No more 'Dog Bites Man' for me

I was half-listening to the news on our new TV yesterday as I took some stuff through into the kitchen and overheard a piece about the 'New Year' celebrations here in Japan. This year, the reporter was telling everyone, it seems that many people will be visiting temples over the holiday period.

Huh? That is news?? People have been visiting temples here at New Year since the days of Prince Shotoku back in the seventh century. The date of New Year changed in 1873, I'll give you that, but temple visiting at New Year, that hasn't.

I often puzzle over that famous advice to young reporters from the nineteenth century journalist Charles Anderson Dana. "If a dog bites a man, that isn't news, but if a man bites a dog, then that is news." If only it was true eh? Was it ever true I wonder? It should be that way, but these days probably 99.5% of all news is in the "dog bites man" category. Politicians promise bright futures, people rush to closing down sales, our folks hate all of their folks, the Tokyo rush hour is crowded, taxes soar, currencies slump, scientists predict that tomorrow the sun will rise in the East. I feel a line from Ecclesiastes coming on here.

All this betrays a tendency to think only in the worst kind of cliche, to allow our brain cells to be permeated and bonded by quick-setting super-strength stereotypes. The old cycle of repeating the same stale conventions because readers, listeners, viewers all need comfortable routines, as if we couldn't cope with other versions of truth and visions of reality. And then there's the pressure on journalists to go on churning the wretched stuff out. "Heck! This seventy seconds or hundred words has to be with the news desk by 3:17 pm, do you think we have time left for originality?"

This kind of mindless journalism is a menace of the dimensions of bubonic plague. It starts seemingly innocently with the local weekly 'rag' using verbatim a couple of paragraphs from the Women's Institute on a talk about 'fair trade' in Uruguay (Chairman's hairdressing salon runs regular adverts!) and ends with political correspondents recycling so-called press releases on dodgy foreign wars handed out by politicians and generals at 'off the record briefings'. "It begins with your family but soon it gets around to your soul" to quote Leonard Cohen.

You think I'm being hard on them? When did you last take a good look at the contents of a national newspaper. You would be better off believing in fairies than most of that stuff.

So that will be one of my many, many New Year's Resolutions for 2009. Look every 'news story' straight in the eye. How about yours?

And a Happy New Year to all regular readers!

Felix religiosus?

This last couple of months we've made a regular routine of reciting the 'Sandokai' together at our home altar after breakfast and we've been touched by Tora's evident interest in what is going on. Soon after we begin saying the scripture he comes and sits beside us and often adds a few 'meows' of his own. I always harboured some slight suspicions about this latter part as he generally gets vocal once the 'signal gong' is ringing and there is some possibility that he is feeling more irritated about the noise than wanting to join in with us, he is certainly no fan of music.

However Edera spotted something a couple of days ago that made us both really laugh because there was such an obvious link involved. No sooner had we started saying the 'Five Thoughts' before lunch - the Zen Buddhist equivalent of 'grace before meals' - than he left his patch of sunlight in our 'school room' and came quickly trotting over to the table to sit between us. It was so transparent that it was obvious what was in his mind. He's a terrible scrounger of tidbits, more like a dog really. In fact I often think of him as a 'dat' or 'cog', a kind of a 'cross' between cat and dog. And he will eat pretty well anything, even broccoli and bits of biscuit.

So then of course we also made the potential link. If Tora has 'sussed' that humans going 'bzzz... bzzz.... bzzz' together in unison is related to looming opportunities to get something tasty to eat then probably he's put two and two together and made five when it comes to overhearing the 'Sandokai' from the washitsu in the mornings.

Maybe I should organise a poll on this one from Tora fans around the world, of which there are many these days. Do you think that Mr. Felix religiosus is:-

a. coming to join in 'morning service' with us?
b. letting me know that cats definitely don't like the noise of signal gongs? or
c. hoping against hope that something tasty is going to come in his direction from the family altar?

Personally I think that it is a bit of a mixture of all three of these. He is that kind of a cat. Subtle.

Another bad Santa

It isn't often the opportunity arises of being a really bad person so you take them when they come eh? Last night I was booked to stand in as "Santa's Helper" at Daniele's party (and don't I get to look ever more like him these days?) so no slacking for me. Around eight I had to sneak out into the starry night and change from my party wear into my regulation red suit in the lane next to the car. Hmm ... a chilly experience, glad that I wasn't changing into swimming trunks. And then when I was ready I had to lurk outside the front door waiting for the 'party piece' acts going on indoors to finish so that I could burst in with my sack full of presents. My last chance in 2008.

But I wasn't alone. On the other side of the porch there was a life size mannequin for company. A large Disney-style 'bandsman' statue that Daniele had bought for some bargain price at Costco. You know the kind of thing, red uniform, tall black hat, bugle.


And then a car pulled up and parked across the lane and a young guy got out and hurried our way. Who could resist it? I just froze where I was like a mannequin and now there were statues on both sides of the porch. He came on up the path without the least suspicion, didn't even look. Oh! Delicious! Right up to where he was going in through the door about an inch in front of me. Which was when I suddenly turned towards him with a beaming smile and said 'Ho! Ho! Ho!' of course.

Yep! At least a foot in the air I would say. He might not have believed in Santa before but he will know better in future.

And later in the evening fun with babies, two babies at the party and both enjoying it so much. Haven't cuddled a baby in yonks and now a whole crop of them around the place in the last few weeks. What is all that about eh?

Meteorology lesson

Wow! It's got really cold this last couple of days here in leafy Chiba-ken. Want a lesson in meteorology? I knew you did. Well, sometimes at this time of year we get a little old 'low' moving briskly up the Pacific Coast and it sucks a heck of a lot of cold air southwards from eastern Siberia and across the Sea of Japan from Vladivostock. We aren't just talking cold air here - not the cissy stuff we get down from Scandinavia in Europe during cold snaps. No, this is the real thing, straight from the 'cold pole' of the Northern Hemisphere, that vast area of tundra around Verhoyansk.

Of course we are much luckier here than places on the other side of Honshu from Akita down to Matsue. Over there they get snowstorms blasting the place and burying it deep in the white stuff for weeks, a bit like the Cascades in North America. Luckily the central mountains of Japan keep the worst of that away from the Pacific side of the country.

The problem here is that your average Japanese house in Kanto and points west is built to cope with excessive heat, not cold. Basically they are sophisticated plywood boxes without much insulation and with no central heating system. As soon as this weather strikes we find ourselves clustering around kerosene heaters and burrowing deeper into the futon. I've never felt so cold anywhere as I have in Japan.

Yesterday was especially bad because there were high winds with it, so freezing air soon leaked into most parts of the house. I abandoned my study and headed for the kitchen table with two heaters running. On Christmas Day we'd set up our new TV in the corner but it seems that digital signals don't like cold windy days, especially when they are as weak as they are around here, and we had a frustrating time before we figured out how to switch back to the analogue signal. So much for technology.

When you get weather like this with high winds the unimaginable happens - the gales affect the power system and pantographs and (shock horror!) the trains start running late because they can't get enough 'juice' from the overloaded overhead system to run at full speed.

Anyway a sure way to get warm is to run a nice deep hot bath and lounge in it for hours with the water up to your neck. Hmm. Talk to you later.

Tired people take a rest

It never ceases to fascinate me how good people are in Japan at doing things together. Somehow the small details of events get resolved in a way that they seldom do back in England, it is a part of everybody's instincts to 'chip in' to deal with the smooth running of things.

I noticed it again at the end of a party we attended on Christmas Eve. It was a kind of 'get-together' organised by a church group in Togane and we had been invited to sing and then to eat a buffet meal with the members there afterwards. The event was held in a large community centre and all the food and other gear like Christmas trees, decorations and keyboards had to be shipped in.

We were expected until six so we weren't there for setting up but we were there at the end of the evening. The party needed to be wound up at nine so that we could be clear of the building for the caretaker to lock up at nine thirty. By the time tables had been set up for around fifty people and a large hot buffet was laid out there was a fair amount of cleaning up and putting away to do but as usual it happened effortlessly in about ten minutes. Absolutely everyone including the children lent a hand and nobody needed to be told what to do and by the time we had got the last table stowed away and boxes carried down to the organiser's cars that large tatami room was completely spotless and exactly as it had been found at the start of the evening.

In a way this attention to detail and instinct for working as a group - I deliberately don't use the word 'team' which implies something subtly different - is absolutely ordinary. In part it is just old-fashioned courtesy of a kind many people in Britain seem to have lost. But what is extraordinary for me is the instinct people have for doing it. It just wouldn't be done to leave early or stop working until everyone can take a break together. 'O-tsukare sama ...' we murmur to each other at the end of some task ... 'Tired people ... (take a rest)' ... a phrase used often in Japan (even sometimes after such exhausting tasks as filling in a form at the library!) but not one you find in phrase books or dictionaries much.

