Dead Crow

There's a dead crow on the track at our local station and it has been puzzling me for weeks. If you have been here to the real "Little House in the Paddy" you will know for yourself that we really do live out in the 'boonies' and our station - a few hundred metres away from the house - is not exactly JR East Japan's busiest. But why a mystery?

Well, I first noticed this crow back in May when it had been dead for around a week. It was on the down line near the Choshi end of the platform between the rails, but it certainly hadn't been run over by a train in the sense that it had been dismembered in some way. Although it was starting to shrivel and decay there were no obvious missing bits. Trains in that direction are headed out into the country away from Chiba and the platform s lightly used compared with its opposite number. But here's the strange thing. It was within just a few metres of where all local trains draw up and stop. The only trains that don't are the occasional 'Shiosai' expresses passing through but they are slowed to a crawl there because of a severe curve just before the station and the points at the end of the loop ahead have an even tighter speed restriction. So even if a train doesn't stop at that point it slows to a walking pace.

In my student days I used to love that wonderful Loudon Wainwright III song "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road". They don't write them like that any more! To paraphrase the great man slightly ...

"Crossin the railway late last night
He shoulda looked left and he shoulda looked right ..."

Had the crow landed on the overhead electic catenary ? Birds are quite often killed like that but usually only if their wings touch a connection to earth in some way - a post or a bridge.

So this bird must have been too dumb to avoid a very slow moving train or there is some quite different explanation - struck by lightning perhaps or simply caught on the tracks at night by a fox.

But even that is unlikely. In two months nothing has been eaten, no raccoon dogs or rats have chewed the corpse because it it on the track ballast, a place wild animals wouldn't usually stray.

One way and another it all reminds me of the ancient Buddhist practice of meditating in graveyards. The crow has moved along from being a crow-like dead crow to a bleached skeleton and a few feathers that blow around in the wind in around ten weeks. There's an excellent book on this topic by the Dutch biologist Midas Dekker - "The Way of All Flesh" and I must admit that these days when I travel that way I take a good look to see how the deceased is getting along, you can learn from everything, nothing to be afraid of. He's become an odd kind of a friend and teacher for me.

Scarborough Fair

A week on Sunday is our choir's tenth anniversary concert and if you just happen to be passing through leafy Chiba-ken I hope you'll come along! We have been practicing for this bloomin' day since about forever but I can see now that we are now started into sliding down that cone into the slippery vortex at last. This last couple of weeks there has been a nervous element creeping into rehearsals, never quite enough time around to do things as you want. In my experience it is a very good sign, you need a fair slice of tension in the air to do a good performance. Better to screw up on the dress rehearsal and get it right on the night rather than the other way around.

One piece I'm trying not to think too much about is 'Scarborough Fair'. Four of us are singing a rather fancy arrangement of it, just one voice on each part. Room for making mistakes: Zero. Peformance-wise it is one of those "North Face of the Eiger" situations, no room for fear there at all, not only no safety net but no ropes nor pitons neither.

In the bass part there are three phrases that have given me occasional trouble right through rehearsals, and the first one is the very first four notes I sing - just me and the soprano - E minor - soh soh lah tee doh .. What could be easier than that? Huh!

Now here's an interesting thing. With all this rehearsing I realised at last in some deep place that I'm not getting any better. I'm as good as I will ever be, there is no margin left for improvement in this activity for me. It is a subtle experience, we live all the time with the priciple that "practice makes perfect" buried in our heads but it is no longer true. I won't improve. Hopefully it is OK, but there's nothing will make it better.

This is quite a discovery. Sumus quod sumus eh? We are who we are DYB!DYB!DYB we used to call out at cubs! "Do Your Best!" Attempting to be perfect was never a part of the plot. When did that creep in?

Pomp and Circumstance

The last few days my early morning thesis writing sessions (and when do I ever do anything else these days?) have progressed to the accompaniment of a brass band. Yes, it's that time of year again, school graduation time. And our local elementary school, a couple of hundred metres away across the tanbo at the back of the house, is preparing for the big day. The kids in the band are in there by around 6:30 am every morning (yes! half past six - if a job is worth doing it it surely worth doing properly!) for extra rehearsals which, what with the time of year and all windows being open to let in some cool morning air, are pretty audible in the rest of the village.

