Prison Strike

I've been reading on the news website some reports about this week's 'strike' of prison officers in the UK. Readers outside Britain probably don't know but on Wednesday their trade union - the 'Prison Officers Association' - called a lightning strke early in the morning. A few hours later after much legal action by the government and various decisions by judges they were reluctantly sent back to work but there will surely be more trouble soon.

The basis of the strike seems to be that the government didn't fully accept an arbitration award and tried to 'stage' the increased payments over twelve months. In theory it is illegal for prison officers to strike - but then in theory the government should have paid the arbitrated sum awarded too. There is a lot of 'dialogue of the deaf' stuff in progress and everyone believes that they are 'fully justified' in what they do. And behind the prison officers come many other public service groups with pay demands this autumn - including the police.

It suprises me that the government have got away with this kind of trick so easily in the past. They won't in future. You can declare something as 'illegal' as you like but 'when push comes to shove' and people don't report to work what are you going to do? Send the soon-to-be-negotiated-with police around to their houses to 'make them'? In the end you can only govern by consent. In several prisons this time even the prisoners applauded the staff and shook their hands when they came back to work.

Setting pay rates always strikes me as a very complex business. It is difficult enough in companies where there is an identifiable pot of money to argue over, let alone public services. And sadly people have had the example of senior managers awarding themsleves huge pay increases and bonuses under the pretense that they 'deserve the going rate' and all that guff. People learn by example and who can blame them? "Do as I say and not as I do" is a strategy you have to be pretty dumb to accept these days.

Good Old Fraud

It never ceases to surprise me just how amateurish so many attempts at fraud, hacking and virus spreading and the like are on the internet. On my academic e-mail address I have just received an e-mail from a Mr. Assou (really! truth is always stanger than fiction!) in Ghana who it seems works in a mine and has lots of gold dust to sell cheap if I can just send him my bank details. How can I resist?

Well at least it makes a change from the Nigerian lawyers who want to cut me in on a share of some huge unclaimed legal estate if I can just cover their court costs and let them know the number of my Swiss bank account.

Does anyone anywhere ever fall for this stuff? Presumably someone, somewhere must have in the past or they wouldn't bother. One in ten million perhaps.

I can understand people getting more confused by all these pishing e-mails purporting to be from banks, or inviting us to 'click on the link' that will activate our 'free subscripton' to the 'Cat Journal' or confirm our acceptance of a new three piece suite. But most people have got pretty wary now eh?

In Japan there's been a spate of phone calls to usually elderly people on the pretense that their grandson or grandaughter has been involved in causing a car accident - but a rapid payment of a large sum of money into an account can resolve the problem. Such is the sense of family loyalty here that the banks now won't permit individual payments over a certain amount (around £500) to stop so many naive relatives being fleeced.

The only e-mail that has got the better of me so far was one purporting to be a free subscription to 'Marxist Weekly'. Huh? In a second I'd clicked on the 'cancellation link' at the bottom and - VIRUS ATTACK! Luckily my virus protection software stopped it.

So be careful! If you don't believe me click here!

Singing Detective

This last couple of weeks Edera and I have been watching Dennis Potter's play "The Singing Detective" on a DVD set that I brought back from Britain. I watched parts of it the first time around when it was on TV back in 1986. Actually I have a rather amusing recollection of watching it sitting next to my grandfather who headed off with a grunt to boil a kettle for a cup of tea every time one of the 'steamier' scenes came up! That was one kind of 'savage amusement' that he had lost all interest in it seems ...

If you haven't seen it find a copy now. It's a wonderfully complex story about a detective novel writer in hospital suffering from psoraisis. In his mind as he lies in bed his own adult life becomes entangled with one of the characters in his novels, and also with experiences from his childhood. Just an amazing piece of writing and also the production that made Michael Gambon's name as an actor. But until now I'd not realised how closely this plot was based on Potter's own life. Take a look here

One element in the play that interested me was an incident from his childhood when he made up a tale about someone at school to get himself out of trouble. His lie resulted in the other boy getting a severe beating. But what was striking was the way in which the rest of the class, seeing how the land was lying and what the teacher believed, also started to invent stories about the guilt of the other boy too. And eventually, since everyone said that he was to blame, the other boy came to believe it himself.

It must easily and often happen. Repeat a lie about someone often enough and eventually it seems to become the truth. That's how 'false' confessions must happen eh?

