Recorder class

My fortnightly 'recorder class' this morning. It is held in the 'Lifelong Learning Centre' of a local university about eight miles from here as a part of their 'extension programme'. Each term we have five classes.

I've only been playing for around eighteen months and as I don't practice hard I'm still almost a beginner. Most of the 'gang' play alto recorders - one size up from the 'descant' recorders kids learn first in elementary schools - although of course the better players can also handle tenor and bass instruments too. We practice a programme for four sessions and then on the fifth Saturday record what we have learned. Usually there are about ten of us, which is enough for a recorder ensemble. It is quite an easy instrument to play at a basic level but not the easiest instrument to play in tune with others. So the more of you there are, the less likely you are to be.

Groups like this often point to deep chasms between British and Japanese culture and recorder playing is no exception. For a start people here arrive on time, even though it is 'just for fun'. And when you DO arrive everyone is sitting quietly, respectfully waiting for sensei to start the session. So you plug your instrument together and sit their quietly too. In Britain we'd all be fidgeting and blowing away in our own little worlds, warming up, reminding ourselves of that awkward little bit of fingering in bar 37. The din would be audible right through the building.

Interesting how perfectly our bodies remember technical skills learned in youth. I struggled for months when I first started the alto recorder and couldn't quite pinpoint why but now I've spotted it. When I was in my 'teens I learned the French Horn, an instrument where you hold the first valve down for 'D' and the first and second valves down for 'E'. On the alto recorder it is exactly the opposite - top two finger holes for 'D' and top finger hole for 'E'. It is forty years since I last picked a Horn up but my fingers still hadn't forgotten that, it has taken me more than a year to 'un-learn' the old skill and I still make mistakes.

Today we were practising 'Sato no Aki' - a song melody by the composer Minoru Kainuma who died back in 1971 and had links with the local area. So it is a popular tune round here, a couple of years ago our choir sang it with the brass band and now I'm playing it on recorder. Very nostalgic and the feelings it explores say a lot about modern Japan too somehow. 'Autumn in my Village' - a nostalgia for childhood colours and smells, memories of a rural life lost to many Japanese families two generations ago with rural depopulation and the big move to the cities during the 1960's. But the song also has a longer history which I must write about sometime. There's a nice Japanese version on Youtube by Ishikawa Sayuri tou can listen to here but I think I prefer the one in Cantonese by the Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng even more that you will find here

Perpetual Yule

Monthly men's choir meeting tonight. As I have to be at Nogiku Plaza by seven I sometimes stop off at MacDonalds at Nagasakiya for tea and a packet of greasy chips was definitely called for this evening as I had a good blood glucose test result from S-sensei this morning. "Let's enjoy a bit of unhealthy excess" has always been my motto it seems. What better excuse for indulging in a seriously bad lifestyle than to celebrate being scientifically proven fit and healthy?

As I was munching my way through a big bag full of 'fries' carefully garnished with a couple of those little pots of ketchup at one of the blue melamine tables under the Mickey Mouse clock I found myself listening to seasonal good cheer. The speakers in the ceiling of the general merchandise section in the adjacent bay of the store were pumping out a Yuletide 'Big Band' medley already. "Huh? November 28th?" you say in surprise? But here in Japan we have to get Christmas in and out of the door briskly, Shogatsu (New Year) follows hard on its heels, two prime merchandising opportunities for striving retailers in just four short weeks. How did that old Tom Lehrer song go?

'God Rest Ye Merry' Gentlemen!
May you make the Yuletide pay!

Angels we have heard on High!
Tell us to go out and buy!

The strains of "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald!" chiming out over the gondola end displays of double thickness toilet rolls made me feel cheerful and somewhere an idea was forming in my mind. The whole 'thing' about these seasonal and 'one-off' events is their essentially transitory nature - right? I mean we only have Christmas in December, 'Hearts and Flowers' on 14 February and so on - they are time bounded discrete phenomena rather than something permanently located at a set of spatial coordinates. Uh! You can see what's coming here I guess ...

Yep! Let's have designated places where seasonal events happen all the time. So there is a five hectare fenced off site with barbed wire and watchtowers in, say, Ibaragi Prefecture or maybe Belgium where it is always Christmas. Not just a pale imitation, a mere 'theme park' but the REAL THING. Whenever you are there people are standing under street lights singing carols, Santa's sleigh is pulled up outside the department store in the main street - Ho! Ho! Ho! Presents for everyone today! (again) - and every tree has candles and decorations and is sprayed with fake foam snow. And this never stops, it is 24/365 as we say in the trade, wall to wall schmaltz. Mary is always giving birth to a boy-child. We were, are, and will be Yuletide through all infinity.

How long could anyone take this experience without going nuts? A fair question. Just imagine - your are already in your 'sixties' and as long as you can remember - your whole life - people have been singing "Good King Wenceslas" around a brazier and the church bells have been pealing incessantly. "What is it like outside today love?" she said as he drew back the bedroom curtains ..."Oh! Nice morning ... and looks like there are some people singing carols over there ...". But then if you had never known anything different ... if someone landed here from Mars they would probably find the traffic jams pretty darn irritating. Don't judge things by your own standards.

And here is a scary thought. If you actually did live in Christmas all the time you would never know eh? It would just be 'the usual' to you wouldn't it? So maybe we actually are living in this kind of a weird situation and just haven't ever noticed it yet.

Sogo lunch

Into Chiba on Wednesday for a visit to the Prefecture Central Library. Not the usual pages of statistics this time - I wanted to track down a book published twenty years ago about the history of the legal action between the City Council and the Kawasaki Heavy Industries steel plant. There as a major series of court cases that lasted from about 1975 to 1990 about air pollution in the city.

Grim stuff. The narrative followed the course of all such narratives the world over. Smoke, bad smells, pollution and then people start to get sick and eventually die. Acid rain even starts to rot the tin roofs of the houses. The company say it can't possibly be their smoke and wheel out some tame academics to prove their point 'conclusively'. And anyway if you make a fuss the city will suffer, the company will suffer, jobs will suffer, even Japan will suffer! Clearly if you want to avoid poisoning you must be a troublemaker. If you really loved your country you would breathe our smoke! Then there's the battle through all the levels of the courts to pay for. But in the case of Chiba - the fight was rather late here compared with some other places in Japan - the protesters did 'win' in the end. It wasn't always the way, a decade before the courts here were shamefully influenced by government and business lobbying.

But that isn't what I meant to write about! I took Edera along to translate for me and afterwards we had lunch in her favourite eating place in town, a kind of a 'Whole Earth' buffet-style restaurant in the basement of the Sogo department store near the station. An 'all-you-can-eat' place of the kind we call 'Viking' restaurants here. No idea why, some enterprising Dane or Swede must have opened a smorgasbord cafe in Tokyo long ago. This one is beany with much tofu and salads and noodles in evidence, not a chip [French fry] to be found anywhere. Customers in earth tones if not actually wearing sandals.

And it is the customers that interest me in this place. About three quarters of the clientele are young mothers with pre-school kids and most of the rest shoppers in their fifties. This week I was the only male in the room over five years old apart from one waiter. Us older customers tend to be a bit - how shall I put it? - well, most look like somebody Beryl Cook would love to paint! Chubby, and focused on the job in hand, on satisfying the particular appetite in question eh? Food for free and trough fulls of it. Me too!

Watching customers carefully like this is a habit, it comes from the days when I used to work in the brewery marketing department. And all those endless meetings listening to earnest young men and women with open laptops and no concept of 'brevity'. Droning on about ACORN categories and ABC1 and 'profiling'. Long hours when you just knew that it actually was possible to die of boredom, it could happen any moment, if you forgot to keep breathing. That you could be sitting there and then suddenly the floor would rush up to meet you and the world would go dark and a compassionate angel would sadly whisper in your ear "consecutive consumer occasions" as a kind of coup de grace, just to make sure that you were good and dead.

Lost in Translation again

I was writing recently about the quality of translation work, but there was one aspect that I never mentioned at all. What about the actual sound of the words? What can you do to try and convey the 'feeling' conveyed by language quite apart from its actual meaning?