I went to a graduation ceremony at this school myself, five years ago now, to my step-daughter's graduation. Graduation ceremonies are big in Japan, people love 'rites of passage' and the move in and out of schools is an important one. We don't do it in Britain at all, maybe a homily by the headmaster for the bunch of incoming students but even that is rare now I'd guess. And leaving is not celebrated - later of course 'prize-giving' and the award of GCSE certificates but that is long after the formal completion of your time at the school. In the school I was once a governor of in Lancashire the head even saw the final year boys off the premises after their last exam in case they decided to trash the place before they left. Unimaginable here.

Well, the band is really getting into its stride for their big moment on the day the departing children are all wished "goodbye" by their teachers and schoolmates and these ealy morning reheasals are a part of a familiar routine to me now, associated with steaming July heat and humidity and the croaking of frogs. But this year for the first time I've smiled as I've heard Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" March No.1 drifting across the ripening rice. In Britain it is known as "Land of Hope and Glory" and hard to think of a more patriotic English song, what the heck is it doing in leafy Chiba-ken? But I understand that in America the music is known as the 'Graduation March'. Whichever - I'm sure that Elgar would have smiled too at the idea of the piece being played on such a day in a Japanese school.

And at a good lick too - those new elementary graduates will need to march off that stage pretty quick!

Sixty One Today

Sixty-one today. Is there a song about it? Feels a funny kind of a birthday somehow, sixty was a definite 'landmark' - a 'Big Ben' of a year - but sixty one is like living in some jokey suburb like Tony Hancock and East Sheen, just plain anonymous. It also reminds me of all those corny old jokes too. What was it Victor Borge who used to say "By the time Mozart was my age he'd been dead for twenty two years already".

It interests me how perceptions of age change from generation to generation. When I was a child my grandfather looked like an old man to me even though he was only fifty. And I have a nice portrait photograph taken of him around then and the truth of it is that he really DID look like an old man at fifty, he still looks like that to me now. My generation - ageing hippies - has actually aged pretty well on the whole, my grandfather in turn might have been a bit shocked by his juvenile sixty-one year old grandson.

Mind you, if any of my friends in Lancaster are reading this I do have to say that there are still a few of us around who DO look our ege eh? You can take this darn flattery too far.

We are also as old as we feel and usually I feel like I'm around thirty or thirty five but maybe sometimes that old but after slightly overdoing it at the pub the night before. By inches it feels to me that there is a slight danger in that - we happily go on using up our days forgetting that time really does fly like an arrow. there's many things I've done already and don't need to do again and also if I'm making a long term plan to do something now perhaps there should be a very good reason to commit that time because even taking an optimistic view it isn't an infinite commodity is it? There's the difference. I'm still 'me' and yet out of the corner of my eye I can see that in addition to that long list of those one-time 'to do' items I can now already cross off the list as impracticable - the Mt. Everest thing, becoming Prime Minister etc. - I ought to be bearing in mind more that the tank is no longer full of petrol. It is somewhere between half full and 'E' for empty and who knows just exactly what that gauge is actually reading?

They really have stopped making it.

I've commented before how I find myself slipping into - if not actually 'being Japanese' - then at least finding living here more and more like wearing a comfortable pair of slippers. There have been a series of 'landmarks' over the last few years that have brought this home to me. The first was when I was given a three year residence visa rather than having to scramble to re-new it every twelve months and another was exchanging my UK Driving Licence for a Japanese one.

And another of these little milestones today. I had a letter from the local City Office confirming that I'd been appointed to serve as a 'citizen advisor' on a committee to help with drafting a new "City Master Plan" over the next two years.

It happened like this. A couple of months ago there was a local essay competition run to look for ideas on the contents of a new plan for our new city area - an amalgam of four earlier rural districts. I just couldn't resist because there are so many issues that I feel strongly about around here, but especially the destruction of the local 'yato' - the ancient rice field areas in the narrow valleys of the Chiba countryside. Doing my studies I've realised that in the last sixty years almost half of them have been built over. The yato are a habitat of beauty and variety, not only of importance for the rice cultivated there but also for cultural reasons. And this environment is as typical of eastern Japan as the Cotswold fields or Pennine moors are for us in the UK, a landscape of truly international significance.

But developers just can't stop filling it in. Every time you look there's a new retail shed or lorry park been dumped on a thousand year old bit of tanbo.

Well, someone must have liked what I wrote about the issue, becasue I've been selected as a member of the consultative group. Let's hope I can make a good contribution to the conservation of such areas in future. Mark Twain is supposed to have commented "Buy land - they have stopped making it!" With the national passion here for filling in the sea-bed that's not always true of Japan but hey! They have certainly stopped making ancient tanbo along the yato long ago so let's hang on to what we have left. We might need it to feed ourselves soon.