Wanna vote?

I was asked today if I had a vote here in Japan. It is an interesting question, I wonder what you think the answer is? And if I had a vote, then could I stand for election? Be a local politician, even a member of the National Diet? Maybe I could even be the Prime Minister one day, it wouldn't be hard to make a better job of it than the current incumbent - in Japan or in the UK.

Well, I don't have a vote. The very idea would surely astonish 98% of all Japanese. How could I possibly vote, I'm not 'one of them'? So it's a question of race then? Oh no! Didn't mean THAT obviously ... we meant 'nationality' of course!

Whatever THAT means.

This question has started to interest me a lot recently, not so much because I really want to vote but it seems far from clear to me what the criteria should be. I understand that in Europe for example I could vote in local elections in any country I was living in, but not in national elections. So why could I vote in city council elections in Poland but not Japan?

After all I DO live here. And nobody in the City Office sent me a note to let me know that I don't need to pay my taxes any more, so how come I don't have representation? I use the same services as everyone else, drive on the same roads and my step-children used the same schools as my neighbour's kids. If you want people to play their part in the community then that surely includes political rights too?

Looked at on an international basis this is now an important question. In these days of so many mixed marriages and people living in countries they weren't born in who is to say that they should be disenfranchised? Time was when it was the poor people who rulers didn't trust with a vote. Now it is 'foreigners'. If you don't trust them to vote, why should they trust you? Or do you think that everyone should "live in his own country."

Well, all interesting questions, and ones that get asked more and more.

English speaker!

Someone visiting from the UK tomorrow and stopping at "Little House" for a couple of days. In fact they must be at the airport in 'Blighty' already, checking their case in. They are flying KLM via Amsterdam and I'll head over to Narita in the morning after breakfast to pick them up. The rain is already hammering down to wecome them. Only a month now and I'll be getting dropped off there myself for the plane back to the UK.

Whenever someone new arrives here it s always fun to give them a quick introduction to Japan. I remember that first time myself. We came on a Lufthansa plane - I felt confident enough in Britain but then when we were in the departure lounge at Frankfurt and it was suddenly about 350 Japanese travellers and us and not a word of English within earshot - back in the nineties there were far fewer Westerners flying than now - then suddenly I felt a bit nervous! It makes me laugh now because of course these days everyone I meet is Japanese, I can go months without coming across a Westerner face to face, one reason my Internet link is so important to me.

What advice do I give to new visitors? Well, it is easy to reassure them, Japan must be the safest country to be in anywhere and people wouldn't see you stuck, if you were obviously lost someone would help you. The biggest hazards I notice are mainly concerned with traffic rules. Watch out for cyclists because chances are they are teenagers busy messaging their friends on their mobile phones and they aren't watching out for you. Watch out on pedestrian crossings too because they aren't. In Britain cars stop for you, here the same road marking just means "this is a good place to cross". Oh! And unguarded drains where pavements should be, don't fall into one and break a leg.

The other advice I give is more along the lines of "don't be aggressive" (a virtue in England, a shocking loss of face here) and don't assume other people are being aggressive to you. In the UK for example a cyclist loudly ringing his bell is giving you a hard time, here it really is just a polite warning to take care because I'm behind you.

Anyway, a busy couple of days an lots of opportunities to speak in English! Back to blogging when I get a chance ...

Sleepless Night

Woke up in the night thinking about waves. My thesis is very much on my mind and it feels like a few ideas ripened and 'fell off the tree' while I was sleeping. Or maybe I'm more than a bit 'stressed out' this week, this compter hassle is getting to me badly. Anyway I put two and two together around one question I'd been worrying away at and suddenly an analogy sprang into my mind I'd not noticed in 'waking life'. Can't think why because it is bloomin' obvious but that is always the way of it, ideas creep up on you.

I've been giving my chapter on theoretical issues a strong 'process slant'. Process Philosophy has been a philosophical tradition since A.N. Whitehead really got it going in the early twentieth century but in fact if you look it goes right back to the Ancient Greeks of course - mainly Heraclitus but also in a way Plato too. How to explain it? Well, most of the time philosophers think about 'things' - trees, cats etc. But you can also turn it on its head and think about processes. It is the difference between 'Yonder flower' and 'Yonder florescent process" if you see what I mean.

What processes are is very subtle stuff, you could write a book on it. Oh Good Grief! I am! Anyway - they aren't just 'events' - events may partly make up processes but they are not the whole story. If you want a technical word for it they are 'spatiotemporal'. They exist and function - and only exist and function - in both time and space simultaneously. If you ever come across Xeno's Paradoxes in the bath, and especially the one about the flying arrow (is it just the sum total of being in many places sequentially or more than that?) then it is the same question of course. If I talk about a 'train' it is an object but how about the 17:20, the 822M Chiba to Choshi? Sure it is a bunch of carriages but not always the same ones and it isn't in the same place at different times - we hope.

How all this relates to change in urban geography will have to wait for another time. Not completely sure myself yet.

Anyway, the interesting link I made was the old water and waves analogy. Why on earth didn't that strike me before? I suddenly thought of the famous Hokusai picture "The Great Wave in the sea trench off Kanagawa". Of course water is substance and wave is process. The wave only exists as 'process', with infinite iterations in time and space over the surface of the sea. A wave is purely spatiotemporal.

But which is the 'most real' eh? Which has 'primacy'? Can you argue that waves can't exist without water? Or water without waves. It's an interesting picture "The Great Wave". Those guys are rowing for their lives up the face of the wave, existence is suspended on the cliff face of an awesome process. If you've never opened the cornflake packet in the morning and suddenly discovered this terror lurking withing the box yet don't worry, you soon will. AND also if it wasn't for the water in that tumultuous sea their boat wouldn't be floating there at all. But I don't think that means that process and substance have equal value. Nobody can tell you the answer to this one, you have to get it for yourself.

End of a bad weekend

Don't want too many weekends like THAT one. Made my usual sleepy way into my study on Saturday morning to check e-mail and the connection to the Internet wasn't working. It isn't an unusual problem, our old ISDN modem box has always been a bit unreliable, every month or so the date would get corrupted and need setting again before you could connect to the outside world. But this time no amount of switching on and off, plugging and unplugging would solve anything.

And no time to sort anything out either. Edera was teaching, I was rehearsing and then we were both performing on Saturday afternoon. By the time we arrived back here tired and cold even the power light wouldn't come on any more, our modem had had it. And that was when we realised that the phones weren't working either. To contact a student about a lesson we had to drive down to the railway station and use the telephone box outside.

Yesterday we had arranged to go into Chiba to listen to a big choir festival, but afterwards we got into Kobayashi Camera. There of course we learned that they stopped making our kind of modem years ago, nobody uses ISDN any more and you just can't buy the wicks for the methylated spirits burners either (only joking.) About an hour later we came out with a (not so) cheap and cheerful (and also slow and unreliable) 'lite' modem so that we could connect the phone and one computer for a couple of weeks until we got the new ADSL connection.

Well, there we go, I can't connect my own computer to the Internet any more but I can get my mail using the new Japanese Windows Vista machine that Edera uses. Now we have a fortnight of pain and frustration waiting for the new line to be connected.

