Halloween Tonight

Halloween tonight eh? The whole week seems to have been littered with non-stop Halloween parties for students, but they have been fun. And lots of opportunities to get those chicken-hearted muppets good and scared, ready to hide under the futon if they have the misfortune to wake up at night.

This year I've been trying out two different kinds of 'scary moment', and they have both worked well. In both cases I've dressed up in a black shirt, black trousers and my wizard's hat and black bask and then crept downstairs while the kids are partying in the dark in the schoolroom and engrossed in some game with Edera.

In Variation One: The Fearful Shadow, which works well with elementary school kids, I have slid silently into the room between the door and the whiteboard and just waited there until someone notices my dark formless shape lurking in the deep shadows and screams. Then of course they all squawk, screaming is contagious.

Variation Two: The Silent Terror has the junior high kids screeching. It involves me entering unnoticed and then suddenly and silently scurrying towards the desks like a giant cockroach, a dark horror that looms up on them without warning out of nowhere.

Happy days. And all the other Halloween stuff, ginger biscuits, mugi tea, singing "big black cat ..." too

When I was a kid Halloween was vaguely there in the background as "All Souls Eve", the night before All Saints Day, but I didn't know what a pumpkin was.We only had potatoes, Brussels sprouts and cabbage in Barnard Castle in those days and we were lucky! All the current stuff is pure American import and probably not much more than thirty years old in British culture. I can remember the vicar in the country area where we lived in Lancashire speaking out against the evils of Satanism when somebody suggested at the PTA meeting that a Halloween Dance might be a good fund-raiser for the school fund.

Like drugs, sex, rock and roll and voting Liberal Democrat - all a slippery slope I guess, the straight path to the leafy bonfire, broad is the road that leads to destruction. Start with a set of plastic vampire fangs from Woolworths and you'll soon end up with full blown Black Masses and sacrificial virgins. Lucky he was around to set us straight.

Ohara Trip

Down to Ohara yesterday on the Pacific coast of Boso Hanto. It is about thirty miles from here, just over an hour mainly along the country lanes that run behind Kujukuri beach. A friend wanted to buy some shellfish there.

That Ohara area is very interesting, and starting to rapidly move up my list of 'areas that I want to get to know better'. Often we don't get to really understand the geography of places just by looking at how they are today, and this part of leafy Chiba-ken is a classic example of this. Now it is hard to see why the east side of the Prefecture was always a separate province of old Japan - Kadzusa. But of course it is because the sea was so much more important in people's lives until the twentieth century. This place had closer ties with other distant fishing and coastal towns along the Pacific coast even as far afield as Shikoku and Kyuushu than it did with Shimosa on the other side of the peninsula. The limited amount of farming around there was quite secondary to the ocean when it came to making a living.

However as in so many parts of the world fishing has declined a lot. Back in the fifties and sixties there seems to have been a pretty 'basic' seaside holiday industry for Tokyo workers around here too but that also evaporated with the coming of cheap international travel.

Ohara is still quite an important commercial fishing centre. Like a lot of small-town Japan it mainly comprises gently decaying timber buildings from the nineteen-sixties and seventies, visually messy and untidy but not of course dirty. There's nothing picturesque here and yet it makes an interesting picture.

When I think about 'alternative biographies' I often wonder what it might have been like to grow up and live in a place like this. Probably I would have hated it. All the bright kids on the first possible train to Tokyo looking for salaried jobs in urban Japan. To stay on in towns like Ohara you have to 'follow the rules'. Under the surface we are not so far from the Meiji era in places like this. Ropes are coiled and stowed in certain ways, you pass on the right side of buoys and most of the rest of life follows similar rules to the sea. There are two ways of doing everything, 'our way and the wrong way'. You can understand why too, if a rope isn't coiled properly and there is an emergency in the dark - then you are dead. It is the same with life and marriage and inheritance and a hundred other things. No room for mistakes, beware of strangers, best do it like we always have, Thought he knew better and look what a bad lot he turned out to be. Economically and socially a million miles away from the modern anonymity of Ginza or Shinjuku, even if Tokyo is less than two hours by train.

Maybe I'm being unfair to the place, but I don't mean to be. And there's clearly some original thinking going on as well! The picture at the top is shrimp-flavoured ice cream that we bought in the fish market on the pier head and it is absolutely delicious!

Synchronicity

As it is something that I notice that trip over every time I get out of bed, I keep meaning to do some serious thinking about this business of 'synchronicity'. Do you know what I mean? It is what appears to be at work in situations where things that seem to be unrelated in terms of cause still happen in some kind of an apparently meaningful relationship.

For example: I'm walking down the street and I hear a busker singing a song and it reminds me of sitting in a bar during a year I spent in a faraway city in my youth. Then I turn the corner and - goodness! There, suddenly, is an old friend from that distant place that I haven't seen for years! Fancy meeting him here! What a 'co-incidence'!

The first of these two links - the link between the song and the bar - is causally related. I link them in my experience because that bar is where I heard the song. The second - the link between thinking of the place and meeting the old friend - that isn't causally related. Is it? These two 'happenings' seem to be only grouped by 'meaning', not cause. Or don't you agree? Something a bit wonderful has happened 'by chance'. Whatever that means. Because if you think 'chance' and 'co-incidence' are straightforward take a closer look.

