Deeds of 'utmost kindness'?

Over the last couple of years I've mentioned bullying a few times on this blog when I've noticed it affecting our students. There's one case I wrote about recently which is still on my mind and it seems to be getting no better. Actually, worse and worse.

As usual 'facts' are hard to come by and perhaps the parents are as mystified as we are. The teenager involved denies that 'bullying' is directly a cause of her constant refusal to attend school, it is just that she doesn't "get on" there. But the weeks of non-attendence are mounting up, the school doesn't seem inclined or motivated to really push the issue, or to make any move on a change of school either. And a whole term's worth of lessons have already been missed, in some curriculum areas she already won't ever catch up. I have the feeling - or at least I like to think - that in Britain 'authority' would already have acted decisively by now, that the doorbell would have rung, that case would have gone through the local administration and arbitration system and ended up in the courts if there was still truancy. It certainly would have when I worked in local government in Wales back in the 1970's where I remember a few children taken 'into care' in extreme cases.

I worry that it's a sign of my mind getting old, that impulse to say "it would never have happened in my day ..." But somewhere something is deeply out of balance for me, a kind of behaviour that needs to be firmly challenged is allowed to pass. In Zen there is a saying that "the kindest Kanzeon is found in hell" and in temples you sometimes see scrolls of illustrations of senior monks thrashing the daylights out of junior postulants with a kyosaku under the caption "deeds of utmost kindness".

What do you think? It feels to me like people are reluctant to enforce limits. I was never - or I don't think I was, hope I wasn't - a heavy 'limit enforcer' as a parent and actually the circumstances never came up where I needed to be. But in these circumstances I don't think I would have let the grass grow under my feet, it's not really an act of love, there are times when you have to be like a dog with a good grip and sharp teeth and not let go of your end of the stick if you really care.

A vintage 'Interesting Day'

Ha! What in the days of my youth I used to refer to in my diary as an 'interesting day'. When I was around twelve there were only two kinds of days to record - 'ordinary day' and 'interesting day' - and usually that is all I actually wrote on the page. It's easy to see why I became such a widely read writer, don't you think so?

Today has been looming on the calendar because I was due to give a half hour lecture to a bunch of academics, mainly foreign and postgraduate students but also a sprinkling of foreign and Japanese professors, about my studies. Generally speaking to groups doesn't worry me, I did a lot of it in my working life, but talking about my research to other researchers pushes me to the limit. Will they come up with questions that I can't answer? Or maybe even just laugh? And you never know if there might be some vastly learned Japanese researcher in the audience who has been writing books on your topic for the last thirty years who just can't believe that you could be so dumb.

But it went fine. I can speak about Japanese urban space and how change happens and when the questions come the excite me, there's more that I want to say. Actually I realise that I've become an expert on my subject and that it really interests me and I can talk about it with some passion.

And at 'Todai' too - the University of Tokyo. "Oh! - by the way - did I menton I was giving a lecture at 'Todai' last week?" One-upmanship at its worst! Ha! Ha!

Also, it's good to talk with others also getting a lot of energy out of their work. Hard to describe but you know when it happens, conversations 'take wings', you have both shared is seeing something about the same bit of reality.

Anway, at least I can stop thinking about it now and get on with other work. Lots of writing to do over the next couple of weeks now before I can take a 'breather' at Christmas and New Year.

Kitsune

I discovered this little shrine on a recent trip we made on our day off. It was one of about half a dozen on a hill near Abiko.

Foxes in Japanese are called 'kitsune' and you often find small statues of them as guardians not only at Shinto sites like this one but also sometimes around Buddhist temples too. White kitsune are said to be the servants of the deity Inari and act as his (or her) messengers in dealings with humans. In Western culture foxes are usually thought of as rather dodgy characters - cheaters and chicken-stealers, or worse. There is an aspect of that here in Japan too, but in general foxes are thought to have strong qualities of intelligence and loyalty and to make trustworthy and wise friends. If they make it to a hundred years old they become wise enough to be able to change into humans.

