World of Difference

Out on my evening 'constitutional' walk a couple of days ago to gawk at work in progress on our local 'flood relief' scheme I took a couple of photographs that for me sum up the subtle yet profound difference between Japan and Britain.

I've talked a few times here about the massive engineering project in progress around here to 'tame the mighty Sakuta River'. 'Pork barrel politics' Japanese style. Only Japanese companies can bid for civil engineering project work in Japan - no foreign competition! And they donate around 2% of the value of the contract that they win to the coffers of the Liberal Democratic Party. So - the bigger the contract the better for everyone eh? Oh! Except the taxpayers maybe ... But in general people think it's a 'good thing'. 'Our man' got his way with the bureaucrats in Tokyo!. They don't see the debt their great grandchildren will be paying.

In Japan planners and politicians are also obsessed with the sheer scale of their projects, always have been since the creation of vast irrigation schemes for rice growing a thousand years ago. They can't stop pouring concrete, moving earth.

So here's an example. Here's our 'mighty' Sakuta River which as you can see is about 3 metres wide. Now the NEW Sakuta river bed being built stretches from the newly completed concrete retaining wall on the right across to a new one about to be built around where that young bamboo on the far left is - around 20 metres wide! And is is now three times the depth of the old river too! So that's er ... about 20 times the capacity of the original river, not counting the vastly improved speed of flow that the new channel will have. Should cope with the big typhoons OK, don't you think so?

If Japan was all like this wouldn't it be awful? But now take a look at the picture below. To make the engineering works seem less overbearing the contractors take care to add little details like plant pots containing (plastic) flowers around their work to add a bit of colour. Where else in the world would a civil engineering company brighten up an everyday job with flower pots? And an even more relevant question - where else in the world would they survive five minutes without being trashed by bored teenagers looking for trouble?

Interesting questions.

Here what you say ... see what you mean

I often read the 'Guardian' here on the internet. It is a good source for UK news for ex-pats and much less biased in its selection and treatment of stories than the BBC (and don't get me started on THAT one ...!)

One thing I've come to especially like about the Guardian website is the many opportunities it offers to readers to add comments to articles and news. Some of the maerial there is pretty irascible and even delusional thinking but there is also a lot of good, intelligent readable feedback too. There's a lot of wisdom out there. I must admit to occasionally adding a comment myself - always low key and impartial polite opinion as I'm sure you would expect, ho hum. Sometimes there are very good debates in the CiF ("Comment is Free") sections.

There have been a couple of 'gems' on the site this week. A few days ago a German contributor passing through chose to add several comments to a rather ill-natured debate about our present Prime Minister and someone eventually gave his metaphorical ankle the 'nip' he'd been asking for all evening. They added something along the lines of "Look, contrary to what you seem to think we are here to express our opinions, not to construct logical arguments". It was a good point to make. Never mind 'hear what you say', pay more attention to 'see what you mean'.

One of my bosses (who was that?) once told me that it was usually better in life to say "well that's how I feel" rather than "that's what I think". Others can argue forever about the wisdon or otherwise of what you think, but no one can dispute with you about how you feel. Only you know that eh?

Of course that is not to say that responses from the heart shouldn't be carefully nurtured and well grounded. That's not what I mean at all.

'Happyoukai' looms ...

Our 'happyoukai' looms tomorrow. It's a big time of year for 'happyoukai' 'happenings'. The 'open class day' that almost all schools and educational organisations, even little 'juku' like ours, put on for parents so that they can see 'work in progress' performed by hard working sons and daughters.

I like to think that ours is a pleasant and 'fun' low key event where kids and parents enjoy themselves for an hour or two. We hire a room upstairs in the community centre and hurry around rearranging furniture for an hour beforehand and then everyone turns up to see their kids put through their paces. But of course this is a country area, people are generally rather relaxed anyway. I sometimes hear horror stories of the kindergarden offspring of striving Tokyoites reciting Shakespeare, and of 'happyoukai' events there that go on for literally days in orgies of self congratulation - "my son is only three and he reads all the English classics you know!" Traveller's tales perhaps, but it's a dog-eat-dog world out there.