Carl Jung puzzled about this experience of 'synchronicity' for years. He defined it as an "acausal connecting principle" and believed it formed a layer beneath much of human daily experience. He thought that it offered conclusive proof for his theory of a 'Collective Unconscious'

I went through a lot of my life not even noticing all this going on. Then a couple of examples bit me quite painfully in the leg and I sat up and paid attention, and now it just amazes me that I never spotted it before. We imagine our lives to be so darn straightforward, we never trip over the underlying mystery until we trip over it. But we are carried along on a positive tsunami of synchronicity.

But look at it closely, straight in the eye, and so often it seems to evaporate. Like the Cheshire Cat in 'Alice in Wonderland'.

There is a line in the scripture 'The Most Excellent Mirror Samadhi' that reminds me of this experience. "A master archer hits a target at a hundred yards because he skill possesses: but to make to meet two arrows in mid-air, head on, goes far beyond the skill of ordinary man"

Clocks Back

I must remember that since the weekend it is now 'nine hours the difference' between here and England. The clocks went back in Britain on Sunday morning. Here in Japan, where we are much further south and the days don't vary so much in length, we don't have 'summer time'. The clocks stay the same all the year around.

In fact the days here are already more or less as short as they are going to get during the winter. Around the 'shortest day' at the end of December it still gets light around six in the morning and we have daylight until about five in the evening. But the sun will dip a few more degrees southwards yet. In December and January it doesn't make it over the tops of the tall cedar trees in the forest on the other side of the lane until around ten, and our balcony is in shade for hanging out laundry until the middle of the morning.

I used to really like 'Clocks Back' time when I lived in England, it is quite a magical moment of the year. Early darkness in the streets, the leaves starting to get blown off the trees by the first serious seasonal storms rushing in from the Atlantic. Hazel and sycamore and small trees like birch are the earliest to lose their summer coats, the oaks and beeches hang on in there until well into November. Often gusty and sunny, English weather is really lovely in late October.

Nine hours is an awkward time difference for making phone calls. Usually whoever you want to contact at the other end is either asleep or working and there are only a couple of hours when you are both likely to be at home and awake.

When the kids were younger I remember once that they had a 'Clocks Back' arts festival in Lancaster and I took them to see some Chinese acrobats in a performance at the Town Hall. They were really amazing, they managed to stay airborne so well that it seemed as if they had wings. Yep! It was like watching one of those dreams you get when you suddenly discover that you really can fly and you try it out for the first time by floating up to the ceiling.

Greasepaint 'Spectacular'

Phew! That's the Halloween Fancy Dress Party done then. A bit of a gamble to try it in this leafy part of conservative Japan but I think that those who came ended up enjoying it.And the kids certainly got things going, 'hyper' is the word I'm looking for I think! That's one thing people in Japan really are good at doing - sitting around in a circle playing games together. In Lancashire everyone would stand around getting paralytic drunk listening to loud music and talking about their last holiday in Thailand and the price of Range Rovers with bull bars. Here nobody wants to get left out of 'charades'.

This is the first time we both got dressed up as clowns ("Fifty Things to Get Dressed Up In Before You Die" as they would say on the MSN News Page). It was fun, even if the effect was slightly spoiled by my suit being so small for me that I couldn't do it up properly. I just can't wait to get that grease paint on again. Of course the beard is a bit 'unusual' in clown circles but why not?

I was thinking what a good idea it would be to re-introduce the role of 'jester' into political gatherings again, like they used to have in olden day Royal Courts. I'd make a good 'joker' - quiet at the back there! Now it might improve the tone or party conferences and IMF and G8 meetings to have a few 'fools' in clown garb wandering around the men in dark suits cracking bad jokes along the lines of "heard the one about sub-prime mortgages" and waving their little sticks with ribbons on. No chance of that of course, it would just point up the real underlying idiocy of contemporary politics. World leaders are the last ones who want us to have a real sense of perspective about events. To laugh at yourself you need a bit of style.

Edera was absolutely brilliant in her clown suit. She reminded me vaguely of some famous French animateur, or maybe it was a singer or ballerina (am I remembering Margot Fonteyn in a part here?). She could really do a good classic mime, she seriously ought to attend drama school. I could get quite interested in learning all that sort of stuff myself. If I'd thought abou it I could have moved up to 'Clowning: Level 2' and made a few custard pies to try out on her. I always wanted to try out that one with the bucket of water where you throw it at someone and they duck and some unsuspecting stranger 'gets it'. Hey! If you come round sometime soon maybe we could rehearse it

Just visiting Cockaigne

A couple of years ago I bought a copy of 'Dreaming of Cockaigne' by Herman Pleij. But I haven't got around to reading it yet.

The Cockaigne tales and legends have interested me for years. They seem to have faded into obscurity now so you may not know them, but 'Cockaigne' - or 'Luilekkerland' in Dutch - was the original 'Land of Milk and Honey' for medieval storytellers, artists and poets. What would the world be like if luxury and pleasure existed everywhere and you could have everything you wanted all the time? Not simply a 'World of Desires' but even better - a 'World of Desires Fulfilled'.