In old Japan foxes were believed to be able to change into beautiful women and would make devoted and romantic wives or lovers. But if the husband ever found out the truth then she would have to leave him, so better to live in ignorance. Kitsune, if they were drunk or not paying attention, might forget to hide their bushy tails for a moment and then they would be discovered and the game would be up.

Kitsune in folklore have one, three, five, sven or nine tails. If they grow nine then they become kyuubi no kitsune - 'nine-tailed foxes' and they turn white or gold and develop the wisdom to see what is happening anywhere in the world.

In Buddhism the female bodhisattva Dakiniten rides on a flying white fox.

Must look out for one of these little kitsune statues to take to England on my next trip.

Anniversary

The third anniversary of my dad's death today, and so we offered incense this morning. It seems already much longer ago somehow. Once events move over the horizon beyond immediate recollection there is no easy yardstick that we can use to measure their emotional and physical distance from us. Was it really only three years ago since that last sunny afternoon on the beach at Hasenuma before he took the plane back to England? One of his friends told me that after he arrived back he'd already started making plans to be 'back here for Christmas'. It was not to be.

I only knew my dad for just over one year as an adult, life's circumstances had kept us apart for nearly fifty years and when we did track each other down we had a lot to talk about. It was vital time for both of us. Just what exactly it meant for him I can't say but for me it laid to rest ghosts that had haunted me since my childhood, nightmares to do with seeming rejection. And I also thought that I had 'found my family'at last.

It all went terribly wrong three years ago today, that dream got blown away in just a moment. And I soon realised that he had left an awful mess behind him. For a time I was deeply, monumentally angry about it. But actually it was a lesson about trusting only in the deepest refuge because in the end there are no others. Good grief! It is still a deeply painful thing to be around, like an extracted tooth socket.

But one new part of this 'jig-saw' did fall into place for me during this year. A friend of his confided me that actually he had shared his plans with her in a converation just a couple of weeks before he died. So it was just his lack of strategy that had been the cause of so much grief, I knew at last that he had genuinely cared about me as much as his other children. That gave me something to smile about - a true 'old soldier' in every sense getting tripped up by his lack of strategy. His sense of honour was not the reason after all. Basically he'd just been dumb in the way he'd handled things, thought he would live forever. And trusted others too much. We all make mistakes.

Leaf Trip

About this time of November we head down for lunch at 'Nippon Aerobics' in the hills behind Mobara for the 'viking all-you-can-eat' buffet lunch (a bargain!) but also to admire the trees in the park there. The place has only been open for about twenty five years so the ornamental trees must be about the same age, but they have thrived and grown tall in that time. It is quite a special collection they have there and the colours in late November are amazing. The humid summer climate of leafy Chiba-ken obviously suits them, I don't think they would have grown so tall in Lancashire

There are always plenty of fine days around now to choose from so we made the trip on Wednesday - our day off. There was a bevy of keen amateur artists complete with easels and large boxes of gear capturing the essence of the moment along the verge opposite the best of the maples, and a crowd of runners running round the outdoor track in spikes and tracksuits. In Japan people just don't feel comfortable with their hobbies unless they have the latest in technology to carry out their task.

Actually you might have done a good job on canvas with just three or four tubes of oil paint, as long as they were all bright red eh? Oh! But you would need the correct yellow green for the ginko trees too.

Along the Riverbank

Took a walk with Edera along the Sakuta towards Naruto this afternoon. The river is just one long building site these days, a new temporary works access road (super-highway might be a better description!) runs along this bank and pile drivers and earth moving equipment are everywhere.

At one point one length of the 'new river bed' is standing in the middle of an area of tanbo like a soccer stadium. It must be four times as wide and twice as deep as the curent river with a new road along the bank and, of course, concrete lined and treeless to appeal to the engineer's sense of 'neatness'.

Somehow it really left us feeling depressed. And not just the complete lack of any aesthetic value either. What the heck is such a huge expenditure on a massive drainage scheme about? OK - there were floods downstream ten years ago after a big typhoon but is that really a good reason to build a 'motorway scale' project in a small valley? The existing river is far from natural, I'd guess it was straightened and piled about forty years ago, but at least on a reasonable scale.

