Big 'mochi' purchase

I've been 'under the cosh' tidying the old place up this last couple of days. It is always the tradition in Japan that for New Year you give the house a 'Spring Clean' and this has been under way pretty well since he Christmas Tree came down.

Why do we do it to ourselves? Edera is an adherent of the popular opinion that "it's a good thing that we have visitors staying regularly because otherwise we would never clean the place up thoroughly" but I don't know. Personally I think I could probably endure living like a pig - after all I was born in the "Year of the Pig" so it's just a part of my karma man, there's nothing I can do about it ho hmm ....

Well, the piles of papers are stuffed into drawers, the crisp crumbs are hoovered from the carpet and the window ledge is wiped with a damp cloth. Tora is happily dozing in an armchair free of clutter.

This afternoon Edera's parents arrived from Hiroshima so the holiday has aleady started for us. We've rushed up to Landrome and bought an extra few kilos of 'mochi' (rice dough) so now I'm looking forward to a few days of not doing too much and stuffing myself with charred stodgy mochi floating in miso soup - maybe one of the most delicious 'winter' tastes in the world but I'd guess impossible to locate outside of Japan.

Wish you were here!

Takasakigawa fens

I mentioned a few weeks ago how I like to be out on the 'tanbo' around here in winter - the big rice growing areas the run along the river valleys. In the lowlands of the east of England between Yorkshire and Suffolk they often use the term 'moor' to refer to lonely low-lying marshland often recently reclaimed for farming, and the tanbo really remind me of those areas around places like Peterborough and Lincoln. In winter tanbo really are 'moors' in this sense, they even have the same kinds of birds in evidence.

Then, in April when the rice seedlings are planted and they are flooded they take on an aspect of vast lakes for a while, and then as the rice crops thicken and ripen of prairies of grain.

Yesterday when I walked over to Sakura I follwed the valley of the Takasaki River down from Shisui. There are just miles and miles of tanbo there, much of it reclaimed in the last century from fens and swamps. It is as lonely a place as you would find around here, no houses at all out on the moor and very few along the margins of the valley. Only the trains keep you company when you go walking there, quite a regular procession of trains between Chiba, Narita and Choshi hurrying along the north side of the fen. There's a small depot where some of these trains are parked overnight but in the daytime this place is quite deserted. It all feels like the setting for a good novel for me. Maybe you could write a scary story about some wild beast that hides up in the thick pampas grass alongside the river.

I like 'ordinary places' like this, I fond myself going there more often just to experience what eyes see and ears hear.

Sad sight in Sakura-shi

I finished my walk today over in Sakura, about fifteen miles from here. It has a fine history museum and a long history but there are a few things about the town that 'get to me' and here is one of them!

When the stopped using steam locomotives in Japan - about forty years ago - many of them found their way into public parks. It must have seemed a nice idea at the time and at least it preserved many that would otherwise have gone for scrap and many have even been designated 'Prefectural Cultural Assets' and the like. But of course as the years have gone by and rust has set in many are in a fairly unhappy state now. Once pistons get rusted in cylinders due to lack of care and boiler plates start to deteriorate they get past a point of 'no return' and most probably have. I sometimes wonder if I should start a UK-style 'preservation movement' and get a national register set up. Certainly in Britain local enthusiast's groups would be looking after these, even returning some to working order.

Look at poor old 58-683 here. Did you ever see anything so sad? Here's an engine literally caged up. Whoever did it? I mean, it's just pointless isn't it? It sits in a park about 200 metres from Sakura station. At some time some local politician, or -this being Japan - probably local official - has played the 'safety card' and a not inexpensive cage has been erected to lock the thing away, like a zoo animal. No chance to photograph it properly, nor even occasional 'open days' to step inside. It's a prisoner.

Who could have thought of a solution like this? Didn't they ask themselves a basic question? It seems not. 'Null Points' To Sakura-shi Parks Department. I rest my case.