Back in the hungry thirteenth century it was food that fascinated people most. Sex - well, we'd all want some of that around later of course but first things first - the almighty blow-out followed by a darn good sleep in the sun. They dreamed and fantasised about succulent ready-grilled geese that just flew into your mouth and cooked fish that jumped out of the water to land at your feet. Let the sky rain cheeses and the streets be paved with pastries! You can't help but really like our ancestors.

Interesting to consider what we go for now if suddenly all the restrictions of society and circumstance evaporated and you could have as much of everything and anything you wanted. I mean - absolutely without restrictions! Your wildest fantasies fulfilled! Dreams of cheeses falling from the sky don't do it much for us these days, we just have to call at the delicatessen in the supermarket. If we put our minds and savings to it we could kill ourselves with excesses of food, booze or hedonism any time we liked. In fact many do.

Whenever you ask people what they would do with that that money if they won the lottery everybody's dreams seem to revolve around 1) a big house, 2) a big car, 3) all holidays and no work and 4) shovelling cash in the direction of families and friends. Good grief! How boring can you get?

No , come on, let's have some honest and considered answers to this one! It is a fair question and do you know the answer to it? What happiness is your personal 'Land of Cockaigne' full of then? Food and drink? Sex? Praise and Acknowledgement? Money and Power? Knowledge? Or airborne Stilton and Cheddar?

'Dansei Korasu' again

'Dansei Korasu' (Men's Choir) practice last night. It is the first time I've been since our concert in early August and what with the subscription being 3000 yen a month and the value of Sterling presently plummeting like a stone I'm starting to wonder just how long I can continue to afford what has suddenly already become £250 a year. When I was young you might have joined the Carlton or Reform Club in London for that kind of money and you got leather armchairs and a copy of 'The Times' to read but on the other hand we don't "blackball" people here. In fact we are more likely to be lurking with a butterfly net ready to catch any passing tenors, baritones or basses.

Everyone was pleased to see me back. In all societies it is the older men who tend to be the 'conservative' group and least accustomed to strangers but I guess I'm not so much a stranger any more for this bunch although for some I'm probably the first gaijin that they have been around regularly. I'm especially useful when learning the words of Western songs. Initially there were lots of serious faces around as we stumbled through these in rehearsal but now everyone is relaxed. Last night there was much guffawing as we wrestled with the lyrics of "When the Saints Go Marching In" for the first time.

The main item on last night's agenda was to learn a Russian song -in Japanese 'O-Michi' ('The Road'). No idea what it is in Russian but we were soon sounding like the Red Army Choir tramping across the steppes into the sunset or taking a rest under some birch trees beside the mighty Volga. We love this sort of song in Japan - "Walking down the road of life, the wind is in our faces, I dream of my mummy at night, ahead lies fame or fortune ...". Somehow as we march along in song my historian's mind can't help wonder what it was really like to be kidnapped into some nineteenth century Cossack troop. 'Cold' and 'hungry' are two words that come up for me. I'm so 'literal' these days, sorry!

Anyway - nice to be back, if only for now. Men's choirs are quite rare, this is the first time I ever got to sing in one and I really enjoy it!

Hell hath no fury ...

Goodness! Here we go with the 'All-Japan Truth can be Stranger than Fiction' story of the week.

I was reading on the 'Japan Today' website this morning that a 43 year old woman piano teacher from Miyazaki has just been locked up for "murdering her husband". But the strange twist in the tale is that in this case it was her 'virtual husband' that she disposed of. The article explained that 'the culprit' was a player in the 'virtual reality' game "Maple Story" and that her 'virtual husband' in this imaginary world - a 33 year old guy from Sapporo - had unexpectedly dumped her. “I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry” she is said to have told investigators. To have her revenge she used his ID and password - which he had unwisely shared with her in happier times - to log on and delete the cad from the game! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

No laughter at the back there! It isn't funny.

Well, what happened next certainly wasn't. The 'deceased victim' complained to the local police department in Sapporo that he'd been killed off and those cops (who must obviously be trying hard for the 'Guinness Book of Records Ridicule Award' here) got in touch with the cops down in Miyazaki. Their 'cruiser' went round to the lady's house and picked her up and she was flown up to Sapporo for interrogation - in UK terms this would be like nabbing her on the Isle of Wight and dispatching her to Inverness for questioning. Now she's in custody in a cell up there in Hokkaido awaiting trial for "inappropriate computer access" - an offence which, here in Japan, carries a penalty of up to five years imprisonment and a 500,000 yen fine. The way some of the LDP politicians around here bang on these days I suppose she ought to count herself lucky that they haven't already introduced the death penalty for such serious crimes. I hear that crayoning in somebody else's new coloring book is already a capital offence.

Uh! Huh! By the way, let's not say too much about all of this to 'you-know-who'. I've learned my lesson, in future I'm going to treat all Japanese women in my life much more cautiously. Seems that once you get on the wrong side of them there is no knowing what might happen, some of them might just log onto their laptops and 'delete' you without a second thought eh? If they have your password that is.

