Impulsive choices

For bed time reading at the moment I've just got my nose into 'The Pilgrimage of Grace' by Geoffrey Moorhouse. If you don't know much English history the 'Pilgrimage of Grace' was a major rebellion against Henry VIII that swept across northern England in 1536, beginning in Louth in Lincolnshire but eventually affecting all the counties from Yorkshire and Cheshire north to the Scottish border.

The causes for this rebellion were complex - aren't they always! - but a big part of it was resentment about the ways in which old systems of Christian belief and practice were being reformed by the State. Then as now, us northerners couldn't abide educated southern politicians with axes to grind (in those days literally!) sitting down in London and telling us what to do and think.

But the thing that has really caught my attention in this book is the ease with which ordinary people could slip over the boundary between 'loyalty' and 'rebellion' - a kind of graphic version of taking 'life changing decisions'. There they were minding their own business digging the garden and then someone rode up with a piece of dramatic news - say rumour had it that Thomas Cromwell was going to 'privatise' their town church and sell the lead on the roof. Suddenly in one moment through one spontaneous choice they have become a rebel who the King's commanders will later put to death, no way back to their former lives. The proverb runs 'marry in haste, repent at leisure' but the principle applies to all kinds of motivation for impulsive action. There is no gradual transition through grey involved with choices like this, no time to wonder. It is white one moment and black the next. Most people probably didn't even get to make their own decision, they found themselves in the middle of a mob with people insisting that they took an 'oath of allegiance' to the new cause - or else. In Tudor times people took such oaths very seriously.

This has always been a puzzle to me. There are many situations in life where bad choices DO have a slow cumulative effect, say a poor diet or a negative attitude to something. And then on other occasions just one blink of the eye is enough to bring the whole house crashing down, choose tofu for lunch instead of beans and suddenly the rest of your life is fundamentally changed. And the thing is that a sixth sense often warns us at the time that this is 'one of those choices'

Coal Fire

I was looking at some old railway photographs yesterday. In one of them the crew of a steam locomotive were 'coaling up' at the start of their shift and it suddenly struck me how long it has been since I last saw any kind of a proper coal fire myself. Seven years I think - probably the last one I came across was lighting one in the grate in a holiday cottage we rented during the winter of 2002. And probably that wasn't a proper 'coal' fire - more likely some kind of 'smokeless' composition material.

Goodness! Thinking about it probably few people under forty have actually experienced a REAL coal fire at all, the 'Clean Air Act' back around 1960 and the introduction of oil and then gas central heating changed all that. In the nineteen fifties every home was heated by a coal fire in Britain, although they were unknown here in Japan where I've never seen a fireplace in a house.

Proper soft coal as mined from the ground is full of tar. Once you get a fire going in the hearth it positively 'sings' to you and in the course of the day it goes through many cycles. When new coal is first 'tipped on' the underlying fire vanishes and it smokes heavily for a while but soon tongues of flame start to leap through the added fuel as it catches fire from below. Soon a good strong blaze is going again, with red hot coals under the surface of the blaze radiating heat.

Maybe that is the most interesting stage of the fire because it becomes unpredictable. The heat underneath starts to partly melt the new coal on top. Tar bubbles and sizzles on the surface of the lumps of coal and then the escaping gases will suddenly catch fire. If you have nothing else to do watching the fire is better than watching TV - something alive before your eyes. What will happen next and where? Dogs and cats love to do it.

And then there is the 'philosopher stage'. The combustion has spread throughout the whole volume of the coal and the flames disappear, there is only red hot coals radiating heat silently into the room. this fire has caves, canyons, valleys, you can see into its heart as if there was a gateway there into another world. But already the fire is dying, as the radiant heat escapes the coals become ashes and occasionally there are small landslides in there as the strength of the cinders fails and the disintegrating embers settle. Beautiful to watch. Writing this I realise that it is what I see in my minds eye when I hear that text from Dogen's Genjo-koan "No form attaches itself substantially to anything. The wood that is burnt upon a fire becomes ashes; it does not again become wood; you must not think that wood comes first and ashes afterwards."

Second Careers

One of the nice things about the deep baths that we enjoy in Japan is that they are great places to sit and think. Not only does the water come up to your chin (if you let it!) but also they have built in re-heating facilities so you could sit in there literally all day contemplating the world if you wanted to.

One of my favourite bath-time topics for reflection is what I would be if I wasn't ... um ... what I am now. I must be a pretty boring person because choices like 'pop idol' or 'soccer star' seldom cross my mind, although to be fair I never think of 'chartered accountant' or 'tax office official' much either.'Philosopher' is a perennial popular fantasy choice, I always fancied looking serious and sitting on a tree stump deep in thought drinking a cup of coffee. Actually I am deeply getting into process philosophy these days, more than is good for me. Maybe I feel an academic paper coming on in that department once my current work is complete. My second career as a Process Philosopher!

The reason I mention all this is because 'psychologist' often features on that 'wannabe' list too and yesterday I was watching a piece of behaviour that had me deeply puzzled. No, it wasn't Edera (although ...) - it was a very small and not very nice 'yakky' dog in the park. A kind of miniature mastiff I think, about the size of my foot with pointy ears.

Now this dog was just a what we 'professionals' call a 'nut case'. He was dragging his master around 'the circuit' so I met them coming my way every couple of minutes, first on the south side of the circle and then on the north side. On the north side the dog completely ignored me, straining forward into the blue yonder on his lead as if I didn't exist. But on the south side he went crazy, dancing around in circles and trying to hurl himself at my throat (well - ankle!).

This doggie was schizophrenic - right? Four times in fifteen minutes he displayed completely contrary behaviours at places just 250 metres apart! Did he think I was a different person? Was it something to do with a sense of territoriality in once place. How did I resist the temptation to kick him (and his minder)? These are the kinds of questions psychologists ask and get paid good money to answer. Also watching rats in mazes and making ink blots.

Where do I join?