It isn't that in Britain we don't often pile in and help out of course. Most people do, of course they do. Why is it so different? How would you ever set up a quantitative study to measure the distinctions? I think one obvious contrast would be the need for someone 'in charge' and so there would be overt subdivision of labour "You stack the tables while he takes out the garbage". Nor would people be so careful, nor would it be 'seamless' with the main content of the evening, just more of a chore afterwards.

Dunno. But if you want my distilled wisdom based on six years of living here it would be "Japanese people are very good at doing things together".

Singing for old people

I wrote yesterday about singing for a big group consisting mainly of very old people and there was more that I wanted to say but there was neither space nor time. Let me get it down now as a 'follow-up' to my previous 'blog'.

If you are singing to a mixed but mainly middle-aged audience you can get away with a lot in terms of content at performance time although you shouldn't 'push your luck' too far. Children and old people on the other hand are never so tolerant. Part of it is that their 'attention span' is shorter, albeit for different reasons. Also other priorities, such as trips to the toilet, are always going to intervene. But it is more than that. With such audiences there is no room for 'bullshit' of any kind, they are looking for not just an interesting experience but also a direct one in which they are involved and participate. The degree of separation has to be less, in fact better no separation at all, more a case of 'leading' and 'following'.

This raises major questions for me about the relationship between performer and audience. Actually 'audience' - in the literal sense of 'those who listen' - is not a good word. There needs to be a better one. The relationship is much more like one between lovers, there is a powerful giving and receiving going on in both directions. When you 'perform' you are 'receiving' the attention of both their minds and hearts, and if you say something important to their hearts you are doing well. So it is not simply 'listening', there should be another word for it. Perhaps we are talking here about Kanzeon in the original sense of "regarder of the sounds of the world".

I especially felt this at Sanrizuka because most people in the room were not just my elders but also from a different culture too. So many of the things that were sharable between them and their own children - the songs that they would have sung in school in the nineteen thirties for example - were not a part of my experience. For most Christmas had played no part in their childhoods, although some of the music - generally the 'popular' items like 'Jingle Bells' and 'Silent Night' which became globalised during the nineteen eighties and they probably shared with their grandchildren.

There is also a subtle balance between 'respect' and 'involvement' that it is difficult to feel out in another culture. With my own mother well into her eighties I'm very aware of the experience of 'reversion to childhood' and these days even her vocabulary has become that of a five of six year old again. I'm also now slightly aware of this 'stripping off of later deposits' in progress in my own being, a peeling of spiritual onions happening. So there's a big part in many very elderly people that wants to be treated like a small kid at a party and you can see their hearts light up and the smiles blossom when they are clapping hands and singing simple old tunes. And at the same time there is wisdom there that calls for special respect.

I'm not particularly good at the kind of confidence and spontaneity that getting up 'out front' and getting others 'going' takes in these situations but some of the group on Tuesday were and they did an excellent job of it.

Sanrizuka Trip

Hardly any voice left today, far too much singing yesterday eh? Lucky that you don't need to talk much to eat nut roast. And now I have to get those darn carol tunes out of my head, no sooner does Christmas arrive than it has gone, once you actually get to the day then in truth the 'big production' is over already. What you think of as 'preparation for Christmas' is in fact Christmas. In England the bad tempered over-tired and slightly bored experience of Boxing Day strings it all out a bit but in Japan they have never even heard of Boxing Day. It is just another day at the office along with the 25th.

So yesterday was our 'big day out' up at Sanrizuka. In the end seven of us went over from this patch of leafy Chiba-ken. I was curious to see the place, I've through it loads of times but never ventured off the Prefectural highway before. This area is rather 'famous' in Japan as the site of legendary and massive pitched battles. Not between warring samurai though it might as well have been. The battles of Sanrizuka took place between armies of protesters and police during the late sixties and early seventies as the government tried to build Narita Airport and pretty well everyone else said "over our dead bodies". This was seriously contested territory, and Narita is still one of the world's most closely guarded airports twenty five years on, 'officialdom' remains nervous about the place being invaded by protesters. If you thought that we were only ever polite in this part of the world you can read all about that fierce struggle in "Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan" by David Apter and Nagayo Suwa.

Well I was a bit surprised that either police or protesters ever found the place let alone fought over it. Even armed with the best city maps we circled around searching for the Santa Anna Nursing Home for so long that we were twenty minutes late which left only minutes to get our coats off and we were 'on' with no warm up at all. A gruelling hour of Yuletide fun at 10:00 am without a cup of coffee first is not my idea of "My Perfect Morning" but there you go, it was no worse than the old 'Glasgow Empire' was reputed to be and we made it through to an early picnic lunch at eleven. Then everyone just 'chilled out' until our main session at two which was in the big lounge on the top floor with a wonderful panoramic view of the jets taking off a mile away. Up there we had at least a hundred residents and very lively too, not just our usual run of a dozen carols to work through but also a big pile of 'oldie' songs of the kind you learn in school and remember all your life. Extra singers appeared out of the woodwork and we did a brisk trade for more than an hour.

Something very odd about this day for me, I'm still thinking about it. Out of the window and over the tops of the nearby cedar trees a clear view of the very first Japan I ever knew. Concrete runways and arrival lounges that I first encountered twelve years ago and are now such a familiar part of my existence. And then inside an aspect of Japan that I haven't seen much of yet but in another twenty or twenty five years might become a very familiar part of my life too. I've always been a bit afraid of growing old here but there is no reason to be.

Happy Christmas to all regular readers.

Santa Theory

Ha! I was well 'sussed' on Monday. I had to hurry into town to grab some more material from the archives before the holiday season closes the old place down for a week and afterwards I grabbed a quick lunch in MacDonalds near Hon-Chiba station. There I was at my table putting on my starched linen napkin and uncorking the Bollinger when I spotted that a little boy around three or four years old waiting in line for lunch with his teenage brother had also spotted me. And he could hardly keep his feet on the floor he was just so excited. He began tugging at his big brother's anorak and chattering excitedly as he pointed me out from between his mentor's legs. "Hey! Ani! LOOK - Santa Claus is eating his lunch over there! No, no over there, SANTA! Really, it is Santa!" Of course the more excited he got the less notice his brother, busy chatting up his girlfriend, took. What a 'bummer' eh? A once in a lifetime opportunity to see Santa Claus in the flesh and you can't even get your dumb relative to turn around and see such a wonder.

I mention all this because at the Christmas Party for some of our elementary school students later in the day one of them asked me if I believed in Santa Claus and I couldn't tell a lie! I had to tell them that I didn't just believe in Santa but actually I KNEW he was real because once I had seen him myself. Or, to be accurate, not actually seen him but heard him ...

It happened like this. Once upon a time around 1951 or 1952 there really was a very snowy Christmas Eve just like the ones you see on the cards. It was when I was staying at my grandparents home in Barnard Castle. Like all good children I had gone to bed with my hot water bottle around 7:30 and slept deeply, dreaming about the possibility of presents the next morning. But later, very late at night (and I know it was very late because in those days in our street they used to turn the gas lamps off at ten and it was pitch dark outside) I woke up suddenly. And can you guess what I heard?

Yep! Sleigh bells outside in the snow. Sounds romantic but to be honest it was pretty spooky. I could hear trotting hooves coming up the street and the sound of the bells on the harnesses and then it suddenly stopped outside my window.

Then a terrible thought went through my mind. If Santa Claus finds kids awake when he calls he passes on by and never leaves presents. So I snuggled down very very deep under my quilt, so deep that not even my nose was sticking out, and I went back deeply asleep again.

So there you are. OK it might not be an epistemology that my professors would 'buy into' as offering definitive proof of the Santa Theory but I never said it was. Say what you will but like that kid in MacDonalds I just know Santa is lurking around here someplace from the experience of my own senses.

Lake Wobegon Days

I was thinking of a few Garrison Keillor stories today on the train coming back from Chiba. And just thinking about them makes me laugh. Do you know his work? Well, if you live in America of course you do, I think he is one of the few people ever to have had a 'coast to coast' radio show. But if you live in Britain then maybe he is not such a familiar name, unless you are permanently tuned into Radio 4. His 'Lake Wobegon' stories featured there about twenty years ago and knowing the 'Beeb' I'm sure that they have been repeated a few times since.

I have a strange memory of listening to tapes of the 'Lake Wobegon' stories on holiday in France with my mother-in-law in perhaps 1991 or 1992. There were guffaws in the car most of the way down the Autoroute du Soliel and around the highways and byways of Savoie and Dauphine. That was one heck of a curious holiday, we might have been physically in the French Alps but a lot of the time it felt like we were wandering around in Minnesota somewhere. I still have a so-far-unfulfilled dream to visit the St.Cloud area and see if they really do sell Dimmer's Beer.