Shimosa Walk

Ha! Maybe I should bore you all with some "that was the Christmas that was" diary pieces and endless photographs of me in my Santa suit. Now here did I put those eh? But it's OK, you are safe. A good holiday break but I'm kind of bored with Christmas myself now. When it gets to December 26th you can't help but get a bit tired of carols and trees and the like. Edera has already packed ours away, inconceivable in Japan that you would ever leave a Christmas Tree up until 'Twelfth Night' (5th January).

I guess it shows how 'skin deep' Christmas is as a festival here. Not even skin deep. In England our trees would always be up until after New Year but here in Japan we have to clean the house inside and out to prepare for January 1st. Ichigatsu tsuitachi - the New Year holiday.

The weather was good today so for something completely different to do I took myself on a long walk across country to Enokido. With the few diversions I made and a break for lunch it was a five hour tramp and now my muscles and feet are sore - a reminder that I haven't been getting out enough recently. The forecast for the weekend is poor so maybe I'll make use of the sunshine and catch the train back up to Enokido tomorrow and finish the walk to Minami Shishui and then along the yato through to Sakura, it is a hike I've had in mind for a while.

Beautiful today though - bright sunshine all the way and the farmland on the Shimosa plateau looking lovely and fresh under the 'cotton wool' clouds. A lot of the winter crops were at their best - fields of cabbage and choi and kale as far as the horizon. There's something really special about horticultural land in winter, and all those polytents full of seedlings shining in the sun.



"Sun, rain, sun, rain! Don't you sometimes think maybe we are vegetating a bit here?"

"Oh! I dunno! At least you get a better class of nitrate from these loess soils ..."

Winter Solistice

So, the shortest day today - the Winter Solistice has arrived at last. Actually down in leafy Chiba-ken the difference between shortest and longest day is only around four hours, nowhere near so extreme as in far north Britain. Here it gets dark around five and light again around six so we still get over ten hours of daylight even in midwinter - a lot more than the measly eight hours or less in England. One winter - and one was enough - I lived at 60 degrees north in the Orkney Islands and up there six hours was our lot in December.

Of course we don't get the long summer evenings in Japan, it all averages itself out. If you want a Geograhy lesson and bring me a globe and a torch I'll show you why! You do end up with a bit more light the further north you go though because summer twilights are longer.

Well after what I wrote yesterday I can't be a hypocrite and settle down here to any "my year in review since the last solstice" blogs. But these days I notice the solstice much more, it feels like a 'special moment' much more than either Christmas or the Gregorian calendar New Year. It's the time when it is as dark as it gets - and yet also the moment when the light will begin to return. In a literal sense it is a case of "within all light is darkness, in darkness there is light ..."

Giving support to move safely through the darkest point feels important to me. We might keep darkness at bay with the electric light but don't imagine that it has ceased to be something that weighs on us. This last couple of weeks I've tried to be softer with people, get up a bit more slowly, move gently, give the pets an extra stroke.

Now the light will start to creep back, just a minute or even less every day but it all adds up. When I get back to England in mid-January it will still be much darker than here but that's about the time you start to really notice the days beginning to lengthen. Nothing stands still.

Quotations of the Year

One advantage of living in Japan is that I don't have to watch all that "The Year in Retrospect" guff that you are all getting on TV and in your newspapers right now. I guess this stuff is on Japanese TV but as I watch it around one hour a month and can't read most of what is in local newspapers I probably never fall over any of it.

It's lazy journalism really, isn't it? A great opportunity to cut and paste old stories and make some use of already paid for archive footage. Add it all together, leaven it with a few quizzes for father to bore eveyone with after the Queen's Speech on Christmas Day and 'Bingo!' you have a few editions filled or a few hours of broadcasting time sorted out. Means we can all go home and enjoy the turkey (or nut roast!) and just leave a skeleton crew on to add a few 'real stories' on the day. News reporters must hate the big stories that break in Christmas Week.

What was your favourite news quotation of the year? For me I think it was Gillian Gibbons, the English teacher recently arrested and jailed in the Sudan for allowing the kids in her class to call a teddy bear 'Mohammed'. When she was eventually released and returned to Britain some reporter asked her who she blamed for the affair and she replied "Well, it was my fault, I should have known better."

Good grief! Steady on Gillian! We just aren't used to that kind of stuff on the news bulletins you know! If you aren't careful you'll be starting a fashion for honesty with answers like that.