Edera gets wistful about former 'glory days' when kids actually memorised their 'happyoukai' contributions and took it all very seriously. Maybe when I first came here one or two of the 'swots' still commited the odd page of English to memory but most of them were already reading from prompt cards and now they all do that and even falter sometimes when it is tatooed on their foreheads. Kids 'aint what they used to be you know, when I lived in a shoe-box with all my brothers and sisters in the middle of the coal tip we knew what hard work was. But our lot do some things pretty well, they are good singers and we have a few songs lined up for parents to enjoy.

I even understand that I have to give a demonstration of the way we do the 'hokey-cokey' in England. I was dumb enough to teach them this at the Christmas Party and it seems we are much more red blooded than our American cousins who I understand only perform a sanitised and insipid version of the dance. So watch out! I hope that the first aid box is well stocked. "You put your right arm in ...!"

Wandope

Amazing how inventive the mind can be when it comes to 'backing off' serious work and finding a way to waste time. One of the little 'sideshows' I've invented recently to avoid death from terminal boredom due to excessive data entry is to take a quite trip someplace on Google Earth for ten minutes. Only ten - honest guv'nor!

A couple of days ago I paid a Google trip to Buttermere in the English Lake District and then via a hyperlink to Wikipedia for some information on a mountain called Wandope a few miles north east of the lake. It's a very beautiful place and I was near there in February with some friends. I've made a mental note to climb this mountain 'while the going is good', as they say. There's something about it that I find especially attractive but I'd be hard pressed to say what - some kind of meaning in the geology of it all perhaps. One dope! - that's me eh?

But that wasn't what I wanted to mention. This Google Earthing turned out to be a 'bad trip', why was that? I think it started when I noticed the editing and comments on the Wikipedia site, a kind of hint there of obsessive mereing and measuring of the earth, like Victorian administrators. No place left for mystery. Sometimes things are far better left unsaid, unmeasured, unexplained. I don't need to know the page reference in the Wainwright Guide, I can get lost in the clouds and fall off cliffs in my own time. And then this 'journey' went on to explore a feeling that people who get obsessive about the Cuumbrian Fells might not be people that I like and they might not like me.

Yes, that's where it landed somehow. This last few years I've started to become a foreigner in Britain, now I can see it. Some places in the hills - like trips to Allendale and the Abbey - are still the places of my youth. But other places have become part of an alien culture, a site for xenophobes who like orienteering and mountain bikes and warm Jennings beer and don't have much in common with trampers of faraway city streets.

Am I making sense? Probably not. Or only to myself.

Cancellaria nodulifera

One way of letting off steam for me during these intensive spells of academic work is taking a trip to the beach. It is a leisurely twenty minute drive and it is always good to get some fresh air in my lungs, watch some birds and move around in a different world for a couple of hours.

Lately I just can't stop picking up shells. Kids do it naturally but as adults we seem to loose the knack if we aren't careful.

OK I admit it, I'm turning into a bit of a 'shell buff', I've even bought a few books on the topic including recently the two 'Field Best Encyclopedia' guides to the Molluscs of Japan (Volumes 1 and 2). I'm becoming an 'anorak' in yet another direction it seems. This edition has some good advice on the cover for all Japanese naturalists. It reads "Loving nature is the heart we have naturally. As our country is fortunate to have beautiful nature. Let's enjoy a fresh contact with nature in the field while you keep this book in your hand."

Well, that's me. 'Keeping the book in my hand' yesterday I found a lovely specimen of Cancellaria nodulifera down at Hasanuma just near the low tide mark. I love the sense of challenge that taxonomy presents - the art of identifying which species out of around 50,000 other kinds of shell the one in my hand is. But most of all picking up shells is a doorway into another life world. Have you ever stopped to wonder just what kinds of critters inhabit them before they get washed up onto the beach. Or where they live eh?