Primary socialisation

I got around this week to reading Berger and Luckmann's "The Social Construction of Reality". An interesting book. Sometimes it is hard to judge how seriously texts as old as this (first published 1966) are still taken by contemporary academic researchers. But what they had to say about "primary socialisation" - the ways in which we absorb a whole raft of values ranging from language to politics from our families as young children - certainly makes sense to me.

I really see this as one of the most powerful forces in reproducing society, much stronger than secondary socialisation such as education. It is much easier to notice in cultures other than your own. And where three generation households are common and grandparents strongly influence the primary socialisation of grandchildren it means society changes very slowly.

For example, if you take people in their fifties here in Japan they were young children in the mid 1960's when the probability is that at least one grandparent would be living either with the family or, more likely, in the neighbourhood and spending time with the grandchild every day, Those grandparents would have been born at the end of the Meiji Era or perhaps early Taisho - around 1905. In turn their own primary socialisation would have involved grandparents born in the 1850's who as small children grew up in the shogunate at the end of the Edo Period when Japan was still largely a society closed to foreigners.

So in other words the whole of modern Japanese history is often contained within two cycles of primary socialisation within a family, two iterations of the reproduction of core social values involving grandparent and grandchild.

Looked at like this it is hardly surprising that fundamental values change only slowly is it? How many generations does it actually take to properly internalise foreign cultural values do you think?

I can sort of see this for my own biography - but only for the 'first iteration' Many of the values that were internalised for me in the 1950's were late Victorian, straight from my grandparent's childhoods. But how about theirs?

I'll come back to this topic.

Back to the mosque

Here's a picture of the Masjid-e-Jamia al Madina Mosque in Waterloo Road, Middlesbrough. It is a building important in my life, but not in its present incarnation of course. Back in the 1950's before the Church of England gave up and sold it off this was St. Michael and All Angels and the place where much of my social life outside school happened. I seem to remember that it had a squat spire then too, not a dome.

I wonder how the interior space is used today. Next time I'm in Middlesbrough perhaps I can find the Imam's phone number and ask if I can look around. When I was seven or eight the ground floor was a large bare church hall where the cubs met, on Wednesdays I think. Where is the St. Michael and All Angels wolf cub pack now? Do they ever hold reunions? Then on the floor above was the main part of the church, a rather ugly square brick space with long cross pews and a wide 'choir' that looked pretty well like the exterior looks here. I think the vicar lived in a flat down an alley somewhere behind.

Memories are dim, but persistent. Our Arkela, a Quakerish lady who was probably related to Baden-Powell if not actually his mum, lived quite close by in a big house by the park. About 6:30 we would mill around here in Waterloo Road (no cars in those days of course!) and finally shriek and fight our way through the doors and line up in our 'sixes' for an hour of noisy fun. Prayers before and after of course.

Upstairs on Sundays I had my very first experiences of singing in a 'proper choir' with hassocks and cassocks and bus trips to Whitby Abbey for various God related duties. Big embarrassment, I remember the first time I was 'on duty' at the end of the soprano front row I screwed big-time up. I thought the filing out in the middle (for us restless little souls to 'duck' the sermon, there was was compassion around even back in those days it seems) was actually some kind of ballroom dancing style manoeuvre to 'swap sides' in the choir stalls. Laughter and mortification all around. On another occasion an old lady in the front row collapsed during an especially graphic hymn dealing with chains of hell and the like. Maybe she even died, there was a certainly a fuss.

It is a different world isn't it? Where have all the bonnets and dingy blue coats and certainties and values gone? To the big Rag-and-Bone man in the sky. Blown away like Mary Poppins. Maybe I'll start a 1950's Re-enactment Society, it would be fun. Come and join me! Let's dress up in those clothes and be just the way we were again.

Day in Town

Into Chiba this morning and it gave us our first opportunity to walk over and inspect our new mega-million yen bridge to the railway station. All part - as I'm sure you will remember from many previous posts here - of a vast project to tame the mighty Sakuta River. Well, here it is. Maybe you didn't really believe before all that stuff you've heard about the money wasted in Japan on civil engineering projects building bridges from nowhere to nowhere. This one has taken more than a year to complete.

In town we went about our separate errands, me to the university library to photocopy another shedful of population census data. It has suddenly got pretty darn hot here again and of course the air-con is long switched off so in the locked window environment of the social sciences 'stack' it was positively Amazonian and my shirt was wringing wet in a minute. Soon a puddle of my sweat had gathered on the copier control touch-screen, dripping from my forehead and causing the wretched machine to short out and keep changing the paper size without warning.

Town seemed very busy too, the crowds pushy. Bikes flying around on pavements and people with their noses pressed to their keitai (mobile phones) elbowing their way into elevators and onto escalators. I was soon Mr. Grumpy. With all the hundreds of miles I've pounded around every corner of the city there can't be any gaijin more streetwise than me about the place but I felt that I'd lost my touch, being away for ten weeks has made me go soft, I need a few days around Tokyo to get back in training eh?