Keeping out the cold

I mentioned here a few days ago that the north coast of Noto Hanto had an unenviable reputation for cold weather in winter. The gales come straight down across the ocean from eastern Siberia making this coast not only one of the coldest places in Honshu but also one of the windiest.

Driving the narrow secondary coastal road between Monzen and Wajima we were surprised to see how people had developed defences against these seasonal Arctic blasts. In a few fishing villages in the exposed bays they had literally screened off the whole village using high bamboo fences. Only the roof tops project above the shelter of these windbreaks. Here and there were small gates in the fence that were used for access to the road and beach but otherwise these places were sealed off just like small medieval walled towns. In this case the enemy was not invading armies, but the cold.

I must track down some books on this part of Noto and find out what these fences are called. But I think the idea is brilliant. We develop common defences against all kinds of dangers - perceived enemies, flooding, driving off the road at bends - but this is the first time that I've ever seen such a 'green' defence. It must save a lot of money on heating in winter. In older properties in Japan central heating is non-existent and heating of any kind is pretty limited so doing what you can to keep the cold out in the first place is really important.

And these screens are really beautiful too, using natural materials available on the hillsides and cliffs all along the coast. The crafts associated with building such big barriers that will stand up to hurricane force winds must have taken centuries to develop.

Sperm 'Donation'

I've mentioned before that I just can't keep away from the 'Guardian' newspaper website and especially their 'Comment is Free' pages. It is pretty well my only regular contact with contemporary issues in Britain and as the 'features' there are often posted in the middle of the night if I have a view to post on anything it often gets posted soon after the author's original contribution. What I like about this site is that whatever you contribute appears at once - none of this laborious process of moderation (what they mean of course is 'censorship') that organisations like the BBC want to exercise on the web. Good for the 'Guardian'.

Yesterday there were two features on sperm donation. Hardly an issue that occupies my mind these days from any perspective so I hadn't been following the latest news but it seems that since the law was changed in Britain recently to give children the right to know the identity of their biological fathers when they become adults the number of sperm donors has fallen off drastically. When it was just an easy way for healthy student volunteers to earn some money with anonymity guaranteed there was no shortage of takers, but now someone might come knocking on your door in twenty years' time it is a different story.

As someone who searched for his dad for nearly fifty years before he found me, and with a friend here who, born at the end of War, still hopes to find hers, I could see that I was reading the comments on the article with quite a different perspective to most contributors. The majority felt that when it came to the "Infertility Industry" the sperm donor's 'rights' took precedence over the child's 'right to know'. Donors simply facilitated conception, a bit like organ donation after death. One guy even asked "can anyone give me a good reason WHY I would want to meet the child?" Many of those who argued that the child's 'right to know' was paramount often did so on the basis of inherited diseases and avoiding relationships of consanguinity.

These points seem quite secondary to me. However you dress sperm donation up - and I can certainly see a case for offering it - the bottom line is that the donor is a biological parent. The life of the child conceived IS genetically (and also karmically in my book) fifty percent transmitted by that donor. This doesn't just 'affect the life' of the child concerned - it IS the life of the child concerned, and that even if another man is then in the role of nurturing parent that child has as much right to know who his or her biological father is as anybody else does.

If you can't accept this, probably better not to become a parent.

Million Stroke Cat

I was watching a video on the BBC Website yesterday about a cat called Nora who, according to the commentary, is a 'Youtube sensation' with her own Website. Nora lives in America and loves playing the piano. Her favourite composer is Bach and she likes being scratched under the chin. She has recently completed a recording with 'acclaimed Lithuanian conductor' Mindaugas Piecaitis. There we have it friends.

The feline in my own life would be appalled at all this pandering to human eccentricities and also the idea of cats making music. For him the dynamics of inter-species association are clear, us monkeys only exist to fulfil feline desires and also to be pestered for tidbits every time we sit down at the table to eat anything ourselves. He works on the principle 'if it moves, demand food and drink, if it doesn't sit on it's lap'. And as for playing the piano! A dignified feline is one that leads a quiet life of contemplation without that kind of distraction.

Tora has his little weaknesses though, as you can see. He likes nothing better than to be treated like a human baby, to lie back in someones arms and be cuddled. If I dressed him in a nappy and stuck a bottle in his mouth he would be in heaven.

He was pleased to see me back last weekend. If we go away for a few days we arrange for someone to drop in and see to the cats and I'm told they sit around looking sad if we aren't here. Certainly when we get back from a trip to the supermarket or choir practice Tora is always waiting for us in the genkan sitting on the green rug waiting for his 'I'm back home' caress. He is truly a 'million stroke cat' these days, a lifetime of love given and received not just from me but also the rest of the family and all the students that come here during the week. Every body's friend in fact.

Seasonable Rain

Six in the morning and sitting here with the rain drumming down outside. Edera got up early today, as it is our 'day off' to weed the garden but even she has been driven indoors by the rain. Lucky the weather wasn't like this last week when we made our trip.

It is the heart of the 'Tsuuyuu' it seems - the 'rainy season' that hits Japan at the end of June and the beginning of July. Looked at in wider terms it is actually the northern edge of the monsoon that heads up from South East Asia in May and June. When I learned about all this with Mr. Dowson in my 'A'Level Geography classes back in 1965 little did I think that I'd be sitting listening to it drumming on the roof in my mature years. The birds love it though - they are singing happily away out there.

I keep meaning to sit down and research the old names for the Japanese 'seasons'. I seem to remember that there are about ten or twelve of them, not the four that we use in northern Europe. This 'longer rainy season' used to be a good time for serious meditation retreats in medieval Japan.