This is a really interesting one. At first glance it might seem unimportant, but then what about if you want to translate poetry eh? Often the rhythms of the spoken syllables convey as much meaning as the words themselves. I feel another bout of Jacques Derrida coming on here. I still laugh when I remember a Heineken Beer advert that had at the brewery back in the 1980's. The uninspired poet was mumbling something about "I was walking about feeling sad and then I saw lots of yellow flowers" but fortunately - an after a swig of our beer which was supposed to 'reach the parts other beers cannot reach' - his words were magically transformed into

"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils ..."

Last night at choir practice there was a striking example of all this. We are planning to sing a love song by Palestrina at a concert in January, a canzonetta for three voices. As we don't have long to learn it we tried singing it in both the Italian and in the Japanese translation to see if we could 'cut a corner' by using the Japanese words. In Italian the text is:

Da così dotta man se’stato fatto
Vaghissimo ritratto
Ch’io non saprei ridir se viva sei
O se fai dolce inganni agli occhi miei

The Japanese version reads:

Mimi no uruwashi e sugita, miredo mo aki nu i kerugoto
Ku hoho e mite, hoho mi wa ga mo e mi dareru i keru

Very roughly speaking the literal meaning of both is "I saw your portrait which is done with such skill that I can't tell if you really could be so beautiful". A great 'chat-up' line there eh? I must remember it for future use ...

Goodness! Sung 'back-to-back' how incredibly different they are in terms of the emotional quality conveyed by the sound of the two languages! In Italian the poet is flirting outrageously with a pretty girl. He is out on in the lane on a moonlit night, lute in hand and 'you-know-what' on his mind. But in Japanese - to me anyway - it feels more like "life speeds by, the colours are beautiful, let's all be very harmonious together". If you can struggle like this over the quality of feeling and meaning in just four lines of a song imagine trying to convey the sense of a major poem.

Oh! And another interesting thing got 'lost in translation' too! I discovered on the Internet today that In Italian the song has a second verse. Seems that this was omitted by the Japanese translator because there wasn't space for it on the score once his Japanese version had been inserted.

Perché d’un guardo almen non mi contenti,
Se respiri e se senti?
Ma se m’inganna troppo industre è l’arte
Ond’avvien che m’infiammi in ogni parte

Decorations may be worn

A few times recently I've come in for some abuse on a newspaper blog site where I sometimes offer the benefit of my considerable wisdom. "No names no pack drill" as my own grand-dad used to say but English readers might hazard a guess as to which publication it is if I mention that this is a quality newspaper with a serious reptiauon for tpyograffic errers. If you know which one I mean. I'll have to Guardian my tongue eh? Haw.Haw.Haw.

As a matter of general lifestyle policy I swear - I do I REALLY swear it - that I try and give opinion columns and blogs a bit of a miss. For the benefit of my blood pressure if for no other reason. They are haunted by abusive fools and incompetents and uneducated clowns who spout endless moronic political garbage that I need to set them right on! Well somebody has to! Huh! Eh? Oh, right! Sumimasen.

Anyway as a matter of principle I think it's better not to get too caught up in that kind of thing, undignified. Also you might lose. So I do try to resist temptation. But it is amazing how people think in such black and white terms, whatever happened to education? If you aren't a full blown cute little Marxist bunny hugger then you must be a Klu Klux Klansman with veins in your teeth, there are no shades of pink or grey left anywhere in the world. But I'm not getting sucked into all of that again and you can't make me. Again.

No, what I wanted to say was this. A couple of times recently I've been called "Grandad" and once even, astonishingly, an "Old Fart" by other so-called 'contributors' who seem to think that my ideas are hopelessly out of date. No laughter at the back there.

Well, if they are then I'm proud of it. Back in the old days when men were men and women weren't invented - no, that's not what I meant to say. Back in the old days we had standards and we knew the price of a pint and how many beans made five.

I tell you, when I got called "Grandad" in full blooded verbal combat I felt like someone had pinned an award on my chest. The "We Didn't Do That Sort of Thing in My Day Medal". When it comes to those 'black tie' dinners where it says on the invitation "decorations may be worn" I will take it reverently out of the little box on the dressing table next to my cuff link case and pin it to my lapel with pride.

So there.

Tom Robinson. 12.1.1923 - 25.11.2004

The twenty-fifth of November already and the fourth anniversary of my father's death.

For most of my life we were deliberately separated from each other. It is a complicated story and no need to re-tell it here; despite both our best efforts to find each other we never met for forty eight years. Then he did find me and we had seventeen months of contact. I spent time with him during four or five trips back to England in those months and he spent time with us here in Japan.

As it turned out that was all the time there was. Not long after he died suddenly and very unexpectedly. Then his family and everything around his memory fell apart too. He left a spectacular trail of damage behind him, a train wreck every bit as dramatic as those he had lovingly engineered in France in 1944. In a moment I was back to being an abandoned little boy again. The young child in me was very angry, more than I can ever express in words.

But eventually I'm coming to understand that he had just been dumb, the 'old soldier' had foolishly assumed he would live forever. He didn't. He should have known better.

I can't simply say that we were very alike, it is difficult to describe. I'm a different sort of person AND we were obviously father and son too. Even 'very close'. We had the same sense of humour for a start and we shared the same opinions on most things.

Easy for me to see now how different my life would have been if he had been a part of it. Through my teens and my early adult years I was without any kind of male model or guidance and support when facing those 'life determining' decisions and so I was 'ignorant'. It deeply undermined my self-esteem then and afterwards in ways I didn't see or understand. But at least having him around later brought 'closure' for a lot of that stuff.

But something was stolen from both of us, and perhaps one angle on all this that has come to my mind more this year is that I can begin to see what a difference having me around might have made for him. He could 'rabbit' for England when he put his mind to it (well, he was a 'Scouser' after all!). And he was far too much absorbed with the memories of his years of military service, he hadn't 'moved on' somehow. He should have done because he had a lot to give in the 'here and now'. If I'd been around he probably wouldn't have got away with that.

Perhaps millimetre by millimetre I'm starting to learn to let the memory of him rest in peace. I hope so. Only time will eventually heal this one.

Let sleeping cats lie

I tooks this photo yesterday afternoon when I popped downstairs from to make myself a cup of coffee around 3:30. The two cats were in the teaching room and had both occupied one corner of the French Window. At this time of year it if the last place inside the house that the winter sun reaches before it sets over the cedar forest behind our little 'danchi' housing area. As it had been a warm sunny afternoon the pair of them had been happily sunbathing for hours, moving from one spot on the carpet to another as the sun headed westwards. Now this was the last moment in the day to savour the pleasure.

Their postures in this photo are rather typical. Pero is always a self-contained little ball of fur with legs neatly tucked under because she is a pretty self-contained kind of a cat. Tora on the other hand is wrapped in the curtains, he has a 'thing' about them for sure. Even when he sleeps in front of the window, which is his usual choice for daytime sleeping, he manages to tie himself up in the bottom of the lace curtain somehow.

I watch these two cats almost as much as they watch me, they are a constant source of interest to us and Edera and I discuss their 'doings' all the time. We are 'a household' somehow. Feline friendship is an amazing thing because, unlike dogs, if they like you they just like you for who you are. They are socially rather solitary, not programmed to be 'pack' animals in any way.

But when I see them taking the whole day out for sitting or lying around there is a corner of my monkey mind that starts to ask "Hey! Shouldn't you two lazy animals be out there chasing mice or something?" When it is raining, fair enough, but to sit around on a sunny day? Shouldn't cats have 'ambition'? Study a language, learn ballroom dancing, try your paw at some embroidery?

Ha! That is where it ends up eh? Some part of me is programmed to feel that they should be "doing something with their lives". If I was sitting around like that then I'd be saying to myself something like "Why are you wasting your time like this? Even cats can laze around in the sun all day!"