A Walk in the Black Forest Gateaux

It sometimes alarms me these days the weird ideas that suddenly pop into my head. After lunch for example I was washing up (Yo! Heave -ho!) and then as if it were some kind of an audible vision that tune "A Walk in the Black Forest" suddenly burst into life between my ears. I'm sure you know it - "dum - ti- dum - ti dum dum dum ... ". Written in the 'sixties by Horst Jankowski. I understand the Germans call it 'Eine Schwarzwaldenfahrt' and since the doctor started to prescribe these bogoribose tables for me to get my digestion working faster belive me I know what they mean.[the old ones are the best ones eh?]

Oh! But that isn't what I wanted to write about! No - once this darn tune started going through my head suddenly I was driven to pick up one of the cooking hashi ('chopsticks') and conduct that invisible band. And not just conduct the band, now here's the thing. I wanted to conduct them whilst displaying the perfect 'knowing smile' to audience or camera like those band conductors do.

You know what I mean. First you get six tubes of Ultraglitter tooth paste and fit the buffing pad to your electric drill then you polish your teeth for forty five minutes. Then you have to set your mouth into the broadest grimace that you can, selecting your position vis a vis the audience with great care so that they are dazzled by the glare from your molars.

Now! Conduct with vigour! The band plays away and then with that fixed grin on your face turn slowly towards the audience and nod knowlingly. One two three four ... they understand your secret eh? That moment of empathy. One two one two, back to the band and then at the top of the next page of the score, turn and ... paper bags ready ... here comes that nauseating smile again folks ....

Onobori-san

One Japanese word I learned recently which has been making me chuckle is 'o-nobori-san'. Back in the nineteenth century Japan adopted the English practice of refering to 'up' and 'down' trains - or in Japanese 'nobori-densha' and 'kudari-densha'. In English we have always used the expression 'go up to Town' to refer to going to London and all our trains are either 'up' or 'down' depending on whether, if they kept going that way, they would eventually be going to or coming from London.

In North America the terms 'westbound' and 'eastbound' were once used in the same way, depending on whether a train would eventually arrive at San Francisco or not.

Well, in Japan of course 'nobori-densha' are headed for Tokyo so 'o-nobori-san' is a simple soul who has arrived in the capital by train. In Japanese the word rather implies a country bumpkin, a tourist, someone with little sophistication who is in town to see the sights, amazed at those buildings that tower above him and all the crowds of people on the streets. Segoi-ne?? It is the story of 'town mouse and country mouse' eh?

Yes, I'm definitely an o-nobori-san, a great wearer of cameras around the neck and carrier of sandwiches in paper bags and scrutinizer of maps. Others may have ambitions to be regarded as suave travellers and cultivated persons but not me.

I'm also a bit of a 'o-kudari-san' too. Nice to make trips but also to come back to leafy Chiba-ken. When I've been in town for the day and find myself on the 'kakuekiteisha' 'all-stations' train from Chiba surrounded by chattering farmer's wives and people with mud on their toe-caps I think "Ah! inaka ne?" Back in the country again at last.

Guilty pusscats

I was mentioning to someone recently how good mannered our two cats are. If you open the door for them they will always 'meow' politely as they pass by. It is so obviously a 'thank you' but then of course they grew up in a polite family.

But this morning when I got up Pero was sitting in my study with a guilty look on her face, there was just something even about her posture that said "bad me!" She looked 'guilty as charged!' When I got downstairs I discovered why - in the middle of the classroom carpet were the bones of a fish we ate for dinner last night. Someone - no prizes for guessing who eh? - had been poking around and found something delicious in the bin and just couldn't leave 'forbidden fruit' alone. And afterwards of course - the pangs of guilt! That sense of doing something wrong! "Do what thou wilt - this is the whole of the law" might sound an attractive proposition when there is a nice bit of plaice under the potato peelings and the grown-ups have gone up to bed but it isn't true eh? It's all more complicated than that.