Stressful stuff, I'm amazed how much it takes out of me, and I've been thinking about it a lot today. Time was - say fifty years ago when I was a child - when whole families set out on six week 'assisted passages' to Australia. They might write a weekly 'bluey' as my dad called them and maybe even get a three minute phone call 'home' at Christmas but most of the time they might never meet again the families and friends they kissed goodbye at Southampton or Liverpool.

So living in a far away country is very different now. "Time-space distanciation" is what we call it in geography - the way technology shrinks the world. But it is when the technology fails that you really realise just what a key part of your modus vivendi it is. My home life is here, I eat, sleep, take a bath and make music in Japan. But my academic and social life in English is largely on the Internet. If even one small electronic circuit fails that all collapses like a pack of cards.

Scary.

Things couldn't get much worse

Well, in computing terms anyway!

Our old ISDN modem died on us on Saturday morning taking out all the internet, email and phone connections. We can't replace it, it is obsolete, so we have had to go ino Chiba and 'trade up' to an ADSL link which might take 2 - 3 weeks for NTT to install. We have a temporary 'one computer' ISDN link partly working this morning thanks to Edera but my computer doesn't work on it at all and I can only get some incoming mail on our Japanese PC and not send mail out. Perhaps I'll open a temporary hotmail account.

Even this temporary link is dodgy and unstable! And we have to try and problem solve not just in Japanese, but also Windows Vista whih neither of us has used.

If you need to contact us urgently I suggest phone, which is now working OK, or Edera's email, which should work OK. Hopefuly Little House will get back to normal over the next day or two

Foggy trip

Foggy last night on the way back from men's choir. There was none in Naruto because the town is on a flat plain that runs down to the sea but as soon as you head up our valley and the forest closes in on each side of the tanbo then the fingers of mist soon appear. By the time I got back to the village and crossed the river it was quite dense.

We don't get fog like we used to, that's for sure. In Britain two or three times in the winter an anticyclone brings a few foggy days and endless accidents in the morning and evening on the motorways but when I was a teenager fogs - or in reality 'smogs' because they were serious exacerbated by smoke from domestic coal fires - were incredibly dense. If you think the air is polluted now you have no idea what it could be like fifty years ago before Britain's first "Clean Air Act" came into force in 1956. In the 'Great Smog' in London in 1952 more than 4,000 elderly people are estimated to have died from bronchitis and other respiratory problems. It was almost 1970 before even stricter legislation and a switch to gas central heating really solved the problem.

In the early 1960's I was living in Crawley in Sussex, a 'New Town' consisting of public housing all of which has been designed with coal grates in living rooms and coal boilers for hot water in the kitchen. In later housing that didn't happen and I seem to remember that even we had to use 'smokeless fuel' - a low sulphur coke - in the kitchen boiler. But we still got some extraordinary 'pea-soupers', especially in November

One evening I went over to a modelling club I was a member of which met in a building about two miles from home in Tilgate Forest. That was the thickest fog that I ever saw. It involved walking a long stretch of unlit arterial road with a cycle track on either side and that whole trip I'd guess visibility wasn't more than two or three metres. There were almost no cars attempting to travel and those that were crawled along at a slow walking pace trying to follow the kerb with their headlights.

There's something nice about fog though isn't there? Amazing the way the water vapour shuts out sound, it is like a cold blanket cast over the world. Everything shrinks into the narrowest possible field of experience and your senses become sharp, trying to make sense of shadows.

Social Reproduction

Some of the chapter of my thesis that I'm currently working on deals with social reproduction. Not the biological kind, but how 'society' remains roughly similar from generation to generation. If you think this is pretty obvious then an academic career is not for you. It is the kind of thing we love to analyse the socks off and when you get down to it, it is a very complicated question.

One of the main theories that I like - 'structuration' was thought out by the English sociologist Anthony Giddens. Unfortunately since I plumped for his point of view he has fallen heavily out of fashion thanks to his one-time association as an 'advisor' about ten years ago to Tony Blair. Now when I mention his name I feel like I'm saying something roughly the equivalent of "but apart from that Mengele had some good ideas on eugenics right?". Another great example of needing to pick your friends carefully eh? Giddens said that two important elements of reproducing social structure were 'rules' and 'resources' There are many different kinds of 'rules' but the most important are what might be treated as 'generalizable procedures'. As an analogy the formula a(n)=n2|+n-1 helps work out the next number to predict in a given series. It tells us what course of action to take next in a set of circumstances.

I head on the news yesterday that there are now 100,000 'pet blogs' in Japan so I'd better watch how much I write about our two felines in future. But recently I realised that Tora operates the perfect example of such a 'generalizable procedure' that has taken him years to perfect. In fact it is so perfect I'm thinking of patenting this as "Tora's Law". He has developed the profoundly irritating habit of diving between your legs and through doors every time you open them, as if he already had some urgent business in his head on the other side. He is clearly clueless most of the time, he trots purposefully for a few paces and then slows down wondering what to do next. Sometimes he insists on going out of the front door and in less than a minute is hammering on the French Window at the back to get inside again.

But if you think about it, this is a classic "generalizable procedure". Let's say that here on this side of the door we have a 'normal distribution' - 50% of the time it os OK to be here and 50% of the time it is better someplace else. BUT if you get through the door then there is a 33% chance it will be better, a 33% chance it will be the same and a 33% chance it is not OK. So on average feline life is bound to improve the more doors you scrape through, because there's a 66% chance it will be the same or better. Or something like that.

I guess this is a four-legged version of the "grass is always greener" principle. Of course it is not always greener, but the odds are that it either will be or at least just as green. I don't think cats are much interested in green grass though, unless it is in a sunny place.

Changed routines

We seem to have been 'under the weather' here at "Little House". Not that seriously, in the sense that we've been crashed out in bed surrounded by ice packs and thermometers and disinfectant, just the usual seasonal 'bugs'. And fortunately it is affecting our digestive systems too, no colds or sore throats. Keep your fingers crossed for us because that really IS important, we have a choir performance on Saturday. We had to drag ourselves to an 'on-stage' rehearsal with A-sensei for three hours last night. Being the only male in a choir of ten would make my absence kind of noticeable. Still, I'm not complaining, just me and nine ladies seems pretty fair 'odds'.

All this sickness has disrupted domestic routines though. I can't remember the last time I actually kept anything inside me for any length of time and feeling like wanting to eat is a distant dream. Thank goodness for Quaker Oats and rice porridge. I've tended to linger upstairs reading in my study and Edera has been sat in the washitsu with her legs in the kotatsu, a kind of low table with an electric fire inside.It's the Japanese version of Jewish mother's chicken soup.

Tora and Pero hate all of this. Dirty and furry objects like cats are (currently) barred from the washitsu. Whenever I go downstairs there are two pissed-off felines stalking around the schoolroom and kitchen expressing their pent up emotions about the collapse of domestic 'normality'.

And especially the lack of a kerosene heater in operation. Tora gives me those big-eyed sorrowful "What is happening here boss?" glances. To be honest I'm a hopeless 'softy', he just has to look at me like that and I turn it on for him for a bit, find a reason to hang about down there so that they don't feel like they have been abandoned. Pero isn't so interested in heat sources, she is just outraged that she doesn't have conjugal access to Edera's lap.