'Wasting your time like this'. There we have it. In the last line of the 'Sandokai' Sekito Kisenn says "The I offer to the seeker of Great Truth: Do not waste time" And yet that advice disturbs me. When I see the cats so content with their existence without adding to it I have to ask myself "so what do we really know that they don't that gives us such itchy feet?" Of course the cats are only cats aren't they? As mere 'dumb creatures' they don't know who they are or why they are here, how they arrived at this point in their lives living in this house and being fed and cared for by us. As humans I guess we are - fortunately - pretty clear on all of that stuff in terms of ourselves. After all it is our name on the 'deeds' and the food in the fridge is the items we bought in the supermarket at the weekend with our own money. So our own rational choices must certainly have brought us to this point in our own lives. We are masters and mistresses of our own destinies after all. Hahaha.

Insurance Agent

Our car insurance was up for renewal this week so I thought it was time to take a closer look at all our policies. After lunch our insurance agent, S-san's son-in-law, arrived with brief case full of quotations and leaflets and we spent about an hour discussing our options. Now Edera and I will have to sit down and think about the details, and also what we can afford.

The differences between insuring Japanese and English homes are striking, you could write if not a book about them, then at least fairly long essay. In England our solid brick-built houses are pretty fire resistant so fires that completely gut buildings are rarer. You usually don't have to completely rebuild a property from scratch because the walls are effective barriers. In Japan on the other hand our wooden homes are destroyed in minutes once a fire gets hold and blazes can also spread rapidly between neighbouring properties if someone doesn't act quickly. That is why out here in the country we have so many local volunteer fireman, there is always an 'appliance' on stand-by somewhere in the neighbourhood because you just don't have twenty minutes for one to turn up from the nearest town.

The outcome of all this is that insurance for fire risk works out rather expensive in Japan. But then it is offset by a much lower premium for crime. Burglary is uncommon everywhere in this country and pretty well non-existent out here in the 'boonies'. Contents insurance is rather cheaper too because most people don't have such valuable belongings. Not so much antique furniture and plush three piece suites (what is an armchair again?) although I do know some homes with many valuable traditional things.

But the main difference of course is earthquakes. I don't think the word 'earthquake' even appears in our house insurance in Lancashire but here basic policies exclude all earthquake damage. If you want 'cover' you have to buy an additional policy which is complicated and quite expensive. For example if your house less than 20% damaged in a quake you only get 5% of the rebuild cost, but if it is more than 70% destroyed then you will get 50% of the cost. You may get some help from government funds too but you are still likely to be paying for part of the damage costs from your savings. However you need to beware. If you home is destroyed by fire after an earthquake - started for example by the gas ring tipping over because you were cooking a meal at the time - then you are not covered by your ordinary fire insurance policy, you need the earthquake policy. This is an important exclusion because that kind of collateral damage is the commonest - and also usually the most dangerous - if a large earthquake happens.

So, well have to think about it. Usually I'm a bit of a gambler when it comes to insurance but at the moment it is on my mind. I can see how suddenly and easily it could happen here that you were left with basically the clothes - or pyjamas - that you happened to be wearing at the time.

Dreams of the Queen

Uh! Here we go, weird dreams again last night. Where does all this stuff dredge up from? The subconscious may be a wonderful thing but mine seems to be downright bizarre these days ...

There I was all set for the first day in the new job and ... I had to meet the boss. But somehow "The Boss" was the Queen. I'd just been appointed as her new Press Secretary. What to do? And what happened to the old one? Tower of London??

I mean, I know absolutely nothing about the British Royal Family, I can't even remember what her kids are called (she does have kids doesn't she?). I think the first one might be Charles - or 'Chuck' as you say 'over there' - but after that it is just a blur. So here is where the anxiety creeps in eh? Time to do some desperate study of some convenient almanac before the 'big meeting' or I'll be caught out. How did I come to get the job anyway? It must have been some kind of a terrible mistake. I'm told that there was once an episode of "Desert Island Discs" when Roy Plomley mistakenly made a programme with someone who was supposed to be famous, but it turned out that a reseracher at the Beeb had got it wrong. Some flattered but unknown Third Commercial Attache from the Canadian Embassy turned up to be interviewed. And they made the programme too but it was never broadcast, they had to 'come clean' with him. Maybe I was now that man, they had someone else in mind but somebodies finger slipped when they were dialling the number. I do have rather extensive experience of press work as in happens but more along the lines of mailing committee minutes to the 'South Wales Evening Post', not telling Rupert Murdoch to take a hike or fixing it for CNN to get cameras into Westminster Abbey.

But I digress. In this dream I did actually get to meet the Queen and even shake her hand which was in a white glove. This act of disturbing intimacy required endless practice beforehand. And as it turned out I needn't have bothered about the kids names because she REALLY had a downer on her new Welsh Secretary who came with me in the car. He had failed to acquire a plaid rug she was giving to some President as a gift. I mean, some of my best friends are Welshmen but if there are Royal bollockings to be dished out rather him than me.

Now I'm wide awake I'm worried about all this. My first thought was "Good grief! Someone has written a well-known book about all this!" And it's true - I just checked it on Amazon. "Dreams about HM The Queen and Other Members of the Royal Family" by Brian Masters. Long out of print but I'm sure that it is about the really sinister side of Freudian analysis. Put it this way, the fact that his other two books are about Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilson is not necessarily good news.

I'd better go downstairs and have some porridge for breakfast. Maybe it will make me feel better.

Winning the 'McIntyre Cup'

Yesterday I managed to make a start on 'scanning-in' a few of the many older family images I've got filed away here in Japan. It is going to be a 'painting the Forth Bridge' kind of a task and I'm sure that as and when I find time to do some a few will feature here.

Today's topic is 'Winning the Cup' - in this case the 'McIntyre Cup' - but I wonder if you can guess what the competition was? These days it could only really be sport - with such 'mature' looking contestants perhaps a 'senior' cricket team? Or maybe snooker or billiards? Well, you would guess wrong.

The date is 8 March 1950 and this is the Barnard Castle Station First Aid Team, and they have just won that cup for coming second in the North Eastern District of the Railway First Aid Competition held at Darlington. They were pipped at the post by the Darlington Engineers 'B' team who again secured first place and the 'coveted Shield' by scoring 301 points to Barney's 299. But they were well ahead of five other teams including those from the North Road Locomotive Works at Darlington and also their rivals at Kirkby Stephen station.

As a young child I knew most of these team members and luckily I've also got amongst my grandfather's stuff a press clipping from the Teesdale Mercury of 15 March 1950 that reminds me of some names. From left to right are George Turnbull, T.G. Robinson (the team's instructor), Jack Picken, my grandfather Wilfred Ransom (who was the captain), Bob Raine, H. Parkinson and J.R. Robinson.

It is an interesting picture. In 1950 'cups' really were cups and valuable silver plated items, not the kind of cheap lookalike you get in trophy shops now. This one lived on my grandad's front room mantelpiece for a few weeks for friends and family to admire and then I think went on display at Barnard Castle station but I don't remember exactly where, perhaps in the booking office or in a cabinet in the entrance lobby.

On the railways then first aid was taken very seriously. If there was an accident, especially in country areas, staff had to cope as best they could until help arrived, perhaps with the assistance of a local doctor or 'bobby'. There were no sophisticated telecommunications or ambulance and police helicopters in the 1950's. This team of signalmen, foremen, porters and booking office clerk volunteers really were the only 'first aid' if people were injured. And of course this generation - my grandad was 57 when the photo was taken - had all fought in the trenches in France in the First World War, none of them were strangers to dealing with carnage and blood and emergencies.

Now that I'm actually older myself than any of this gang of very kind guys were in 1950 I'm still struck by how 'old' they all look too. Why is that? The haircuts, the suits? No, it is something more, people really did age quicker two generations ago.

'Rules' vs. 'Agenda'

At the moment I'm doing some serious reading of English history to help one of my students who is studying the military tactics of the Duke of Marlborough. This week in my 'spare time', which is usually after eleven at night, I've got my nose into "The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and early Georgian Britain 1660-1722" by Geoffrey Holmes. A good read. No racy details here of Queen Anne's sex life but if you want to know what the National Debt was in 1718 or about the workings of monopoly trading companies Professor Holmes is your man.