'Neko o miru' neko

When I went up to 'Landrome' to do some shopping for tea most of the women pushing trolleys around seemed to be in downright 'pokey' and unsmiley moods. End of the school holiday season I suppose exacerbated by husbands lounging around the house untidily making the most of their three day's annual leave. But mainly the heat, it has been cloudy today which just makes the humidity worse. However the JMA forecast for mid week sees us with daily maxima of under thirty degrees for the first time in a month so inch by inch autumn is arriving.

We were at a barbecue yesterday evening and I noticed then a very 'autumnish' moon looming through the early evening mist over Matsuo way. It was a classic 'tsuki o miru' moment - a 'moon-viewing evening' - and in Old Japan they would have been out there writing seasonal haiku as quick as you could pull your fan out of your yukata sleeve. But we were all chatting away in French (of a kind!) to a friend's parents who are over here from Montreal. They haven't stopped sweating since they got of the plane. Quebec to Kanto in August is truely 'savage amusement' eh?

By the time I got home from the supermarket today Pero was out by the gate looking for some early evening trouble. She's a 'neko o miru neko' in this hot weather - a 'cat-viewing cat'. What better fun in the evening heat than to beat up a few 'strays' in the neighbourhood before feeding time after sleeping under the cool air-con all day?

She made me think of that old nursery rhyme

"Fee fi, foe, fum ... I smell another neko chum ..."

Just put one paw on this side of the lane and see what happens next ...

Train on time

One of the things that people who live here like to tell visitors is that the trains always run on time - and it's true! Hard to imagine for most British people I know because with us any train that arrives within ten minutes of the advertised arrival time is counted as being 'on time' for official statistical puproses (and even then only 86% still arrive 'on time'!). If a train arrived ten minutes after time here for no good reason the driver would be sacked at once. Barring accidents, major earthquakes or typhoons Japanese trains arrive and leave exactly on time.

This is actually the result of a management policy that dates back to before 1920, so JR have had nearly a hundred years practice of 'getting it right'. Because Japan has so many single track routes to keep them moving it became crucial to develop new ways of punctual working so that trains could pass each other at station loops. Also now on busy suburban routes around Tokyo trains run at three minute intervals - so just a one minute delay would cause trains to back up for miles.

Our new 211 class units down here in leafy Chiba-ken offer both driver and passengers a good view of the track and in this photo you can see just how much the driver's attention is focused on punctuality. On his right is the train time card which has on it all the information for this service - arrival and departures at each station, speed restrictions and line speeds. Times are given to the quarter minute - and if you are more than 15 seconds slow you are LATE! On the left is a clock with a second sweep hand set in the depot for accuracy and a tachometer recording device. The microphone links the driver to area control in the event of emergencies and also lets him speak to passengers. Usually if there is a problem he'll let passengers know at once - "Sorry but we are held up at a red signal here for about one minute ..."

But perhaps the main reason the train is on always time is that in Japan the driver's job has status and he's treated with respect and so takes his responsibility very seriously. Somehow in Britain we have completely 'lost the plot' when it comes to treating people in skilled manual work with respect.

Rice Harvest

Rice harvest started around here during the week. The weather has been perfect for ripening the grain and I expect that the farmers are moving fast to get the crop in while the tanbo are so dry, especially with rain forecast for next Thursday and Friday. Grain farmers' worries must be the same the world over. Not enough rain or too much rain, not enough sun or too much sun ...

This last three weeks has been perfect for ripening rice and it's amazing how quickly it turns yellow and the heads start to bend over with the sheer weight of grain. You couldn't live around here and not be moved by the beauty of the land and the sense of the changing season and have some inkling of how farmers must feel at this moment. Edera was telling the kids in her UNESCO class how every day during the week as she'd been driving over to Togane she had seen how the tanbo were turning yellow as the crop ripened day by day. A bit like learning I guess, you take it day by day but it is only over time that you suddenly realise the road you have travelled

Where I was brought up ther was plenty of farming done but not arable work. With livestock you mainly notice the changes in Spring when the fields are full of lambs and calves, here it is at the end of the summer. The older people who work the land here though look just like the older people I knew who eked a living from upland Pennine farms fifty years ago, their clothes are somehow bleached through so much exposure to sunshine and rain, even their 'Sunday Best'! Generations of practical skill in their fingers.