Interesting how much Tora understands about kerosene heaters. Of course he spends a lot of time looking at them in winter time, usually from about six inches away or even sitting on top of them. He guards ours carefully so that nobody can creep in and steal one. The other day I noticed that when our large heater did it's two-hourly "twinkle twinkle little star" tune routine to remind us that it was 'check for carbon monoxide time' and that we had to press the blinking button to tell it that we are still alive, Tora actually looked concerned, got up and came and touched me with his paw. No kidding. He must have 'sussed' that if I don't do something it will switch off and the nice blast of hot air will stop.

I was joking with Edera that it won't be long before he even learns to turn our smaller bathroom kerosene stove on. Quite easy for him really, he just has to push one lever with a paw. So maybe it's no joke, I'll come down one morning and there will be the familiar lingering smell of scorching feline and he'll be there in the ofuro in front of the fire on a cushion he's dragged in, 'shades' on and a martini in his paw, flicking through this month's edition of "The Mouser". He isn't called 'TC' for nothing.

si monumentum requires, circumspice

'Inauguration Day' at last then. Edera and I were watching the TV News at breakfast time and listening to the opinions of some young Japanese and it was striking just what an impact Barack Obama's inauguration was having on them. I've noticed the same thing with some of our students here too - in fact it is the first time I've heard any of them express any interest in politics at all. That's globalisation for you. (but not my spelling eh!)

Well, to be sure I really and one hundred percent wish him well on his 'Big Day' and for the next four years too. American politics was long overdue for some major changes and he was clearly the best candidate. Let's hope he fulfils some of the dreams of the millions who worked for his election in America and also the billions elsewhere in the world who have high hopes of him too. Like young Britons, young Japanese seldom express any overt interest in political matters. Japan is a society governed by an ageing bunch of 'fixers' who, though they may no longer wear two swords, are very much the great-grandsons (hardly ever of course the great-granddaughters) of their samurai forebears. I wonder if Obama will influence the long term make-up of Japanese politics too.

It was all very much on my mind yesterday. Nobody makes a perfect 'fist' of any big card game but it really is important that he is seen to make a reasonable go of it. If youngsters around the world are seriously let down by his kind of politics then what kind of politics are they going to turn to instead? When the going gets harder, the recession bites deeper and a lot more people have neither jobs nor money even for essentials. Especially young people with 'ideals' and energy.

We British are especially sensitive to this stuff with the recent shameful example of Tony Blair engraved on our minds and the current spectacle of Gordon Brown daily before us. How well I remember that sunny morning back in 1997, Tony and Cherie walking hand in hand from wherever it was they lived down towards Central London and Downing Street on the morning they won power. All the promise and delight of a Labour victory after years of Thatcher and Thatcherism. It was the social revolution we had all been longing for half our lives, a new dawn and the end of a long dark era in British politics.

Or so we thought. Ten years on and my personal view is that he overwhelmingly and cynically betrayed that dream for most of us. In fact he had never even shared it, he was simply a great 'talker', and then when we gave him the power he shockingly abused the trust we'd placed in him. Now long after he has skillfully vanished from the scene we are still stuck with the awful administration he persuaded us to vote into office.

During his last year in power Blair was for ever twittering about his 'legacy', as if he were planning to leave the nation some kind of priceless Faberge egg. People often comment that his 'legacy' was Britain's role in the Iraq War but in fact it is even worse than that. It is that we have completely stopped trusting politicians. That is Blair's legacy. We just don't ever trust them any more. If they say it is Wednesday, we reach for the calendar to look, if they say it is raining, we go outside and check for ourselves. Si monumentum requires, circumspice. If you seek his monument, look around you. Perhaps it was a valuable lesson after all and one learned with much less pain than the Germans and Japanese experienced in the nineteen-thirties

Often during the American election campaign and again over the last couple of weeks I felt my palms of my hands getting sticky at the sight of the Obama family 'in tow' and all those kind of 'Blair-style' details - the Christian conviction, the kids, the puppy. It felt like the recurrence of a looming nightmare. But then rationally I can see that nobody is ever going to get elected in America without that kind of stuff, it is like ticker tape and balloons.

And it looks like he's got some real substance there, I sure hope so.

Tony Hart

I see on the 'Guardian' website that Tony Hart died on Sunday. He was 83 and his health had been poor for some time following two strokes which left him without the use of his hands.

That must have been hard for him because he was a natural artist and just to watch him working was to realise that drawing was his life's passion. Not a 'serious' artist forever worrying the ontology of images and the like, but a real 'draughtsman', someone with wonderful co-ordination of hand and eye. It was a always a craft for him, something to be continuously perfected.

Tony Hart was best known as a presenter on children's TV, the man with the big smile and an easel or sketch pad who could talk with boundless enthusiasm about drawing even as he drew. I used to watch him as a teenager when I was studying for my art 'A' level and I found it hard to believe that you could actually talk and draw at the same time. People used to joke about Ronald Reagan multi-tasking when he managed to both walk and chew gum at the same time but Tony really could talk and draw simultaneously, for me drawing took my entire concentration.

In a way he made art look easy, but the message he managed to convey to kids was that it was "all right to have a go" and that if you worked at it you were sure to get better. There was nothing remotely pretentious about the way he presented the craft he loved, I had the feeling that he could have just as well have been enthusing about playing cricket or soccer.

Back in the sixties I must have been in the first generation that Tony encouraged to pick up a pencil and pen, later more exotic sketching media like charcoal and chalk and pastels. He was still going strong when both my kids watched children's TV in the eighties and early nineties, now with felt tips and acrylics. He must have encouraged thousands in his life time.

Gosh! It is a long time since I drew or painted a picture!

(photo courtesy of the 'Guardian Unlimited' website)

Remembered or Forgotten?

Recently I was reading some letters that I wrote more than forty years ago. It was a powerful experience from many different angles but one general point that struck me was how variable my memory was about many of the occasions recorded there by the 'young Iain'.

I've always believed that I had a good memory and, what is more, that it was improving with age. Certainly meditation brings up some very distinct recollections for me which can involve very specific details abut colour and smells from more than fifty years ago. Astonishingly detailed. So it was a surprise to me to come across references to things that I had completely forgotten about, just erased from my mind.

For example in one letter there was a reference to two concerts that I took part in. One I can remember in detail - where I stood and even I think the order of pieces we performed. I have no recollection of the other concert at all but there is no obvious reason why it has vanished, the must both have been equally important at the time.

So what is all that about? I keep meaning to read a lot more about the processes of memory. Henri Bergson wrote a lot on the topic in his book 'Matter and Memory' and it is very subtle stuff that I don't have the energy to write about it now. But how the process of memory is constructed and 'where memories are' is much more complex than you would imagine. If you thought that they were simply stuff filed away inside your head somewhere Bergson has a surprise in store for you!.

If I wasn't laid rather low with a chill at the moment I'd roll my sleeves up and sketch his ideas for you but it will all have to wait for another day I'm afraid.

Scissors and glue

Late post today, I seem to have a bad chill and I've slept most of the time. It brought to an end quite a good 'run' with academic work. This last few days I've been feeling that 'writing up' my thesis is going a bit better. Thank goodness! Really it has been a grim couple of months; often I come up here and just seem to fool around with a couple of sentences all day. It is easy to keep busy shuffling figures in tables and drawing maps but as soon as I need to write something with a bit of creative backbone I end up staring out of the window for hours, watching the trains pass by and the crows on the roof tops over the tanbo. Edera rings a little Swiss cow bell that I bought in Andermatt last summer when breakfast, lunch and tea are on the table (surely not that time already!) and I take a short nap after lunch and a walk mornings or afternoons but apart from that and a few weekly and monthly commitments it is just me and this darn laptop.