Our bodies get very accustomed to the patterns of seasons when they are young and so moving later into an environment where the flow of seasonal weather is quite different can be very stressful to cope with. Our British summers are hardly reliably sunny but the intensity of heat and humidity we get during the 'Tsuuyuu' bears no relationship to any kind of weather that we ever endure in Britain. My first trip to Japan was at this time of year and lugging a heavy rucksack around for two weeks on and off trains in Turkish Bath conditions resulted in me losing five kilos! I then made the big mistake of registering for my routine diabetic check-up at a new clinic and the first time turned in an excellent weight and blood test result which of course could then only ever get worse. I should have had my tests before I made the trip and then at least I would have been able to show some progress!

These days I don't find the 'Tsuuyuu' so bad, sometimes Japanese friends even say to me that it is 'mushiatsui' today - hot and humid - and I think "is it?". I'm acclimatising eh? But only because I have learned not to go rushing around and to switch the aircon on once the sweat starts to run into my eyes.

Tetrapods

Just had to include a picture from last week of our trusty Nissan Skyline - not so much 'old' any more as positively Methuselan. Maybe she even has 'Classic Car' status in Japan now, how old do you have to be to be 'classic' if you are a car? She was first registered in Heisei 2 - 1990 in Western terms, so she is almost twenty years old and runs so smoothly you would hardly believe it. Believe it or not she cost us 20,000 yen (about £120, $200) back in 2002. You seldom see cars this old in Japan but I guess a lot of this generation have been shipped out to places like Cambodia and Indonesia where they are still enjoying second careers.

But it wasn't the car I wanted to talk about - it was the odd looking objects in the background. I don't think we have them in England like this, although the design is French. Can you guess what they are for?

Well, they are called tetrapods and they are used here as sea defences. We love pouring concrete and 'pork barrel' public works contracts here so you can find the darn things everywhere around the coast but often they are a very sensible protection against tsunami - the big waves that are generated by underwater earthquakes. This car park is right next to the quayside at Wajima and in the opposite direction just behind my back about fifty yards away is the town's main street.

Nice insurance 'just in case' - don't you think so? But actually they have already earned their keep. There was a Shindo 7 earthquake here on 25 March 2007 which wrecked 300 homes and damaged a thousand more. A four metre high tsunami hit the port a few minutes later, but the ocean and the main street were kept on separate sides of this car park. Thanks to tetrapods.

Hatagoiwa

I don't know how many of these pairs of rocks there are dotted around the Japanese coastline but there must be dozens. The best known are the meoto-iwa, the husband-and-wife rocks, down near Futami in Mie Prefecture. This pair are between Futara and Togi on the west side of Noto Hanto.

Often such pairs are linked with legends of the Shinto Creator God and Goddess Izanagi and Izanami, and they represent one aspect of the ultimate relationship between a man and a woman. The rope that links them is a shimenawa, the kind of rice straw rope used to define the boundaries of a sacred or ritually pure spaces. It defines such a relationship as sacred.

But shimenawa need regular attention. They quickly deteriorate. On stormy coastlines where they are exposed to the elements they may need to be replaced several times a year, a heavy and sometimes dangerous task. Does the shimenawa 'tie' the two rocks together? It doesn't feel like that for me, it is just a beautiful but ephemeral representation of a more profound relationship experienced only with the heart. There is nothing permanent about forms.

So it is never the rope that endures. That which binds is always fundamentally transient. In the end the rice straw - with all that symbolism of sustenance and nutrition, of nurture - is just straw. Completely at the mercy of the wind and waves of karmic consequence.

The defining thing, the underlying and enduring nature of the reality between these two rocks, is actually their natural position in respect of each other. Tied together or not, they are undeniably a 'couple' - a part of the whole reality and yet set apart too. The rope is sometimes a necessary aspect of the relationship, a manifestation of the association visible in the world. But its very fragility is the thing, it might point for a moment to an important aspect of the ultimate reality of the enduring relationship revealed in process but it is only a form. A kind of ceremony.

And north from here ...

It usually surprises me to come across bureaucracy with a sense of humour, no matter how 'heavy handed' it might be, but actually here in Japan it seems a lot commoner that in England. Us English like to think we have an unparalleled sense of comedy as a theoretical position but in practice British officialdom doesn't laugh much.

Driving out of Wajima up on the northern coast of Boso Hanto on Thursday afternoon I couldn't resist pulling over to take a nostalgic look at the old railway station. It was here that I first arrived in town with Julia in July 1997 but you can't catch a train here any more, the single track line down to Anamizu was closed in 2001 and the building is now usefully redeployed as the bus station, information office and a small museum linked to the main City Hall on the other side of where the track used to be.

Poking around behind the station building I discovered that a few yards of track and the buffer stops had been left as a reminder that this was once the terminus of the Noto Railway. Also the small section of platform shown here although this is a complete fake - no train has ever drawn up here! The real platform was located on the other side of the tracks.

It was the old station sign that made me laugh though. In part it is just as I remember it with Noto Ichinose written in the bottom left corner - the next stop south towards Anamizu and the rest of Japan. But in the bottom right corner some official 'wag' has written a new destination in place of the blank white area left on the original signboard (this being the terminus and so with no rail tracks in that direction)

If you don't read katakana it says "Siberia". This is literally true, nothing north of here except a few hundred miles of the Sea of Japan until you arrive at Vladivostok. But I guess what the Mayor's Office is really alluding to here is Wajima's unenviable reputation for being an incredibly cold place in winter. Once those seasonal northerly gales start to bring snow down across the ocean from Siberia you certainly don't want to be going outdoors around town without putting your hat and coat on first.

Sounds like my kind of place!

Norikuradake

Travelling across Nagano-ken this week made me realise that it is a long while since I spent much time in the mountains. When I was in my teens and early twenties I used to be a tireless hill walker and then in my thirties I discovered the pleasures of alpine botany walking the mountains in Haut Savoie. Since then mountains and me haven't met close up so much, I've admired Mount Shasta and Mount Fuji from afar and done some occasional easy hill walking in Cumbria and Northumberland.