Your first foreigner?

Spent part of the morning today with a bunch of kids in the 'UNESCO' summer class that Edera has been running. I want to write about it further as soon as I can get a picture copied but ther's one question I'd like to ask everyone already and that is "when did you meet your first foreigner?"

I ask because I realise that for some of these elementary school students I'm probably the first 'gaijin' that they got a really close up 'gander' at. And we are such an ugly bunch eh? Our noses really are THAT BIG. Of course all these kids have seen gaijin on TV and across the street but maybe I'm the first one they talked to.

Also, I realised today that I couldn't really answer this question myself. Up in North East England in the 1950's foreigners were as scarce as hen's teeth. Probably the first were some Australian penfriends of my mother's that called when I was around seven years old but heck! Aussies don't count as foreigners, they are just an exotic variety of Brit eh? Sometimes on Teeside we'd come across someone with a Polish or Ukrainian name who had managed to stay on (or hadn't been able to go home) after 1945. But to a child they too seemed as English as the rest of us, their refugee status wasn't obvious.

My first 'real' foreigner might even have been the French language teacher I had at secondary school. Hard to imagine now, when so many people in England take holidays in Spain as children.

When I was growing up in Middlesborough in the 1950's my only contact with anything remotely 'Japanese' was the occasional poster outside cinemas for war movies like "Bridge over the River Qwai" and "Camp on Blood Island" which were quite a genre when most adults still had vivid war-time memories.They demonized Japan in a way which both scared and felt wrong to me as a young child for reasons I couldn't have explained then.

So what was your first taste of something really foreign I wonder? Someone a bit prettier than me I hope.

'Area' and 'Line'

I've just been re-reading Barrie Shelton's book "Learning from the Japanese City: East Meets West in Urban Design". It's one of the very few books I've read by any Western (or - come to that - Japanese!) author that I feel really shows any deep understanding of the topic. Although I don't share his interest or background in contemporary architecture when he writes about the forms and character of ordinary vernacular buildings in towns I can relate to pretty well everything he writes. So I find this book is a good benchmark for me of my own growing understanding. At one time it was all rather strange and theoretical but now I can even spot many points he missed.

One of his main arguments is about the underlying importance of 'area' compared with 'line' in Japanese cultural experience. For example in writing , the use of 'kanji' involves 'area' - the use of space in two dimensions. When you learn to write at school here your exercise book is printed with squares and how you fill the whole area is important. In England school exercise books have lines and we are taught to write our words - which use arbitrary smbols from the 'alphabet' - in a completely linear way.

This difference pervades cultural experience in all kinds of ways. For example in traditional Japanese buildings it is the floor plan that is the important thing. Basically the whole house is a raised floor. The 'elevations' are of little importance and the interior walls usually comprise very standard 'shoji' and 'fusuma' screens slotted in between the structural posts holding up the roof. At one time it even used to be common for tenants to take these 'walls' with them when they moved house a bit like Westerners move with their furniture, leaving the just the floor and roof behind.

In Europe though our buildings have always emphasised the line of walls since Greek and Roman times. Our linear elevations are decorated walls with linear pediments and fenestration, you just can't get away from those lines in our urban landscape whether you are looking at Buckingham Palace or the High Street in some pokey country town.

Looking up old friends

On our recent O-bon trip we stopped over in Mie Prefecture because Edera wanted to visit a place she'd lived in as a child, to see the house and also to try and trace an old friend from elementary school there. This being Japan the house had long gone and was now a car park but we had better luck with the friend. Quite by luck and against all odds she suceeded in finding her - much to my suprise! It was over thirty years since they had last spoken to each other and the friend had moved away but then had come back again to the the area. Also after her husband's early death she'd taken her former family name again.

I've sometimes made contact with people after a long gap and it's always been really great to hear from them again. But somehow the relationship has never 'stuck' again for them, or sometimes perhaps for me, in terms of the former friendship. I guess it's because we have become very different people after half a lifetime. Or have we? It is equally suprising for me to notice what endures in people too, what 'persists' from decade to decade compared with what is changed. It varies a lot from person to person. Some are like statues made of bronze - they rust and weather a bit but otherwise keep something that is essentially 'them'. Others are like butter, you can hardly recognise the child or youth in the adult.