If you haven't listened to 'Lake Wobegon Days' you should get the CDs. Just wonderfully sensitive and witty writing about the inhabitants of small town America. I remember a while back some documentary made about the author and they had a TV crew head for the rural area where he had lived while he wrote the stories. They had a local farmer talking about his recollections of his literary former neighbour and the interviewer asked him what he thought of the book. Not much it seemed, he had never met anybody thereabouts like the people Keillor wrote about.

And of course the hilarious part of it was that this dour, serious, small-time prairie farmer was exactly like the characters in Garrison Keillor's stories. He even had a Norwegian name.

Well, if Santa leaves the CD in your stocking this Christmas, be sure to have a good laugh listening to it!

Old Handwriting

I've been helping a student with some early modern English handwriting recently. He is researching the military campaigns of Marlborough and is hoping that he can do some original research in England next summer so a couple of weeks ago I gave him a copy of some seventeenth century handwriting style examples that I had. I wish I could give him photocopies of a couple of real documents to have a go at but I don't have any here in Japan. He will have to wait until I am back in Lancashire in March, I know I have some copies of letters from the English Civil War period somewhere in one of my filing cabinets.

I really need to make this study a bit more structured for him, trying to read seventeenth century letters from a 'standing start' is difficult enough even if you are already used to our later handwriting styles. So I'm letting him look at a few examples of nineteenth century handwriting by printing off some census schedules which include members of my family. I find material from the late nineteenth century quite easy to read - in fact the general style is usually the same as my grandfather's familiar handwriting. He was in school between 1903 and 1910. But once you get back to the 1861 Census and earlier there was no universal system of elementary education in England and writing styles are much harder to read and also closer to eighteenth century conventions.

Yesterday I had a bit of a 'brainwave' looking for suitable material for him on the 1901 Census database and after a bit of hunting I tracked down what I was looking for. The line registering a Mr. K. Natsume. It seems that when the enumerator called he was living as a 34 year old boarder at the home of Mr. Harold Brett at 4 Flodden Road, Lambeth.

Who was Mr. K. Natsume? It might even have a few Japanese readers scratching their heads. But turn it around and it becomes Natsume Kinnosuke or as he is much better known Natsume Soseki, one of Japan's most famous writers. He lived in London from 1901 to 1903 and absolutely hated it. He was to write later "The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant years in my life. Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves." He lodged in four houses there during his stay and one of them - 80b The Chase, London SW4 - is now a Soseki museum.

Soseki is one of the few Japanese authors whose features I can recognise because when I first moved here his picture was on the reverse of the 1000 yen note

Ready for Sanrizuka

I've just been sorting out the 'batting order' for singing carols over at Sanrizuka on Wednesday. Goodness knows where that is all going to land. I think that the undercarriage is 'down' as we plummet towards the airfield but as to the wheels working or tyres being inflated, who knows? I'm rather hazy on several 'fundamentals' too, such as who exactly has the keyboard we are supposed to be taking for our pianist to use.

I was a bit doubtful about using a pianist at all, for as long as I can remember carols are for singing a cappella. But one of the group has turned up a real "good 'un", we had a 'run through' with her during the week. She's a proper musician, it just flows out of her finger tips and she can follow the singers like she was singing it herself instead of banging it out on a keyboard. I'm quite looking forward to it all now. I was feeling a bit low when our usual carol event at Narita fell through, the prospect of a Christmas without it seemed a bit glum. What is Christmas without carol singing?

Some months ago one of my oldest and closest friends got back in touch after forty years. The Internet can be amazing eh? In fact she sometimes reads this blog. Carol singing was an important part of senior school years for both of us, thanks to our music teacher. Graham Gooder, a man who influenced both our lives. He often comes into my mind when I'm involved in singing, and Christmas is certainly a time when I remember him. During this week before 'end of term' he would take twenty or thirty of us dressed up in duffel coats and school scarves out into the streets of Crawley to sing carols around the residential neighbourhoods under the street lights. He would give us the first note on a pitch pipe and then we would be airborne in four part harmony, running through two or three items sung from roneoed music clutched in our cold gloved fingers while a group of younger 'collectors' knocked on front doors within ear-shot of the choir. Our collection was on behalf of our usual school charity, the 'Save the Children Fund'. I'd hoped to add a photo of it here but it must be back in England; next year I promise.

Nothing quite like the magic of carol singing outdoors as teenagers, you never forget it. Silhouettes in the street on dark foggy nights, little knots of chattering and laughing friends walking together and then hurrying to catch up with the main group. Under the next street light 'Sir' already has his music out, the altos are on that side next to the hedge, the basses are here next to the telephone kiosk. And then the sweet sound of music, and the mystery of the words

"They looked up and saw a star
Shining in the East beyond them far"

And when you looked up as you sang you really could see the remote stars shimmering above your frozen breath suspended on the air, and feel the warmth and sincerity of those around you, and the moment spoke of something so timeless, timeless in the chilly dark.

And then everyone moved on around the corner and if you were even just a few steps behind suddenly they were gone as if they had never been there and you were alone on any foggy winter night in a suburban street

Trouble at t'mill ...

A hint of trouble around the district this afternoon. A couple of times today I heard a 'gaisensha' - a 'battle-bus' belonging to one of the right wing political groups known here in Japan as 'uyoku dantai' - heading through the village. These groups are the equivalent of the 'National Front' in the UK and promote a similar kind of agenda and appeal to a similar membership too. In substance their politics and style often hark back to the symbolism of Japan's pre-War military days. If you ever visit Japan you will probably see one of their gaisensha sooner or later, speeding around the streets in Tokyo perhaps and playing martial music at an incredible volume. Usually old converted buses and vans, their windows are grilled over as a protection against bricks and stones. They are painted black and adorned with slogans and sometimes the old Japanese Imperial Flag and the Emperor's crest. Many of these groups are said to have links with the 'yakusa' - the Japanese mafia - which seems to buy them a certain immunity from the police. There is certainly plenty of potential violence around in this country and sometimes it even results in assassinations of politicians. Last year the Mayor of Nagasaki, Iccho Ito, was shot by a gangster in a revenge attack.

It isn't the first time I've heard a gaisensha in the village but it isn't common here. Occasionally they can be seen speeding through the countryside trying to drum up new membership amongst farmers but they are usually a more urban phenomenon.

Well, today when I heard them after dark headed along the prefectural highway on the other side of the valley for a third time it suddenly dawned on me what was afoot. About a mile from here is the only mosque in the Prefecture. There are almost no Muslims living in the area but they have chosen the location because it is pretty well the geographical centre of Chiba-ken and also handy for the rail network. And this was the time for Friday prayers. The guys on the bus were obviously minded to wind up the guys in the mosque.

Well, that was all there was to it, compared with some stuff I've seen in my time in Northern Ireland and the Middle East it was hardly 'big potatoes'. But it had the unpleasant edge to it that xenophobia always does, nobody had an 'amicable solution' in mind. Let's hope it doesn't become a regular feature of Fridays around here.

Winter Shade

A frost on the roof of the house over the fence behind my study window this morning. We bought this house back in 2001 in the early summer and we never noticed that in mid-winter it was going to be be shaded by the cedar forest just across the road at the top of our lane. It isn't shaded much - only between around mid-November to the end of January and then only until about ten o'clock in the morning. But of course those are the very hours when it would be nice to see some early morning sunshine to lift the first frost off the place. If it was shaded a bit more from the worst of the summer heat instead it would be rather nice!

Cats notice everything. When I let our two out in the morning they head immediately for the sunlit rice stubble in the tanbo around the back of our danchi, or those allotments up near the little cemetery. There they fool around and sunbathe or just 'hang out' and play until they get hungry, by which time the kerosene heater has warmed up the teaching room and it is time for some serious lazing around indoors. The sun also reaches our front upstairs balcony before it finds the garden - in Japan everyone hangs washing on the balcony rather than on a clothes line.

This question of access to and alignment with the sun is much more important in Japan than in Britain. Houses are always built so that the front faces south, or if not south then as near to it as possible. An east of west aspect is OK-ish but no-one wants a house facing north, nor would ever build one. Living spaces face the sun. Other parts of the house - kitchens, bathrooms and toilets - have the cooler and shady north facing aspect. This is the case even with modern housing in cities. On a suburban street running east-west the front of the houses on the north side will face the highway but on the south side the 'back of the house' - kitchens and bathrooms- will be next to the road and the front of the house will face the garden.

I'm not sure why this should be so strongly the case, nor why 'aspect' is not considered so important in Western housing where we do like living spaces facing south or west but don't insist on them. Perhaps our much longer northern summer days and breezier climate play a part, and also the darkness of our winters when it hardly matters. During the short and horribly humid summer days here in leafy Chiba-ken you rely on the sun to 'air' and dry the house and avoid mould taking hold in unventilated spaces. Bedding needs to be aired every day and futons get dragged onto the balcony to get the benefit of sunshine. One of our neighbours whose house is shaded by trees even pushes hers out into the lane on her old bike and parks it on th verge to get some direct sunlight. Also in winter in our largely unheated houses we can rely on the sun to 'warm things up' a bit during the daytime even in December and January. You sure wouldn't get much benefit out of the sun in Lancashire at this time of year.