Around New Year time I felt some serious despair setting in, I was writing up some sections on trends in the Japanese economy 1975 - 199 and it was truly awful junk, I knew it myself. Boring, boring, boring. A mass of figures and disconnected sentences. The BULK was there, enough words to sink a battleship, but absolutely no quality.

What has made the difference this week is that I have gone back to the start - page one line one - and got some quality at last into the general stuff at the start and then got into the meat of the theory I have to think about. Inch by inch this is clearing my mind. I'd been working on the basis that I could shift the bulk of the 'bog standard' text first and then think about the theoretical context in the light of 'the facts' but actually exactly the opposite is true. If you don't have a clear road map in your head defining where you are going and why you won't write anything worthwhile, you really need the ideas clear. I suppose this is true of all creative writing - not just the content but the style and process too. A bit like calligraphy here in Japan - you have to 'know' with your body what that brush will do when it hits the page, once the process starts you can't stop and reconsider; hand, eye and mind have to flow and complete the event seamlessly.

Nice analogy but not really true, it isn't exactly like this either, because once the creative juices are flowing you are going back to work over many iterations. Laptops are hopeless for that, the temptation to re-work is like influenza. I wonder if Shakespeare knew exactly what was going to happen in his plays before he picked his pen up? What do you think? Well, of course he must have had the 'big idea' clear in his mind - Hamlet dies at the end of the story! - but maybe the details emerged. "Skull - jester - hmm, that might be a good one. Now let me think, where's the darn scissors and glue?"

Grenfell lookalike

A couple of weeks ago a group of us were playing recorders together and I was suddenly struck by just how much one of the players resembled the English comedienne Joyce Grenfell. To be accurate not so much Joyce herself as one the eccentric female characters she could impersonate so brilliantly. Some people are just amazing like that aren't they? Harry Enfield is another one who can do it. Somehow they draw the essence out of characters you've met a thousand times in the course of daily life and distill something wonderfully observed into just a few gestures and phrases.

It so surprised me that someone Japanese could remind me of Joyce Grenfell that I quite lost my place in the score trying to work out exactly what it was that had 'rung this bell' for me. It was partly a very slight air of 'scattiness' about her, that hint of a hair-do being marginally out of control, and a nervousness of movement. But then I realised it it was mainly the breathless way in which she kept saying 'iie, iie, iie' (no ..no..no) in a mildly self-deprecating way. She was the nice well-bred spinster of a dozen Grenfell sketches.

Good grief! It is thirty years this year since Joyce Grenfell died, it doesn't seem so long. I just took a look at her biography on 'Wikipedia' and I realise that although I often heard her on the radio and saw her on TV I didn't know much about her as a a person. She always managed to give the me impression of being a well meaning but scatty and even rather lonely middle aged lady. I'd never realised just how rich and influential her family was, not that she had a successful fifty year marriage. What an unusual background for a professional comedienne. But certainly a privileged upbringing ties in with that crystal clear voice of hers with a pure 'Recieved English' accent. She was a kind of peculiarly polite English version of Bob Newhart and could have me rolling around on the floor with laughter. If you have never heard her at work listen to her famous radio sketch of the distracted nursery school teacher (George! ... Don't do that!). You can find it here.

Toda trip

Over at Toda yesterday morning - a small hamlet about six miles from here. It's a huddle of buildngs along the margin of a sea of tanbo and the cold wind was blowing wave patterns across that rice stubble despite the strong sunshine. Should I button my coat up or leave it open? There's a children's story about that one.

Along one reach of the river we put a big crane up twice; he seemed resigned to us disturbing his fishing and flapped lazily on his way, looking for another sheltered spot in the sun.

There is a nice little country temple at Toda called Kongoushou-ji. It is next to the road on a sunny west-facing hillside with the forest and bamboo rising up behind. Amongst some much older, moss covered carvings that were hard to decipher there was a neat little row of Bodhisattva figures all wearing the usual red 'bobble hats'. A bit like the Seven Dwarfs that I wrote about a couple of days ago but only six of them, one for each of the Six Worlds. I had a feeling that they were old friends sitting on a bench waiting for us to turn up, a kind of a 'welcoming committee'. Part of the great gathering around the Buddha on Divine Vulture Peak that has somehow got displaced to leafy Chiba-ken.


"Wonder who the next beings through the gate will be?"

"Dunno, but someone will be along today. Or if not today then tomorrow."

Jizo - Khstigarbha Bodhisattva - was the tallest of the six He comes in many shapes and guises and in Japan often he features as either the 'patron saint' of children and travellers or takes on the form of a monk with a shakujo - a long staff with a head comprising of six rings to symbolise each of the worlds of spiritual experience. This Kshtigarbha was none of these specific forms, just gentle faced and patient, ready to 'aid each being according to his own weaknesses'.

According to the Kshtigarbha Litany that is his promise. If even at the gates of the hottest Avici hells you can just remember even one sentence of teaching then he will grab hold of you and help you find the rest, become 'whole' again. It is a profoundly optimistic vow, it points to acceptance and moving on, even the most extreme anguish doesn't last forever. But seeing the magnetic attraction the hottest hells seem to hold for so many people I think he has his work cut out.

In future if any beings have karma that brings them to into hell:
If such a one can remember the name of one Buddha - or one Bodhisattva -
Or one passage or even one sentence from the Mahayana Scripture,
If such a being - when he or she shall reach the gate of hell:
Through your supernatural powers you should lead such a being
Out of all sufferings. Show them your various transformations
And bring them to salvation to enjoy supreme bliss.

Walking off excess

To the doctor's yesterday for my monthly 'long-term' blood sugar checkup. Interesting how this event has shaped my life over the last few years, by inches I have come to take unseen but risky levels of unabsorbed glucose more seriously. It is S-sensei that has worked this miracle, he's a serious doctor, there is no kidding him about anything and he is an uncannily astute observer. I don't always do what he says but he certainly manages to apply subtle - in fact not-so-subtle - pressure when it comes to eating habits.

That doesn't mean to say that I don't ever misbehave on the grounds of "whose body is it anyway?" of course and this Season of Excess has been a good time for some dodgy eating. Not so much out-and-out venal sin like milk chocolate and condensed milk, more your 'broad and easy road that leads to the leafy bonfire' stuff, excessive dairy products (our code word for 'cheese' eh?) and bad carbohydrates - crisps and the like.

So when blood test time looms - which I have to endure to get more medication - then I get busier than usual with exercise. And so it was yesterday. Being a fine morning and a day off we took a hike up a very remote yato a few miles from here before heading for the surgery.

If you aren't sure what 'yato' are, basically they are a very distinctive form of long, sinuous and narrow valley that are ubiquitous around this part of Japan. A few thousand years ago most were flooded and so the valley bottoms are flat and fertile - perfect for growing rice. What is so nice about the yato areas of this part of leafy Chiba-ken is that they are an absolute maze, without a map you would be lost in a minute. And usually very unspoiled - just rice fields and cedar forests around the low steep slopes. That's mechanisation of course - this land was worked by the great grandparents of those who now work in offices in Tokyo or factories in Chiba-shi. Yato are very much man-made but then so are most beautiful rural landscapes

I always find the essential loneliness of these areas a big part of their charm. In April you see elderly farming couples with small tractors ploughing and planting rice but through most of the year they are left alone, acres of stubble or ripening grain.