But it's an area that makes me curious, and I like to know how people that were once important to me are. I often check out the university alumni web site and the 'Friends Reunited' old school friends site too. Interesting to see who has done what, to try and 'read between the lines' of all those jokey biographies, "my life in a paragraph" stuff. It often reminds me of a Paul Simon's track off 'Rhythm of the Saints'

"Some have died, some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there ..."

O-bon reflections

I didn't write anything about O-bon this year. Actually we were in Hiroshima a couple of days earlier and so back here in Kanto before the holiday was over but we did make a visit to Edera's father's family grave down in Kure. It is the season for such visits

Graveyards in Japan tend to be on steep hillsides not usable for other purposes, often located around the edges of town. I'm not sure that our 'Skyline' would squeeze up the lane to this one and even if it did there is nowhere to park or turn around. So it is a long hike up from the Pachinko parlour car park far away on the main road down at the bottom of the hill. This year it was a fearsomely hot day for our visit too. But when you arrive the view is worth it. Behind you on the mountain just a wall of trees and bamboo groves and in front a fine panorama of the landward side of the city. It was nice to 'set to' and weed and sweep the area and wash the marker stone.

Japanese graves are 'communal' family affairs, not individual tombs. After death and cremation the ashes are interred in a jar and placed in the small chamber under the marker. Eventually a whole generation of brothers will be resting there together with their wives and any unmarried children. And then it is the responsibility of ongoing generations to look after that family grave. Usually they get cleaned up at the Spring and Autumn equinox and at O-bon and sometimes New Year too,. There are not many that are neglected in cemetries like this in provincial towns.

At O-bon the spirits of ancestors are said to return and people still go to the graveyard to welcome them back and then see them off again once the festival is over. And we offer incense and prayers there in a quiet way - it's a place you can always go to be near departed members of your family.

Making the trip this year brought the question up for me as to where, if at all, part of my own 'ashes' should rest in Japan. Of course I'd hope that part will find their way back to Northern England but after all these years at least a part of me will rest in Japan too I'm sure. It's a more subtle question than it seems. Leafy Chiba-ken is my home on this side of the world but there is no family around here to keep our patch weeded and swept. I'll think about it.

You can't beat a good simulator

Into Chiba to do some serious walking today and pick up a few places a bit 'out of town' that I'd planned to see. Around 12 kilometres and I needed the exercise - every time I get on those scales I seem to have put on another kilo. It was forecast to go to 35 degrees but no point in putting it off because it is forecast to go to that every day next week around here.

Anyway - I had a good laugh outside Sogo Department Store. One side of the store the police band were playing in their solar topees and the other side the Prefectural emergency services team had parked up their "Experience an Earthquake" vehicle.

I say "laugh" because it was a pretty unfortunate bit of timing. The last seventy two hours we have experienced nothing else but earthquakes down in this leafy corner of Chiba-ken including a couple of meaty medium sized ones. I've counted at least eighteen shocks and after-shocks and Edera says she's never experienced anything like it. It seems that there's been a lot of movement along a fault line under the Pacific near Shirako about fifteen miles from here.

You can definitely have too many earthquakes. To be honest I've felt a bit spooked by them. But everyone seems to take them in their stride. Like the British, the Japanese do a good line in "stiff upper lip".

So there was a terrible irony that the Prefecture were showing off their new "Experience an Earthquake" truck just when we were all having more than our fair share of the real thing. But then who needs the real thing when you can a simulator?

However I can't scoff - I actually found that demonstraton truck pretty interesting myself. It simulated an earthquake of Shindo 7 with graphic sound effects but it was interesting that the room did only shake about a foot each way. A heck of a lot more than the couple of inches we've been experiencing this week and it would bring loads of stuff crashing off shelves and a pile of slates down from the roof and knock you off your feet if you couldn't grab something.

But yes - it wasn't a 'nuclear explosion' by any means, I'd be less scared now if I found it suddenly happening. But let's hope I never do eh?

'Vet' visit

Off to the vets for Tora this morning. Since we arrived back from Hiroshima he's had his old blocked sinus and runny eyes complaint again but also problems with his waterworks too, maybe a recurrence of a problem with gall stones he had a couple of years ago. Cats being desert animals are particulalry prone to difficulties with peeing brought on by the summer heat and humidity here in Japan and both of our felines have been suffering this last month, not venturing too far from fans and air conditioners.