In my 'day job' I've also just been reading "Japan: Beyond the end of history" by David Williams which covers the years 1975-1992, the period during which Japan become the formidable economic world power she is today. A real piece of serendipity at work here because between them these two books cover exactly the times when England and Japan respectively emerged from being secondary players to being major powers on the world stage.

There are many points of similarity between the two stories but what really strikes me is the one huge and fundamental difference. In his struggles with the French King, William III certainly had a 'grand design' in his head for a Protestant Europe but nobody was 'in charge', events unfolded in a way which was a cumulative outcome of the ambitions and talents of many individual leaders. There was no 'script', no 'one objective' that the whole team was working towards. In fact often we don't even realise or accept that there should be 'a team'

In Japan on the other hand, ever since the 'genro' - the first leaders of the Meiji coup d'etat in January 1868 - seized power, there has been a completely clear objective and 'script' which has been to secure Japan's future as a strong and independent nation by all means available.

The big underlying difference is that Japan, in common with China and Korea, has always had some kind of a 'Confucian' culture shaping public life - a government managed by senior administrators of great power and (hopefully) ability who will pursue the national interest unswervingly. In old China they were scholars selected by stringent public examination who were then given immense power to rule as they saw fit; in Japan selection was more hereditary.

That tradition has never been a part of Western culture, where we focus much more on ideas and principles whether it be Protestantism, Monetarism, Statute Law or 'Democracy' whatever those mean. So the Western instinct is always to worry about the 'rules' while the East Asian instinct is to worry about the 'agenda'. And you can really see it in the way history has evolved.

Quaker Oats

One of our friends was in Costco over in Makuhari yesterday. We rarely get to the 'big city lights' of that part of Chiba ourselves and their prices are just amazingly low on some stuff (hurry! hurry!) so we asked him to bring back a couple of things for us, including a big 'bulk-buy' 100+ servings box of Quaker Oats. I love porridge for breakfast in winter, I'd quite happily eat it every day, maybe even every meal! And it is good for my blood glucose too. Unlike that spoon of sugar that I tip over it eh?

The Quaker Milling Company. Founded in Ravenna, Ohio in 1887 by Henry D. Seymour and following several mergers became the Quaker Oats Company of Chicago in 1901. It seems that they had no links with Quakers at all, some businessman just thought that the image of a sturdy, happy, clean living Quaker was ideal for 'pushing' porridge to the masses. In fact the Quakers themselves were so cross about it they petitioned Congress to bar trademarks with religious connotations. There is also a story around that a huge copy of the 'Quaker' logo once adorned the White Cliffs of Dover and that it needed an Act of Parliament to get it taken down - I must research that one! Sadly the old Quaker Oats Company was merged with PepsiCo a few years ago.

I really love that Quaker Oats logo and when I see it these days I realise that it has had a subtle but significant influence on my life. In the 1950's when I was a small child in Barnard Castle we used to always have a box of Quaker Oats in the pantry under the stairs. That Quaker figure fascinated me, I'd never met anyone like that and I just knew I would like him if I met him (although actually I notice the face has changed over the years, he used to look older and wiser somehow. And the hat! Amazing! If I was a Quaker when I grew up could I wear a hat like that? Where did you sign up?

Nobody in my family circle then had the slightest idea of what Quakers were, except that they were pacifists, very much an issue for people who had recently lived through and fought in two world wars. But later, when I was around sixteen, I did make it at last to my first 'Society of Friends' meeting. Sadly the 'cool' hats weren't in evidence any more but like many English people I first discovered meditation in Quaker meetings and I also discovered a tradition and community that I came to love and admire. In the end I couldn't quite 'find my feet' in that Christian context but it eventually brought me when the time was right and the opportunity existed directly to Zen practice.

I wish those worried Quakers who once petitioned Congress could have read this! It just goes to show that everything around you teaches you in ways you can never foresee

The taste of regret

I occasionally get a kick in the solar plexus from some bit of karma lurking in my past which seems wildly out of proportion to the 'original offence'. It happened today - a sudden flashback to a situation badly handled in my thirties. Some clerk was careless and my salary hadn't been paid on time and I got angry with the Finance Director and then he got angry back. I handled it badly, felt bad, and apologised. Maybe luckily I moved to a new job a couple of months later. But that was all there was to it, a few ruffled feathers on both sides. Why a sudden surge of regret half a lifetime later? Why does it suddenly make me cringe to remember now? Why do I even remember it at all?

Regret seems a very disturbing thing to me and not easily understood. I once knew someone who claimed that their motto and guiding principle was "Never apologise, never explain" but I couldn't live from that perspective myself. I don't have much more or less to regret than most people, I've never killed anyone - yet - nor have I acted much from malice. Bad things I've done have usually been done 'in the heat of the moment' - in hot blood. In common with so many others I know I was once divorced and regrets around that mainly of the pragmatic "what might I have done to stop it all tipping off the rails?" kind. And who raises a family or works as a boss without compiling a sizable catalogue of regrets about choices made and things done? I don't know how my conscience would have coped with being a judge or a front line soldier, where intuitive choices have such drastic direct consequences for others. In situations like that you must just have to act honestly and to the best of your care and ability and accept that those consequences will be a part of it.

When I think of karma like this - what you might call "your regular karma" eh? -I think of the sange verse."All the evil committed by me is caused by beginningless greed, hate and delusion, All the evil is committed by our body, mouth and mind. I now confess everything wholeheartedly". With bows, it can be offered up, the consequences accepted.

These small but sudden floods of regret like the one today aren't outside of that, but they feel very different. They are more 'existential' somehow, like lumps in custard.

I'll tell you a secret. I sometimes wake up at night sweating at the memory of something truly awful that I saw once. I can't remember where or when or the context but perhaps it was in a cafe on holiday, or in a car park. A distracted guy in his thirties nearby was berating his five year old son about spilling something or some other minor problem. And then suddenly that child crumpled under some terrible unseen weight of guilt and regret, profoundly apologising for his mortal sense of inadequacy, pleading and crying out "I'm sorry daddy, I'm so sorry, I'm really really sorry". Truly awful, I still weep for that child sometimes. When life kicks us hard in the teeth with that kind of grief and regret and we are so lost in the dark God help us all.

Essay Newsletter

I've had a few hints from "The Management" recently about the upcoming 'Kotoba no Hiroba Essay Newsletter'. We produce this compilation every year and most of our students contribute a page, so it ends up as quite a neat and weighty document. Interesting read too. The elementary school kids focus on simple sentences and 'cartoon character' illustrations while the junior high and high school children often turn in something pretty sophisticated. Me - well, I can get my crayons and felt-tips out of my pencil case with the best of them.

The theme for 2008 will be "A Different Country" so I have to think about somewhere that I've visited or lived and write a page on that. But where shall I write about? Now that I think about it I haven't travelled to many places in the last ten years. Oh! Except between England and Japan about twenty times eh? But that hardly counts as 'travel' somehow, no flying fish off the port bow or caravansary departing into the desert dawn. I see the same bits of Manchester and Narita airports and we fly over the same bits of Russia, usually in the dark. That's all. If I was to write about that it would have to be along the lines of "Great Films I have seen while Airborne" I think.

Some of the places I really enjoyed visiting during my life were the 'reservation' areas in the deserts of the American South West. If I had to pick one 'favourite' favourite I think it would have to be the Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. But heck! It must be fourteen years since I was last there, I wonder if I'll ever make it back?

No I suppose I'll have to write about my 'on the hoof' trip to China in 2005, to find the temple at Tiantong where Dogen studied and then to P'u-t'o Island. If there was one defining 'trip of a lifetime' in my lifetime that was it and not just because it was still quite a difficult place to get to, at least for someone who speaks almost no Mandarin. It still surprises me that we ever got there but we did.

Before I got to P'u-t'o and my feet actually touched the ground of the island it felt like it could only possibly exist in Mahayana sutras. Then when I finally arrived, and despite all the "P'u-t'o Island Buddhist Realm" Tourist Board Marketing Department stickers pasted around the ferry terminal, I discovered for myself why it was such an important destination for pilgrimage. You have to do things for yourself after all, no one can make journeys for you

OK. That's settled then. P'u-t'o-shan it is.

