Ou sont les nieges?

Good news for those regular 'Little House' readers who are starting to despair of me ever getting back into a regular routine of posting here. On Tuesday I eventually finished the archive work I've been doing on old aerial photographs after months of trailing into Chiba in all weathers with my laptop and a very large magnifying glass.

If you are one of the few people left in the world that I haven't bored to death with my studies I'm looking at the way Chiba-shi (city) has evolved and how it actually changes. My investigation goes well back into the nineteenth century, but the main focus is own how the city has changed since the Second World War. One technique I've been using is to visit around 4,500 places in the city to see what is there now and then checking back on aerial photographs to see what was there in 1990, 1975 and 1960.

Madness! It has meant setting up a database with more than 13,000 observations in it and I'll never care if I don't ever see another aerial photograph in my life! But it is done now. All I have to do is analyse the changes and write the darn thing up.

It might seem an odd thing to say but it was sometimes quite an emotional thing for me to peer at those photographs and especally the black and white set from 1960. A different world, tiny cheap wooden homes that belonged to the parents and grandparents of my Japanese friends. Houses crowded together in a now vanished city landscape. Those pictures reminded me of that refrain in the fifteenth century poem by Francois Villon - "ou sont les nieges d'antan?" Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Prince, don’t ask me where they are,
in what land or in what time.
The only answer I can give is:
'Where are the snows of yesteryear?'

I make no firm promises about posting more regulalry yet as I still have a heck of a lot of writing to do but let's hope so, I've been missing spending time down in 'Little Paddy'