It's not all bad news. I couldn't help but notice the admiring glances that I got from several ladies around the place today. One in the restaurant where we had lunch was so interested in me she almost missed her mouth with a spoonful of fruit salad. Edera says it is just because I'm so handsome which may be true but my guess is that it is this Burgundy shirt that is turning heads, me and Burgundy just go together somehow like peaches and cream. I bought it as a standby for my Sana Claus debut a few years ago but I must get it out of the closet more often.

Voices on the wind

Splendidly windy afternoon here, one of those gusty days that we get in England in April but in Japan are more a feature of autumn or late winter. Windy weather is absolutely my favourite and especially if I can just lie back in the grass and listen carefully. Or like today on the bed, my eyes resting on the patch of sunshine on the wall. Wonderful to discover the child inside again, who can be with the wind and not wonder? Like sitting beside an invisible river. The great mystery of the flow of the wind. For the Navajo the wind is sacred; for me too.

So many moments and places that are tied into the voice of the wind. A six year old child sitting in the kitchen on a cold grey morning snug next to the blazing kitchen range and hissing kettle. Someone goes out of the back door and Oh! Listen to the wind racing up the flue and around the chimney pots. "That's a 'sour' wind!" says my Nana but it isn't sour at all, it is full of friendly spirits racing across the grey sky. Zephyrs.

Half a lifetime later in the Friends Meeting House in Lancaster, meditating on a Monday night in winter. A gusty west winds off the Irish Sea, blustering over the tiles while I sit beneath within the very stillest of still minds. If I could arise on this wind from this sitting place I could climb into the void over the estuary where the moonshine is already on the waves.

Spaniel's ears flying in the wind. We sit on the turf by the cairn and share a sandwich. The wind makes dogs laugh, they love to sit and admire views from high places too. "How much further along this ridge brother? In this cotton grass I could run all day, my paws have grown wings ..."

Costume angst

Good grief! This looming 'fancy dress' is giving me a hard time. Yesterday I wasted hours staring gloomily at Japanese 'Novelty Apparel' sites on the Internet. What a depressing bunch! I saw two things that just might, on a very bad day, have 'done'. But both were out of stock. How did we get into this hole? Already I've spent more hours worrying about what to wear than the time the whole event will take from the first shoes off in the genkan to the last of the dishes washed up and put away. There is always a pixie on my shoulder muttering the Japanese national motto - "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing properly!"

Lots of very interesting costumes there for the ladies though. Goodness! I had to rub my eyes! Fairies with ballerina skirts and magic wands, 'French maid', 'nurse' and 'police woman' (complete with handcuffs!) outfits of some brevity and some very low-cut 'medieval maiden' gear. Call me a tad suspicious if you like but I formed an opinion that not all of these outfits were necessarily intended for fancy dress parties, I never saw anyone getting off the train at Yotsukaido wearing that kind of thing. I realise after all that I might have led a sheltered life. There was a very nice 'banana' outfit I could have worn and I could have wandered around looking yellow and morose in it but it was about 7 foot high and our internal doors here are only six foot two; I'd have been on my hands and knees half the night. Most of the other 'fruit and veg page' offerings were too wide; to get to the bathroom I would have had to go via the French windows and back in through the front door. If we were richer our house might be bigger but too late to worry about all that.

All this despondency had me wondering about the whole men and fancy dress scene. Maybe it is more a feminine 'thing'. Once you have got beyond Dracula and Nelson and Al Capone the male selection peters out, we are abandoned on the beach, perhaps men only ever get involved as a kind of appendage to their women. Existential questions start to arise for us like "What the heck is this for?" and "What does dressing up as a pirate really reveal to others about my libido?" Oh dear! I think I'll have another cup of coffee ...

'Noses' and 'Grindstones'

It is starting to feel like the energy has drained out of the year for me. To focus on my thesis I've been getting up at 5:30 am recently to take advantage of the quiet early mornings but it is just amazing how those first few hours in the day fly by and how little seems to get achieved. The early morning in the village is punctuated by a whole sequence of events - mainly involving trains - that I'm very familiar with now. At 6:13 the first 'Shiosai' express of the day rumbles through bound for Tokyo and then at 6:32 an empty kaisoku heading out for Naruto pulls up to wait for a Chiba-bound local train to pass. Half an hour later it is back through the village already loaded with sleepy commuters but it doesn't stop here, our platforms are too short. All this coming and going has developed into a kind of ritual as I stare at an empty screen, determined to get something started before breakfast.

If you are seriously writing anything then it seems that you have to have a ruthless routine like this or nothing gets done. Even if you do, it isn't a guarantee that something will flow.

This coming week I'll move off the arid uplands of the 'theory chapter' and onto some more substantive stuff with lots of tables and facts that I can keep busy with. Factual writing isn't so hard, you just have to put one word after another, subtract one set of numbers from the next. And then when a chapter is done you feel good about it.

When I was at school our headmaster used to like to quote a prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake who no doubt muttered it before he set sail to give the Spanish a good 'seeing to'. It often pops into my mind when the mire gets thick and the Slough of Despond a bit more bottomless than usual ...

"When Thou givest to Thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldest the true glory."

Yep! "Now think on" as my grandad used to say. Seen any Spanish galleons headed this way my hearties?