Kanzeon sits on P'u-t'o Isle ....
She waits and waits, unmoved, in peace -
A meeting in our inmost place!

Kind of 'Writers Cramp'

I'm going through one of my periodic spells of struggling to write up my research here at the moment. It would be lazy to just label it 'writer's cramp', it is a neat phrase but it doesn't mean very much. Also I think that old fashioned 'writer's cramp' as suffered by authors of fiction and short stories might often refer mainly to a drying-up of inspiration, and I don't think that is exactly my problem.

But it is a kind of a 'condition' for sure, probably it is more like a serious bout of indigestion or constipation than muscle trouble. Partly it seems to stem from too many ideas in progress, too many threads hanging in the air and no 'structure' there to organise the material. When the log jam is cleared and you are making progress again it is usually because you have almost unconciously arrived at a structure in your head at last and then you have something to hang the words on and they start to flow. But if I spend time actively searching for this structue I often find that the problem just gets worse. Better to just write stuff no matter how awful it is, you can go back and get the bones out of it later. 'Polish' it.

It doesn't help with serious academic work that there are so many other angles that you are expected to tie in. My study floor is littered with piles of partly read, often only partly understood books that have found a home here on the basis that "you need to relate this to ..." It's like the mathematics associated with calculating area and volume. If you only walk X paces from the middle of the discussion you need to cover the are X squared or even worse possibly the volume X cubed in terms of context. Just ideas, ideas, who cares? A lot of these academics are like can-can dancers, flaunting their charms in the hope they will distract our attention. But they do, who can resist a peek between those covers? And then what does it mean?

Them there is the bloomin' internet! Horrible.You just HAVE to learn to leave it alone. "I wonder what's on the 'Guardian' website this morning? How much further has my pension plummeted today? And then suddenly it is lunch time, a nap, better walk off that blood sugar eh?" And suddenly the day is done, they are sounding the 'last post' and the bath is running. I'm not depressing you am I??

The only way out of these deserts is just to keep fingers moving. In fact just keep moving period. Get up, do some work, put a table of numbers together, talk about it. You also have to have a pretty robust set of values about what you are doing and why you are doing it and who you are doing it for but I'll write about that another time.

Cat Bath

Two very anxious looking cats lurking in my study at the moment. They have just been bathed. As usual at this time of year when the weather suddenly gets cooler several local fleas that have been making a living on neighbourhood 'strays' have decided it is time to move on to better fed hosts and find some nice warm indoor 'quarters' for the winter. The usual medication from Cainz didn't seem to be having much impact on the problem so Edera decided that a bath for the pair of them would solve the problem.

At times like this my study becomes a refuge for 'moggies' hoping to keep a low profile. Cats have a lot of natural wisdom eh? The know when it is a good idea to stay out of sight.

Interesting just how different our two cats are at any time but during periods of adversity they are like chalk and cheese. Tora has already got over it, he's sitting here happily sunbathing on a towel in front of one bar of my electric fire. He soon comes to terms with changed circumstances like being wet. He likes me so much he purrs even before my hand touches him to stroke him. Wonderful to have a friend like that. Pero on the other hand has just spent a quarter of an hour perched on my shoulders like a parrot hiding behind the back of my head. She thinks if everything else fails at least I'll protect her from doom and in general she's right. She would like to be on my knee safely curled up and half hidden inside my sweater but as I'm working on the computer I've got my legs strategically far apart.

Tora has become remarkably bossy recently He's always been good at the 'door!' and 'food!' and 'lap!' type imperatives but now he's progressed to more complex instructions for his humans. He's learned a very effective way of just 'looking' at things he requires in the certain knowledge that we'll get the general idea sooner rather than later. So instead of kicking the cat food box over (I mean - that's only Feline NVQ Level 1 eh?) he'll just stare meaningfully at the bowl from some distance away. But the one that makes me really laugh is the way he objects to Edera or I singing or playing the piano or recorder. Once he used to head straight for the door but lately he's got a lot bolder. At the first note he'll miaow loudly, go and create a diversion like shaking the kitchen bin and then come and sit in front of us and stare balefully up at us with saucer-sized eyes. I get the slight feeling that this could mean "Cats don't like noise, so why don't you just shut up?" Or something like that.

Walk around the marsh

For our 'Wednesday Walk' this week we took advantage of a shopping trip over towards Togane to go for a hike on part of the coastal plain. Around there it is about seven miles wide, running east from a low but sharp escarpment that makes the edge of the Shimousa Plateau down to the beach at Kujukuri, and it is former marsh land and pretty well as flat as a pancake. Actually five thousand years ago all this area was under the Pacific, if you look carefully you can easily pick out the old cliff line marking the former coast behind the old high road that runs parallel to Route 126.

We parked up in the Nagasakiya store car park and headed eastwards across the big area of 'tanbo' rice paddies between the highway and the JR line. Once you have crossed the railway the modern ribbon development is left behind and you are into the countryside of old Japan. The broad flat landscape is dotted with the occasional traditional single storey farm house and the big sky arches overhead from horizon to horizon. Here and there a parcel of land has fallen out of cultivation and is already colonised again by tall dense reeds and thickets of deciduous shrubs. If the land isn't taken back into farming soon it will revert to forest again in a few years. Elsewhere areas have been moved over to grow 'hatake' dry field crops, mainly beautifully maintained rows of 'negi' onions.

I say these areas are as 'flat as a pancake' but actually they aren't. Once your eye gets used to the country and to the map you can see where the slightly higher land lies by the location of farms and old road patterns. The newer land is easily identifiable by the large square rice cultivating basins and lack of trees and most of it has only been brought into cultivation from swamps and marshland in the last two or three generations. The amount of backbreaking manual work involved must have been incredible.

I really love these big flat landscapes, in England you can find them in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire and around The Wash. The stuff of Constable paintings. But who needs to go there except for those who make a living from the land? They aren't picturesque in the way old animal husbandry country is, earlier landscapes aren't pickled and preserved here and there are no pretty views of mountains or forests. As agriculture was mechanised people moved out,probably glad to get jobs in warm dry factories rather than struggling in the fields in the biting cold rain or summer humidity.

Looping back towards the main road we walked along the gravel farm access roads through Gumyo. There's a small graveyard there not far from a copse that shelters the village shrine and as far as I can see the place didn't have any lane access at all. When families want to tend graves they must just walk around the edge of the field. Those whose ashes are interred there are probably exactly the same men and women who worked in the surrounding fields their entire lives and never made a trip further than town a few miles away. They made the place what it is - in life with their strength and hands and afterwards with what was left of them too.

Translation Pains

I finally managed to get my comments on our latest City Plan documents into the city office yesterday, just as the deadline loomed. I spent most of Tuesday evening working on them, and then Edera took over with a first 'cut' at translating them and finally we worked on the translation together yesterday morning.

This process of translating technical documents fascinates me. We don't do as much as we once did, and the professional work we handle is usually Japanese into English, so working from English into Japanese is unusual for us.

People who don't work on translation probably assume that it is a relatively straightforward task of transposing the literal meaning of the words accurately into another language. But of course it is much more complicated than that, and especially when it involves 'technical' content like observations on city planning issues. Texts like this contain a vocabulary - call it 'jargon' if you like - which is quite specialised and language is used in ways that don't feature in 'Standard English' - whatever THAT is! So we first make a 'rough cut' translation and then discuss line by line what the original contents mean, adjusting the text to reflect the 'shared view' that we have arrived at during discussion. Working as a couple the translation somehow emerges in the relationship between us. As we are both quite creative people this can be expressed in a pretty energetic, even 'explosive', process of negotiation a lot of which revolves around the basic emotion of "For God's Sake! Can't you understand what I'm trying to say?!?" in one form or another. The answer can often be "No! Do you even know yourself??" or at best you hope for "Who knows? I think so" And who does know? Translation is not an exact science, ultimately it really tests the idea of 'meaning' and if the author didn't know exactly what he 'meant' in the first place how can you expect somebody else to 'second guess' him?.