Well, he had a blood test and was suitably dosed up and injected so we'll see how he improves. The problem with peeing seems to be a source of minor 'accidents' and this afternoon he is lurking in the cool 'ofuro' entrance feeling very sorry for himself. He's thirteen, maybe fourteen now so he's getting on. Not 'old' in cat terms but certainly elderly, the equivalent of early seventies for a human. Let's hope this morning's horse-sized 'shot' of antibiotics and saline drip has him feeling perkier soon.

No matter how many times I take animals to the vets - and it has been a lot over my lifetime - I always feel stressed out by it, just as much as the pet concerned I guess. Well maybe not quite that much. Tora was pretty vocal as soon as he was corralled in the car this morning, he didn't want us to think that it was any trip he was looking forward to or had been planning to make. Our old dog Crackers had many painful vet visits after she developed a blood complaint and her knowledge of the geography of north Preston became so well developed that she'd start trembling with fear maybe a kilometre before we got to the surgery car park. Good grief! Animals know about vets eh? You don't have to spell it out for them.

Actually I had to laugh this morning - three dogs and a cat and their owners all crowded into the small waiting room at the surgery. Quiet as mice the lot of them, ultra-low profiles all round. Back on their own turf it would have been a case of "I'm the dog so there!" or "I'm the cat so there!" but here down at the 'furry friend stalag' surrounded by all the guards and searchlights best keep quiet and hopefully the man in the white coat won't notice me if I'm good eh?

Some fat chance. If only life was that simple

Glass Screens

A couple of times in the last week while we were away I found myself in 'new' social groups. I'm no 'shrinking violet' when it comes to talking to people in gatherings but nor am I a natural socialiser. I'm a quiet person and I guess I'm a natural introvert too. I really enjoy new 'company' but also recharge my batteries by being on my own or with 'family'.

Anyway, both occasions were pleasant enough but I found myself a bit perplexed by them. For me something was 'missing' and I realise it is the old familiar 'cultural angle' coming up again.

I've had Japanese friends tell me that they have found the English a bit 'cold' and aloof when they first meet and I can understand why. Actually for us there's often a lot of shyness there too. But we do often have an ingrained habit of mild informality too, it is usually our idiosyncratic style [but not like you bloomin' Americans out there eh? No Siree!]. And once a conversation starts it can quite quickly relax and survive on its own merits.

In Japan I usually experience new contacts as friendly too but these days I realise that there's more to it - a sense of formality and structure underlying that, as if people are unwilling to let go of 'forms'. Actually it's the old business of 'tatamae' and 'honne' again isn't it? 'Public' and 'private' face. You never quite know what people are really feeling because the forms are the thing. Let's "follow the Rules of Engagement here". Do it by the book. I even sometimes feel that there's a protective glass screen there, like you find in banks and ticket offices.

Of course sooner or later once you have been 'checked out' and if you 'get on' this stuff is all left behind. But it is very important to understand that it is there to begin with, it is part of the culture, even a bit formulaic like bowing or saying 'tadaima' when you come home. We might imagine that the more hazardous social encounter would be with loin cloth clad and blowpipe brandishing tribesmen up the Amazon but there the differences are pretty obvious and so the hazards hopefully avoidable. The riskier meetings might be with people where you both think you are both on the same 'wavelength' but you 'ain't.

Restless Night

Woken at 4:21 this morning by an earthquake. You can tell how close they are by how 'crisply' the house starts to shake and this one was pretty bloomin' 'crisp' - the whole place was shaking vigourously in just a second. We turned on the radio to hear that it was Shindo 5.3 and just off the coast south east of here near Kujukuri. No tsunami forecast though. Around us it was Shindo 4 - enough to make stuff rattle and even fall over although we had no damage ourselves. You can see the full details here

Since then we've had seven after-shocks but at least it gives us something to complain about apart from the heat and humidity. Japan in August - good grief!

Ondo Lodge

On our O-bon trip this time we stopped off for a night at Ondo Lodge, a hotel just south of Kure. It is closing for good at the end of this month, so we were lucky to get a chance to go there before it finally vanishes.