Anyway, not all cats are guilty cats. Here is my hero Tora who never went skulking after bits of fish in the garbage in his life (Ho! Ho!). Here he is this week in one of his favourite places, toasting nicely on top of the kerosene heater and looking like the Prince he is. "Can't you turn it up a degree or two more boss?"

Buffing

Edera has been busy attacking the kitchen sink and various pots, pans and kettles with a 'buffing wheel' recently. If you don't know what one of those is, it is a kind of circular hard thick cotton wadding pad that you can put into an electric drill and it polishes - fast! I've never seen our kitchen looking so clean and shining, you can see your face in every stainless steel surface.

When I was at school I had classes in metalwork for two years - a subject that I loved! Forge work, lathe work, milling work and using the various hand tools - I learned to do them all. But the one thing that everyone loved to do was 'buffing'. We had a big circular vertical buffing wheel on the same power shaft as the grinder, and we could spend all day shining up bits of brass and copper on it. One of our 'projects' was to make a small shoe horn from sheet brass and they all shone like gold.

Unfortunately it's quite a tricky business to buff slippery sheet brass on a big powerful wheel, especially when you are holding it with your finger tips on a wooden board. I have happy memories of airborne pieces of brass and copper riccocheting around that workshop from all angles, bouncing off the light fittings and walls to peals of laughter. These days it would give the Heath and Safety brigade nightmares and you would have to wear armour plating in a lead lined room to do such dangerous things no doubt but somehow we all survived

Elizabeth from Denbighshire

I was doing some work on my 'family tree' records a couple of days ago and had something of a 'breakthrough' in tracing information about my great grandmother. You have to be so careful using the public records, it is easy to make a mistake. For a while I thought that she was someone called Sarah from Burnley but careful investigation of earlier census records has proved that she was someone called Elizabeth Edwards, born in Llanfair near Ruthin in Denbighshire in 1848 and died in West Derby, Liverpool in the Spring of 1891. So she was a 'Gog' then!

'Gog' is a nickname for people from North Wales used by people in South Wales and it comes from the Welsh 'gogleddwyr' which means 'northerner'. I've managed to trace her dad, Robert Edwards and also her grandmother Elizabeth and mother Alice Davies. So this particular ancestor 'trail' has led me back into the misty Cambrian mountains around 1800. It's a surprise, I'd no idea I was one-sixteenth 'Gog' blood. Somehow she found her way - I think as a cook in her late teens or early twenties - to Liverpool where she married a cobbler called Albert and they had at least four children. She died aged 42 - not especially young but I'm still curious to find out how - a copy of her death certificate is on order. After she died her husband remarried within the year - I guess with four kids to care for it was almost a necessity in those days with no ready meals in the shops or washing machines or fridges.

From that part of Denbighshire she must have been from a family of Welsh speakers too. Her dad was a farm labourer.

So many of my ancestors seem to have been part of the same story around then - drifting from badly paid rural work or with no job at all into the industrial towns in search of work in the shipyards or on the railways or just doing casual manual work. In the big cities they stuck to their kind - no accident that their marriage was in St. David's church in Liverpool.

A couple of years ago Julia and I were through Ruthin, it is an area that I don't know at all. Must go and see it when I'm in the UK! Somehow I feel a sudden sense of affinity with this newly discovered relative that died sixty years before I was born and has been an unkown part of me through my whole life

Carol Singing

Edera asked me to write something for her 'End of Year' essay collection this week. Around this time she asks her students to write a page for it and it comes out as a very nice booklet where everone gets a chance to read everyone else's work and see their sketches and cartoons.

I wrote about carol singing. It makes me smile to think that after a long absence - more than thirty years! - coming to Japan has actually brought me back to exactly the same carols and Christmas 'arrangements' that I sang in school as a teenager.

Back in the early 1960's we had an excellent music teacher - someone who died still quite a young man and who I often find myself thinking about now that I'm so involved in music again. Graham Goodier. We never know until far into life the debt that we owe our teachers. Music was part of day-to-day life at school but at Christmas there would always be more with school carol services and singing in local churches. And the best part of it was going out around Crawley in the evening singing in each neighbourhood. We had 'collectors' who would go from door to dor with their collecting tins on behalf of a a children's charity while twenty or thrity of us sang in the street. Not just 'sang' - we did it properly in four parts of course. Wrapped up against the December fog and cold with our scarves and overcoats, finding street lights to help us see the faded 'roneo' copies of music sheets (and I still have some!). Surrounded by friends. All those carols and hymns became a part of my life.