Edera and I really enjoyed that warm sunshine. It doesn't last long - a chill sets in and the frost returns the moment the sun goes down but it is a hint of warmth in future, the sun returning and nature awakening to the new year.

Half of 'Snow White'

Just watched the first half of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' again last night. The rest will have to wait until another quiet evening. I spotted a copy of the DVD in the local bookshop in Togane for 500 yen. It is one of the later 'remakes' of course, I think from 1987, not the black and white original. But it was still fun to watch and after a very tiring day a bit of that kind of fantasy was what I needed. Good grief! Life has come to something when I'm watching Disney cartoons to relax! Don't tell anyone whatever you do!

I think the 1937 version was probably the first film I ever saw when I was perhaps four years old. We used to have a tiny picture house in Barnard Castle - the 'Scala' down at the bottom of Galgate, one of those places with only one projector so you had to sit there while the projectionist changed the reels. In the 1950's it was probably quite a nice little earner, catering for the soldiers based at Deerbolt Camp just on the other side of the river. Now it is a small convenience store. Well, that's where I saw Snow White first and got my first rush of adrenalin at the sight of the Wicked Queen. She's still scary. That talking mirror reminds me of the use of identity cards but I won't get onto that one this bright cold morning.

Edera hadn't seen the film before. That's something I really notice about us - how we don't share much in terms of childhood and teenage experience of stories. No Beano here, no Uncle Mac, no Yogi Bear, no Desperate Dan and no Bilko. What was everybody doing with their leisure time and what did they talk about at school I wonder? Mind you, there is also a decade in terms of time as well as seven thousand miles in terms of geography between our childhoods and perhaps that is even more significant when it comes to what kids saw and read. And ten years later still it had become a much more 'globalised' landscape in respect of children's culture. Some of the things that I loved to listen to as a seven year old aren't even in the archives any more. I've been trying for years on Internet nostalgia sites to track down the signature tune that they used for "Adventures of Toytown" on the BBC Home Service Children's Hour. You know - the trumpet bit - diddly dum da dum diddly dum da dum. You don't? Good grief!

The thing I love in Snow White is the "Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho!" song. I sing it relentlessly around the house when I'm washing the dishes, hoovering the schoolroom and cleaning the toilet. Yep! It is my theme song. I'm getting to the time of life when I sould seriously start thinking of suitable epitaphs because nobody else will and maybe that would be a good one.

Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho!
It's off to work we go!
With a shovel and a pick
And a walking stick
Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho!

Well, maybe on a tombstone you would need to change the words a bit. The shovel and the pick might come in handy but a torch might be more useful than a walking stick. Oh! I feel an idea for a radio programme creeping up on me here ... which seven things (apart from the Bible and those collected works of Shakespeare of course!) would you take into your coffin ... more about that another time.

An odd view of 'institutions'

Had my nose in 'Wikipedia' yesterday. When you use it for reference it has all the worst aspects of HTML eh? Once you start clicking those darn hypertext links in articles to check on a term, and then another and another! Sooner or later you end up over the hill and far away and you have quite forgotten what you are meant to be doing.

I was writing about 'social reproduction' and I wanted to see what they had on 'institutionalisation'. Institutions - marriage, money, the Church, that kind of thing. But to my surprise I found just one sentence on the topic - "the embedding of norms, values, relationships and patterns of interaction" - and then about a thousand words on the history of British Mental Hospitals. Of course it is one kind of 'institutionalisation' - one of about a thousand kinds.

But someone had got their teeth into it and written half a book on the subject. And it was all what I would call "if only little Jeannie hadn't been playing on the tram tracks" stuff. The more I read the more depressed I felt. On the discussion page another author summed up my own feelings exactly. He had written "I do not agree with your premise that this is the meaning of institutionalisation. You have attributed a specific negative meaning derived from the word's negative (historical) connotations in Great Britain".

I've noticed this tendency often before with Wikipedia. Contributors with 'axes to grind' giving material a completely unnatural meaning and taking angles that pass judgement on persons, processes and events in history. I was slightly reminded of a cruelly observed portrayal that the English comedian Harry Enfield based some sketches on, of a German student in an anorak trailing around London after groups of embarrassed tourists apologising for war crimes. Nobody had asked him to do it, it was just something he felt compelled to do.

If you study much history you soon realise that 'rewriting history' is in fact what history is mainly about. You can't help doing it because the very act of writing involves reinterpretation of facts. But swilling bucketfuls of guilt in all directions based on interpretations that even if it they are valid now were meaningless at the time is something different. Seventeenth century cavalry horses suffered terribly in battle but I don't think this means we should remember Oliver Cromwell primarily for animal cruelty.

Lurking somewhere in this for me is a question that I find very difficult to answer about where blame and consequence begin and end. I bear no responsibility for British atrocities in the Opium Wars against China because I'm 'British' any more than I do because I have 'black' (well, OK, white!) hair or brown eyes. I wasn't even born then - honest! And yet we do reap karmic consequence from seeds sown by others

Dondoppi Evening

Our local 'dondoppi' here yesterday evening, the big bonfire held on the little field just across the rice stubble just behind our houses. Somehow it is always a beautiful evening when it is lit, and last night was no exception. Lots of frost on the grass and a big moon rising over the cedars in the woods on the opposite side of the valley, it could have been an illustration by Hokusai. I spotted the local volunteer fire engine over that way earlier from my study window but I think the lads were giving advice on lighting the big stack of bamboo branches rather than worrying about putting anything out. Just the one can of kerosene, that kind of thing.

We went across for a while, took some of the New Year decorations to burn. That is the purpose of the 'dondoppi', it is a kind of a ritual fire to dispose of old things with some kind of a sacred value attached, a sort of a spiritual cleansing. But also fun, especially around here. Our local fire is a big one, we have a good committee for sorting out that kind of thing. Lots of soup and beer flowing and mochi rice cakes being cooked in the heat on sticks. Even in many of the more rural districts around here such events have often become a thing of the past. I think what works in our local area is that there is a good balance of old residents and newcomers and the two tend to mix very well. I wonder what makes that kind of thing happen in some places but not others? Just luck I suppose, a matter of how extrovert the older families are and how prepared to join in newcomers turn out to be. I know of other places around here where there seems to be absolutely no mixing at all.

Anyway las night there were plenty of happy and sometimes rather inebriated residents happily chatting around the fire. A lot of people came over to talk to me and a lot of the time I had only a rather hazy view of what they were talking about about but it didn't matter, they just wanted to be friendly. And later on I went to help someone out with an Internet problem and he chatted nineteen to the dozen too about his recent trip to Thailand and he just wanted to be friendly too.

I do notice in myself though a growing tendency to be reclusive. I always was a classic 'introvert' in some respects, I always enjoyed meeting and talking to others but it drains my batteries like someone has shorted my terminals. I have to build my energy up either alone or just with people or animals I'm very close to. So it felt yesterday evening, I enjoyed it all AND I got back here feeling like I'd been in a heavyweight boxing match.