Huh! That's got you beat! You should get out more often.

By the way. I just noticed that this is the 700th entry on 'Little House in the Paddy'. Congratulations to those readers here who have ploughed their way through most of them! Your medals are in the post ...

Memory Footprints

If entries here seem a bit sparse at the moment it is because I'm heavily into entering data collected during my fieldwork over the last three years. I'm planning to have all my fieldwork results put into spreadsheets before my son Patrick arrives here at the end of the month. That's far from being the end of the whole job, but it is a good vantage point to aim for.

Putting in nearly 4,500 sets of observations could be a pretty mind numbing work, you certainly can't "rush" it and you would never do it if you got too focused on the end of the game. Just a day at a time, head for around 110 records and keep at it with regular coffee breaks and walks around the garden. "A journey of ten thousand ri begins with the first step". But then of course the second, the third ...

What is interesting in this work at the moment is how clearly I find I can recall the details of days walking the city that might have been three years ago. What did I see there? What did I do next? How big was that car park? How tall was that building? Understanding yourself certainly means understanding memory. I find I've got almost perfect recall of the routes I took. Memory is just an amazing thing, but what the heck is it? I've come to think now that this stuff is not The conventional wisdom about the human mind is that we log "inside me". everything away in our brains, like a laptop hard drive filling up, but it can't possibly be like that. Now I feel that our minds are more like radio recievers and transmitters, that all this almost infinite volume of recollections and impressions is actually someplace else, nothing is what it seems on the surface.

Interesting too when the memory fails. In a few cases there's just a gap covering a record or a page in my notebooks, no recollection at all of a place visited. Why is that I wonder, why didn't those get stored properly? Something else on my mind?

All Change at Landrome

Up to the 'Landrome' supermarket this evening for a bag full of 'contraband' (however do I manage now back in England without seaweed-flavoured crips?). You could tell it wasn't a 'happy ship' even before you got through the door just by the number of staff scurrying around with worried faces and the problem became evident soon enough. The whole place has had a 'makeover' this week.

Yes, shelves re-arranged, new 'gondola ends' in place laden with assorted 'best buys' and nothing is left where it was last Friday. This is the new look Landrome. They've even changed the music. Gone is the 'Star Wars' theme that used to have you hurrying around the dairy section and in it's place something with infinitely less character.

What is it that makes senior management of companies do this kind of stuff? Apart from the money they waste surely they can't be blind to the extent they alienate the rest of human kind with totally unessessary change of this nature? But perhaps they are, whoever got to be a senior manager by listening to good advice? I once remember hearing a supermarket marketing director in the UK arguing that his 'perfect supermarket' would be one where all the goods were shelved at random and were moved around every day. That way you would have to look at every single shelf to find what you wanted - and of course make lots of 'impulse buys' too along the way.

Seems to me that there was an important point he had missed there. People would simply stop going in the place at all.

Of course senior managers imagime they justify their existence by this kind of nonsense and who will tell them otherwise? Personally I think cats have the right attiude towards change; they hate it. Needless change of this kind is promoted by fools as 'inevitable' and 'unceasing' but here's a suprise, it doesn't have to be. I increasingly look on needless change as a kind of attack on you and me. When it happens it's nearly always someone else looking for a bigger share of a pie, your pie. Let's say around 97% of the time it isn't in your interest. Maybe I'll start a movement eh?

Canine persuit

Our day off today so over to 'Sunrise Kujukuri' for a swim and lunch. We needed a new pie dish and on the way we stopped off at the Cainz Home store at Togane.