Here now in Japan I find myself again with a rather similar - if older - bunch of friends practising the same carols. So the wheel has gone full circle. We haven't sung in the steet here yet but maybe we might. But we do sing every year for the air crews and travellers spending Christmas away from home when we take to the foyer in the Radisson Hotel at Narita. If you are in leafy Chiba-ken on Christmas Eve be sure to join us!

'Shout'

Went for a walk out on the tanbo towards Naruto this evening. Actually I do it pretty well every evening just before dark, I can time in to 'take in' the passing down 'Shiosai' express as it heads out to Choshi and just get back home as it gets dark.

I really like it down there - wall to wall tanbo with the odd polytent dotted around for the rice seedlings. A lonely place in a nice way, miles of rice stubble and cedar trees all to myself.

On the way I can see 'work in progess' in the multi-billion yen project to tame the 'Mighty Sakuta River'. I'm getting like those pokey old guys with nothing better to do I used to see in my youth standing around looking at building sites and going 'tsch! tsch!' in disapproval at everything they notice. Lucky I'm not pokey or old eh?

Tonight our path has been diverted again to another new path from the old path that they built erm ... about six weeks ago alongside the access road they built to save taking the crane around on the public road. The road which they will need to tear up again soon because that will be the new course of the 'Mighty Sakuta River' when they move the hill. Six guys were erecting a new temporary fence but don't worry that still left two others with illuminated orange batons to wave me safely past the work in progress. Glad I'm not paying for all this ... erm .. And one percent goes as a 'political donation' to the LDP too, that's the 'usual' here, money well spent it seems. I spy pork barrel politics.

Later out on the tanbo the evening peace and calls of the ducks were suddenly interrupted by an emergency 'shout' - must have been a fire over towards Shibayama. First off was a police car with sirens blazing on the toll highway and then within a couple of minutes the entire neighbourhood errupted as every enthusiastic volunteer fire crew in the area got their pint-sized engines on the road with bells ringing and lights flashing and loud cries of "pull over to the left!" through their loud speakers. Wonderful! I counted fifteen appearing and disappearing in various directions in five minutes. Like the Keystone Cops.

A kind of little vision went through my mind of squadrons of wailing cop-cars suddenly descending on glad handing politicians and fat cat building contractors but heck! You would need more 'cruisers' than you could ever shake a stick at to pick that lot up.

Another UHS Day

Good grief! Another one of those instances of "UK Hassle Syndrome" leaping out of the woodwork at me to make my day. Actually I think I'll patent that description - 'UHS'. I can make a fortune writing learned Management Science articles about it maybe.

Saturday I ordered two rail tickets for Japanese friends from the Virgin Rail web site. When I got the confirming email it had the wrong address on it. I'd put in my new Lancashire address into the web site but the Virgin system had somehow selected my dad's old address in Harrogate. So of course I wrote back at once saying 'something wrong here, the address is wrong, this is the right address' but I had no reply. Wrote again yesterday and eventually had a reply this morning which basically said "not our problem pal; maybe you could go around there 'yerself or better buy another one".

Of course I reacted to all this provocation with my usual restraint and calm dignity BUT actually it is their problem. Something went awry in their system around the entering of credit card details and their computer has referenced old bank details and information I supplied four years ago in error. Somewhere, sometime, somehow, they will acknowledge and rectify this mistake.

It makes you wonder though. What on earth is a railway company, who I thought ran trains, doing holding on to my crerdit card and bank details four years after I last used their services? Who said they could do that? Does Richard Branson's business empire supply credit card and financial services too? Hmm ... now let me think ...

In the old days when I was in elementary school in the stories David always beat Goliath and cats looked at Queens but not now eh? Not in Britain anyway when it comes to big organisations abusing their power and a complacent government doing nothing to stop it any more. In fact they are the worst at it!