To be honest it is all modern Japan at its very worst. Grossly over-engineered and costing far more than was ever reasonable to spend, another few billion yen loan for the taxpayer to pay interest on in the excuse of generating jobs and corporate profit. This kind of stuff even went on back in the Edo-era when new rice fields were the limits of civil engineering ambiiton and it has just got worse and worse in the last fifty years. No suprise that the civil engineering industry here is the biggest in the world, contracts are completely closed to foreign companies so that prices are rigged and - huh! forgot to mention it - the industry pays a 1% levy on contracts into the ruling LDP party slush fund. Pure pork barrel politics and there isn't a darn thing you can do about it ...

Am I my feline's keeper?

To slightly paraphrase a well known quotation from the Book of Genesis. It is a question I find myself asking a lot these days. Tora just can't resist the temptation to get into fights with 'The Enemy', seen prowling past the window here as Tora happily cat-naps on his favourite 'foot-warmer' cushion.

This has been going on for nearly a year now. At first this big grey male seemed to be a passing stray but someone nearby has given him a home and he's recently even got a white collar. Neither of them seems to get a decisive 'upper hand' in terms of territory but I think in the frequent fights Tora is increasingly loosing ground. A few days ago he even came home covered in mud - he must have slipped into the rice field ditch behind the houses here in the course of an encounter.

It worries me because Tora is no young cat, I'd guess fifteen already. I'm amazed that he fights like he does and perhaps the excitement and rush of adrenalin is one of the things that keeps him so fit and active for his age. He'll come back in after a battle, eat and sleep for an hour and then he wants to be back out there. But there must always be a risk of injury.

I heard a 'set-to' in the neighbourhood this morning and it was four hours before he turned up again. I think he's getting chased off now and then has to hide awhile and take the 'long way home' when the coast is clear.

Hard to know what to do. My instinct is to protect him, keep him inside as much as possible. And it is surely right to keep him out of harm's way when I can. But at the same time it is his choice too, he's not a prisoner. If her really wants to go out, then he can. And if he wants a refuge, then he has one. A 'middle way' seems to be the only way.

Male Voices

One thing I seldom do here is find myself in the company of a group of men. Actually I'm not all that keen on male company 'en masse' if you know what I mean. I have some good friends who happen to be men and some who happen to be women but in general I find I enjoy talking to women more than men. Dunno why - perhaps it is a result of having no dad around the house when I was growing up.

And certainly when it comes to 'men's interests' I am really like a fish out of water. Football, fishing, real ale, yawn. Even the idea of being forced to watch a Saturday afternoon consisting of nothing but sport on TV drives me crazy.

Sunday evening had me along to a 'special practice' of our local 'dansei gasshodan' - men's choir. Not an English speaker for a million miles. It would have helped if I'd been told the right time and hadn't been sitting around for an hour waiting for the 'main event' to start but I did find myself asking myself what I was doing there. Only about a dozen turned up and in the absence of our choirmaster - we can only afford his services once a month - our senior member and founder took charge of the practice. A bit like having the puppets lying around the place but no-one pulling the strings, somehow we were sadly draped around the room.

I know it's just a cultural thing but a dozen older guys around in Japan with no clear leader feels to me like a recipe for concrete setting somehow. Nobody quite wants to take charge (much too pushy!) and nobody wants to 'lose face' either. Better just to sit around and maintain a dignified presence. Edo-era village meetings must have been like this. "OK shall we start ... is everyone OK to start ... let's start at the beginning ... have you brought the music ...do you have your notes? Shall we stand up ... was that OK, did anyone have any problems? Do you know your parts OK ..." tick tock tick tock.

I'll stick in there though. Men's choirs are rare outside Wales these days, perhaps even there too. In Japan very rare. And twenty male voices makea a good noise once in tune and confident with their parts.Ho hmm ...

Samui ne?