As we were making our way from the car to the shop across the car park we noticed a small elderly lady stalking a miniature dog. She was walking slowly behind him with a dog lead in her hand but somehow she couldn't quite catch him up, just when she got that bit closer he speeded up again although to be honest it was a pretty slow motion chase, hardly a scene from the Keystone Cops. A decoy dog-catcher from the local dog pie factory? It didn't seem likely. There wasn't any meat on him worth having.

Anyway, twenty minutes later when we came out we saw the same elderly lady still stalking the same dog, so we thought that we'd better lend a hand. It turned out that is was her dog but he didn't want to go back on that leader. Simple enough eh? Well no - it turned out that this dog despite his diminuative, almost rodent size, was something of a 'biter'. So the three of us tried to corrall him in a kind of 120 degree 'out of the sun' dogfight formation but boy, that really made him cross!

A fourth lady joined us and I got a stick and a rope from the car boot but to no avail. This dog's coat was thick and his collar - if it actually was there eh? - was deeply hidden. It was a situation where, without strong leather mittens, no one was going to make the required grab. We all had good reasons not to risk our fingers.

I did vaguely wonder if this was a kind of 'Candid Camera' or 'You've Been Framed' set-up, if some film director was having fun shooting us from the roof. But anyway we had to go, we were already late for meeting up with S-san. Many 'domo sumimasen's and bows all round and we bolted for the car. If that dog hasn't got hungry or tired yet maybe they are still stalking each other out there on the tarmac.

Surgical hikers

Walking across to Yotsukaido yesterday along a leafy village lane three people came around the corner. Sometimes I find myself having to get a serous grip to stop myself exploding with laughter and this was just one of those moments. Lucky that I have iron self-control eh?

It was a combination of things. A woman and two men in their sixties, they had a kind of 'hiking club' feel about them. But what really got me started was that they were all wearing cotton face masks.

It's a Japanese tradition of course, I'll have to seriously research it some time because it clearly goes much further back than the Western-style surgical masks now used. When I first came here I used to believe that it was people with colds and 'flu being kind to the rest of us and for some I'm sure that's the case. And others wear masks because they have allergies. But now I sense a lurking self-interest there, basically most people are wearing them because they are obsessed with the risk of pickng up someone else's germs. It's a very Japanese thing, ritual purity and all that.

This doesn't stop it looking downright comical to Western eyes, like a scene from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Here was a party that looked like it was about to tackle some serious heart transplant surgery wandering around the countryside in sensible shoes. I was reminded of that delicious scene in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" where Jack Nicholson introduces the inmates of the mental hospital to the nervous boat owner pretending that they are all doctors from the institution.

But the best of it was, hard to believe I know, the last of these would-be surgeons was wearing a baseball cap above his surgical mask. And he had it on backwards. Anyone for a lobotomy?

Sunday Walk

Some good news for once; my injured tendons are improving much quicker than I thought. Today Edera and I walked from Sakura over to Yotsukaido, about ten kilometres, and my leg was fine. But I do need to take it very carefully on any kind of slope, I can feel my calves starting to seize up at the slightest strain.

This walk filled in a gap which completed my planned 'winter excursion' to follow the route of the Sobu Line from our home into Chiba. It is a nice hike, usually well away from busy roads as the railway follows the quieter 'yato' valleys for most of the distance.

Just this side of Monoi station we came across this small roadside shrine today. I know that some regular readers here have a particular interest in and affection for the Bodhisattva Kstigarbha, the Buddhist 'patron saint' of all children, fire-fighters and travellers. In Japanese Kstigarbha is known as 'Jizo' and this statue is an 'Anzen Jizo' - literally a 'Safety Jizo' put there to protect people at a potentially dangerous spot.

As you can see this representation of Jizo sits in meditation with the tracks of the Sobu Main Line just a couple of metres behind his back and a narrow paddy field access road just a metre in front of him - so this is a busy and potentially hazardous place for unwary travellers. And as usual a nicely cared for shrine too. "Holy Lord Jizo, we take refuge in thee"