I'll have to watch it, not let it become even more a part of my character. Being on your own is OK but only some of the time eh?

Blair Mayne Reading

I always try and read something a bit more entertaining when I go to bed, if not fiction then at least something with a bit of a narrative to it. It tends not to be for long, out of kindness I turn the light off after ten minutes or so. 'Her Indoors' seems to 'crash out' in seconds these days, slumped over the counterpane with her nose buried between the pages of some book on kimono she had planned to read. I never saw anyone fall asleep so fast. So to get through a whole 'bedtime read' book can take me a week or more.

Recently I've been working through "Rogue Warrior of the SAS: The Blair Mayne Legend" by Martin Dillon and Roy Bradford. Julia bought it for me for a Christmas present and it has been a good read. She sent it because my dad was a soldier in the SAS back in World War II and Paddy Mayne was his commanding officer for some time. She hoped I might find some references to my dad in it but as it turned out I can only find one - he is included in a list on page 253 of men parachuted into the Autun area on 10 April 1945. If you'd listened to him you would have thought that he'd run the entire regiment pretty well single handed! He once told me that he'd proposed me as a member of a 'Blair Mayne Association' he was involved with but I'd been refused. Having read this book I don't think I would have 'fitted in'.

Military biographies generally aren't very well written but this one is rather well presented. Blair Mayne was a complex character and that really is apparent from the chapters of the book. It must have been rare for an officer of his stature to have seen so much literally 'hands on' fighting and survived. I didn't add them up but between his operations in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany he must personally have killed several hundred enemy soldiers at close quarters. He died himself in a car accident in Northern Ireland in the 1950's.

As a statistician there was something I found deeply puzzling about it all. Even assuming a significant advantage in terms of strength and skill by all the laws of probability the chances of him surviving so many lethal encounters should have been infinitesimal.

What is at work there? It was undoubtedly in part exceptional instincts, agility and speed. But I think one factor must be that in such extreme situations of close combat with automatic weapons fear makes almost everybody's attention slip, if only around the margins. With the rush of adrenalin the instinct to keep firing is there but the accuracy and purpose wavers. He must have been one of the very exceptional people that just kept a very cool head in those situations, continued to make every action, every bullet count with complete concentration. That preserved his life.

Aso on Work

I see from the 'Japan Today' site that Prime Minister Aso has been at it again this week. Just before the holidays I relayed here his opinions on old and sick people and now he's out there telling us all how we should all be more like the Japanese and work a much harder. At a parliamentary committee meeting on Thursday he told surprised listeners that Japan's belief in hard work contrasted with the Judeo-Christian tradition. "Our values in Japan regard hard work as important. To work is good. It is completely different thinking from the Old Testament"

It is no flash in the pan, last month he expressed similar opinions. “In the Old Testament, God gave Adam punishment: labor. The Old Testament, Christianity, Islam—if you add them up, what percent of the world is that? About 70% of religions hold a philosophy that work is a punishment.” In the 'Kojiki' on the other hand, a book which includes Japan's creation myths, the Sun Goddess saw many other deities working unpaid overtime and took the hint.

This kind of thing might go down well with inebriated retired farmers and shopkeepers in constituency bars but he clearly has no idea how it would play to the foreign tabloid media if they got their hands on it. And If I were Aso I'd be a bit bloomin' careful about what I said about Japanese views on hard work. His personal fortune comes from the family mining business in Kyuushu which 'employed' 300 prisoners of war and also Korean slave labour back in 1945, the details of which the Foreign Ministry and Home Ministry seem very reluctant to talk much about. Seems like a cue for anyone with an ounce of brains to keep quiet about the virtues of Japan's taste for 'karoshi' - working yourself to death - a fate suffered each year by thousands of salarymen here whose bosses don't know those three little words 'go home now'.

And the other surprising thing about these outbursts is that Aso is supposedly a Catholic. It isn't for me to tell a cobbler how to mend shoes but I can think of at least half a dozen references in the Bible to the merit of hard work. In my favourite book - Ecclesiastes - we find for example "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom." (9:10). Now there's a quotation you could display behind any company president's desk here. Mind you, a bit earlier the writer does say "One hand full of rest is better than two fists full of labor and striving after wind" (4:6), something the Bank of Japan might consider as a new motto for the 1000 yen banknote

There again, might want to also bear in mind the bit in the New Testament about "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." (Matthew 6:29-30) I don't recall Jesus adding "Or even better you could work your nuts off uncomplainingly like the Japanese do" afterwards.

Does he take sugar? Again.

That's twice now in two days! Wednesday morning at the bank and then yesterday afternoon in a lesson here. People acting as if I'm simply not present - incredible!

Wednesday it was while seeing one of the managers at my local bank. A transaction hadn't come through from the UK and we needed to check if there had been a problem at this end so we both went down to our local branch. Japanese banks thankfully don't go in for so-called 'service desks' to the extent that British ones do. All the way through the three way discussion that took place the guy had his eyes glued nervously to Edera like I simply wasn't there. That verse from "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" kept popping into my head and I had to work hard not to laugh ...

Like one who, on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head
Because he knows a Fearsome Fiend
Doth close behind him tread!

That was me alright. A fearsome fiend. Us gaijin are even scarier than we look eh? I bet he lay awake half the night thinking about it.

Well, he may have had the 'excuse' that he wasn't used to dealing with foreigners and foreign banks but yesterday's episode was even weirder. A very educated lady came for an occasional lesson with Edera involving help with a translation. One of these strange cases where she is a quite high standard translator from English to Japanese but actually seems not to speak English confidently. Her forte is knowledge, not fluency. I was making a cup of coffee around the corner in the kitchen and I got dragged willy-nilly into a discussion as to the exact meaning of a reference to a 'narrow counter'. Was it 'narrow' side to side like book case or front to back like and ironing board. Well, I gave them my best shot at nuanced interpretation but even before I'd finished talking they were at it in Japanese explaining and debating it like I didn't even exist. As if from very expensive electronic dictionaries they could deduce a logic in the phrase that for a native speaker just wasn't present.

What is going on there? I'm aware of doing it myself sometimes, giving Edera and explanation for a student when the person concerned is sitting about fifteen degrees to the right just out of eye contact. Everything to do with 'transmission of meaning' of course but why don't we look at the people we are talking about?

I'm reminded of that classic well-meaning phrase used so often about handicapped people that it has even become the title of the weekly programme for the visually and physically handicapped on BBC Radio 4

"Does he take sugar?"

No he bloomin' doesn't!

The Good Companions

We took a break at choir last night to think about what we'd like to do in the future. What sort of music we want to sing this year, if there were any specific pieces we wanted to sing and what local music events we want to take part in? One of our members had prepared a questionnaire to help collect all these opinions and some of the questions made me smile a bit. For example one was "as we are all getting older do you think we should have our 'fifteenth anniversary' concert a bit earlier" or something like that. Good grief! We just had our tenth! But we can't expect our voices to last for ever, we ought to know the time to 'hang up our gloves' when the moment comes. Still, there is life in most of the 'old dogs' in this group yet!

Because it might influence the music we choose to work on this year I put a short report on the table about the prospect of a 'choir trip' to England in June 2010. Will it happen? I'd say the odds are about fifty-fifty. Five members including Edera and I are keen but most of the rest are concerned about price, family and work commitments etc. The whole question is a kind of microcosm of the dynamics of social interaction involving voluntary projects. The relationship of 'movers and shakers' to 'watchers', 'glass half full' and 'glass half empty' people and all that stuff. And trying to give some leadership and direction on the possibilities in a second language and different culture - phew! But it is interesting.