Solstice on Sunday

The week before Christmas is a one of those times to watch out for the tell-tale signs of nostalgia in the air. I wonder if it is just co-incidence that we arrive at the solstice on Sunday. Over the years I've spotted that it is often the equinoxes - that sense of fast changing daily rhythms in mid-March and mid-September - that draw spiritual questions up into the conscious mind. But the solstices are a turning point of of a different kind. In June from light towards darkness and in December from darkness to light.

So this week is the Winter Solstice, a nadir in the year, a low point for energy, the sun has headed further south even if you live as far south as we do. And if you live in the north then the days are short and further north still the days have evaporated into the season of total darkness that you pass through if you fly between Japan and Europe between November and February.

Woke up slowly from my-after lunch nap and there was a lovely aroma in the house. Edera has been doing some baking for the various Christmas parties we are organising over the next few days, mainly for our students. I paused quietly to take it in. The smell of new bread and mince tarts and a nut roast for Christmas Day and the singing of the kettle on top of the little paraffin stove by the table in the kitchen and the ticking of a clock. All experiences of the senses that address the 'free child' in me, the little boy who peeps around the curtain when he thinks 'grown ups' don't notice. For him it is Christmas 1951 in Coronation Street in snowy Barnard Castle, for me it is Christmas 2008 in leafy and rainy Chiba-ken.

Sounds heard and smells touch your heart in a way that neither words nor sights do. They inform the senses we rely on as animals. Martin Heidegger wrote of 'dwelling' and it is a good word to use, our awareness of dwelling here and now, the deeper meaning of the utterly familiar, the jewel expressed within the mundane. Hearth and home. Memories can be like the sun, so bright they seem painful to look at directly but also so warm and brimming with energy.

When in doubt walk faster

I've mentioned before that I sometimes get a bit remote from the Japanese news, what with our TV not working much at the moment. It isn't too bad, the little red light at the front comes on when you switch it on, it is just that there is no picture or sound. So I tend to rely on a website called "Japan Today" to read uup on whatever is going on in Japan. I wouldn't recommend it, they are a pretty shameless bunch. Lots of articles by weird American religious cults disguised as news items ("Will the World End on Monday?") and the opening of some business hotel down in Miyazaki is carried as front page copy because the company bought an advert last week.

The blog comments that readers add to news items are sometimes pretty good though. A bunch of rabidly right wing American servicemen sequestered on remote island military bases around our shores take their vengeance on the world here for their sad wasted lives. I'm ashamed to say that during the recent Presidential Election I even had a lot of fun trolling on the site. Also the 'mods' seem to all be Japanese and so have an absolutely zero sense of irony, it is quite invisible to them. I know, I shouldn't be so childish.

But that wasn't what I meant to talk about. I spotted on there today a report about the Japanese Prime Minister, Aso-san. Strange name for a politician because there is a big volcano on Kyuushu with the same name Aso-san. It is as if our British Prime Minister was called Mr. Ben Nevis or you lot over there in America had a president called McKinley ... umm ... well, you get the principle of it anyway.

However Aso-san, has been getting a hard time of it recently, he suffers from strong views. He is the kind of old-time Reaganite lookalike that the LDP specialises in and his neoliberal conscience is bothered by oldies. The trouble with them is that they live too long, get sick too often, and cost the State a lot of money. A pity they can't shuffle off a bit sooner, they would be doing the nation and the business lobby a great service. Preferably just after they had cast their votes for the LDP would be a good time to go, you can't live forever. Altzheimers sufferers are a big burden on the state too. These frequently and tactlessly expressed opinions have not necessarily gone down well with elderly LDP supporters, many of whom in fact are now already 'former LDP voters'.

This week in a meeting Aso-san mentioned that recently he had been "mistaken for a disoriented old man while out for a morning walk". We don't know who made the mistake, some hapless young cop on patrol maybe or perhaps a kind jogger in a Tokyo park stopped to make sure that this confused, weird looking old guy knew who he was and what he was doing. But what really made me laugh was what Aso-san said next. "I walk fast now and no one mistakes me any longer".

There you have it. If you don't want to get mistaken for a confused old guy in Tokyo parks his advice is to walk faster. And if you don't want to get mistaken for an amazingly dumb Japanese politician my advice is to put your brain in gear before you open you mouth.

Calendar

Stopped off at the pharmacy at the traffic lights on my way back from my afternoon 'constitutional' yesterday. I had dropped off my monthly prescription for my diabetic tablets there and I needed to collect them. S-sensei went rummaging around in one of the dispensing trays in the back for my package and then handed it to me together along with my 'seasonal gift' - a 2009 Nippo Phamaceutical Calendar.

I wasn't sure wether to feel pleased or sad. It isn't necessarily good news eh? Being such a good customer of the local pharmacy that you even get a seasonal present for being such a good customer! But of course seasonal gift giving is very much a part of Japanese culture, no matter what your job is. It is also traditional to give gifts twice a year to teachers too, and Edera often gets quite a little stash of items like cookies and coffee.

Anyway I'll put the Nippo Pharmaceutical Calendar on my study wall and it might remind me to remember to take my tablets, I can be pretty absent-minded around all of that.

Maybe you wondered what a calendar from the chemists might look like? I mean, they don't sell sports cars or indeed anything that might even be considered vaguely 'desirable' unless you have a pain somewhere. Perhaps it might feature a blonde in a swimsuit on a beach staring meaningfully at a big box of Sanatogen? Or even be an 'adults only' Special GTX Edition with a scantily clad starlet draped across a filing cabinet eyeing a packet of Viagra? No, you would be wrong! Suprisingly the calendar seems to feature cartoon characters giving lots of useful advice of the "don't attempt to learn to fly by jumping off tall buildings" kind. There is a little 'professor' wearing a white coat (he must be the pharmacist eh?) who jumps from page to page keeping his amazingly dumb customers straight. Japanese manga artists love this kind of little figure of authority - obviously since he is a professor he must give good and utterly impartial advice to everyone. I often notice him in politician's pamphlets too giving information on taxes.

On the cover for example a smiling man asks "If the medicine isn't working is it OK to take bigger dose?" Well, of course it is mate! What else would you want to do? Just swallow a whole gob full, you'll soon feel much better. And I see on the 'January' page the professor recommends that we swallow our pills with the help of a swig of beer or sake, plain water is a big 'no no'. At least I think that is what that kanji means, I'll have to look it up sometime ....

Carol practice

Carol singing practice here yesterday afternoon. It was supposed to be last Sunday but somehow it didn't happen. It slid between the floorboards the way things do. we had the kettle on but only one person showed up and that was half an hour late.

Better turn out yesterday though. Now there are five of us. It should have been seven plus a pianist but there was a problem about the pianist's baby I couldn't get to the bottom of. Possibly my lack of 'grip' on colloquial Japanese but also one of those inscrutable wading-in-treacle moments when you just know it is best to 'move along there'. "There's nothing to see here Sir! Move along now ..." as those old-time 'plods' used to say in the movies. I had a brief vision of the 'credits' rolling by on the screen. Gaijin ... Gaijin's Wife ... Pianist's Baby ... And there was a definite whiff of bad temper amongst singers around the topic too ... strong stuff down in leafy and extremely polite Chiba-ken "Let's do it a cappella then! And how about we make a start?" I murmured encouragingly. I could have had a career in the 'Diplomatic' if I had gone for it.

So that's what we did. And after just one verse of "Hark the Herald" around our kitchen table we were suddenly all much more cheerful, banging away harmoniously in four parts if not exactly 'word perfect'. It just means I need to sing those words louder myself really, as long as the rest of it sounds plausible it feels OK. Oh! And when I say four parts I mean three and a half, we haven't got a tenor this year but when I remember I fill in the flowery bits that tenors do.

Sire! He lives a good league hence,
Underneath the mountain.
Hard against the forest fence ...

And by the time we'd rehearsed three or four carols we were taxied to the end of the runway with all engines roaring and ready to go. "Do you reckon this kite will fly Skip?" "Wilko Ginger! We'll have the 'Old Girl' airborne in a jiffy! Wizard Prang!" There was just something splendidly zany about it all, some real 'Christmas Spirit' on the boil, a quart of good cheer and crazy good humour. Can we do it? Yes we can! Amazing how soon the blood starts to circulate once singers and carols cleave together and become one flesh. All these arrangements have been drilled into us for years and we really do know them.

Of course it isn't quite like the 'Good Old Days' when there were twenty of us in formal dress singing in a grand hotel foyer. And some of our more 'professional' singers of yesteryear might have been shocked at the prospect of turning out in jeans and tee-shirt to sing in a home for the elderly at Sanrizuka. But you can be too 'prissy' about carol singing eh? All the fun of it is making real music 'on the hoof'. Someone a long time ago commented that your average English church choir was full of execrable singers accompanied by a tuneless wind band none of whom knew what they were up to so Hey! We are making a pretty authentic job of all of this!