Fancy Dress looms

Wah! Just ten days time and we are having a fancy dress party for Halloween. Well, 'party' might be a bit of a misnomer but we'll do our best to give some of our students an authentic taste of real 'Anglo' culture eh? But FANCY DRESS? Who dug that hole? Komatta na? What to wear? What to wear?

Fancy dress isn't a big thing in Japan somehow. I mean, someone must do it somewhere but who and where is a mystery. Of course being vulgar and English my butterfly mind immediately alighted on a 'vicars and tarts' evening as being your traditional, even mandatory United Kingdom format. But even Edera looked perplexed around that one and I was soon convinced that there might be cultural barriers to some of our middle-aged ladies wearing suspender belts and St. Trinian's hats. Or even understanding what a 'vicar' is, let alone a 'tart' in deep and leafy rural Chiba-ken. So I think all this might end up with more of a straightforward vampire theme to it all. Where can I get a Dracula outfit around here? Fashion Center Ogawa maybe, most of their ordinary clothes have a Transylvanian cast to them.

Far be it from me to mention this but I've had my successes on the fancy dress front. Once I went to an Agatha Christie Murder Mystery Dinner Party dressed in a naval uniform and I was pretty darn convincing with my beard and all. I seem to remember it was the gardener what did it with a bottle of paraquat in the conservatory that night.

My big time success though was a party that the brewery had at Pinewood Studios. It was around the time we were about to be taken over and we all expected to be out of a job the following week so we spent the most outrageous amount on a bash that Christmas. We had to go dressed as characters from famous movies so I went along as King Henry VIII and boy! was I a knockout in that costume. Perhaps I'll have a go at that again - I like the white tights, they appeal to a dark side of my nature. And I always did fancy six wives too, I'm working on it.

Lefebvre: a critical introduction

The last couple of days I've been working my way through "Henri Lefebvre:A Critical Introduction" by Andy Merrifield and I've really enjoyed it. Not just a well written book about a complex man but also one written with a real sense of purpose and direction too. Quite rare in academic books these days.

My supervisors at university pointed me in the direction of Lefebvre about five years ago. I've enjoyed some of the suggested reading and scratched my head over most of the rest if it. And especially the book for which he's held in high esteem by Anglophone geographers, planners and architects - "The Production of Space". At times I've suspected that the vast majority of 'professionals' who praise this fearsome book so highly never made it past chapter one, and occasionally I've wondered if the author had really made it past chapter one either. On a fifth reading it 'opened' to me rather more and this new book by Andy Merrifield has also helped me get one layer deeper into that particular onion.

Lefebvre was a Marxist - but a very unusual one because he was a serious humanist too. In fact a humanist first I seem to have got most of the way through life without understanding what Marx was about, and having discovered him through Lefebvre I've been deeply impressed. I'd thought all that stuff about workers and revolutions was obsolete long ago but actually I realise now that I'd only ever heard about "the evils of Marx" through the mouths of those with a vested interest in trashing him. I'm not a Marxist but I can see that what he had to say about recovering power over our lives is probably even more relevant now that when he was writing in the 1840's. We live in an infinitely more complex world.

Lefebvre. One of nature's great troublemakers. Pyrenean peasant, radical thinker, thrower of rocks and visionary. The antipodes, the anti-type of all bureaucrats, professional politicians and lovers of all-encompassing abstract systems of control. Always that optimistic message lurking in his writing "Fight back in every way you can". When they try to tell you "There Is No Alternative" - that is the time to pick up the rock and take aim. It is OK to be human, you are not a part of their machine. What's that line about sitting in your own shadow and all you need to do is turn around to face the sun?

Images

One thing that came back with me from England this time safe in my hand luggage was a scrap album full of old family photographs. It is my plan to scan them here as soon as I can so that the images are safe, and I'll probably reproduce some of them here as I work on the project.

Amongst the pictures are several of my great-grandmother, Mary Jane Baldwin, nee Furness. I never met her, she died eleven years before I was born. But she seems to have caused a heck of a lot of trouble both during her lifetime and after; she is by far the most 'interesting' of my ancestors. I'm sure I don't even know the half of it.

Just these few images and a few public records - that is all that now retrievable of her biography. Everyone that knew her directly is already dead and in any case none of them ever talked about her much - apart from her younger sister Nora who had a sense of humour and had forgiven her outrageous older sister. If I'd known better and asked more about her I could have known a lot more but there we are. You can't go back and recover the past. There would be a lot of customers around if you invented a time travel machine eh?

Images. It's a topic I'm thinking deeply about in my research, from an epistemological angle. Just what do images represent in terms of any theory of knowledge? What can be known from them, what is available to the senses? In my studies the questions revolve around fifty year old deposits of silver salts on archive aerial photographs of Chiba-shi but here I'm more concerned here with what meaning even older silver salt deposits have for me in a very personal way. What gateway do they provide in terms of 'touching' and knowing someone who is 'me' - or at least one eighth 'me'? I have no images at all of my other seven great grandparents, nor do I know the name of the man who impregnated Mary Jane in the summer of 1896 and sired my grandmother and so became my great grandfather. I probably wasn't on his mind much at the time I guess.