My 'gut feel' is that within the core group interested the enthusiasm is such that it will probably happen and we will maybe pick up two or three extras along the way. Two sopranos, a 'mezzo' doubling tenor, an alto and a bass - that is enough to make a really nice sound if you work at it! And then there's the possibility of working with other singers in England.

The important thing at the moment is to develop a realistic vision of what might be possible. I'm sure one or two have a subconscious desire lurking in their hearts if not actually to hire the Royal Albert Hall then at least to stand in some lesser spotlight. That isn't how I see this at all. First and foremost it has to be a party of friends out to make music for the fun of it, discovering the deepest pleasures of making harmony together. That requires real effort to achieve I think, to learn to just relax and enjoy you have to work at it. No looking down off tightropes.

Lying in bed last night J.B. Priestley's novel 'The Good Companions' jumped into my head. Maybe there is a kind of ageing 'Jess Oakroyd' lurking in me, ready to escape to the road for one final 'concert party' in life eh? But unlike the hero in the book I can't emigrate at the end of the story. I already have.

Fujin

Usually in old temple gateways here in Japan there are representations of Buddhist deities on either side of the entrance, often very old wood carvings and in the country still brightly painted too. They are set there to protect the site against evil influences, and if I was an evil influence myself some of them would certainly scare me off. One of the favourite deities assigned for this task is Fujin, the God of The Wind. In Hindu mythology he is known as Vayu, and he arrived in Japan travelling along the Silk Road and through China. He is related to the Greek Wind God Boreas too. In the picture here he is sitting at the entrance to a small rural temple at Ohara here in leafy Chiba-ken.

Fujin usually has the four winds trapped in a sack that he carries over his shoulder and which looks like a long sausage or maybe part of some celestial bagpipes.

The moving wind. On of the five elements of physical reality in Mahayana philosophy. In the street Fujin gently touches your cheek on sticky August afternoons, sitting reading a book in the morning sunshine he surprises you by singing a brief sweet song outside the partly open window. Is there anything more wonderful than the presence of wind? Unseen beings ride on his shoulder, things we cannot possibly know and why should we? Heraclitus said that 'it is better for men that they not obtain all they wish'.

Once, in Orkney, in a winter storm, Fujin picked me up and carried me right across the street. If the joke had gone any further he would have thrown me into the harbour but he was content to leave it at smashing a pane of glass in the facade of the Kirkwall Hotel instead and sending lobster pots careering into parked cars before moving on in a laughing blizzard of dry leaves and salt spray and old newspapers.

I love fierceness, the fierce aspect and face of things. Makes my heart sing and dance. What would life be without fierceness?

So much for Guardian Deities.

Moustache-free politicians

This last few days I seem to have been coming face to face with this DPJ election poster everywhere I look around here. Seeing so many around says something about the current state of Japanese politics. This is a traditional 'pork barrel' and 'look after the farming lobby' constituency if ever there was one. But now the ruling LDP (Japan's equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher) is even more unpopular than Labour in the UK if such a thing is possible. So for them the rash of 'Democratic Party of Japan' posters in a rural area is not good news. Maybe Japan will at long last move to the left this year.

So many interesting differences compared with Britain lurking here. The first is the use of the image of a politician at all. I'm sure that if you put up posters like this in the street in England they would be defaced within ten minutes. Every child capable of wielding a felt tip pen would be adding moustaches and spectacles and adults would be scribbling obscenities. Basically we really hate politicians now back in Blighty, even the image of their smirking faces is enough to have us foaming at the mouth and cursing. Traditionally in Britain we showed our support for candidates by putting their poster in the front window but to display a 'Labour' poster now in many areas would be to invite a half brick through your glazing.

I've never once seen a defaced election poster here. Partly this is because people in Japan are just much more polite and respect other people's property, even posters of politicians they don't agree with. But also politics is somehow much more focused locally on individual people. In Japan it really is the 'local man' who makes the running, it is the man you vote for. The story line is about him as a 'fixer' about how he struggled to get the cash for that local project from those bureaucrats up in Tokyo. National manifestos don't count for much and faceless central party officials don't easily parachute their candidates into constituencies. In Britain now we don't even use pictures of people any more. We are shown 'logos', images like red roses and blazing torches and meaningless slogans and promised on huge posters are thrust on us at election time.

By the way, don't you think that the DPJ leader Ozawa Ichiro (pictured on the left above endorsing his local candidate) is a 'dead ringer' for the UK politician Ken Clarke (below)?. Well, maybe Ken Clarke ten years ago. And not only the man but the politics are rather similar too.

They shut the road through the woods

Took advantage of the sunny weather yesterday to hike down to Naruto. It was my second long walk in two days and I ended up with sore feet. I have to keep the pressure on a bit with this fitness programme that I've set for myself and this is a good time of the year to 'tick off' several places on my local 'to see list' too. But at the same time I have to keep the balance with getting academic work finished. Next winter I hope to do a lot of walking.

Neither of these two recent walks ended up as planned because some lanes and forest tracks that I'd planned to use no longer existed. There they were clearly marked on the local large scale map but on the ground the road just ended with a barrier warning me not to tip garbage. 'Did they ever exist?' I wondered Certainly they must have dropped out of use ten or more years ago to have been so completely erased from the landscape. It takes a while for cart tracks to vanish even here in leafy Chiba-ken where the 'shrub layer' in woodland grows a metre or more every year. It reminded me of that classic poem by Kipling

"They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods "

In England we have an ancient footpath network which, despite the best efforts of many farmers and landowners over centuries, we have managed to keep substantially intact. Here in Japan that kind of network doesn't exist at all. It never did, there is not the same concept of a 'right of way' across land. Once you leave the well established public highway it is very 'hit and miss' in terms of what you will find by way of walking routes. And long distance walking hasn't seriously caught on in Japan at all - yet.

This general lack of footpaths is very much a matter of economic history. Before the twentieth century almost everyone lived and worked in a village and around here the way to and from work was the lane that ran along valleys between villages following the tanbo rice fields. Before electricity and Western technology in the form of pumps brought reliable water supplies to plateau areas and enabled hatake 'dry field' farming who would ever need to go up to those wild areas of forest and heath that occupied the higher ridges except in winter for firewood, building timber and hunting? So regular footpaths just weren't needed much.

As I discovered, yet again, yesterday, when I had to retrace my steps for a mile back down into the valley and to the river instead.

People with procedures

I have followed closely the debates on the introduction of ID Cards in Britain. Here in Japan I have to carry one in my wallet. I don't like it but it is my choice to be here so there is some element there of "When in Rome". I don't intend to write about this topic here, other than to say that I think it is the most objectionable and dangerous political project to threaten the UK in my lifetime. I will work unrelentingly against it until the scheme is finally buried however long that takes.

The real driver behind this project is not politicians - who simply seize on any fashion they think might buy votes or advance their powers - but the 'bureaucratic-information technology lobby' which is every bit as powerful as the 'military-industrial lobby'. In Britain even more so. These make, like fire and lawyers, good servants and bad masters. But the idea of 'service' is far from their tidy and systematic minds. What they want are lucrative government contracts and more administrative powers.