Whitesmith

Curious how dreams so often pick up and embroider on the content of events during the day. Last night I was dreaming about cutting tinplate and making some kind of a small implement - perhaps a sugar scoop - from a sheet of thin bright metal.

There are usually at least three skills involved with that kind of a job. First you have to carefully mark the work out, 'scribing' the lines with a sharp scriber. Then you have to bend the metal along the folds, tin and thin brass and copper bend like cardboard but you need to know the skills involved in doing it neatly. Then finally you have to solder joints without getting blobs all over the place, and fix on small attachments in the right places. Oh! And the fourth skill I should have mentioned is cleaning the work up at the end.

Why was I dreaming about this? Well, in some research I had done yesterday evening I came across the term "whitesmith".Apart from being an English surname it is not a word you hear used at all these days but a 'whitesmith' a hundred years ago was a kind of metal craftsman who worked making things from cold metal, as opposed to a 'blacksmith' who used a forge to work red hot iron. Usually whitemith's work was rather delicate and their skills were similar to those of workers in precious metals - 'silversiths' and 'goldsmiths'. They were also closely related to the 'tinkers' who repaired the pots and pans first manufactured by whitesmiths. The particular 'whitesmith' I was researching last night was described in his teens as a 'tinker', then a 'whitesmith' and later in his life a 'tinsmith'. At the end of his life in the 1920's he was a 'panel beater' - the main use of his ability with sheet metal had become mending cars that had been involved in accidents.

In Japan kids just aren't taught these kinds of skills at all in schools and if I had the money available I would set up some kind of a hobby and handicraft centre where they could learn and make things themselves. I was lucky to go to a school where I had four years of weekly classes in metalwork and I learned all the basic crafts there. Now here at 'Little House' I have quite a nice workshop in the shed I built in the garden and it is fun working away in there on rainy evenings. Sheet metal work is always the most interesting to me, it lacks the 'tension' of machining where dimensions are everything. A piece of brass comes alive once you start to bend and solder and saw, objects are often so much more than the sum of their parts.

Tenor voices

I was watching a friend of mine in the men's choir practice last night. He must be nearly eighty now and sings baritone and it was while most of us were taking time out for a few minutes so that the conductor could coach the tenors on a few bars that they were 'struggling' with. N-san was sitting there with his eyes closed and his face radiant and relaxed, smiling with delight as he listened to those three tenor voices. One of which belonged to his son.

At the end of the first chapter of the Vimalakirti Sutra there is a short passage I find myself reading often. The Buddha's disciples are together in Amra Gardens at Vaishali. Shariputra, who often stands in as a kind of 'Doubting Thomas' in Mahayana scriptures, is pondering something the Buddha has just been saying to another disciple, and begins to question whether the world appears impure because the Buddha's teaching itself is impure or inadequate. In a way this is a Buddhist formulation of that familiar question "If there is a God why does he permit so much suffering?"

The Buddha knows what is on his mind and tells him "Shariputra, it is the failings of living beings that prevent them from seeing the marvellous purity of the land of the Buddha ... Shariputra, this land of mine is pure but you fail to see it."

A Brahma king listening to the conversation confirms that he too sees this world of experience as pure and spotless but Shariputra isn't convinced. He argues back "When I look at this land I see it full of knolls and hollows, thorny underbrush, sand and gravel, dirt, rocks, many mountains, filth and defilement."

And the sutra continues "The Buddha then pressed his toe against the earth, and immediately the thousand-millionfold world was adorned with hundreds of thousands of rare jewels, till it resembled Jewel Adornment Buddha's Jewel Adornment Land of Immeasurable Blessings. All the members of the great assembly sighed in wonder at what they had never seen before, and all saw that they themselves were seated on jeweled lotuses".

And then the Buddha released the supernatural power he had exercised with his toe and the world returned to its former appearance

Is this simply an allegory or just an analogy or is it literally true? What is your experience? Sometimes there is listening to three tenors in the rehearsal room in Nogiku Plaza, and sometimes there is listening to three tenors in Amra Gardens at Vaishali. Depends where the ear is I guess.

Yuletide "Do's" and "Don'ts"

I see that my MSN Home Page is offering advice on "Office Christmas Party Do's and Don'ts" this morning. Uh? A bit late eh? They should have had this feature back in October as the Office Christmas Party Season was beginning to get under way. What planet do these people live on?

I always feel slightly annoyed with myself for allowing my eye be distracted by the siren titles of these MSN Features, let alone letting myself be gulled into clicking on them and starting to read the darn things. That is a real black mark 'start to the day' for me, I flagellate myself with birch twigs for being so weak and dumb. You know the kind of thing, all those promising 'tasters' about "Eighteen Delicious Greasy Snacks from Around The World to Eat Before You Die", "What Women Really Think of Men - Your Chance to 'Score' at Last!", "Ten Practical Ways You Can Avoid Social Ridicule" etc. Whatever the title these 'pieces' may be they are all selling financial services products nobody needs or over-priced 'escape' weekends in Dorset (bring your own woman and have the best row of your lives!). You can be sure of it.

So I haven't actually read this "Office Christmas Party Do's and Don'ts" you understand but whenever did that get in the way of giving an opinion on anything? At the brewery we used to have really big-time Christmas blow-outs of course, more food and booze and excess of all kinds than you could ever shake a stick at. And not just once, that is for 'wimps'. Let me see, in Sales or Marketing there would be your 'team party', your boss's team party, the 'peer-group' beano, the 'Site Christmas Special' and the Departmental no-expense-spared 'extravaganza'. That is excluding, of course, all the customer events that you get involved in and the supplier parties that you get asked along to. And legion trips down the pub. The 'Good Old Days'. In the 'pub trade' having Christmas Parties is a bit like those jokes about making a living by taking in each other's washing. If the punters won't buy your beer you are just going to have to drink it all yourself.

Except in Finance and Business Systems of course. All Finance Directors are po-faced Gordon Brown look-alikes and utterly shocked by excess. "I was young once (ha!ha!ha!) and I don't want to prevent anyone having a good time but please remember that the full allowance (against VAT receipts) for this year's staff party is £2.45 per head and that you need to be back at your desks after lunch by no later than 1:50". Business Systems on the other hand are just a congenitally miserable bunch, they can't scratch their ear without defining a manual of quasi-legal operational rules around the situation and 'fully documenting' the process. Uh! I'm not going there, too close to Christmas. But as they say "Working in Marketing is like spending your life at a party and working in Business Systems is like spending your life waking up the morning after".

So with this lifetime of practical experience to call on do I have any "do's" and "don'ts" to share you ask? Well, I think my advice for a Very Merry Yuletide and a Happy and Prosperous New Year would be simply this. If you are going to chuck your bread roll at the Managing Director at Christmas lunch dunk it in your Brown Windsor soup first and make sure it ricochets off the top of his head. But please! Do it when he is looking straight at you or he won't know who to thank. Who likes 'sneaks' eh?

Singing trip

Back in September we were talking of "bringing the choir" to northern England and I'm going to have to start doing some serious thinking about it. If we are going to make a trip June 2010 will probably be the time and "the choir" is likely to be no more than five or six of us but I'm still quite interested to give it a try.

When people talk of "choir tours" they generally have in mind the kind of big events made popular by the likes of the "Red Army Choir" and um ... (Hey! Norman! what was that group of schoolboys from Bavaria with shiny faces called that toured England when we were young?). The little bit of asking around I did in Lancashire soon convinced me that nobody but nobody was remotely interested in hosting even for an hour or two a bunch of foreigners for a "Meet and Greet" style of get-together. In fact everyone was even 'much too busy' to get back in touch and say "sorry much too busy". Let alone putting on a joint concert or anything like that. And at this end there was a general muttering of 'isogashii' ('busy') and muzukashii ('difficult'). A festival like Llangollen might be ... but too much pressure there and I don't fancy sleeping in tents either.

But of course I'm not in this for the 'glory'. Then why am I in it? Good grief! I'll have to think about it, I'm not sure. Well, one thing is that in Japan we never get to sing polyphony in the right settings. If we went to England we could sing madrigals in old places, religious music in empty churches, hear our voices reverberate in stone. That is literally impossible in Japan, we don't have stone buildings here. I'd like those of my friends here who would like to do that know how it feels to sing in an old buildings and get a chance to do it. Without a tenor it is a bit difficult but we have at least three sopranos, an alto and a bass and there is plenty of three part music around.

There is a strong sense for me of "it is time" to do this too, now or never. Perhaps an element of "Last of the Summer Wine" in it all. To be honest we are all a bit over the hill, past our best, nobody is going to rush our way with a recording contract. The ladies are getting a hint too much wobble in there (Ha! In more ways than one eh?) and I am scratchy on anything over Middle C. We no longer have good voices if we ever did but we are all quite good singers, we can pick the bones of harmony out of the music we meet. If we are going to do it, then let's do it now.