Button Jug

Recently when I wrote about my grandmother's fire screen I said that I had very few possessions of hers left, but I'd forgotten one item that lives on the top shelf on my study in our house in Lancashire. It is a rather nice pewter jug branded with "Ringtons Teas" and dating I would guess from the 1930's. Ringtons was a Newcastle tea company and there are at least two regular readers of this blog might be able to tell me something about them. Certainly around that time they came up with a scheme for helping unempoyed craftsmen in the area and I suspect that this jug might well be a part of that project. So the jug is a bit of an heirloom in itself.

But for me the interesting thing is what is kept inside - buttons! My grandmother grew up at a time when recycling might not have been as politically correct as it is now but was certainly much more intensively practised. In her house nothing of any value was ever thown away, we even unravelled old sweaters and scarves and she re-used the wool to knit new garments. This jug was her 'button library' - buttons and fastenings would be carefully snipped off all worn out clothes and rags and stored in here for future use. If you lost one off your cuff or jacket she would soon track down a near match in this old jug and sew it on.

As a child this jug was a source of endless pleasure for me on rainy afternoons - the contents would come out onto a tray on the kitchen table and I'd spend a happy hour sorting them by size and colour. Good grief! That must be where I got my lifetime passion for databases and systems of classification from. Thirty years later my daughter Julia played with them in exactly the same way.

So this jug and its contents are a real heirloom for me. Every time I peer inside I can see my grandmother sorting through them for a good match to repair my grandad's shirt

Old ones are the best ones

'Society Column' piece today so brace yourselves for action. It was 'Taiiku no Hi' - National Sports Day - and a public holiday. We thought we should mark the occasion by going out for lunch somewhere special so we headed over to a posh restaurant near the lake at Togane. Not too posh you understand - have you seen what's been happening to the exchange rate recently! Everybody who is anybody goes there, it is the in-place for an inimate lunch around here.

Anyway it seemed that today everyone really was going there and it was full. So we ended up having a 'curry rice' in the little Nepali cafe around the corner from the High School and went for a walk around the lake afterwards. I keep meaning to check out the history of this place, the lake itself looks like it was built long ago as a reservoir for the tanbo below the town to irrigate the rice and it was all done by the shoguns who spent summer holidays here . Tokogawa Ieyasu liked to come hunting around this part of leafy Chiba-ken and even had a road specially built in a straight line from Funabashi to speed up the journey from Edo. It is called the "Lamplight Road" because they worked on it night and day to make sure that it was finished by the due date. Back in old Japan nobody told the shoguns "Sorry mate! We are running behind with this one ..."


On the road between Togane and Kujukuri I always get a good laugh from this one on the wall of the tool store as I turn the corner near Katakai. Yet again the old "General Erection" joke in another incarnation; the 'Carry On' scriptwriters would have loved it ... ooh matron!. Erectical machinery sounds good to me, I wonder how it works.

[Congratulations Iain! This is your 750th posting on 'Little House'!]

Feral Cat

We have more than a few problems here with a feral cat at the moment. He's lived in the area for the last two years and has often featured on this blog as "The Enemy" in lots of scraps with Tora. But recently he's grown so strong that he has come to dominate the neighbourhood. Our two felines have got to the point where they don't go outdoors much and when Tora went for a morning stroll yesterday it soon developed into a serious fight that we had to forcibly break up.

What to do? I don't know, we are thinking about it. But it can't go on like this or there will be serious injuries or worse in store. I was rather hoping he might calm down but he's getting even more fierce with other cats in the area.

If you are a cat lover - and we both are - it really raises questions eh? This guy is only doing what male cats in the wild are supposed to do - fight for a territory to secure his livelihood. He's a wild animal, if you hope to socialise cats to human ways you have to do it when they are kittens. Often feral cats actually do come to live with humans later in life, but on their own terms. Their 'significant people' get to accept them as 'a bit anti-social' while the truth is that they are actually loving but wild animals sharing your home. Our old cat 'Barry' in Lancashire was like this, just came scratching for shelter one snowy night and stayed on to live with us, fierce and affectionate in equal parts .

Around here there is space enough for feral cats to get on with their lives in the forest but this grey Tom has learned to make a living around human habitation. It must be the same problem that a lot of rural homes in Canada and sometimes even Hokkaido have with bears

I don't think we can ignore the problem any more, it won't go away. But of course no possibility of turning to officialdom, if the City Office trapped him they would kill him.

If there was some way of this guy living around here without terrorising the place we'd go for it. But I suspect the only solution might be to trap him ourselves and release him several miles away in one of the more densely forested areas of leafy Chiba-ken. I'll think about it.

Mary Whitehouse

One advantage of using British Airways at the moment is the variety of in-flight entertainment on offer. IF the system works properly of course, coming home they had to re-boot it twice with many pleas "not to touch the buttons or screens until we tell you it is OK" in English and Japanese. But to be fair they have the best selection now, I never thought I would see the day when I'd have to admit it.