Clear skies last night and the temperature soon started to drop as the sun went down. It looks like more of the same this evening too. So the cold nights of winter have arrived at last. Not too cold by the standards even of places in northern Honshu and Hokkaido, but chilly nevertheless, a few degrees over freezing. And there's a big contrast with the warm sunny daytimes - as soon as it gets dark kerosene heaters and electric fires get turned on fast. Samui ne? - Cold innit?

It might suprise many European and American readers that it can get so chilly this far south but the Pacific currents around here flow down from the Aleutians so we don't get the boost from the ocean that the Gulf Stream gives the much more northern English climate. I often feel a lot colder here in winter than I do in Britain but the reason isn't so much the outdoor temperature as the construction of houses and the lack of central heating.

They say Japanese houses are designed and built to avoid the summer heat - and it's true - but actually the problem in winter is more that they are built cheaply. Brick isn't practical because of the frequent earthquakes so family houses are built with timber frames and plywood interior and exterior skins. In effect they are thin wooden boxes with no insulation at all- except the wallpaper. So they quickly lose the heat of the day and the value of any internal heating that is turned on. Central heating hasn't caught on in Japan either - again presumably because of the earthquake risk to piping. So we rely on room heaters out here in leafy Chiba-ken.

One traditional and effective way to keep warm is to take a really deep hot bath in the ofuro before going to bed and it works too. Once you've soaked for fifteen minutes your hands and feet stay warm under the duvet all night, even if your breath is turning to ice. But of course the problem with this strategy is actually getting out of those layers of clothes and into the water fast enough in the arctic room temperatures.

The Far North

I've just been on the UK Ordnance Survey map ordering site buying M-sensei's Christmas Present. I think she deserves one for persevering with me and my Japanese. Anyway, I'm buying her two maps at different scales of the Inverness area. It seems that she wants to visit Scotland sometime soon and as she's a former geography teacher I'm sure that she 'devours' maps just like I do.

Looking at these sheets on line reminds me of trips I used to make to Scotland long ago, and how I even still have a few ambitions left up there. I always wanted to climb Suilven for example, a mountain neat Lochinver. Maybe I should plan to do it soon because it is a long walk in from the nearest road.

One summer - maybe I was eighteen - I climbed Liathatch which is a formidable mountain in Wester Ross with some school friends. The night after the climb we good flooded out of out tent and had to walk to the nearest youth hostel about fifteen kilometres away but we had no idea what the time was. Was it OK to arrive there? All our watches had stopped and in June it is daylight pretty well all night. But there was a distantand ancient red phone box visible about a kilometre away so I trudged through the rain to ask the operator the time.

"The time?" he said in a strong Highland accent. "That will be four pennies in the slot A please". In vain I pleaded with him just to tell me, that I'd walked the length of the loch in the rain but sadly without any money. It clearly offended his canny Scottish sensibility that I could dream of asking for something as valuable as the time for nothing. So I had to trudge back to the sodden tent, get four pennies from my friends and walk back again. Of course I got the same operator, he was probably the only one on duty in the whole of the Scottish Highlands, sitting somewhere in a warm dry exchange in Inverness.

"Put the four pennies in slot A. The time is now 4:07 am. Good morning" Click.

I'm ashamed to say that this incident has kind of coloured my opinion of people from the far north of Scotland ever since.

Art Exhibition

The trip that we made up to Abiko on Tuesday was to take a look at some outdoor art a friend of ours had in an exhibition in the village. Moi, I thought that we were going to take a gander at stuff in some exhibition hall followed by a leisurely lunch but far from it. These exhibits were scattered around about a square mile of village and we would never have found anything without help - and a couple of 'lifts' - from one of the organisers and one of the artists. Another one of those moments when life seems to get out of control a bit and I did feel mildly nervous about plunging around in woods and overgrown lanes in the hot frog-croaking autumn sunshine but there you go - 'all's well that ends well'.