So there we have it. I envisage a nice time flitting from cool empty church or chapel to the odd corner of some minor stately home and maybe a few zany spots too like caves and woodland groves. An anthem here, a madrigal there, a folk song from the back seat of the bus. Sunshine, cream teas, fresh air, making music, talking. Could be a good trip.

Quelle Sneeze

Wednesday is our day off but Tora still gives us a 'wake up' call as usual. He doesn't officially recognise Wednesdays it seems, if we are even a few minutes late into the kitchen he is soon upstairs to see what the problem is. And he has become so bossy with his hammering on doors recently that now I have started to thwart him by putting a big piece of plywood across the landing.

He's a great 'sneezer' first thing in the morning too and has been for as long as I can remember him. It is a form of mild asthma and when he seems to get troubled by it more than usual there are pills and eye drops from the vets that help keep his sinuses clear. If he gets a sneezing fit you have to watch out as he can ricochet alarmingly around the room; a good sneeze can send him flying backwards a foot or more. But if you gently stroke the saddle of his back for him it seems to stop it at once.

I also have a bit of a reputation for sneezing here, and also for blowing my nose loudly. Can't think why that is, people make such a fuss about nothing eh? No, it is because I'm a 'gaijin' of course. It is a "well known fact" that all foreigners have big noses, not like cute Japanese ones, and so they are uniquely noisy in that department. Say I'm wandering around in the kitchen when we have kids next door in the teaching room and then I sneeze there are immediate titters all around. "Segoi! Incredible! So loud! It is all true!". And if I blow my nose then they just fall about laughing. I'm just waiting for someone to pluck up courage to tweak my 'conk' see what it feels like. At parties when people are having fun it often happens that one of the younger kids asks if they can tweak my beard and then, once the precedent is set, suddenly everyone in the room is curious and rushes to try it out. But so far nobody has plucked up the courage to tweak my nose. Or anything else.

Sneezing and nose blowing are a great way to get your own back on the Japanese when you are feeling a mean critter, as I usually am. A good sneeze on the train into Chiba will clear a space around you in a moment and people start to look nervous even as you begin to dig tissues out of your pocket. A foreigner with an infectious disease? Quelle horreur! And no face mask either! Maybe I'm a mad scientist, a poultry specialist just back with test tubes from business in China, anything might happen! To be honest I think this is an unfair smear, the biggest danger to health on trains I see are all the heavily infectious salarymen who would sneeze their way up to Tokyo on stretchers rather than miss a day's work due to sickness.

Creative Vocations

The whole business of 'vocation' in life has been on my mind lately. A friend of mine has really struggling in some personal relationships, and I feel that the issue of 'vocation' is down there somewhere at the bottom of it all. And just to make it worse it is linked to the whole 'mid-life crisis'angle too. They began down a path involving making a living from 'creative work' and teaching as young adults and now the sun is already beginning to seriously 'wester' and the shadows lengthen. They have come far from the gate and there is no road back in that direction. Did they make the right choices and has it been a 'success'? Or not? Are the angels already writing 'FAILURE' in bright red ink on that page in their Big Book, sighing softly and closing the volume.

'Vocation' is a word with its roots in the the experience of religious 'calling' and from personal observation of many people with sincere and strong religious vocations they pretty well all struggle with them mightily during parts, maybe most, of their lives. Sometimes within the context of roasting in good old-fashioned disbelief and sometimes struggling through endless arid deserts of featureless and heavy experience. 'Vocation' later became associated with the three classic medieval 'professions' - the priesthood, medicine and law - for which you required a special training and developed abilities which were expected to use for the benefit of others. Now those two weasel words 'profession' and even worse 'professional' have been totally debased in vernacular usage to cover every imaginable trade and even hobby. That confuses the heck out of people because in conventional wisdom life seems to be making promises of a kind of 'added value' that aren't ever going to be fulfilled. I'm reminded of that long list of book titles in a Monty Python sketch about telling whether toads are male or female. It starts off innocently enough .... "Toad-Sexing for Beginners" etc. and then works up into a positive obsessive intellectual froth with titles like "Professional Toad-sexing" and "Toad-Sexing; the Relationship with the Theory of Relativity Explained" before ending in a sad little heap with books like "Giving Up Toad-Sexing", and "There is a Life Too for Former Toad-Sexers". Every time I hear stuff like "professional telemarketing representative" I feel an old joke coming on. Aren't I a snob?

One problem with the idea of a secular 'vocation' is that the people who 'pursue' them often seem to see the 'vocation' angle as something that subtly sets them apart from others. "I'm a qualified professional toad-sexer while you are just an amateur doing it for fun". Even if they don't say it - and some do! - they think it. "I'm a professional writer/musician/painter doing creative work and, for good or ill, this makes me something special. I have devoted my life to it". There we have it! They should look more closely at examples from the past. Rembrandt used to mix his own paint in a pestle and mortar. Bach used to have to rattle off cantatas by teatime, no luxury for him of 'time out' for 'wandering as lonely as a cloud'. I can imagine him thinking "Good grief! A new fugue to write for Sunday morning and then a 'fantasia' for the visit by the Bishop of Bruges on Tuesday AND my shoes are leaking and I need to get them to the cobbler. How to get it all done and still get to the 'Parent's Evening' at Carl's school?" Artists like that were truly craftsmen and 'ordinary people' first. If creation doesn't blossom from roots in the passion and humanity of ordinary life how can it ever reach as high as heaven? We are only ever its medium, its conduit.

It is the old parable of building on sand and building on rock I suppose. If you do the best you can and 'just get on with it' then what comes will come and you will be rooted in what you do and who you are and maybe you will give splendid expression to something. But if you are forever afraid that your life has been a 'failure' and keep pulling it up by the roots and dragging out the measuring tape to find out where you are then God help you. It doesn't matter, it isn't up to you to know where or who you are. If you think that way you are already doomed.

Chinese 'bore'

I was writing that short essay on my trip to China last night and there was a spelling I wanted to check so I took a quick look at the Hangzhou page in Wikipedia. From there - surfing in the way you do - I had soon clicked my way from page to page and landed 'on', or 'in', the Qiantang River, which runs along the east side of the city. How come I managed to spend two nights in Hangzhou and never got to see the Qiantang? It was the end of a long and tiring trip and it was several miles across town but that would never have stopped me once upon a time. Well, I did SEE the river, we travelled over the new motorway bridge you can see in this picture - 'Bridge Number 6'. But it was only a glimpse of sand bars and mist, a bit like crossing the Severn Bridge driving up from Wales to London.

The Qiantang is famous for having the biggest tidal bores in the world, a subject that I've written about here before. Hangzhou Bay is funnel-shaped and on really big Spring Tides the water crowds in so fast that it can create a tidal wave around nine metres (35 feet) high. That is big - much higher than a house. You get similar but smaller waves in many places in the world - the Bay of Fundy in Canada and on our own River Severn in Britain of course. But nothing beats the Qiantang, I've heard it said that on a still night at full moon you can hear the roar of it coming ten miles away.

There is something fascinating but very scary too for me about big waves like this, that dark fear of getting caught far out on the sands . Maybe my watch stopped, I never realised, but then I suddenly become aware of the peril and strike out for the shore getting stuck in the deep mud. But I know that it is hopeless, I can never make safety in time. One reason that I have this lurking dread is because the many dangers of our local River Tees were effectively drummed into me as a child.

Surfing the net I found the picture of this picture of the bore taken a couple of months ago by a real surfing team. They obviously have ho lurking dread of bores! - you can see their site here. I can't help but admire surfers like this but at the same time it seems impossible to contemplate any natural wonder these days without somebody in the foreground doing 'dangerous sports'.

Bores usually don't photograph well, you have to travel to see them. Perhaps I'll make it the hobby of my mature years - travelling around the world at Spring Tide time to see some of the best of them. And I can start off by heading back to Hangzhou and taking a proper look.

Brewing no more

One thing I miss in Japanese cities is the general absence of derelict industrial sites. Some nice grim old edifices with a bit of 'backbone'. Up in the North of England of course it often seems like we haven't got a lot else, but here most defunct factories are soon torn down and the land used for a new shopping mall or a 'mansion' apartment block. Not that the places here were ever that 'old' in any case - in Chiba-shi there are no factory sites of any size remaining from before the war, and only one industrial building left from the 1900's that I can think of. Many of our derelict industrial sites in Lancashire date from the nineteenth century or even earlier. Good wall-to-wall 'Dark Satanic Mills'.

During my career at Whitbread I worked on two sites that were closed and demolished around me. The first was the old Ely Brewery in Cardiff, once the main brewing site for Evans Bevan of Neath. By the time I'd started there the old bottling hall was finished and after a feeble attempt at running a packaging line for giant "Party Seven" cans of Trophy Bitter (did anyone ever actually drink any of those?) the whole lot came clattering down and the brew house soon followed. You can brew unremarkable keg bitter anyplace. The small office building where I had a desk was sold to a local business but the rest of the old place has long been built over with new housing. You would never know a brewery had even been there.