Actually 'hotel' doesn't quite describe it. It was built in the 1960's just at the time when Japan's economy was taking off but people were still far from affluent, so the accommodation side is more like a Japanese version of Butlins or a Youth Hostel rather than a modern hotel. And that's where the problem lies for the owners, it is a structure that would be just impossible to modernise. The rooms are too small with no en-suite facilities and the building is already suffering from many earthquake cracks around the corners of its ferroconcrete frame. Nothing to do but demolish it although it is less than fifty years old. Soon it will be rubble.

An interesting place for me though; the architecture and ambience spoke of a Japanese daily lifestyle well within my own lifetime and yet somehow already vanishing fast. And a great 'ofuro' communal bath and restaurant too.

But most of all the view eh? From the ridge out across the town of Ondo and the 'narrows' between mainland Honshu and Kuruhashi-jima. Now it is crossed by a short but high bridge with two spiral access roads crammed into the available space and it is still a very busy passage with a steady traffic of trawlers and ferries to Shikoku and Miyajima.

In 'Old Japan' this was truly the busiest of routes from Kyoto to the west. As I sat on our terrace looking over bay I thought of how the monk Dogen must have travelled this way in the Spring of 1223 on his way to Song China.

Guessing Games

I've recently been reading a collection of essays under the title "Japan:who governs?" by the American academic Chalmers Johnson. I really like his style, he's a quality writer. So many academics write stuff that is so opaque that it is barely readable but actually the opposite tendency - academics with 'axes to grind' - is even worse. I often find myself grinding my teeth at what can amount to little more than sloppily researched journalism.


One of the essays in this volume is about translating Japanese political terms, and the author writes at length about eighteen potential areas of difficulty. The first is the area of 'false friends' so familiar from our own school French lessons - a 'libraire' is a 'bookseller', not a 'librarian'. But in Japanese we have not only equivalent 'false friends' of the traditional kind ('konsento' doesn't mean 'consent' but refers to an 'electric socket') but also the uniquely Japanese trap of 'sounds like' written 'guessing games' which he calls 'katakana opacity'. The author Suzuki Takao has even referred to Japan as a 'guessing culture'. I know what he means ....

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If you've never studied Japanese you should know that 'katakana' are the syllabary used here to spell foreign words and every character represents one sound. They are easily spotted on the written page as they are rather angular and often look alike too. They still somehow confuse the heck out of me even me after all this time. I have to carefully spell out each syllable until - eureka! - I suddenly realise what the original word in Engish was! Hopefully. In theory eh? Because of course Japanese sounds are often very different, there is no straight match of phonemes.


But it's a guessing game familiar to all gaijin, and so it made me laugh out loud when Chalmers Johnson gave a classic example of 'katakana opacity'. He and his wife were once watching the NHK Syphony Orchestra on TV when up in katakana on the screen popped the title of the next piece - 'Rolling Green'. 'Sounds like an English composer' he thought - 'maybe Elgar or even Vaughan Williams'.


Then the orchestra began to play the overture to 'Lohengrin' ...

'Yamato' Museum

Just back from west Japan this afternoon. Our trusty 'Skyline' coped well with the 1400 mile round trip despite five days all at 35 degrees or hotter. At one point after a scorching trip from Kure back up to Hiroshima on Saturday I could detect sounds of bubbling under the bonnet but it turned out to be the reserve coolant tank cooking in the heat and not the radiator boiling thank goodness ...

So much to write about it is hard to know where to start first ... so let's stick to something simple. Friday afternoon we made a trip down to Kure to take a look at the new 'Yamato Museum' next to the main pier. Squeezed between a 'You-Me' department store and the ferry terminal for the Shikoku boats it can't have been open long because I can't remember it when I landed at the pier here in 2002. It is certainly well worth a visit just to see the amazing gallery covering the development of the town as a naval station and shipyard. I suppose by way of comparison with Britain this part of Hiroshima-ken is the equivalent of Dartmouth and Barrow-in-Furness all in one place.

For little kids like me though the highlight of the new building is the huge model of the battleship 'Yamato', the original of which was built just a couple of hundred metres away on the north side of the harbour. This must be about a 1:10th scale verson and it certainly wouldn't fit in your average bath. Admiring this scaled down replica which bristles with guns on every side it went through my mind that the real Yamato must have made a heck of a noise when those big 48cm guns were fired. The ultimate in battleship development.

Later on we took a cruise around the harbour to admire the current crop of SDF ships at berth. There were seven submarines tied up in one basin all flying the Japanese naval ensign. Nothing half as big as the old 'Yamato' but impressive nevertheless.