Then of course there is a final stage where Edera looks at all this from the perspective of idiomatic Japanese and the impact on the reader. This is the part of the process where the author just has to trust the translator. Your work is already in somebody else's world and you just don't know enough about the navigation there to steer the ship. You might have launched straight in with "Please send me sixteen 4mm self-adhesive widgets no later than the 23rd" but she might begin with "The autumn colours are beautiful in the bamboo thickets this year" and you just have to accept that it is down to culture and she knows best.

I say final stage but of course there is one more point that you influence even less - the actual meaning taken by the reader from the text you wrote. I once used to puzzle about the amount of ink spilled on 'deconstruction' by Jacques Derrida and others but now I see exactly what they meant. I think! Who knows what, at the end of the 'chain' some young Japanese town planner is going to take away from what I've taken such pains to write?

Magnifying Glass

I was looking on a local city map today for the name of the area up behind our local supermarket. In Japan these 'aza' names ('cho' in cites) are a crucial part of the address because streets have no names so your address is the 'aza' and plot number. Out here in the sticks the 'aza' areas are centuries old, a bit like English parishes but much smaller. In fact the only place I know of with similar very small administrative areas is Ireland, where until recently 'townlands' used to appear on large scale maps.

But this isn't a geography lesson. I mention it because I struggled to read the second character of this name and in the end I had to get a magnifying glass. And then I realised that it was the second time that I'd used that glass this week.

Well of course my eyesight is pretty well OK and with glasses I'm fine on distance vision, no problems at all when it comes to driving. And until recently my close-up sight without glasses has been fine too. But now it is starting to deteriorate just a fraction, I need the help of a lens to see small things. When I get this darn thesis finished I'm planning to do some serious work in my workshop but will I have the vision to do it? Or in a few years time be able to read the mountains of books piled around the place? Or to study Japanese? Who knows? What would it be like not to see?

We assume so unthinkingly that our faculties won't get deteriorate with age, not even a little bit. And then here we are, looking through a lens at a map. Again.

When I was a child I wondered how it was to be 'grown up' and 'be old' and so far I can't say that I notice so much difference. A lot of the time I feel just like I did when I was twenty. I'm not like I was at twenty of course, I couldn't make it up mountains like I did then for example, or run a mile in less than five minutes any more. But it feels like that, until there is some particular problem. Later it won't, more problems relating to the senses and mobility and ability will arise. And what to do then?

Bad Teachers

I regularly read or hear about people bleating on about how some good teacher has been such a strong influence in their lives. A few years ago we actually had a campaign on TV in Britain to persuade people to change careers to teaching in mid-life which was run along these very lines. It featured our former Prime Minister (I can't bring myself to even type his name any more!) waxing eloquent about some teacher that had been a big influence on him. Where is that man now I wonder and would he dream of owning up to being the teacher in question. Come to that, where are either of them any more?

But what about the really BAD teachers? We have all had one or two of those surely, they lurk everywhere. The school in England my kids went to had a 'world class' inadequate teacher of music, you could have written a novel about him and now he's retired he's the local Tory councillor. Poacher turned gamekeeper. Later on my daughter switched to German because she had such a poor French teacher, a change that affected the entire subsequent course of her life although not necessarily for the worse.

I was probably quite lucky. The only bad teacher I had at school was for Latin, when I was thirteen. I can't even remember his name now. Somewhere just past 'amo, amas, amat' and 'vipera est in herba longa' (aren't they always?) He lost me and never noticed I'd dropped off the back of the bus. Or maybe he noticed and couldn't be bothered to give me the extra ten minutes help I needed, or thought that I was stupid. Anyway that drew a line through any later possibility of training for a career in medicine for me, in those days you needed Latin to write prescriptions so that the patients couldn't read them. If it had happened a few years before it would have been the end of any hope of any university place at all in England. But fortunately they had downgraded the former Latin requirement to a mere 'foreign language' by the time it was my turn to fill out an UCCA form, and I struggled to pass even that.

My all-time worst teacher though was for statistics at university. He must have done something very bad at some stage in his career to be sentenced to teaching undergraduates basic statistics but there you go, he had drawn the short straw. Probably he did know himself what he was talking about so you can't say there wasn't a single person in the room who understood a word he said. They didn't go in for appraisals and assessments back then, no photocopiers I suppose. Anyway, much too vulgar.

Footwear test flight

I was test flying my new walking shoes yesterday, just a couple of hours around the vicinity, ending up at the library and the JA "Green Shoppu" where we bought some negi onions. I carried them back down the hill in my rucksack. The long green leaves stuck up over my head so that from the front I looked a bit like an eco-friendly Navajo 'brave'.

Nice. I'll have to get some new socks to make best use of them but you could walk for ever in these shoes, as far as your feet are concerned anyway. And while I'm about it I'll buy some waterproof trousers from Cainz so that even if it is raining I can walk cheerfully during the winter with my 'Regatta Brand' yachting anorak hood up and not get wet. I have a minor fantasy about having a kind of transparent plastic 'bubble' to inhabit and move around in that you could spend time outdoors in during all weathers, a kind of a 'cross' between a space suit and an inflatable tent. Somewhere that you could spend time sitting in on windy ridges on rainy days enjoying a flask of coffee and reading a book. But for now some red waterproof pants will do.

With all our new 'Everest' gear on we must have made a brave sight walking up through the danchi. E was determined to take in some new houses we had heard about during the week that were 'built to last two hundred years'. There are five show homes on this plot a couple of miles from here but yesterday they looked rather sad and deserted in the cold Sunday afternoon drizzle. There was nobody around so I can't give you the sales blurb I'm afraid.

Compared with the usual cheap and cheerful plastic covered plywood boxes further down the road that pass for houses here they did look more substantial, due mainly to the use of cedar external beams. But the composition tiles and pressed steel window panes and smoked glass panes told a different story to me. And who is going to need an integral car port two centuries from now? Get your story straight! A stable if you are lucky! So my money is on the bulldozers being back down this lane to clear it all away for another dream if not in my life time then certainly not long afterwrds.

Ensemble Outing

Our city 'Ensemble' concert day yesterday, a time for small groups of local musicians to come together and play something. 'Not more than a dozen musicians and not more than eight minutes' is the rule. We have taken part three or four times now, initially with a slimmed down group of singers but our choir has shrunk so much recently that I think we could all sing now if we wanted to.

There aren't many choral contributions, it is mainly an instrumental event and so we leaven the programme a bit. Yesterday only two of the seventeen ensembles involved singing. The majority are wind players, some adult but mainly high school woodwind and brass players with the occasional string or mandolin ensemble. And sometimes an odd mixture of instruments that has arisen because that is what friends just happen to play and they wanted to play together.

To be honest I don't like this kind of concert much, they wear me out a bit. There is no continuity at all in the programme, Brahms features next to jazz that features next to Handel. And as about half the audience consists of people who are also about to play or just played, or their families and supporters, and it is hard for them to pay attention to what is happening on stage with other performers. Also, it has to be said, there is a significant number who just push off home when they have finished so the last on stage has less than half the audience of the first players. Bad form! But at least in Japan nobody over-runs.

We were OK - two brief a cappella Japanese pieces from the ladies, 'Mizu no naka' and 'Tsuki' and then N-sensei and I joined them for a deliciously 'slushy' rendition of "When you wish upon a star" with E on the ivories sounding like Leigh Harline. I'm getting to be a shocking exhibitionist with this one, I like to croon out to the whole audience and feel the spotlight on my face! Because we usually sing it at Christmas I'd come to think of it as a seasonal song but of course any time will do!

I enjoyed listening to all those High School kids though. The are just so 'keen' - and great musicians too. A lot of my own school years revolved around music-making and I can see an enthusiasm in their faces and a confidence in the way they relate to their friends that are very familiar to me as a layer of very formative emotional experience. If you come to understand music deeply at that time in your life it will aways inside you. "Everything your heart desires will come to you" eh? If my Japanese was better I would have stopped and told them so instead of just giving them a grin as I squeezed by them grabbing a last rehearsal in the corners of corridors backstage.