But all this was just a bit of an appetiser for the two years I spent based at the old Duttons Brewery site at Blackburn. The day I went for interview there I could hardly believe that such a desperately dark and dingy pile could still exist in the nineteen-eighties and actually be legal. But there you go. And actually it turned out to be a great place to work, the setting was Dickensian but the local staff were great, I've never come across a more cheerful and happy place to work. There were three parts to the site - a modern and pretty charmless three storey office block, the rather grand but derelict Victorian brew house and across the road a horrendous five storey 1950's brick built bottling hall that made Alcatraz look like a desirable holiday resort. Never got to go inside there, all padlocked and boarded. We had stopped brewing on site a couple of years before and rumour had it that there were rats as big as sheep in the catacombs beneath the maturation vats. Not making you nervous I hope.

All this lot was built around 'High Street'. The address sounded rather charming, maybe even possibly a bit of elegant half-timber lurking somewhere or at least a branch of Boots the Chemists. So first time visitors were unprepared for the dust storms in the deep sunless brick walled canyon swept continuously by chip paper bearing westerly gales. I even saw some tumbleweed once. Only joking.

Sites like that fascinate me. So full of ghosts. Men spent their whole working lives in that place, rolling barrels, scrubbing vats, writing invoices, loading drays, drinking beer pretty well all day every day. Doing serious work. And then suddenly all gone, a brick strewn wasteland, no brewers in white coats any more. Now it is a Morrison's supermarket, no doubt they have photos on the wall of the old brew house trawled by some in-store interior designer from the County Archives but we can give all that stuff a miss I think.

[The picture at the top of this blog shows the demolition of the bottling hall at Blackburn in 1986. What is left of 'High Street' is on the left. Courtesy of Lancashire Evening Telegraph/Cottontown Digitalisation Project]

'Durham First'

Got my University 'alumni magazine' in the post yesterday - 'Durham First'. It lands in the mail box twice a year and I find myself leafing through it for ten minutes or so before binning it. Professionally written but I can't say that I find it much of a 'good read'. It always feels so wretchedly self-congratulatory, I'm reminded of those jokes we used to make about Michael Howard setting off the 'smugness alarms' in TV studios. I know that this kind of publication is supposed to be like that, that it is what the Vice-Chancellor expects. What else could you want to write you ask? Well, they could always run a feature on the old place's performance in the latest Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) league tables for example. Up there still ranked at No. 83 'In the World' when I returned to study in 2003 and now well out of the 'Top 100' and slithering down to No.122 in 2008, just below Nagoya and just above Otago (which is somewhere in the 'colonies' I believe). But we turn a blind eye to that kind of reality at Durham, too challenging. We decline gracefully while enjoying our muffins in oak panelled tea rooms and reflect on past glories. Britain in microcosm eh? Our whole history and culture in the proverbial nutshell. Who wants to make trouble by saying "what the heck is going on here?"

A great feature of alumni publications, as with most parish magazines, is the journalistic 'heavy pun'. In this edition I see that the "Hockey Legend Charges Forward" and that there is a feature on "Moving Mountains" which is all about someone developing education on the Nullabor Plain. No! Only joking of course! It is surprisingly about Peru and Nepal. One item that really caught my eye is a piece on the new "Centre for Death and Life Studies" which has just been opened at the Department of Theology and Religion. The centre already has several major projects 'up and running' including one which explores the development of cremation is Scotland. This ground-breaking topic (if cremation can ever be considered ground-breaking) has just received a £320,000 grant from the Leverhulme Trust to fund a team of four experts and a Ph.D. research student. You think I'm kidding you a bit on this one don't you? Well, take a lookie here.

The thing that makes me wistful, even a bit sad, about this alumni magazine is not the University scrounging for my money (though it often does)on the hypothesis that education, to be good, must cost a lot. No, it is the feeling it attempts to convey of visions past and present of a jolly hockey-stick-waving and striving ambition world of youth that I feel I ought to have been a part of somewhere sometime but somehow wasn't. My life was much too full back then of late teenage angst, mountains of self-doubt and rivers of confusion. But I'm sure I was absolutely nothing special in this respect, pretty well everyone I knew around me seemed to be hitting life's panic button in one way or another. So this full-colour art-studio litho world of 'Durham First' is a subtle kind of a lie, another utopia destined to let us all down. If I want to be reminded of my college days, which I do now and again, let's have it straight please, the whole darn chiaroscuro picture. There would be a lot that could be really worth reading there.

In the blood

Looking at the 'Guardian' website this morning I see that the British Government has been unanimously found guilty by all seventeen judges sitting in the European Court of breaching human rights in the UK by enabling the police to retain DNA and fingerprint details of innocent people on a national database. It has come to a pretty poor pass when we have to rely on foreign judges to uphold what is left of our civil liberties in Britain but that is where we are now. Of course there is no guarantee, in fact probably no likelihood, that this awful government will actually take any notice of the judgement in terms of deleting records. The Home Secretary Ms. 'Jacqui' Smith has already called it 'disappointing' as if it is Europe's best legal minds that have been found wanting. Nothing might happen, but at least someone has clearly said "This is wrong".

The issue is that if the police in Britain arrest you for any reason (and in certain other circumstances too, for example to detail you to 'eliminate you as a suspect') they will take your DNA sample and fingerprint you. And then even if you are innocent they will 'retain' this information on the database. No need to charge you with any offence. It is impossible to get that entry removed. This has happened just this week even to one of our senior opposition MP's, whose office in the Houses of Parliament was also 'turned over' by the police without a warrant.

Someone on Henry Porter's 'blog' asked the question today "How is one inconvenienced by having one's DNA and fingerprints in a file? How does that breach your privacy?"

The old 'if you are innocent you have nothing to fear' card eh? Someone else who believes in fairies. But it is a straight question to which another contributor offered a very good answer too.

"Because they're my details. And therefore nothing whatsoever to do with anyone else. Its called a principle. I know there are few of them left. But some of us think they're important."

In my research I come across "The State" a lot and it has made me think a lot about what "The State" really is. You could write a long book on it, it isn't as obvious as it looks. The British or Japanese or American Federal "State" is an animal fundamentally different from a sense of being English or British or American, and we confuse the two things at our peril. The apparatus of government might or might not not be 'on my side' at any particular moment. If I am lucky and it is good government I owe it my allegiance. But it and I are different things and it has nothing more to do with my sense of personal identity than an organisation like Tesco's supermarkets has. We can easily see this when the State as an organisation becomes sufficiently corrupted and implodes as it has in Zimbabwe. Then the state becomes a dangerous animal and doesn't deserve allegiance at all. I feel Henry Thoreau sitting on my shoulder here and murmuring "welcome to the club".

I like to think that our British DNA is a bit special, traces of the authors of 'Magna Carta' lurking in the blood somewhere, a few red corpuscles from the likes of Oliver Cromwell, John Locke and William Wilberforce. We don't like compulsion.

When you walk the lanes and footpaths of your own country and feel the afternoon sunshine and breeze on your face "The State" seems a long way away but it is an illusion, the apparatus of bad laws and courts and hypodermic needles and fingerprint pads and prisons and the insolence of their apologists are always just a short car ride away. Impossible for it 'to happen here'? It already has happened, I know exactly how thinking Germans and Japanese must have felt in the early 1930's. I think our present Labour government in the UK has completely 'lost it'. It is frightening how far things have already deteriorated into forms of bureaucratic fascism spawned in the name of 'utopia' and I really feel ashamed of it. To use our Home Secretary's own words, I find it 'disappointing'.

Bedazzled

I was hunting through the drawers in the washitsu yesterday looking for my video of the film 'Bedazzled' to watch again. But then I remembered that both our 'multi-format' video player and old TV are 'on the blink' at the moment. I'll have to stow it in my case and take it back to the UK to watch.

I'm talkng here about the original 1967 version of the film starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Eleanor Bron, not the 2000 American 'remake'. In my view it is not only one of the funniest and most outrageous films from that era (Heck! MY era!) but also one with a lot of perceptive 'content' too. It has dated of course, most of that 'sixties' stuff has in one way or another. Good grief! Peter Cook must have been dead for fifteen years already! You are giving your age away just by knowing his name now. But it is still a 'five star' piece of creative work in my opinion.

The story is one of a 'Faustian' pact, a sale of souls for dreams. The Devil - Peter Cook of course - grants the love-stricken 'innocent' played by Dud Moore seven wishes in return for his soul, and then Dud uses them all up attempting to get the woman of his fantasies - a Wimpy waitress played by Eleanor Bron. And the deal is that whatever life he has selected for himself based on his final wish is going to be the life he is stuck with for all Eternity.