Somehow this trip made me restless in that direction again. We took the old road over from Matsumoto to Kamioka, disdaining the fast toll highway tunnel in favour of the endless terrifying and torturous hairpin bends that take you up to nearly six thousand feet. But although the driving is tricky it is just 'cheating' of course, views like this one of Norikuradake, the ten thousand foot volcano further along the ridge, should belong only to climbers. For somebody accustomed to British and Alpine mountain landscapes Japanese mountains seem impossibly vast and inaccessible, surrounded by endless impenetrable forest and wilderness before you make it out onto open crags and tundra. On our mountains you can walk and climb where you like but here you need to stick to the trail or perish.

Looking at Norikuradake stirred up a lot of questions on my mind about purpose, effort. Could I ever make it up there? At sixty two my body has become too lazy and fat, could I retrieve sufficient fitness to climb so strenuously again? Well those are practical and 'biological' questions but also what about the nature and purpose of effort itself, a much more formidable consideration? We have an idealised view of the pilgrim on the road of life, we imagine ourselves travelling a primrose strewn version of Basho's "Narrow Road to the Deep North". But effort is not picturesque, it involves real sweat, pain, breathlessness. Fear. If you don't understand what effort is really about then you lose heart and then you lose everything. Like steam in the boiler,the 'mainspring' in old clock mechanisms, effort always involves and arithmetic of energy. But why? I don't think I've discovered what 'Right Effort' is yet even if I've poked around it with a stick a few times

Bears in the Woods

Ah! Back in leafy Chiba-ken after a ten hour driving stint today. 'Savage amusement' as my grandad would say, but somehow I can't give it up. Some people - and I know one or two - are 'one place people' and blossom beautifully with all their roots in one flowerpot. I was never like that, I always want to be around the next corner. 'Sumus quod sumus' I suppose, 'we are who we are'

Lots that I want to write about here about my trip over the next few days but I want to go and soak in a nice deep bath this evening so as a 'taster' here's a picture that I took on Wednesday near Shokawa in the Hida Mountains in Gifu Prefecture. These houses are called 'gassho-zukuri' because they look like a pair of hands pressed together in 'gassho' - the gesture Buddhists make when they bring their hands together to 'centre' themselves and express gratitude.

And these gasshozukuri are authentic too. Half an hour down the road at Shirakawago you can find picturesque clusters of gasshozukuri that are part of a "World Heritage Centre" interpretive experience but up here on the awful mountain road over from Nagano-ken there are no tourist buses, this is very much a working farm as you can see from the terrace rice field in the foreground. This is a place where people make whatever living they can from whatever cultivatable ground there is and from that amazing wilderness - those forests that close right up to the eaves of the farm.

And there are bears in those woods too. Lots of bears!

Sakura concert

Over to Sakura yesterday for the Mixed Choir concert. I'm hoping to sing with them as a 'second' choir once my thesis is submitted. Although 'the ladies' at Naruto are 'family' and will always have my first loyalty I want to get more experience of singing in a much bigger group too. So I was there not just as audience but as a prospective singer too.

Yesterday they had a guest conductor, Nobuaki Tanaka. Tanaka-sensei is one of the founders of modern choral singing in Japan, he has been working away at encouraging the development of music here since the 1950's. So it was a rare opportunity to see him conducting some settings of poems by Miyazawa Kenji set to music by Akira Nishimura.

Miyazawa Kenji is maybe Japan's greatest modern poet. His work is getting better known outside Japan since new editions of his poetry (and also his children's books) have been available in English translation over the last ten years. Born in the same month as my own grandmother in 1896 he was a 'northerner' too - from Iwate-ken - and a devout Buddhist who spent most of his short life helping the poor farmers in that area of harsh winters and unreliable summers improve their farming techniques. He died aged 37 of tuberculosis so his writing career was less than ten years and very little of what he wrote was published in his lifetime.

The three pieces we listened to yesterday were from a cycle of five poems published in 'Spring and the Asura' which mourn the untimely death of his younger sister - 'Morning of the last farewell', 'Needles of a pine tree' and 'Lamentation on silence'. All very powerful settings of the original words, contemporary music and harmonies and yet in a very distinctive Japanese style too.

To these two bowls of snow that you eat I pray from my heart
That they may change to food of the heaven of Tusita

One of the most powerful aspects of this performance was what was not sung. At the end choir, conductor and pianist stopped and stood completely still and silent, for perhaps a minute.


On holiday for a couple of days, watch out for 'Little Paddy' later in the week.

Real Pictures

Fiddling with my camera last night to make sure it was ready to take lots of pictures this week after its recent visit to the mend. Now the battery is charged up again and the memory card 'wiped' but I need to hunt out a much larger memory card that I have somewhere from my last trip to England. Perhaps it is in a box on my bench in the shed. The worst problem wasn't getting my camera sorted out but the Canon software on my new computer. I'd innocently loaded Julia's (more recent) software in the UK in March and ended up having to completely un-install every bit of Canon functionality (about twenty programmes!) and re-installing before I could get camera and laptop to talk to each other.

There is often a little fantasy in my head around cameras. I try to imagine what it would be like to be able to travel in time and take back my Canon EOS 'Kiss' with me so that I could take the same quality photographs then that I take now. What might it be like for example to go and photograph some street scenes in old Edo (Tokyo) around 1800 with exactly the same quality of image that we are used to seeing today? Of course such scenes are recreated in HNK 'soaps' and 'costume dramas' all the time but not REALLY eh? We are seeing a twenty first century facsimile.

Or trains eh? Have a day 'gricing' on Darlington Bank Top station around 1890 and photograph everything and everyone in sight. If anyone is wondering what to buy me for Christmas that is it!

This last one is especially interesting because many glass negative images taken with early 'plate' cameras exist from the time. But emulsions weren't fast enough to take moving objects reliably. Locomotive crews posed like statues on their stationary steeds, everyone knew that you had to stand still to have a picture taken. Now these are REAL images BUT they are only accessible through a technology which only partially reproduces the image (they are captured in silver bromide salts and are 'colourless'). Also because of the size of the camera and the presence of 'officialdom' in the shape of the Company photographer everything is so wooden. If this was a film set a wholly modern quality image could be captured but the SCENE would just be a facsimile, it would not capture real people's lives. The rain, the litter in the streets (did they have any?) the smoke from domestic coal fires in the air.

