Evacuation

Back in sunny Lancashire on my twice-a-year visit to see family and to meet my supervisors at college. No need for any of that air-con here, no earthquakes, no snakes lurking in the long grass! England might have its problems but it has its advantages too....

And one of those benefits is that I can understand everything that I watch on TV. In leafy Chiba-ken I tend not to do much viewing. You can have too much of NHK chat shows and those 'soaps' where the cast dress up in Edo Period costume and look penetratingly at each other. Or little Ichiro's granny is worried about his school report, much sighing and many a komatta na? "What to do?". Back here in England people in 'soaps' drink far too much and take the most outrageous decisions in their personal lives at the drop of a hat. All much more interesting.

Yesterday I was watching an episode of 'Evacuation' on children's BBC. 'Evacuation' is a word that still makes me laugh because it was very popular with my nursing-trained grandmother. It was a term in daily use in her house along with 'bowel movements' and the like and watch out if you gave her the wrong answer to her questions, there was a large bottle of castor oil waiting for you on the top shelf in the cupboard under the stairs. But that wasn't the 'evacuation' the programme planners had in mind at all of course.

This 'evacuation' involved modern day city kids dressing up in old clothes and going and spending time in the country just like child war-time evacuees had to back in 1940. In this episode they were having fun learning to plough with some big Shire horses. It was lovely to see the excitement on their faces as they got to work doing farm chores from sixty years ago. Made me feel my age too because I could remember ploughing being done like that at West End Farm, Bowes, where we used to help out with work at busy times.

There was something unsettling for me about this programme though and it took a while to put my finger on what it was. It was the 'virtual' aspect of the experience that was on offer. Here were six kids being filmed doing the 'real thing' and perhaps six million others watching them in urban living rooms and bedrooms across the land. I really notice this kind of counterfeit passing for reality these days. The travelogue from Bolivia, the fantastic documentary featuring the natural history of the deep ocean, the music programme with the perfect performance of a complex piece by Bach. In a subtle way they all rob us of the ordinary, even boring, but nevertheless direct experience of a trip to the park, poking around in hedgerows, singing something for ourselves. It isn't that they are wrong in themselves, but they substitute for real world in a subtle way, insulate you from the mundane but real. If you don't watch out you don't even notice it.

Mukaebon

Today is the second of the three days of O-bon. The traditional dates for holding the festival vary a bit around Japan because of the way in which the Gregorian calendar was adopted back in 1872 but in most places including leafy Chiba-ken it falls between the 13th and 15th August.

O-bon is a Buddhist festival which celebrates the story of a disciple of the Buddha called Mokuren. In an insight during meditation he became aware of his dead mother's suffering as a 'Hungry Ghost' and through his compassion and with the Buddha's advice managed to help her. But I suspect that the actual elements of O-bon are much older than the Buddhist stories that they have been adapted to represent. On the 13th - especially in the rural areas like this where people's families might have lived for generations - parents and children visit the graveyards with lanterns in the evening to call at the family graves and invite their dead ancestors to back come home and visit them.This event is called 'mukaebon'. On the 15th, at the end of the festival, the ancestors are accompanied back to the graveyards and bid farewell until the following summer,a nd this visit is known as 'okuribon'.

O-bon is a powerful thing, even if you don't literally have a family grave to visit, and somehow for me it feels very heavy this year. I can't put my finger on why. It is a disturbing season, in the humid half light of dawn and in the hot dusk the cicadas make an incredible racket and moths circle around every street lamp out here in the countryside. It is still the worst of summer heat but autumn is in the air. But it isn't just all that.

Now, apart from my ailing mum, I'm the oldest in my family, and I have a fair string of ancestors of my own who seem to come knocking on my door more often than they used to. For children going and looking up your dead relatives after dark with a lantern is spooky enough - "They don't really come back to the house with us do they dad?". But when you are older you know darn well that they do.

Some of my ancestors I would delight in brewing a pot of tea for, and chat away once more about geraniums and the exploits of family dogs and cats. And others feel too raw and painful to handle somehow. At a distance, as a theoretical possibility, in terms of the occasional stick of incense offered on a good day, they might be OK. But when it comes to putting on my coat at 'mukaebon', grabbing a torch and heading off to a dark cemetery to actually say "won't you come home with me?" ... Oh! Goodness! That's another thing entirely.

Hiroshima Anniversary

The sixty third anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima yesterday. I don't watch or listen to the news here regularly but I sense that even in Japan the event is reported rather less that it used to be a few years ago. Perhaps 'sixty' is a milestone in commemorations. The format, the speeches, the school children, the white doves, the pattern of the ceremony is familiar to everyone. Maybe some new angle, some new world personality ... if Obama or McCain had shown up I guess it would have made the headlines.

But this afternoon it seems to have suddenly loomed a little larger for me because I picked up a John Pilger thread on the Guardian newspaper website. He had written a pretty pithy article about the American use of atomic weapons in 1945 and drawn parallels with the current situation in respect of Iran. The comparison certainly got that thread smouldering, every contributor seemed to have an axe to grid and boy! were there a lot of what I would personally consider pretty deluded contributions by Americans setting out to justify their military in Japan, the Middle East and pretty well everywhere else. So much anger there, you could have lit a bonfire with it. What was that line Bob Dylan wrote ...

"Well I just can't tell you, you have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot had 'God on his Side' ..."

Actually I try and keep away from this stuff now - I mean, what is the point? No one is about to chip in and murmer "Hey, that's a good point! Never thought of that one! Maybe I should change my position on that!" On the other hand it shocks me to see so much ignorance in one place, some people seem to have strong opinions I can hardly comprehend based literally on no knowledge of actual events at all. Underlying their anger and self-justification there is often a powerful but barely articulated racism too. Those damn Japs needed a kicking, needed to be taught their place. It all reminded me of hatred expressed back in the nineteen forties and so well documented in John Dower's book "War Without Mercy".

You can't acquire Japanese family and friends and live here long without bumping into this koan, you just can't. There's an elephant in every room and here we are again. Bump.

It always reminds me of that verse at the beginning of the Dhammapada, whoever wrote that knew what he or she was talking about. Don't have a copy to hand but from memory it goes ...

"What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday
Our lives are the creation of our minds.
"He insulted me, he decieved me, he hurt me, he robbed me."
Those who think like this are not free from hate.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday
Our lives are the creation of our minds.
"He insulted me, he decieved me, he hurt me, he robbed me."
Those who do not think like this are free from hate.

For hate is not overcome by hate
Hate is overcome by love.
This is an eternal law."