I sometimes feel nervous generally about looking at this kind of work. I mean, I'm not quite one of your "well yes but what is it supposed to be" brigade I hope and stuff doesn't have to be either overtly representational or even demand a level of skilful input for me to enjoy it. But at some stage I start to feel unomfortable about the "so what is art then?" kinds of question. Perhaps the two most interesting visual objects we saw during the day were a mat covered with peanuts drying and some rotting plastic laid to keep down the weeds. But neither of these was an exhibit. If it doesn't look like something, isn't an 'ouevre' and contains no message ...

Heck! But I sound a Philistine eh? I'm not really. Best not to go there. At various times in my life I loved painting and I am always looking out for textures and shapes with my camera in hand. And I really enjoyed the sort of stuff at Abiko pictured here. It's fun isn't it? So as long as nobody is trying to put an 'exchange value' or even a 'use value' on it, it doesn't matter.

Meiji Street

Up to an outdoor art exhibition in Abiko today, up near the Tone River. I love the flat landscape in that area, on a gorgeous day like this you can see right across westwards to the mountains of Tochigi-ken in central Honshu. The levees and flood defences along the main stream - at ten metres high they dwarf the adjacent houses dotted between the river and the tanbo - are a reminder that Japan's biggest river has a long history of catastrophic floods. If these defences were ever 'topped' now after some terrible typhoon half of Kanto would vanish under water.

On the way we stopped off at Boso no Mura, the Chiba Prefecture building museum near Narita. It's featured here on 'Little House' before and it is well worth a trip. 'Museum' is not really quite the right word because they are all replica buildings based on good examples seen around the area. But the place offers a perfect introduction to traditional building designs and techniques. More importantly, it is a place where those carpentry skills are still used and practised so that they are not forgotten.

If you ever wondered what a typical southern Kanto small town looked like a hundred years ago before electricty and telephone wires got strung all around the place and more modern building materials and neon signs became the 'norm' I think this picture gives a good 'feel' of a street of dozo zukuri merchants buildings from the middle Meiji Era, perhaps around 1885. Today it was 'occupied' by several elementary school students on a visit but half close your eyes and you can populate the place for yourself with women in kimono haggling over the price of daikon and tofu and enjoying the late autumn sunshine.

The Geographer

OK, so I know that bit about "the sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye" [Shakespeare] but I thought that this photograph of me down on Hasanuma Beach that Edera took recently was pretty bloomin' good. Don't you think so? I mean, when the chips are down I can manage to look both your rugged outdoor 'manly' type and a philosopher too at the drop of a hat. It's a rare combination of talents. Suave, original, cultured, modest. And above all in this picture I look every inch "The Geographer", I won't hear otherwise. That weatherbeaten face has obviously seen more latitudes and longditudes than you have had hot dinners guv'nor.

Psst ... actually ... come closer ... I blush to mention it but when I saw this my first thought was "don't I look like Sir Edmund Hillary"? Take a closer gander, I could be his twin brother.

Remember Hillary and Tensing? Those two Englishmen who first conquered Everest back in 1953, another triumph for Britain. Huh? Oh! Well, of course, if you are going to be picky, Hillary was actually born in New Zealand somewhere but his grandad came from Yorkshire. And Tensing might have been a bit Nepali but he did get the George Medal from the Queen. It was a Commonwealth 'do' after all, we were first in everything in those days.

Call me cynical but I'm just waiting for the Hollywood version 'Everest 2' in which (and it goes without saying apologies - but not too many - to all my American friends ...) in which it will turn out that the Yanks will get there first and they will re-name it 'Mount Freedom' like they did with chips (formerly 'French Fries'). Just like that film (sorry guys, 'movie') about the submarine and the German Enigma code machine. Richard Gere will play the Lama of course but who will get the lead climbing role?

Sadly since this photo was taken I've had a hair cut and trimmed my beard. But don't worry, it grows fast and I will be starring in "The Return of Santa" soon. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Looking from Both Sides

I've had my nose deeply into microfilm copies of some old - very old - Chiba-ken statistics today. The tables I've been working on, converting them from faded pages of kanji into modern Excel spreadsheets, date from Meiji 14 - in the Western calendar 1881. I've also been reading recently a book by James Baxter about changes at exactly this time in Ishikawa-ken on the other side on Honshu. It has helped me understand more of the story behind the numbers.