Watch out for Nurse Ratched

Into town yesterday to go to the archive office. The planning meeting I attended on Thursday had thrown up some information in a document that didn't look right to me and I wanted to check it out. So I took the opportunity to copy the relevant census data and also get some data for my thesis that I knew I was missing. That is a bit of a 'Forth Bridge' task, you never know you don't have it until you start on a paragraph or table and discover the numbers aren't in the pile you thought they were in. But I'm trying to limit my trips to no more than one a fortnight.

Actually yesterday was my first trip into town on my own since I got back, and my first trip to the archive office in three months. It was interesting to notice all the changes that had been taking place in the streets around Hon-Chiba station since I was last there. A new apartment building that was a hole in the ground in August is now 'topped out' and the steelwork almost complete. The new Prefecture offices are looming over the ring road and they are busy constructing the interior. A derelict car park I used to take a short cut across has had new markings painted and is now being used for short term pay parking. I had to pick my way between the cars.

Great to be back in the archives too! I really like working in that place, nice staff and nice environment, it has become an enduring part of my life. Without it, and especially the wonderful collection of aerial photographs there, I'd never have got my thesis done.

This is the only archive I've ever used where there is piped music drifting around the place - subtle but still there. If you go once you would hardly notice it but if you have worked there daily for some time the tape - there only is ONE tape playing continuously of course! - becomes deeply familiar to you. That sad little violin solo, the valse from ... um ... what is it? The 'Merry Widow'? All this music has a kind of 'Palm Court Orchestra' Belle Epoch wistful and nostalgic feel.

I was laughing yesterday imagining that Nurse Ratched was going to suddenly show up behind the request counter, glaring down the row of desks towards me. "Time for my medication" eh?

Planning Meeting

Our first 'serious' City Plan meeting yesterday. If you didn't pick up the blog a while back I've been asked to be one of the 'Citizen Advisers' helping to draft the new Twenty Year City Plan for the area. I must admit that I'm really chuffed. And 'fair dos' to our local City Office, not many planning teams in Japan would have invited a rather eccentric foreign resident to take part, it shows the place has some real 'class' to it. Which it does.

Today being our first serious 'get together' we had the charabanc trip before getting down to business. Inevitable I guess, but most of us as 'locals' had probably been to nearly all the places we peered at from the coach. It was hot and sunny and I had a tweed jacket on I couldn't remove in the confined space and I was glad to arrived at our lunch venue. Not for long though as it turned out to be your usual tatami-style group function room with never a chair in sight. I already stood out in this crowd like I was wearing a flashing blue light tied to my head so I wasn't making any fuss about seating and I groaned my way in agony through the sashimi and tempura sitting in seiza with my legs folded under me. Maybe they will work again one day, let's hope so.

Then back on the bus to complete the tour and followed by a two hour meeting in the City Hall. Welcome from the mayor followed by a hop and a skip through thirty six pages of statistics, all meat and drink to me of course. I was born for pleasures like these.

Again it struck me in this meeting what a world of difference there is between planners at regional and local level. When I used to work in local government in Britain (and what a mistake that was!) it was between urban district and county, in America it is between county and state and here in Japan it is between city and prefecture. Completely different animals. The upper tier guy lives like he is high on smoking ganja, dreams about the big picture and loves the nuances of language, especially metaphors. Details don't concern him. The bottom tier guy drinks Carling Black Label, gets angry, worries about the dimensions of building plots, tells people that they can't build a chicken shed there and looks at the small print of contracts. They inhabit different universes.

I'd also forgotten how long people could 'bang on' with questions at public meetings too. Everybody it seems has at least one axe they are busy grinding. To say this is taxes my limited Japanese to far beyond snapping point and leaves me feeling like I've just done several rounds in a boxing ring would be an understatement. But of course my trusty translator comes along to whisper in my ear. Thank goodness. In fact she learns a lot more about local planning issues there than I do I'm sure.

Lost in Yachimata

Over to Yachimata yesterday for a haircut and to take the car to Autobacs for an oil change. We have a venerable Skyline; well, perhaps more geriatric that venerable. But it can still go a lot faster than I can, though not of course around the thoroughfares of leafy Chiba-ken.

While the car was being serviced we took in a quick hike around the lanes off the east side of Highway 409, all a part of our planned fitness programme. I'd taken my Yachimata city map along but we quickly ran into the familiar problem of not having the faintest idea where we were. 'City map' isn't a good description of Japanese city maps if you are used to English street maps. For a start the maps here take in the whole administrative areas of 'cities' which usually include lots of deep countryside too. So the scale is large, generally around two or three inches to the mile. As no roads here have 'names' - houses are identified by the banchi area and house plot number - once you are even slightly off your bearings you are really lost unless there is a handy landmark like a school or temple.

The problem today though was that, although the map was only printed in 2002, lots of new housing had been built and old lanes re-aligned to take advantage of new road access. Houses that shouldn't have been there were and roads that should have been there weren't so that even a professional geographer was lost in less than two miles. New Japanese danchi - housing estates - seem to be purpose designed to get people lost anyway. Almost everything winds around three sides of a square and comes to a dead end. They remind me of some old 'Carry On' film where Kenneth Williams gets a crowd of happy campers lost in Hampton Court Maze.

As a geographer I keep my eye on the 'big picture' at these times. I have a nearly infallible compass inside my head which always tells me where north is and that's easy confirmed on sunny days. All we had to do was keep heading east and eventually we would come back to civilisation. Yesterday we could also see a line of electricity pylons in the distance which we knew crossed the Yachimata Cainz DIY store car park. And so it proved.

It was fun, I like these half-town half-rural places. Endless fields of onions and carrots and peanuts and then kiddies bikes and washing hung over balconies. We where laughing because in this kind of country a serious looking middle aged couple wandering the danchi says only one thing - 'evangelists'! I was amusing myself looking carefully and sincerely at each house as if I was about to ring the bell for 'The Lord'. If I had been carrying a black book under my arm the disguise would be complete.

Shall I take one along with me next time? OK I promise not to. Well, I THINK I promise ...

Shoes on Order

Went into Togane today to look for some walking shoes. Well, actually I saw a pair there a couple of weeks ago but it was when I was still wandering around in a daze with nothing but English money in my wallet. They fitted nicely and felt very comfortable so I went back today to buy some. They had gone of course.

Anyway the bottom line is that I have a pair on order. Actually they are a brown pair, not black ones. I can't remember the last time I had a pair of brown shoes or boots, I'm excited already. They should be here in about a week.

Not cheap though, 16,000 yen. During the summer that would have been seventy-five quid but now - since the pound collapsed thanks to the 'prudence' of our nice Mr. So-Far-Unelected Brown - it works out at just over a hundred quid. When did I ever spend so much on shoes before? Never!

I'm getting these shoes because, as usual, I need to loose some weight and get my Hba1C blood glucose measurement down out of the stratosphere. Again. Edera has me earmarked already for a 50km. walk in April so I think I had better work my way up to that one by degrees. In addition to all my other commitments walking seems to be on the agenda.

The first walking - or 'hiking' boots I ever had were ex-army black hobnailed affairs that I dubbined regularly and used to clamber up and down screes on Scottish mountains in. I used to aspire to one of those pairs of Alpine boots that you can fit crampons to and make your way up the spidery cracks of super severe climbs on beetling cliffs, but I never made it that far. Maybe I can forget those now.

But these new ones are pretty swish in a way. They lace up stoutly to give ankle support but also have a kind of a quick release zip in the 'uppers' so that you can take them off and on easily - an important consideration here where we are always taking them on and off whenever we enter buildings and don't want to be fiddling with laces in the genkan all day. Oh Dear! I'm starting to metamorphose into a Japanese 'oldie' here. I already have the little haversack and big Canon camera. All I need now is the felt pork pie hat and my disguise is complete.

Spells

I keep meaning to make an inventory of my personal 'minor superstitions' and 'spells'. You know the kind of thing I mean, I'm sure that everyone must do it. Or do they? Those small actions of no obvious relevance that you feel compelled to do so that the day will 'Go OK'. In a word so that you are 'lucky'. How many of these do I really have? Is there any observable connection between them? Have they changed over time? I'll have to keep a notebook.