I think what I'm trying to say here is "what was REALITY like then?" Wouldn't it be interesting to see images of it that were exactly in our own terms?

If you know anyone with a reliable 'time machine' let me know.

Preparations

I'm getting my things together here for a trip to Noto next week. Only three days away and one of those will be driving there and back but with the pressure of routine we are under that will be our joint 'summer holiday' for this year I guess. The need for trips to the UK to take priority for 'family reasons' and meetings, finishing my thesis, the welfare of the cats, Edera's teaching schedule - I can't ever remember a time in my life before when I've felt so 'boxed in' in terms of options. 'Retirement' was supposed to be an opportunity for more travel but actually so far I've done much less - outside of the grind of going to and from Britain - than at any other time in my life.

And yet I must cover a heck of a lot more miles than most people. Goes to show that 'travel' is nothing to do with moving around, perhaps you don't even need to leave the house to do it. Some kinds of 'travel' I would really dread. The idea of a conventional 'beach holiday' so beloved of most British people, would drive me crazy. Two days on the beach and in the bar and I would be 'climbing the walls'. No, real recreational travel for me involves cars and interesting agendas, places to see and experience. My perfect holiday is driving thousands of miles around American deserts stopping at remote grade crossings to photograph Santa Fe trains. Or driving around historical sites in Burgundy and photographing French trains. Probably on my own, maybe with Edera, but no conflicting agendas, that's the main thing. On holiday you want to be selfish.

Hopefully Noto will be a bit like that. It is the bit of Japan that sticks up like a thumb into the Sea of Japan half way along the back of Honshu. A kind of Japanese Brittany or Cornwall but not a spot much visited by most Japanese. lots of interesting temples, nice beaches and even some trains to photograph. Yummy!

I don't plan trips as well as I used to though, I still have no idea of how to drive to the Kofu side of Tokyo, likely to be an interesting experience in that maze of urban motorways that permit absolutely no opportunity to make mistakes! Take a wrong 'right' and maybe our trip will be up to Sendai instead, a dodgy 'left' and we will have two days in Hakone. And I need to charge the camera battery, fit the new memory card, get into Tadaya to pick up the topographic maps I ordered - oh yes! There must be lots of maps!

Miss Tokyo University

Goodness! Watched some daytime TV while having lunch yesterday and I'm still feeling dizzy. You have to be careful about stuff like that don't you? There was a forty minute (well, must have been longer, I switched on part-way through!) interview with Miss Tokyo University about her busy action packed life and the biography of her first two decades and life with O-kaa-san and her trips to the juku.

Yep! That's right. "Miss Tokyo University". The little hamster that runs on that scratchy old wheel in my mind was just spinning around the situation again and again as the sycophantic interviewer said "Your mom and dad must be very proud of you winning a place in the Tokyo University Medical School" for the seventy-fourth time. I mean you could hardly get a more clear cut example of the cultural chasm between East and West could you? You are not us and we are not you, that's for sure. Vive la difference!

Don't get me wrong. She was a very nice girl, I really liked her, if I'd been twenty four and single again I would have been in hot persuit. Very pretty, long hair, lovely nature and adored dogs (someone had thoughtfully brought hers along to the studio, a miniature long-haired dachshund). What more could a moon-struck boy be looking for? She had even brought some samples of her High School chemistry notebooks to show to viewers ("Your mom and dad must be very proud ..."). Awesome! A wonderland of information on the properties of sodium.

No, I was just wondering when the last possible date might have been when you could have run such an event in an English University. Nineteen sixty-two perhaps? Maybe a tad earlier. Can you even begin to imagine the thermonuclear response to suggesting such a thing now? "Hey girlies! How about wearing a flouncy skirt and bringing your doggie to a talent contest so we can decide which of you is prettiest?" A "Miss Oxford University"? Or perhaps a "Miss University of Central Luton" - doubtless an all-burqa event there. I sense a whole shelf full or Virago Press contributions on the issue if some demented university administrator was ever to suggest such a thing.

Anyway I promise. No more lunch time TV for me for a bit eh?

Hiraita, hiraita

This last two Wednesday nights we have started into working on a long list of music that we want to learn for our English trip next year. Top of the list, to give us something completely different to English madrigals to work on, are several Japanese folk songs. Although the melodies are straightforward they need a lot of attention both from the point of view of pitch and also of fitting the language to the music. Although some are children's songs or 'working songs' reflecting the rhythms of working in the fields it doesn't make them any less subtle.

Of course sensei's 'ear' was very well tuned the way we were working with the language and she was soon hard at work on changing all that herself, talking about the sounds that we should be taking care about. Interesting for me of course, I'm not used to having my Japanese pronunciation put under such a powerful microscope. But also for the ladies - they might be native speakers but there was a lot about their own pronunciation that needed attention too, I wasn't alone! Singing 'simple music' well is often very difficult, sensei's favourite line seems to be "you will never be perfect but you can be much better.

One of the songs we worked on yesterday was 'Hiraita, Hiraita', a well known children's "play song" from old Tokyo - or 'Edo' as they would have called it. Really nice to sing in two 'voices' - in fact we were doing exactly that at one stage - working through the score two singers at a time to get some confidence. It is interesting how the words of children's songs in any culture, which were never written by anyone and simply evolved over centuries, can acquire such intense and profound meaning.

Opened up, opened up
What is this flower that has opened up?
A lotus flower has opened up
Right when I thought it had opened up,
Before I knew it, it closed up

Closed up, closed up
What is this flower that has closed up?
A lotus flower has closed up
Right when I thought it had closed up,
Before I knew it, it opened up

You can find a recording of this song on Youtube here.