For most of my working life at the brewery I was cordially disliked by our IT Director and many of his staff. I was perceived as a troublemaker to the extent that a few times they even conspired to get rid of me. The problem was that not only didn't I buy into their agenda of control or follow their processes and procedures but I often had sufficient skills to circumvent them and do their job when they didn't. Leaders of large IT teams, whatever they pretend, don't see it as their role to 'facilitate' the business but primarily to act as rule-setters and policemen. Show me a true 'IT Professional' and I'll show you a man or woman who can't live with an untidy desk. In part this is absolutely valid - you don't want just anyone fooling around with business processes like invoicing systems. But only in part eh? There is no perfect 'sales prospecting system' or 'brand promotion system' to be invented for example. These depend on people with originality, flair and commitment. The mistake 'controllers' always make is to assume that there is such a thing as an ideal 'steady state' system to discover or define.

There isn't. Everything changes. There are no 'steady states' in the world.

If I'd done the studies I'm doing now while I was still working I could have articulated the errors that were being made so much more easily. They were trying to impose crude 'Taylorism' believing that you can de-skill every kind of work into structured tasks by defining a kind of tidy programmed process. Then you can pay less to have that job done and maximise profits.

Moonshine. This is why we suffer from such dreadful so-called 'service-desks' in British companies. Even worse, at a time when Harvard was planting such recycled 1920's era conventional wisdom into our senior directors minds on 'high-powered' and very expensive business courses the real 'leading-edge' companies here in Japan really were creating effective business processes and had been for twenty years. But not for the short term with this year's balance sheet in mind. And who do you think is the most successful car manufacturer now? Ford or Toyota?

Well, at least in retirement I don't have to worry about all that any more. But I certainly have to worry about some clown out there actively planning to micro-manage the lives of my children and grandchildren with the help of database technology. As usual, the really evil things are always done with the best of intentions. The world is not going to be taken over thanks to the nuclear weapons of megalomaniac dictators hidden on Pacific atolls. But if we don't get wise soon it will be hijacked by men in office blocks in Reading or San Jose with manuals of procedures.

DNA Chickens

Spent part of yesterday evening filling in some rather distant gaps on my 'family tree' and also following up a thread on someone else's. I can get very absorbed in this kind of work, skating back through the historical records available on the Internet. Actually I have to ration myself to an hour or so of that kind pleasure or it gets to be a bit of an obsession with me. My policeman's mind at work there, I love to unearth 'the truth' from the fragments of evidence, and I have learned a lot of the tricks and skills of this kind of craft from working on my own family history and also helping others.

To follow a 'tree' back you usually need to hop between birth, marriage and death records which give details of specific events and census records which give 'snapshots' of households at different times. So if you want to trace back from 'John Smith' for example you might look for him in say the 1881 Census. There he is 32 years old and married to 'Jean Smith' aged 30 and then you have their ages and the age of the oldest child in the household, Tom Smith aged 11. Look at the marriage registrations for say twelve or thirteen years before that and there you have John Smith marrying Jean Jones, and now you have the next thread out. Look further back and you get their parents. And if you are lucky so it goes on until you hit the earliest records around 1840. Beyond that you have to use different resources and skills.

Usually the most difficult part of a 'tree' is what happened between the 1901 Census and the earliest surviving 'living memories' in a family - now typically from the 1930's or 1940's. In Britain we have a '100 Year Rule' of confidentiality on census records so if you don't know something about your recent family this chasm between the present and public historical date might be impossible to bridge.

One thing that stuck me again yesterday following a family thread running through four generations in the nineteenth century in Somerset, Wiltshire and Berkshire was just how deeply 'predictable' the sociology of reproduction used to be. Maybe it still is but in less programmed forms. Life was just so short then. Almost everyone I checked out yesterday married between seventeen and twenty one and was a parent in less than two years. I sometimes get the sense, if not of randomness, then certainly powerful arbitrariness at work in selection of mates and life courses. We experience it as 'falling in love', the biological imperatives at work in us aren't obvious to us at the time in that fever of early adulthood.

I sometimes read popular science articles where DNA is presented as "our" template for reproducing "our kind" from generation to generation of human being. But I always want to turn that one around on its head and say that "we humans" are simply the template that DNA uses to reproduce itself from iteration to iteration. It is a classic 'chicken and egg' situation isn't it? It is also a door to a different level of understanding too, I'm sure of it.

'purikura' time

With the girls home for New Year I got dragged off for a 'family portrait' by Chi-chan and one of her friends last night. Times were - I remember them well! - when one of those would have involved a photographer with a Hasselblad and tripods and studio lighting. But what they had in mind yesterday was a visit to a 'purikura' booth over in Togane. If you have never seen one of these - and if you live outside of Japan you probably haven't - then 'purikura' is short for 'purinto kurabu' or 'Print Club', a form of picture-taking that is based loosely on the sort of photo booth that we have in Europe for passport-sized photos. But there the resemblance ends, 'purikura' booths are big enough to hold several people - usually giggling girls - and contain enough computing hardware to run a space shuttle. This will edit and transform your images at a touch of your electronic pen. When the first 'purikura' was opened fifteen years ago it printed off small photos but now that is all digitalised - your handiwork is sent directly to your 'keitai' - your mobile phone.


Going to a 'purikura' session makes me realise just what a hopeless 'oldie' I am now. I would probably stand more chance of landing a Jumbo Jet safely than operating one of these facilities. My role was simply to stand where I was told and look in the right direction eh? You need to be under thirty to understand 'purikura' and even if it might come as a surprise to some of you I have to tell you now that I am not under thirty any more. But one nice thing about these 'purikura' facilities is that they do make you look under thirty again, don't you think so? Tell me honestly now.


While the girls finished their artistic work on the editing screens Edera and I went for a leisurely drive on the 'Ultra Race Rival Grand Prix' machine just around the corner. With "motion on" and "gear stick off" we did a few laps of the 'Ocean Circuit'. I let 'her indoors' drive of course, what with being a gentleman and all that stuff. How did she do? Just fine of course, for a woman. We never tumbled off the cliff edge or landed in the sea once and only hit a couple of crash barriers where she misjudged corners or got carved up by aggressive male rivals in red sports cars. Just like an ordinary ride over to JusCo for some groceries really.

And now 2009

Well we can't complain about the weather for New Year 2009 over here in sunny Kanto. Brilliant sunshine this morning after a bitterly cold night, and we have been busy celebrating the occasion in all the usual ways. We get it nine hours ahead of Britain here and a full eighteen hours ahead of the Pacific Coast where I guess you are lingering in 2008.

Last night at midnight we made our way over to a small gathering outdoors at our local shrine, which is in the forest about a mile from here along the bank of the Sakuta River. It was a great walk down there under a spectacularly starry sky, and the shrine 'committee' already had a big bonfire going under the trees for visitors to warm up by and have a drink after paying their respects at the shrine itself.


Then today as usual over to Shibayama Noison temple where the fine weather had brought immense crowds from all over this part of leafy Chiba-ken. In fact it was so busy the queue for making an offering there was around two hundred yards long and they had given up on visitors ringing the temple bell, it was just far too busy.

And then back for New Year lunch. And now for a rest!

Happy New Year to all readers here!