One thing I can certainly say about mine is that they are usually linked with a kind of vague subconscious numerology, that has been there since early childhood. My 'lucky number' is three, I consciously realised this when I was around nine years old but I'd been aware of it for years. So all multiples of three - especially 3*3=9 are powerfully lucky, as is the pyramid of three 9+3+1=13. Then come all those numbers that add up to, or include 3 - 39, 18, 27, 36. Often they relate to milestones in life, like car registrations and phone numbers.

So little 'spells' like eating three crisps from the Pringles tube, taking three sips from a cup of coffee and touching the rim of the hot cup to the tip of my nose, looking three times out of the window - these are performed almost without me realising it. It is 'lucky' to do this. And from it being 'lucky' it is but a short step to seeking some form of trivial control from the ritual - "if I do X three times then something good will happen, something unfavourable will be avoided ..."

Other formulations of 'spells' involving luck are based around subtly testing chance and reality. "If I cross the railway before the level crossing barrier closes for the train, it will be lucky." "If I can hold my breath until the bus goes through the traffic lights, what I want to happen will happen." "I must keep my feet off the ground until ..."

These minor superstitions and rituals have changed over time. For example as a child, and in my 'teens, I went through a period of touching lamp posts with the tip of my tongue three times for luck, when nobody was watching of course. Hopefully!

Am I weird or does everyone do this? I suspect it is an unarticulated process in everyone's life, who wants to tempt fate for goodness sake? I'm not saying it 'rules my life' in a compulsive way. Though subconsciously perhaps it does, in the sense I always hope for some modest kind of intervention. I'll have to see if some observers of the self, perhaps Erving Goffman, have written about it. You can see how a shedful of sophisticated perceptions of trust and religious faith might ultimately be linked to such primitive behaviour. Another interesting topic for study and research, life is much too short.

Choral work in progress

A new 'sensei' to coach us at choir practice yesterday. Goodness! It was a pretty wall to wall solid afternoon, three hours of intensive work with just one short break. Having a rather introvert nature means that sessions like this draw heavily on my batteries. If I throw myself completely into the experience, and I do, then I'm spent at the end of it all.

We did all the usual Desmond Morris stuff of circling around each other and sizing each other up. With our bunch I don't think there is so much to measure actually, a short tape measure suffices, but our hearts are in the right place! Pitch ... hmm ... not so sure! We all meet up somewhere in the middle of the prairie though. Head for the camp fire smoke.

I came away yesterday feeling very confused by both creativity and intimacy in both singing and life. "You sing for enjoyment? ... but to enjoy what exactly?"

I certainly sing for enjoyment. The idea of singing in any sense 'competitively' makes me feel almost physically sick these days, value judgements of all kinds have me groping for the brown paper bag in the seat pocket in front of me. If I was pressed along the lines of "what kind of enjoyment?" I would probably say "to express harmony" or even better "to be spiritually intimate" . Whatever that means. What else is life for? Don't we understand yet that we are here to love one another? So a cappella singing is created not just out of a recipe of vocal technique and musical skill but more importantly harmony of several different flavours between those who sing and those who listen. I sometimes think after my time here in Japan that this sense of intimacy is even more powerful when you don't fully share language becasue then the music is the main foundation of the communication.

This engagement between creativity and intimacy is a form of sensual, even erotic knowledge. But the structures are always invisible to experience. Like a young bird learning to fly looking for sky hooks. Sometimes in a cadence there is an awareness and luminousity that makes hearts soar to heaven and then yoicks! the breeze runs out and down we go, stalling and spiralling towards doubt and confusion. Like clear air turbulence. Where does the edge of this stuff lie? If you know tell me! Does it have a name and form? Can you spot the difference between smooth whipped cream and stiff meringue at ten paces? Assuming we still eat that kind of stuff eh?

Teatime Walk

Now that the cooler autumn weather is here it is time to venture out regularly for my winter walking. At the moment I feel guilty for taking any time away from my desk but that won't do, I'll end up looking like a beach ball and my blood glucose will rocket. Mr. Sugar Ball. So I just have to commit some time to walking, even though it means less writing. At least it is 'quality time' (horrible expression! - what isn't quality time?) when I can think through stuff. What I need to plan to work on next and how I'm going to stitch it all together. And it is good for clearing the brain of course.

My 'usual' walk from here is to head down the lane to the bridge - now our four lane 'new bridge'! - over the Sakuta River and then follow the right bank eastwards for about half a mile to the lower bridge. I cross the river there and then take a straight metalled lane that follows the railway down the valley. It is a through road but not much used, really more of a farmer's access to the adjacent tanbo.

I don't think this walk would find its way into the 'Guiness Book of Scenic Japanese Walks'. With all the work on flood defences in progress it sometimes seems more of a hike through a construction site. But I like it, and especially when I've crossed the river and find my way out onto the empty tanbo. At this time of year the pans used to grow rice are quite deserted apart from the occasional heron or crane looking for a meal. I really love flat, open, featureless places, perhaps it is the Norfolk ancestors in me approving of familiar contours. Over centuries people worked hard to create this environment and today they work hard to grow food there and it rubs off, you can't doubt that the place is cared for.

My usual cue to turn around and head for home is the passage of the teatime 'Shiosai' express speeding east from Tokyo towards Choshi. On a still day you can mark its progress down the valley from the level crossing gongs kicking in up in Kibara long before you can see it. And then the distant train hoves in sight as it slowly negotiates the points at the end of the station loop. By the time it reaches me out on the marshes it has accelerated up to full speed again and swishes through the long stands of goldenrod along the embankment. An alien piece of contemporary technology rushing through a timeless landscape. Time to turn around and head back, in twenty minutes it will be dark, another day gone.

Izunadera

On our trip down to Ohara last Wednesday we stopped off at a country temple called Izunadera in Misaki-machi or, as it should be called now, Isumi City. It is a very interesting old building in a small village about a mile to the north of the point where the wide brown Isumi River finally meanders out of Boso Hanto and reaches the Pacific coast.

When I say 'old' I mean old by Japanese standards. Most of the building here dates from the 1790's. Temple buildings in Japan are timber and so don't last forever. Like many small country Buddhist temples this one has had a chequered history. In the nineteenth century the Meiji government had periods of persecuting Buddhism as a 'foreign religion'. They insisted that Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines - which until then had often shared the same sites - were separated and many old temples were demolished. In Misaki they seem to have got around the problem by designating their valued old temple building as a 'shrine'. Like many such places today it remains primarily as a museum piece, but sometimes is used by 'locals' for festivals.

The wonderful thing about Izunadera is the wood carvings. They were created by an artist from Kamogawa called Ihachi and they really are just amazing. He had a particular gift for working with the grain of the wood to incorporate it into the flow of his artwork that has to be seen to be believed.

The main carving above the altar bay shows a Tengu - a mythical 'monster-spirit' - handing a 'testimonial' to Ushiwakamaru (the popular Kamakura-era hero Yoshitsune Minamoto).Fascinating. Ihachi was so clearly influenced by Catholicism in the way he presents this topic, although at the time he was alive it had been officially banned for nearly two centuries. Presumably this influence travelled with the crews of coastal vessels up the Pacific coast from distant Kyuushu where the shoguns had ruthlessly stamped out Christianity generations before. You can see it not only in the Tengu's archangel wings and posture, but also in the way that Ushiwakamaru is being handed a 'testimonial' rather than 'presented' with sutras. From one angle the monster's face is fearsome, from another compassionate.


On either side of the main bay are two other carvings, on the left a female 'dragon and ocean' and on the right a male 'dragon and ocean'. The male carving is said to have inspired Hokusai when he painted his famous illustration "Great Wave off Kanagawa" in his series "36 Views of Mount Fuji". There is much more to say about these two "dragon and ocean" sculptures but it will have to wait until another time


[Note for regular readers: To get the next two chapters of my thesis ready by the end of the year I will probably only post here about once in every two days in November and December, but please keep checking back regularly as usual + Iain]