Residence Permit time

Just been sorting out my paperwork for a trip to the Immigration Bureau office today. Well, to be honest I spent most of yesterday sorting it out too - amazing how quickly 'Murphy's Law' kicks in when you start to do something really important. I soon realised that I don't have Adobe Writer installed on this laptop yet, the CD must be in Lancashire. And then I started getting in a tangle with the Microsoft Office substitutes that all wanted 17-character code numbers typing in before the would do anything. Eventually I just carried the darn thing downstairs and connected it to Edera's printer directly and wrestled with the Japanese menus without benefit of Japanese keyboard.

I don't need to file a residence permit application for another month but if I don't do it now then it will be the summer vacation period and it will be even busier than usual. Better get it over with even though it seems to take all day just to hand in some paperwork.

They certainly don't make it easy. I think that everyone should get to have a spell registering as an 'alien' just to learn humility and not least those people responsible for running the system. They have always been polite enough to me but it is just crazy the amount of time it takes, queueing for three or four hours just to hand in an application. You can't do it by post of course and if you have a query don't expect anybody to answer the phone.

Still it will be nice to get into town, even that seems to be a big expedition these days. And my camera is fixed, I need to go and pick that up - just in time for our trip over to Noto next week. it isn't all bad news!

Skylark

A couple of times doing the circuit of the park in the early evening I've been hearing a skylark somewhere up there in the 'blue yonder'. My eyes are not so good these days and I struggle to see anything against the sky but the song is powerful enough.

I say 'skylark' and checking their range on the internet I see that do they stretch across Europe and Asia. But I wonder if it is a different lark species to the ones we see - or more often hear - in Britain. It isn't the first time I've heard the call here, occasionally I've heard lark's song on the tanbo down the Sakuta River and also on the heathier parts of the flat farmland towards the coast. I'll have to do some asking, but certainly as far as I can tell the song is identical to the one I sometimes hear walking across the Pennine moors in June or July.

So that's a nice link with England - the sound of a lark rising. Here it is on a humid evening with kids practicing baseball and joggers 'doing the circuit' under the cedar trees. In Britain it is a sound linked with airy sunshine and big empty open spaces

Whenever I hear a skylark I struggle to remember the last part of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

A nice idea and the idea of larks singing at 'heaven's gate' at break of day and is a pretty accurate description of what they do but maybe you would have to be a real 'romantic' in search of a good 'pitch' to relate the perfection of that song to a relationship with a woman! But hope springs eternal. The invocation of larks that touches me the deepest though is Vaughan William's piece "The Lark Ascending". The violin solo has me back into the English countryside in about ten seconds. You can find it here.

Making Bread

We have had a 'bread-maker' here for more than five years, and it is still 'going strong'. Touch wood. The only problem we've ever encountered with it so far is that earlier this year we had to order a new 'rotator' after the original vanished. Presumably it somehow got into the garbage when the sink trap got emptied. This bread maker doesn't just make bread four or five times a week but also pizza dough if we are having a party for students, so it certainly earns its keep.

'Shop bread' as my grandmother would have dismissively called it is quite different here to its European counterpart. Most of it comes in short square-ish loaves with no crusty ends, I'd guess the product of a continuous production process. Almost always it is sliced too, another 'no-no' from my younger days, but the slices are much thicker with some 'door steps' on offer as much as an inch thick. What would you ever do with those? The quality of the bread itself varies a lot though, from the cheapest supermarket product being just what you would expect through to the nicest loaves from 'Chartraise' or other bespoke bakers being delicious and twice the price. In shops like this you can get a loaf uncut and then ask for it to be sliced on a 'bacon-slicer' type of machine.

Our bread maker makes really 'home made' tasting bread with proper crusts and the smell in the kitchen as it bakes always reminds me of my grandmother. She really did make it in the traditional way. Twice a week she would bake a batch of four loaves, mixing the dough in a big pot bowl, kneading it on a board and then putting it into the baking tins. She would leave it to 'rise' for about an hour before putting it into the big oven on the kitchen range and stoking the fire to get a good medium hot oven.

Watching that dough rise was one of the best times of the week for me. When you are six or seven the whole idea of living yeast doing its work is just amazing, I would come back to the tins on the hearth every few minutes to see how far the pale cream 'bubble' had risen up inside the tin, a kind of a mix between plasticine and bubble-gum that had a life of its own. Sadly in our bread-maker you can't see the dough rising but it makes me happy to think that it is 'at it' in there.

Clocks around the place

All the clocks in our house seem to tell a slightly different time and, as we are occasional train-catchers and trains in Japan DO run exactly to time, most of them are slightly fast. In the school room, about three minutes, and the clock over the piano near our table, four or five. There is a clock in the ofuro next to the hand basin that we put there to avoid Chi-chan missing her train to school through attending to her appearance for too long (and just how close can you shave catching a train? I doubt she ever made it to the platform until the guard had actually blown his whistle) but since she moved to Tokyo that one runs pretty well exactly to time now.

Our two alarm clocks by our bed are also a few minutes fast, I don't know why. The only clock that runs slow (and today it is about 20 minutes slow!) is the one here in my study. But it is on the wall behind me and I have the little digital clock in the bottom right corner of my screen to look at so it seldom gets a glance. The clock out in my workshop is probably stopped because it is so long since I got to spend any time out there.

When my grandfather still lived in Barnard Castle and was taking in clocks and watches to repair he was always keen to get them properly 'regulated' before they were returned to their owners and so the place was full of other people's clocks ticking away in his upstairs workshop and downstairs on the sideboard and in the front room. In the 1950's most people's clocks chimed on the hour and a fair number chimed the quarters too, so having twenty or more clocks around the place was a noisy experience. All that whirring, dinging and gong-ing going on in the space of a few seconds. But you got used to it. Well, you had to or you would never have got much sleep.