This trip one of the offerings was Julie Walters in "Filth: The Story of Mary Whitehouse" and I really enjoyed it. If you are British probably no need to remind you who Mary Whitehouse was but if you aren't it is a name you won't be familiar with. She was a school teacher who during the 1960's began a campaign against what she perceived as declining moral standards in TV broadcasting, especially in BBC programmes. At the height of her influence in the 1970's and 1980's her "National Viewers and Listeners Association" had around 150,000 members and gave British broadcasters and politicians a hard time. She died seven years ago. Compared with a lot of the present day radical religious campaigning in the United States her 'Oxford Movement' Christian values were rather tame in retrospect, but at the time she was a figure of fun for liberals in my generation. She packed a punch too.

An interesting film. Julie Walters not only succeeds in looking like Mary Whitehouse but she is also an actress from the same part of the world and well acquainted with small town English Midlands values. I thought that her portrayal of the Whitehouse family was sensitive and sympathetic and it rather revised my opinion of those events. Even if you don't empathise much with someone and disagree with them profoundly you shouldn't judge them by your own standards. If it was true then it is even more true today. Ad hominem arguments are no use to anybody.

And at the same time it underlined for me the seeming impossibility of ever coming to an 'impartial view' of anything that you care about deeply. History is never about 'impartial views', where could such a vantage point ever exist? You would have to be an angel sitting on a cloud. Maybe the best you can hope for is to see the quality of your opponent's sincerity and try to work on towards a third position. I think I just suddenly understood what the term 'dialectic' refers to ...

Face job

Back in a leafy, and rainy, Chiba-ken after a rather bumpy flight back from Heathrow. What you might call a 'rodeo ride' with plenty of time to contemplate the likely strengths and weaknesses of Boeing 747-400 airframes. But after a terrible flight in one a few years ago when we caught up with a typhoon over the Sea of Japan I have a lot of trust in the design; after that morning nothing could make me nervous about flying ever again.

Returns here are always eventful and this time it is an allergic reaction. I had a similar one last year and I don't know what triggered it then either. It has been coming on since Sunday. I spent last week at the monastery and my work periods were in the kitchen so I suspect this has something to do with vegetable preparation. But which vegetable 'got me' I wonder? Courgettes? Parsnips? The squashes I peeled? My money is on the parsnips.

Whatever it was my eyes are puffed up and I look a bit like a 'bit part' in Dracula. I'm amazed that they didn't pull me out of line and grill me walking past the the health and quarantine check counter at Narita. ("Felt unwell during your flight? Tell us and get arrested!"). Even the ladies in the choir looked shocked when I crawled into rehearsal yesterday evening and and croaked my way through a few items. And before you ask I'm NOT about to post a picture here just to satisfy your curiosity!

Amazing how just a few quite minor changes to your face completely change you appearance, and so apparently your personality. I kept thinking of that short story 'Metamorphosis' by Kafka although for him physical transformation was more of a metaphor for psychic distress. And Dr. Jeykell and Mr. Hyde of course - If you look bad then you must be bad, it 'stands to reason'. Just a tweak to your eyelids and a small swelling of the pouches under your eyes and you have become a different person. Even to yourself.

It is an interesting one to think about. It has made me realise just how strongly we identify ourselves with our own faces, let alone others with theirs. Many people think that they 'are' their jobs, that their role defines them, but that is even more so the case with the image we happen to confront in a mirror. There's a real koan lurking at the back of this one - in a way it is a re-run of "What was your original face the moment before your parents conceived you?" on a mundane level. If even a minor allergic reaction can do this then ...

Maybe I'll give mirrors a miss for a day or too. Shouldn't be difficult, I'll be sleeping most of the time in any case!

Making choices

Just back in sunny Lancashire after a spell 'out of circulation' and last night I enjoyed the luxury of reading in bed for the first time in days. It was the usual kind of 'railway history' that I often read to relax and on one page was an Edwardian photo that caught my eye. A pity that I don't have a scanner here or I'd include a copy for you. It showed an engine driver oiling his locomotive 'ready for the road' while two men nearby tipped coal into the tender. It brought into focus for me something that has been on my mind during the week - making choices.

All three men in the picture looked like Edwardian workmen - wiry figures in overalls and outsize cloth caps - but of course that masked a big difference. The engine driver was a well paid mechanic, he was earning perhaps two or three time as much as the two others doing dirty manual work nearby. What kind of life choices led to the situation captured by the photographer?

We usually think of 'choices' as something consciously made, as if we habitually sat down and made comparative lists in the face of a looming big decision. "What should I be when I grow up? A street sweeper or an astronaut? Now let me think?" Street sweeping has a lot of pluses eh? Regular hours, not too dangerous, you get your uniform and equipment paid for, a pension scheme and there is a canteen back at the depot. Astronauts on the other hand, perhaps the fame offsets the much higher risk. And the job involves travel. Of a kind. So let's make a rational choice here ....

I often fantasise about this kind of stuff, it doesn't involve much tweaking of reality does it?

When I look back I realise that very few big decisions in my life were made consciously and perhaps none of them rationally, I never did write down that list of 'pros' and 'cons'. So how did these crucial decisions come about? Instinct? Impulse? Karma? Choices are an important mechanism of change and you head off down roads with no idea where they lead or often even why you thought you were headed in that direction. Some turned out OK, some didn't, que sera sera.

But there is more to this, I'll have to think about it. After all, we aren't talking 'random' here are we?