Many of the scenes in this movie have me laughing just to remember them. For example there is one where Peter confides in Dud how it was that he came to get kicked out of Heaven - how boring it was circling around God having to praise him all the time. You can find it on Youtube here.

During the course of the story Dud manages to use up all his seven wishes without ever getting what he wants. The Devil manages to deceive him every time, exploiting some 'loophole' that was left in the formulation of the original wish. The second wish for example was to be 'incredibly rich and famous' and so Dud instantly has all the tangible resources he could ever want to get his woman. But then then he is thwarted by the presence of a sexy young 'live in' tennis coach who suddenly appears on the scene to spoil the plan.

At last, in that all important final wish, he manages to exclude pretty well all possibilities of error. No other men around, he and Eleanor both love each other, neither of them is married and they are living in harmony in a quiet place in the country etc. The wish is granted and ... then he is transported to ... a nunnery! They all ALL women - he forgot to be sure to ask to be a man! Dud has become 'Sister Luna' in the Nunnery of "St. Bridget of Sussex" and these nuns praise the Lord by continuously trampolining. This will be his life for Eternity, to bounce up and down in a nun's habit!

I'm reminded of another of Dud Moore's comic characters, a vicar who was forever saying "Well, some of us think life is a bit like that!" We go on making those wishes every day but we never know which will be the 'last one', the spot at which there will suddenly be no more logs for the lumberjack to jump to next. I wouldn't mind being a monastic at all but I don't think my knees are up for much trampolining these days.

Yacs and Booth's on the same street?

Is this the right 'Yacs Drugstore' shop? I'm sure the one we left the car at wasn't a yellow building. And this wheel-chair of my mother's is getting very heavy, I've been pushing it for hours since I came out of that place where I seem to be committed to doing some carpentry in the loft. Somehow I think we are on the wrong side of Blackburn altogether, the 'Yacs' branch that I am looking for must be on that hill at the other side of town with the water tower on (but isn't that Luton?) I'll never push her up there! Perhaps there is somewhere that I can leave her in that Booth's supermarket at the bottom of this hill while I run up and get it. Yes, there is a nice care assistant here in charge of a kiddies play area but she wants to know if my mother will need to go to the toilet. In that Tibetan temple in the big old terraced house we didn't eat until the ceremony was over so she should be OK for another thirty minutes. Why is there a cat scratching and meowing at a door in a supermarket .....?

Anxiety dreams are bad enough, but 'international anxiety dreams' mixing up Yacs Drugstores of Chiba and Booth's Supermarkets of North Lancashire must be rare eh? Perhaps I'm the only person to combine these two in a cocktail of of low-flying worry. Maybe I can patent it and do some influential flying research on it - "International Correlations in the Spaces of Anxiety Dreams: Towards a Theory of New Geographies of Marxism and the Libido". You think I'm joking? You obviously haven't seen what passes for academic geography in some parts these days. I'd better not go there.

It must be .. um ... a week at least since I last had an anxiety dream, one of those 'feet stuck in treacle' 'Jacob's Joins' full of random worries regurgitated by my subconscious. I think I get more as I get older and the contents of this one - capacity of parent's bladders, ability to push heavy loads up hills, stoop down to work in confined spaces - is really "now I am sixty-one" vintage. isn't it? Always low level concern, I never meet a mad axe killer lurking around a corner or get my car stuck on a level (grade) crossing as the barriers come down in these nightly travels. At least we have the luxury of waking up from this kind of minor nightmare, that sudden 'start' and then you realise that it really IS a cold hungry cat hammering on the door and you can do something about it. You don't have to climb that big hill looking for a car you can't remember worrying about if your mum needs a pee or not.

What a relief.

Home Alone

'Home Alone' for a few days at the moment. Edera has gone down to Hiroshima to see her mum and dad so I'm here looking after the cats and doing my best to nail myself to this computer keyboard and write up my research.

It is quite an unusual experience for me. Her and I generally do most things together so here in Japan I probably get left by myself not more than once a year. Living on my own is more familiar as an English experience. Towards the end of my working life I lived alone for some years, and when I go back to Lancashire now when my daughter Julia is away from home working - which is most weeks - I have the place to myself too.

Some of my research has involved taking a close look at the rhythms involved in the use of urban space. Most people associate 'rhythms' with music but in fact you come across them everywhere. Biological rhythms are the most obvious - processes of breathing and digestion and sleeping for example - and the growth cycle of plants is always related to daily rhythms of photosynthesis and respiration. But there are endless less obvious and non-biological rhythms too. For example think how the processes of exfoliation and the chemical decomposition of paint on the walls of houses is driven by daily exposure to the sun. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre wrote an interesting book on what he called "Rhythmanalysis"

Our bodies only function properly when they establish good rhythms in daily life. They hate any lack of predictability as much as cats do, even though our monkey minds always crave variety. You only have to be knocked out by jet-lag for a few days to experience that one at first hand.

This few days on my own is reminding me how much we depend on others for maintaining those daily rhythms within ourselves, a lot of the strength of routine comes from the commitments associated with relationships. 'Living alone' is a very modern phenomenon, in traditional societies nobody lived alone and survived for long. Even if you were a widower you lived with your children or at the very least took part in the daily routines of the village with others. It was only when people moved to modern cities and waged labour that isolation became an issue and that 'your own time' at weekends away from the rhythms of work became commonplace. In Japan the word for 'free time' - hima - still has a rather bad feel to it, as in "The Devil makes work for idle hands". Whoever would want the vacuum of "free time"?

Within a week you can't get too far 'out of routine'. I've had my fun eating mountains of chips - but just three times! - and gone to bed and got up half an hour later than usual and had my main meal in the evening rather than at lunchtime once. Sinful stuff, someone in Heaven is making a note in that Big Black Book I'm sure. But if this was seriously 'living alone' again I can see I'd have to work much harder at it now I'm older to keep a grip on it all.

'Class' In Japan

Someone used the word 'Class' when they wrote to me recently - as in 'Working Class', 'Middle Class' and 'Upper Class'. I'd not heard it used for a while and it has had me thinking about how different are Japan and Britain in terms of such social distinctions. I often see Japan referred to by commentators as a 90% (or even 95% or 99%!) 'Middle Class Society'. In Britain, on the other hand, we are supposed to be obsessed by distinctions of class.

No space here to analyse "what class is" or say much about why it is more noticable in some cultures. It is certainly a fairly crucial part of social reproduction everywhere. All societies seem to have some kind of similar structures related to the transfer of power and influence from generation to generation. Oddly I never met anyone outside of my 'own class' when I was growing up and I kind of assumed that all that 'class stuff' was just a part of British history, perhaps because many of the British stereotypes of 'working class' life had vanished from the Keynesian world of my 'Grammar School' and the 'New Town' enviroment we grew up in. It was a big surprise for me in my first term at University when I heard my room-mate, the son of a bank manager from Stockport, describe himself to a social science researcher as "Upper Middle Class". He obviously thought that he was a cut above me! Huh? Later I often felt out of place a college gatherings, a 'Working Class' boy living somewhere 'above his station' in life. I had begun to discover my 'Working Class' roots eh? These things run very deep, it is about who you are.

When look at English history now I can see that our present ideas of 'class' started to emerge in Tudor times and have been transformed in every period in the way they are framed. The social role of class has remained the same, but the categories and 'rules of enforcement' have emerged organically - although hard up Dukes and Earls still do marry the daughters of rich industrialists.

I do experience Japan as rather 'classless'. In part this is because I'm just not noticing social distinctions. Of course those middle-aged doctor's wives in their kimono on the teatime 'Shiosai' down from Tokyo are as utterly 'Upper Middle Class' as their horsey English counterparts in their Range Rovers, but most Japanese people take care to avoid personal displays of status. And some of the distinctions we make in Britain - geographical segregation of housing for example - are nowhere near as strong here. One of the things I really like about Japanese cities is that you can get an elderly widow living on a pittance of a pension whose neighbour is a rich professional with a big 'Benz' in the car port and they still see it as quite natural to know and talk to each other. And on 'equal terms' somehow. A large 'tick' for Japan there from me!

But here's the big difference I think. Until the end of the Edo Period around 1860 a legal caste system - samurai, farmers, craftsmen and merchants - was enforced on Japanese society. It was very inflexible and didn't properly reflect the balance of power and influence and so an 'informal' parallel structure emerged. Then came a scramble for 'Victorian' Western-style social categories in the Meiji years, followed by the trauma of the thirties and forties. After the War everyone was moving from the land into the cities. Most of the old distinctions about reproducing structures of power and influence became irrelevant and people were, indeed, nearly "all Middle Class" in that new world. A pretty hard-up Middle Class too.

It's changing though, and education is the filter (and if you aren't rich how will you afford the education?). If your kids study hard, get to a good university, become salarymen, then they are the new 'Middle Class'. If they don't and end up doing 'arbeit' - casual work at 800 yen an hour - they 'aint!