a long way off by the way in which our house shook for nearly a minute.

It feels like in Japan people mentally adjust to the possibility of quakes in the same way that in Britain we have become accustomed to the possibility of becoming a victim of terrorism. If hazards are always present we have to get by through discounting them. Back in the late 1960's I was working in Northern Ireland when IRA terrorism really took off and I saw for myself the violence and burning buildings resulting from the early attacks in Falls Road and the sectarian partition of Belfast. I'll never forget the quality of the fear people on the streets experienced through being on the receiving end of hatred. Once the Irish situation began to be resolved in the 1990's Islamic terrorism became a feature of our streets so actually in the UK we've lived with those kind of risks during my whole adult life.

When I think about it there are lots of similarities between our experience of earthquakes and terrorism. But there is a big difference too of course. Terrorist acts are potentially avoidable through vigilance but quakes are essentially random events. Geologists might predict by spotting some tell-tale signs but its just as likely to take everyone completely by suprise. And the last big urban quake here - at Kobe - claimed three times more victims than the events of 9-11

Flight around both edges of the night

Back in sticky Japan with the usual strong dose of jet-lag. It was an eventful flight back with plenty of bumping around up there at ten thousand metres thanks to the powerful high altitude tail winds but at least it got us back here forty minutes early. Glad that I wasn't flying the other way ...

British Airways had already messed Edera around in both directions, missing both her connecting flight and loosing her bags on the homeward trip. So I wasn't sanguine about the journey home. But to be fair the trip was OK apart from a 'tropical' 747 waiting for us to board at Heathrow. It seemed that the aircon han been switched off for repair and the plane had been sitting out on the tarmac in the sunshine for hours. Atsui ne? But once the engines were started it soon cooled down.

It did result in an interesting little 'incident' though. A bunch of around twenty rather fractious Japanese sixty-year-olds was sitting in my part of the cabin and the arrival of their group laden with the obligatory back packs prompted much running around by the three - Japanese - cabin attendants with bottles of water and sincere apologies. Somehow these only got handed out to Japanese passengers though, our neighbouring Western eyes were carefully avoided. There was nothing 'nasty' about it, it was simply that they seemed to unconsiously assume that Japanese passengers would expect and demand a better quality of service than us Brits, who are used to keeping our complaints to ourselves ...

Later on our flight across Siberia we managed to follow the 'sine curve' shadow of the night between the 14th and 15th high up into the Arctic and then at dawn southwards again towards the Patom plateau - a wonderful kind of dusk that lasted nearly four thousand miles and six hours.

Even before we had set off from London the pilot warned us that typhoon 'Man-yi' was headed towards Kanto and that we might be diverted but in the end we won the race with the bumpiest landing I've ever experiencd at Narita amidst strong winds and driving rain. Actually that storm missed us in the end, heading east out into the ocean. Lucky eh?

Now I am sixty

'Little House' has been a bit neglected this last couple of weeks. Not only have I been busy with maintenance work around the house here in Britain but also Edera-chan has been here for two weeks holiday and we've spent a lot of time with my mum. But the main reason I've been missing in recent days is has been my sixtieth birthday last Thursday and the party we had here on Saturday.

Yep! Sixty years old. Hard to imagine eh? It seems to have such a touch of 'finality' about it somehow but I can't say that I feel depressed. Somewhere I read reccently that "today's sixty is yesterday's forty" and I feel that's true for me. In my grandparent's generation once you had turned sixty you were definitely getting 'old'. It is certainly true that some sofas seem to be getting lower these days and suitcases heavier but today I plodded up to the top of Arnside Knott which, if not high, is a pretty steep hill.

In East Asia sixty is a special age because it is five times around the twelve year calendar cycle. Once youa re safely past the big day it's OK to be a big kid again sometimes and that is something I won't find hard.

On the day we went out for a family lunch but on Saturday the weather was fine and we headed off for a hike up Nicky Nook. Later around thirty of us met up at the house and I had a suprise birthday cake in the form of a train.

England is coming to an end now. Edera flies home tomorrow and I follow at the weekend. Lots of humidity and mosquitoes in store for me eh?

House painter

A low profile these last few days - Edera is over here in England with me now and we've been taking my mum out on various shopping expeditions as well as putting the family house here in order. The whole place needs repainting externally and this is the time of year to do it, no chance of getting work like that finished during the winter. But the weather isn't being kind. Today I've been repainting part of the garage but it has been a case of dodging heavy and even thundery showers.

June is supposed to be the best month for weather in England but this year it has been pretty grim with lots of flooding in the Midlands and Yorkshire. There have been far too many houses built on flood plains over the last thirty years as developers have twisted the arms of local councils to permit housing on low lying areas with claims that floods there are only 'once in a century' events. I feel sorry for people who have been taken in by that kind of stuff.

House painting isn't a Japanese chore. If you want the exterior painted it tends to be a professional job because there won't be enough space around the building to gove access to higher walls and roofs from ladders and the wole place will have to be scaffolded. I don't see high gloss paints in Japan either, and there certainly is nothing like the range of colours available in DIY stores.

Well, keep your fingers crossed for me over the next few days. I need to have the bulk of this workk finished by Saturday!