I say this is a "UK Hassle Syndrome" because my experience is that in England stuff like this is always going wrong due to carelessness on someone's part but it never does here. In Japan if you want a rail ticket you go to the station and buy it. No clown has dreamed up some 'marketing system' where if you don't order it three months in advance via the internet in will cost you four times as much on the day. Here a rail ticket is a rail ticket and has one price and there's no hassle because you just buy it! It takes around 15 seconds, even if your Japanese is lousy. And amazingly the fastest and sleekest shinkansen service from Tokyo to Nagoya, about the same distance as London to Preston, will cost you less than half the 'normal fare' on Virgin.

Doorstep Delivery

Last week someone called at the door one lunch time with a small packet of 'free samples'. It turned out to be someone starting a 'milk round' in the area. I guess it is some kind of an agency proposition being marketed by the Meiji dairy company.

A milkman in Japan! Amazing! Just when we had got rid of the last ones in England they start delivering the 'white stuff' in leafy Chiba-ken. Try this wonderful new idea ... fresh milk can be delivered to your home every morning!

For most of my life the early morning rattle of glass milk bottles was like an alarm clock. There were milkmen everywhere, starting on their rounds around 4:00 a.m. and using electric 'floats' laden with crates full of pint bottles of milk. In towns deliveries were by quite large dairy concerns with fleets of 'floats' but in the country delivery was usually by a local family business, often straight from the farm. Straight from the cow actually. Yesterday evening's milking was on your cornflakes at breakfast. Sights and sounds from another era now. It was a great 'social service' too - often the milkman was the first to spot a problem with elderly customers not taking their delivery indoors. And in winter the birds loved it - the cheeky tits could drill through the foil bottle top and steal the cream off your 'pinta' in a moment.

All this vanished around 1990 - a combination of supermarket competition selling the stuff at half the price and European bureaucrats insisting that 'raw' milk was unhealthy and wiping out small farm businesses by demanding impossibly expensive sterilisation and treatment. Now that those herds are gone and competition safely destroyed I see that 'raw organic milk' has become fashionable in supermarkets again. Good grief! No doubt Tesco and ASDA can afford better lawyers than the farmers could.

And now we can get daily 'pintas' on our doorstep here. We are going to give the service a try anyway.

Your 'dabs' taken free of charge

A couple of weeks ago the Japanese government began photographing and fingerprinting every foreigner that arrives in Japan.

It's compulsory. Basically, if you refuse to be fingerprinted you are put straight on a plane back to where you came.

When I first heard about this my first reaction was one of anger. I've never been fingerprinted in my life. And talking to other foreigners here their reaction is the same, they are deeply angered and offended by it. They consider it as a personal insult and a disgrace to the Japanese themselves. This fingerprinting applies even to people who have long term visas or permanent residency here.

The ostensible reason for doing this is to 'protect Japan agsinst foreign terrorists'. Baloney. How many foreign terrorists has Japan suffered from in the last fifty years? Zero, none, nix. All Japan's terrorism, of which there has been very little, has come from home grown Japanese cults and extremists.

My first reaction was that this was just a move by an unpopular right wing government to curry favour with a few voters by playing the public security card - and the unspoken but ever present under-the-surface xenophobic card. But I don't think so. Actually the scariest part of this is that most Japanese themselves don't even know that the rules have changed. It merited a couple of paragraphs in Japanese papers and got more space on the BBC website. In Britain or France where there is a well developed 'civil society' this kind of move would have sparked riots and mass disobedience but the Japanese on thh whole aren't used to saying 'Boo!' to their masters. Yet, at least. Many might say that 'the Americans are doing it already' but ask yourselves if that is an example you want to follow.

Having thought about it for a few days I think there's an even more sinister explanation. I think this is just a case of the Japanese government being happy to brown-nose the Bush administration. The American 'defense' industries have been happily developing and installing systems like this themselves for the last few years and now they want to make a profit selling their junk to everyone else. It must be costing Japanese tax payers a fortune. Just watch out that it doesn't come your way too ...

In the meantime if you don't want to be treated like a criminal maybe give a trip to Japan a miss.