Doing Biography

Biographies are cropping up a lot for me this week. It is a genre of writing that I don't often get into as a reader or author, but at the moment three are on my desk.

One is a short biography of the railway locomotive designer Edward Thompson. Even though I'm a considerable 'buff' of trains from his time I didn't know that this book existed. It was a short run publication from a minor publisher and a real 'find' when I spotted it on Ebay recently. Another is more of a 'sketch' of the life of the Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei and covers his part in the Lookheed scandal. The last one is a work we are translating at the moment which is a biography of a modern Zen Master.

Hard to imagine three such different lives although the last two probably at least knew of each other as they were from the same part of Japan and almost the same generation. One a gifted engineer and administator but a very private man, one a consummate 'fixer' and 'wheeler-dealer', one a senior religious teacher and academic.

What strikes me is how, even though there are still people around that knew each of them personally, already most of the details of their lives has evaporated like dew. All the day to day stuff is gone and perhaps most of the detail of achievements too. What's mainly left are 'outlines' of the man concerned, like shadows. The impressions left on others. And soon even that fades, unless you did something profoundly good or bad you are soon forgotten. Writing biography is hard.

* * * * *
We are taking a short break and heading down to Hiroshima for O-Bon. See you next week!

View to Voice Training

Another lethal thirty five degrees today and looking at JMA we are stuck with this all of O-Bon week. Talking to some friends yesterday who were just back from the Philippines they said it feels much hotter here than there. Of course in the desert it can go much higher because the air is dry. Forty is the highest ever recorded in Japan because at least the humidity off the ocean keeps the lid on extremes - just like for the UK the sea acts to even out the reservoir of heat. Until the typhoon season in the autumn. That might be a 'biggie' this year.

Quite unrelated to the rest of what I'm writing about today but I added the picture of the 'Narita Express' bucketing through Sakura yesterday teatime because there's something about that 'pea soup' haze of humidity and mosquitoes that says "Very Hot Sticky Afternoon"

This morning four of us went to see a local singing coach in action with another local choir with an eye to using him sometimes ourselves. We are having a bit of a reappraisal of our 'act' at the moment, some minor soul-searching with an eye to 'doing better' at our tenth anniversary concert next year. It was interesting enough. The other choir are all ladies and all professional piano teachers so they are keen but they sing what to me feels like very easy and conventional stuff in Japanese. I've mentioned it all before eh? The "sky is blue, grass is green, let's all stride along the road of life together" genre. It's like watching paint drying for me.

The voice coach was OK and we are spending some time with him soon, but I also felt that I'd seen voice coaches before too. Put it down to the hot weather getting me scratchy. They all focus on either vowels or breathing and this one was no exception; it was all in the breath control for him, just feel my rippling tanden muscles! It's true that these things are worth paying attention to. Bad vowels make you sing flat, bad breath makes you unpopular with your friends but also sounds scratchy too. I hesitate to say it, hope it doesn't sound too elitist, but probably having a reasonable voice and the ability to sing in tune and read music helps too eh? In choirs I guess we are self-selecting, we don't get there if we don't have these basic skills.

I came away very much with the thought in my head that if you really want to DO being a choir there are no 'quick fixes' and also probably the first question to ask yourselves is "what are we doing this for?" I can see that is a profoundly subtle question in terms of making all music and not unrelated to the one people ask themselves about "doing meditation" for example. If you asked most of the choirs around here I suspect the answers might be predictable and to do with "being best and admired - making 'progress'" at one level or another and I can see that delinquent tendency in us too sometimes. But those aren't the 'best times' and we do have many 'best times' with other stuff in our hearts when we are in harmony with each other and the world in general .

If you'd asked the same question to choristers back in the Olden Days I like to think they would have answered "to praise the Lord".

Bear and Cat

I came across this recent photo on the BBC News web site a while back. I hope that you can see it OK.

Up the tree (which is in a garden in New Jersey) is a wild bear. Down at the bottom of the tree the tiny brown dot in the flowers is a domestic tabby cat called Jack who is pretty cross about the bear trespassing in his garden. The cat's human, Ms. Donna Dickey, told the local newspaper - the 'Star Ledger' - that Jack "Doesn't want anybody in his yard". So he chased the intruder up the tree. She had to call him in so that the bear could escape. You can read the original story here.