Some people collect clocks like that, but I could never bring myself to be so tidy or organised.If they were left in my charge half of them would soon be stopped because I'd forgotten to wind them up and the other half would be telling wildly different times. No discipline.

Moving fingers

I try and avoid writing too much about politics here - although I sure feel like writing about UK politics SOMEWHERE at the moment! Our current woes in Britain even made it onto the NHK lunchtime news as the second item yesterday, but at least I had the pleasure of hearing the Japanese presenter trying to say 'Purnell'.

I'm just fascinated by the sheer extent of the delusion involved in what politicians get up to. Is there really ever any kind of 'leadership' in national affairs that doesn't involve self-delusion on a grand scale? There must be somewhere, surely? Hidden somewhere is at least a small measure of virtue. I'll have to watch out for it coming around. When people get their hands on power they seem to lose all sense of 'reality'.

But the main thing that has struck me this last few days is how difficult it is to change things. Once you fall off a cliff gravity has a nasty habit of taking over the situation. It is easy to see mistakes with the benefit of hindsight. Events take on a momentum of their own, players double and re-double their stakes because to them the ONLY thing that matters becomes winning the game. "As long as I haven't lost, I stand a chance of winning". And so it becomes a fight to the death, in many places and situations literally a fight to the death. People lose all sense of perspective and decency, they become corrupted. Perhaps the one real virtue of 'democratic process' is that most of the time it does facilitate a change of leadership without people literally losing their lives.

Ha! I'm really 'sitting on my hands' hard here! There is no correcting mistakes, absolutely none. Just consequences

The moving finger writes and having writ moves on
Nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out one word of it.

With swift and painful action you might just be lucky enough to mitigate their effect but you can never get back to status quo ante. If you have made a bad choice you have to live with the consequences which might seem out of all proportion to the size of the original error, as the British Parliamentary Labour Party is discovering.

It all goes to show what a good idea it is to think before you act.

Not falling asleep!

Writing about sleeping train drivers yesterday reminded me of the years when I used to have endless struggles with sleep on the British motorway network. Not the happiest time of my life, when I look back on it I'm amazed that I survived it all.

For reasons too complicated to explain I ended up with a 'home based' job but which in practice actually involved a working routine of driving from the north to the south of England and back every week and spending three or four days in an office in sunny Luton and staying in a hotel. And to get to Luton by nine on a Monday or Tuesday morning I needed to be away from our house in Lancashire by 4:30 am. Coming back - usually on a Thursday evening - I would work until around seven and then go to a Japanese class in Milton Keynes on my journey home, setting off north at 9:30 and getting back after midnight. A five hundred mile round trip.

Every week.

The really tough part of this completely crazy routine was driving south in the years before the new road between Stoke and Derby was complete and you could cut across to the M1 and cut out Birmingham. Part of the need to set off so early was to get through Birmingham before seven, otherwise you could be stuck there for two hours. Once through Birmingham I would stop at the service area at Corley and sleep for half an hour. I couldn't take any longer because otherwise I'd get stuck in traffic in Luton and be late for work.

That awful stretch through the south of Birmingham and up the hill to Corley Services. Every week it was a literally a life-and-death struggle not to give in to an overwhelming need to sleep and in the end I knew every trick to avoid it. Singing is the best of course, it you are making a loud noise you can't doze off. And you need to 'jig about' in your seat too. Music and movement, music and movement, only another five miles ... If you stopped moving and singing you'd be asleep in a moment, then if you went to sleep you would probably die. Good also to have a full bladder, the discomfort keeps you awake.

And of course there is no way off the motorway, you have to endure this fatigue once it starts.

Oh! The blessed relief of getting into that parking area at Corley. Handbrake on, engine off and ... rest.

Asleep on the job

I see on the BBC news site this morning that a train driver in India has been suspended from work after falling asleep of the job so deeply that he drove past two stations where he was supposed to stop. It all happened in Bihar. When passengers managed to clamber along the moving train and onto the locomotive they found him snoring in the cab. And that isn't the end of the story either, to appease angry passengers who had missed their stops the driver then reversed the whole train two stations!

I couldn't help but wonder what JR Higashi-Nihon senior managers would make of all this. Beyond their wildest nightmares really. In Japan railway management start to get very upset if a train is running even a minute late or someone hasn't got his cap on.

In the history of railways there have been many accidents that must have been caused by train crews falling asleep and the technology of the 'Dead Man's Handle' these days is supposed to render it impossible for a train to keep moving once the driver isn't conscious. With steam locomotives it was much rarer because they had a crew of two, and the fireman had to keep stoking the boiler to keep the engine going.

It still happened though. There was an accident at Grantham back in September 1906 which is a real 'Mary Celeste' story amongst railwaymen. An overnight express train from London to Edinburgh was supposed to call there but raced past through red signals without even braking and then overturned a hundred metres north of the station where the route was set for a sharp curve onto the line to Derby. Just moments before the accident witnesses saw both driver and fireman standing in their proper positions as the locomotive roared by and making no attempt to stop the train. But they were both killed in the pile up so nobody ever discovered what had happened.

The most likely theory is that the driver had a 'microsleep' at just the time he should have been applying the brakes and that the inexperienced fireman hadn't realised what was happening. A spooky story though and the stuff of Gothic ghost tales - a midnight glimpse in the soft gas light of the platform lamps of the doomed crew apparently looking ahead as the train full of sleeping passengers hurtled past moments from destruction.

By the way, not travelling by train today are you?

The Big Screen

Il y a beaucoup des choses a faire chez nous and one of the more exotic ones can be found living in our upstairs toilet. Wedged between the wash hand basin and the wall is an old carpentry project of mine that must date from around 2005.

It is a king size television screen. Well, not a REAL television screen of course, more a very large square hole with rounded corners cut in a big sheet of plywood. Even though it folds it is still pretty big, and that is why it lives there. Just nowhere else to keep it in the house really, nor the two large support stands which live together with wing nuts and bolts between the loo and the window.