The early Meiji years are arguably the most interesting time in the history of Japan - a country with more 'interesting times' worthy of study than most. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Western nations insisted that Japan be opened up to foreign trade. Most of the next fifty years involved a struggle by the Japanese to avoid becoming the next colonial 'lunch' on Britain's or America's or Russia's plate. In 1868 the percieved foreign threat led to the coup d'etat now known in Western versions of history as the 'Meiji Restoration' and in Japan as the Meiji 'ishin' or 'renewal'

One thing that strikes me looking at these old numbers is how unthinkingly we look at such moments in history through the filter of hindsight. Most people take a very 'positive' view of the Meiji era because it led to the 'successful modernisation' of Japan which thereby kept its integrity as a sovereign state - actually I think that only non-Western nation to do so. We hear how the government planned railways, a modern army and navy, manufacturing industries a new system of schools etc. - 'Progess!' All this must surely be a 'Good Thing' eh?

But when people are actually 'living history' (and we all do that!) they never do have the benefit of hindsight, the ability to see how things will turn out. They can only look backwards and see what is at risk, how the lives and things they value might change. There is no view 'forward', the world in that direction still lies in darkness. And they don't judge events at the time by the same yardstick that history later holds up as 'the only possible' yardstick by which to judge the outcome as successful which is, unsuprisingly I guess, the yardstick of the victors and not the vanquished.

A lost friend

I had some sad news yesterday. One of my friends from University who has been living in America for several years died on Tuesday. His health has been poor for a long time.

Dave was I think two years younger than me, cetainly he was in his 'fresher' year when I was getting ready for my 'finals'. We both lived in student rooms on the top floor of the south west tower of Lumley Castle, a rambling pile few miles north of Durham. I'd ended up on that site because I wanted some peace and quiet to read away from the main part of the college. He was there because - well, that was where they dumped most first years students then. Most of my friends in the previous year had been linguists and so now were abroad for their year of study in various French and German universities and I was pretty lonely.

That part of County Durham was a great place to go rambling and that is what we often did. Most often probably to the pub but also around the villages of West Durham and along the River Wear. The castle - now a hotel - was our playground and we went in pretty well every part of it including all those where we weren't supposed to go. Across the roofs in the moonlight, along galleries above the ceiling of the Great Hall, even down the 'rope and sling' fire escape out of my window. We both had a pretty juvenile taste for practical jokes which usually involved bags of flour, large balls of string and wire coathangers.

I only saw him a few times after university, and never since 1971, so that's my main and best time of memories of him. It struck me today how like the TV programme "Last of the Summer Wine" our lives were then but in fact it was the "First of the Summer Wine" for us - endless pranks and innocence in a world still full of steam trains and cheap beer and tasty girls in mini-skirts'. These days I guess most students are too sophisticated and focused on their MBA's for such nonsense and institutions are much less tolerant of those who don't 'shape up and get serious'.

We were in touch again after thirty five years in 2005 and 2006 in the way you can be on the phone and on the internet and phone and he was a frequent reader of this blog. But we never met up again and in fact I never even saw a recent photo of him; he never quite got around to rigging his video up to Skype. And although it was very important for both of us we somehow never quite 'got it together' in the same way. I think we had both changed far more than we realised and I regret to think that that was probably mainly down to me.

But I still have the volume of Auden's poems that he gave me at college. It's here on a bookshelf in my bedroom in leafy Chiba-ken.

"Gaudeamus igitur
Juvenes dum sumus
Post jucundum juventutem
Post molestam senectutem
Nos habebit humus."

(Let us rejoice therefore
While we are young.
After a pleasant youth,
After a troublesome old age
The earth will have us.)

'Japlish' bag

Chinatsu, one of our elementary school students, gave me a nice packet of home made cookies this afternoon. She'd clearly been busy in the kitchen. The are star-shaped and they came in a cute little bag with a picture of a Dalmatian dog on it.