I had a good laugh about this picture and especially its resemblance to one particular 'Pooh Bear' illustration when I first saw it but actually it says a lot about life doesn't it? I feel very sorry for the bear somehow. He looks so undignified and it's because he has no sense of his own strength and self worth eh? He's got no fundamental confidence in himself and that's why he's hanging up there like a fool. Somehow I feel I've been that bear for most of my adult life.

The puss cat on the other hand. He doesn't doubt that he's loved and this is HIS garden and who so cares about bears. A great frame of mind until you get eaten.

Somewhere between the bear and the feline lies the truth

Phew! What a 'scorcher' again ...

Today my usual early August whinge about heat and humidity. Yesterday I had a trip into Tokyo that I couldn't avoid and boy! was it hot there. Thirty three degrees according to JMA but out on the streets of Bunkyo-ku near the university in the direct sun it must have been several degrees hotter than that. After my meeting I walked back the couple of kilometres down to Akihabara and then took a train up to Nishi-Nippori to find a shop there. Savage amusement! I didn't feel much like blogging afterwards for sure. Today my new aircon is blasting away to keep my study down to a 'chilly' twenty six degrees. I feel like I've had my money's worth out of it already.

According to the weather chart it would go to thirty six today in Toyama in the wake of the latest typhoon to cross western Japan. I'm watching this a bit nervously because next week we are making the long trip down to Hiroshima by car and I don't want blinding rainstorms to add to the usual nose-to-tail traffic madness of the pre O-Bon holiday traffic. Actually we'll hopefully miss the worst of it; we are planning to spend one night on the journey down to make some visits to places in Mie Prefecture and then also a night on the way back near Nara.

In preparation for the trip we went over to Autobacs this morning to get two new tyres but the mechanic told us that we didn't need to change them yet and there was still a reasonable amount of wear left in them if we rotated the wheels, which we did for a 'fiver'. I was touched, it's hard to imagine a tyre business in the UK doing that, we'd have driven off with four expensive new tyres for sure. However with a small part of the notional 'windfall' I did buy a car CD player, a bit of an extravagence but now I can listen to something that will keep me awake on the long journey rather than send me to sleep - which is what the NHK traffic news and weather forecast usually does.

Pick 'n Mix Grand Theories

I promised a 'second installment' and some 'grand theories' in my last blog and so as far as you can express a 'grand theory' in three paragraphs here goes ...!

One of the really interesting 'understandings' emerging for me from my studies is about the whole area of 'social reproduction'. What it is that 'endures' in societies, and why. I could write a book about this already - well, I AM writing a book about it I suppose. Amongst the most enduring aspects of social reproduction are the 'cultural' ones and especially both language and the ways in which we create relationships with each other - including the relationships of power. One reason must be that these are learned once, early in childhood, and then become almost unconsious aspects of the way we live for our whole lives.

Whatever 'politics' may be it is certainly about the use of language and relationships of power. So my guess is that contemporary LDP politicians loosing in the polls look like despondent samurai because that is really what they are. 150 years - just two consecutive life spans - isn't a long time in the social evolution of any cultural group. I think that you could make a good case to show the similarities between groups like the Tokugawa daimyo and their retainers of yesteryear and the LDP factions and zoku of today. These things change only very slowly in society. 'Sumus quod sumus' - we are who we are. Seeing this through living in a different culture helps you see how comparable tendencies and characteristics play out in your own. It feels like a very important insight to me because it runs so contrary to our naive expectations of expecting others to 'become like us'. Deep social change takes centuries to happen.

Democractic 'process' on the other hand - that's different. It is a form, not content. The 'how' and not the 'what', method and not purpose. Contrary to popular myth it is a recently and imperfectly adopted method and process of change in most Western societies too. Universal 'adult' suffrage was only achieved in the USA in 1920, in the UK in 1926, and in Japan in 1945. Most British nineteenth parliamentarians were as 'dead set' against extending the right to vote as the Meiji 'genro' were.

My personal observation is that underneath the cultural differences and despite those wretched loudspeaker vans, democratic process is actually now taken more seriously in Japan than in the UK. There are extremists lurking in every society but in Japan and especially at local elections many people really do listen carefully and with respect to candidates and (something almost vanished now in the UK!) and then do go out and vote. "Don't vote, it only encourages them!" is not a part of Japanese culture yet.