This screen is used in performances in class 'Open Days'. I put the roof rack on the car and it gets transported to the kominkan and bolted together and then kids stand behind it and pretend to the auduience that they are newscasters or weather men on TV. A couple of years ago its use was de rigeur, we couldn't put on a show without it, but it seems to have got a bit neglected recently. Maybe I can set it up in here in my study and disappear inside it and do a 'live performance' to you all over the internet now that I have a camera in my laptop lid.

I have to admit it, recently I've caught myself daydreaming of doing a proper 'Punch and Judy' show around here, maybe set up a little tent in the park on Sundays and do performances in Japanese with the obligatory swazzle in my mouth'. Look behind you!!! When we were in Provence a couple of years ago we watched 'Guignol' in a tent in a car park somewhere - the French version of Punch and Judy - Oh la la la la! But the Gallic tale is a bit insipid and 'politically correct' compared with our full blown '44E cup' British counterpart. On our North Sea beaches we need a bit of violence just to keep our blood racing as we huddle in out overcoats to watch Punch murder half the cast before the judge and hangman catch up with him.

I have to wonder a bit how a deformed child murdering wife-beating psychopath with a squeaky voice would go down in a park in leafy Chiba-ken. It isn't their culture, you know. But heck! It's just a bit of fun after all! You never know until you try it.

Takuhatsu

Interesting how even typing a word can trigger all kinds of 'mental formations' for us. Mental formations that can have strong emotional charges too. We don't need to buy other people's dynamite, we can brew our own any day of the week just by casting around inside our heads.

I had an instance of it yesterday. In an e-mail to a friend I was asking about the formal 'etiquette' of writing an 'acknowledgement' page. 'Etiquette' is a word that I wouldn't often have any reason to use, but it reminded me of something that happened not long after I first came to Japan and which I felt quite shocked about at the time it happened. I haven't brought it to mind for some years but when I did yesterday for about ten minutes I felt angry about it. Again. And then it evaporated.

I was getting a lift from two junior monks in their late twenties, still in the early stages of their training. The journey was from a very remote temple down to a railway station, but they were continuing onwards to make a trip for some days down to Kyuushu. On the way they needed to do 'takuhatsu' to raise cash for the trip. 'Takuhatsu' is the traditional form of begging that monks do in Japan, it has quite a specific ritual associated with it.

When we got to the spot they were dropping me I asked if I could make a contribution to the costs of their journey and proffered an envelope with a donation inside. To my surprise one of these young monks got very angry with me, saying that what I had just done was 'very very bad'. I apologised and they drove off.

Still a complete mystery to me. But I think the donation was refused because in this monk's mind what was at stake was that this didn't follow the usual form of 'takuhatsu' - the giving and receiving were not formally 'anonymous'. They weren't dressed in robes and carrying the right bowls for it.

If I had been paying attention I should have immediately asked him what his teaching was in relation to this. Of course it would be easy to analyse the whole thing and feel cross because there were obviously some very major misunderstandings flying around. When things like that punch you in the face there is always more to it.

'Takuhatsu' is just a form, it is the 'dana' - the paramita of unattached generosity that it should represent - that counts. Does this act involve any expectation of 'reward', even if it is only a 'feel good factor'?

From that perspective maybe doesn't really matter if my offer was angrily declined. It doesn't change the intention.

Shinfonia

Well, that's the 'Big Day' over then. This weekend was our Prefectural Choir Festival, when singers from all over leafy Chiba-ken converge on the 2000-seater Culture Hall near Chiba Castle and have their six minutes (and not a second more!) of fame.

How many times have I sung in this now? Four? Five? It is certainly the masterpiece of organisation that you would expect in Japan, around two hundred choirs are got onto that vast stage, do their 'stint' and take a bow and depart over two days with meticulous efficiency. In previous years I've developed serious aesthetic constipation and a headache at listening to sixty or seventy completely unrelated items of music in two and a half hours with six minutes of personal adrenalin 'rush' somewhere in the middle. But I must have got used to it now because I really enjoyed it yesterday. Also I know a lot of people there.

When I was a kid I used to stand on railway station platforms and collect engine numbers (actually I still do!) and there is an equivalent 'angle' on this festival too which is to 'spot the uniform'. Unless you are 'Bohemians', like what we are I'm afraid, it is de rigeur that men wear ill-fitting dinner suits and bow ties and women wear ... well, now there's a thing! Saffron yellow taffeta with the red rose accessory ... must be that lot from Matsudo again. Purple silk with a fresh 'spray' - that rich crowd from Ichikawa! For me these ladies' 'get-ups' fall into two classes - the vaguely tasteful, even sometimes slightly erotic 'classical drapes/curtain' school and the unashamed 'soft furnishings genre', patterns you wouldn't be ashamed for your sofa to wear.

'Stately as a galleon she sailed across the floor ...'


Maybe one day I'll write the definitive 'spotters guide' to Chiba-ken choir uniforms. Maybe.

And there is even a supplier on hand that specialises in this stuff. Symphonia - well, 'Shinfonia' in katakana, it is the nearest you can get to the Italian in Japanese. In the lobby you will find racks full of sample dresses for the ladies to peruse and swatches of material. Bored with your present design? Here is the chance to sign a contract to 'tool up' for a new generation of frocks indeed.

But the group I enjoyed most yesterday was the bunch of ten seventeen year old High School students who sang a cappella in their rather unambitious school uniforms. The bass was even wearing his 'trainers', maybe he didn't have black shiny shoes, and his tie was a bit wonky. But he was the young 'me' and they were all singing because they really loved making music together. Suddenly I was back in the days of our school madrigal choir again, on stage in East Grinstead or Tumbridge Wells or for 'morning assembly' with a bunch of close friends learning about music and harmony and friendship and how all these fitted together in a practical way, like carving wood or digging a garden. These experiences will influence the whole path of their lives, much more than they could understand now. Lovely to listen to and watch.