On the bag it says "I love Dalmatian. Only imflowing you don't flowing imflowing I must go to you stay a place". So, that's clear enough eh? Kawaii ne? So very very cute.

Somewhere I've got a little black notebook that I first kept when I came here of things like this that I'd read on tee-shirts, all more or less in the same vein. Pure 'Japlish'. It was quite a hobby of mine until I caught myself one sunny morning on the train to Chiba peering anxiously around some girl's left bra cup and under her amrpit to capture the end of a sentence. Nobody had noticed - I hope - but it occurred to me that such behaviour was possibly open to misinterpretation and especially by husbands and boyfriends.

We have a new and mega-cheap Miyayama garment store just opened up by Landrome and it has whole rackfuls of pink and purple tee-shirts and sweatshirts with various 'Japlish' mottoes on, I'll go and take a good look some day soon. This is an opportunity to get some inexpensive and cheerful Christmas presents that everyone back home will love, don't you think so?

The Party

Saturday night we had a party. It was someone's birthday - one of the tenors in the choir who also plays recorder with Edera - so it was a bit of a 'clan gathering' for the recorder fraternity.

A woman academic from Okinawa who once worked in the 'States and so speaks good English had been invited to keep me amused but she and her husband cried off the day before so it was pretty well an 'all Japanese' event. The usual kind of stuff, fish and er ... fish oh! and rice of course ... with fish. Beer and other kinds of booze were flowing but they are way off limits for me so you can sense it was shaping up to be a good evening eh?

Usually when this crowd are around I can follow the gist of the conversation fine though often not the detail. But as the evening wore on - and 'wear' it did until after midnight - the talk got more animated and colloquial and found myself understanding less and less and eventually nothing it seemed. Also, being the only 'chair sitter' I was kind of 'out of the circle' physically and not just linguistically.

I can see myself being a bore at these 'do's'. I'm a natural introvert anyway - I enjoy animated party chatter in English but after a few hours I need to be on my own to recharge batteries. But this 'do' seemed to totally short-circuit me, I was down to just a few psychic milliamps and a flickering glow by the end of the night.

Living in a totally foreign culture is an interesting experience but it is often a hard one too. Especially as you get older. It is the price you pay for the experience.

Kantele Performance

'Bunka no hi' here yesterday - 'Culture Day'. A good day for exhibitions of children's paintings, sales of all kinds of crafts and garden produce and more of that kind of stuff. We headed over to a 'freebie' early afternoon concert at JIU - Josai International University - and it was well worth the trip.

The principal artist was a professional musician called Hazata Masako who played the kantele. It's the first time that I ever heard one live. It's a national instrument of Finland and a kind of zither. The artist was a superb player and had studied in Helsinki.

If you haven't heard a kantele see if you can find a CD, it is worth the effort. It has a beautiful soft 'bell-like' tone that is sweeter than the familiar central European zithers and very hard to describe.

Sitting with my eyes closed listening to this music had me transported away to far northern forests in a moment. Somewhere lurking in me is a dream around all of that. A part of me wants to be in among the silver birches with the bright sunlight filtering through the thin leaf canopy and onto my skin in the chilly Spring wind. Wilderness. Strange how we can even be nostalgic for experience we have never knowingly had.

Common sense tells me that such dreams might not match reality, that perhaps I'd be in my log cabin five minutes and then the septic tank would overflow and I wouldn't have a spanner the correct size. Also, once in this forest retreat probably my first and last instinct might be to unzip my big bag of books and settle into a warm armchair.

But that would be a pity. If I make it into the far forest where the rain beats softly and the big snowflakes fall and the sun shines through crystals of ice I should look around, don't you think so? Maybe there are woodsprites and the like waiting to take my hand and sing songs to kantele melodies if I only give them the chance

Truth will 'out'

I generally check out the UK news daily although often I'd be hard pressed to name a good reason why and today feels like one of those days. The BBC and other internet news services are all reporting the result of the recent trial which ended with London's Metropolitan Police found guilty of contravening UK 'Health and Safety' laws when they shot someone mistakenly believing him to be a terror suspect.

Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician, was catching a subway train in 2005 when he was shot dead without warning by plain clothes police who thought he was about to detonate a bomb. They had followed the wrong man. It was in the days following earlier terrorist attacks in London. Somehow those involved have contrived - as people with powerful connections often do - to avoid being charged personally with the killing. But now the police as an organisation have been found guilty of a string of mistakes that 'culminated in an unwarranted risk to the public and ultimately the death of Mr. de Menezes'. The police will now have to pay a fine (from our taxes!) to the court (paid for by our taxes!). So, that's OK then, job's a good 'un. I wonder if the lawyers too got paid anything for all their hard work and where that money came from...

It is easy to see why this awful accident happened. Bad practices and careless observation may have been involved but the men who fired their guns claim to have sincerely believed that they were confronting a very dangeous man and if that is true who are we to judge them? But that doesn't mean that the events shouldn't be fully and impartially examined. How otherwise can similar mistakes be avoided in future?

What was really unacceptable in this case was the way in which, having quickly discovered that they had shot the wrong man, the police then went out of their way to fabricate a whole bagful of reasons to 'excuse' what they had done. The guy was a Brazilan after all (and heck! we all know what their police are like!) He was in Britain illegally - his visa had expired! - so actually he really was a criminal! Blood tests even suggested he'd taken drugs - clearly he was a bad lot. So it wasn't like they had gunned down some choir boy on the way home from Harrods eh? A pity of course, but maybe he only had himself to blame...

Sometimes when I hear this kind of wicked delusion I think "if even the police can't be honest why should the rest of the world think of bothering?" Other times I think "Why should we expect those who we ask to maintain the law to be any better than the rest of us?". But deceit like this always rebounds on people in the end, ultimately even the most powerful are not immune. Whatever today's brave talk about this "not being a resigning matter" I'm sure we will see the departure of the Metropolitan Police chief soon. The metaphorical bottle of whisky and loaded revolver already stand before him on the table. In the last analysis people really do usually know the difference between 'right' and 'wrong' and thank goodness we live in societies where that is still so. But the recent case here of the hapless school bus driver in Kochi-ken involved in a fatal accident with a speeding police motor cyclist suggests this kind of thing is not just a British disease

Old Bridge New Bridge

Needed to stretch my legs so I just took a quick stroll in the dusk to see how work was progressing on the new flood protection scheme down by the river. As I thought the 'old bridge' has come out today. We started to use the new one on Monday and I climbed the barrier and sneaked a last walk over the fenced off old structure late Tuesday night. So maybe I was the last member of the public across the river that way. Now there are just two concrete abutments left.

I don't feel especially nostalgic, it was just a couple of girders and some tarmac. But I've been crossing that bridge for five years so it has served me well. Also I'd got driving over it down to a fine art. The new chicane involved in crossing the new one offers a pleasing little challenge to speedy drivers which I'll explore in the coming weeks.

There was lots of 'coming and going' along the river bank in the drizzle. A crane here and a bulldozer there, it reminded me of a picture on the cover of Bruno Latour's book "Reassembling the Social" except not so French looking. Here in Japan everyone wears yellow hard hats of course.

Projects. When I worked at a 'real job' I was forever involved in projects, mainly involving information technology. I even had a little used copy of 'Microsoft Project' on my laptop, but I can't pretend I was good at that stuff. It would make me smile to see how our computer staff could spend many happy hours setting up these plans under the fond delusion that simply by having it all 'documented' (a word I came to hate!) something would happen. Did they imagine that Henry the Fifth pored over his dependency charts at the Battle of Agincourt I wonder?

And yet good planning is essential eh? I wish I'd spotted it sooner. These guys rushing around in the mud by the river are very good planners, on a civil engineering contract you can't afford to be anything else. But they plan as only a part of their job, they know how to make it happen too.