Sushi conveyor

We've had a visitor from England over the past couple of days and this morning we dropped him over to Narita early for his flight to London. We are on the edge of a typhoon at the moment but with luck it will head north off the coast and even if not their flight takes off at ten so it should be OK - the eye of the cyclone isn't expected around here until after lunch and it looks like quite a modest storm.

Yesterday evening for a bit of fun we headed over to a sushi restaurant near Togane. It was one of these places where the comestibles circulate around the room on an endless conveyor belt that runs out and back along central piers with tables on either side. You select what you want to eat from the endless procession of passing food and then when you are full the waitress comes and counts the number of plates and you pay so much per plate consumed - in this case only 105 yen, very cheap!

I've used this kind of restaurant before, but not often. When I was doing my fieldwork there was one in Mihama-ku on Highway 357 I used to like lunching at. It was built on girders so that vehicles could park underneath and it was very popular with lorry drivers 'on their break'. The place was a total madhouse at lunchtime, somehow they could vary the speed on that conveyor and at crowded times the food would shoot past in front of you, you needed to be poised to grab whatever suited your fancy (and aren't we always!). Yes, I could wax philosophical about this metaphor - some of us feel that life is a bit like a sushi conveyor belt eh?

This place in Togane was packed out with families on a wet Sunday evening and very noisy - lovely! Edera had chosen it because it seemed like a good place to relax and chat but of course we soon became totally absorbed in acquiring food from that passing procession on the conveyor belt. kind of factory farming for humans. But fun - and it really gets you talking about the food! Is this crab meat or sweetcorn sushi flying by? Oh! Gone already!

We were wondering how this kind of place would go down in England. I'm sure there must be some. But we could see that it would be a tough 'operation' to run. Us 'Brits' would scoff the food and hide the plates under the table I'm sure, or slip the 'empties' back onto the belt when the waitress' back was turned

Coaster

With a visitor due I've been tidying up my study this last couple of days. OK not ALL the time you understand, it didn't actually take the entire forty-eight hours although if you had seen it earlier in the week you could have been forgiven for expecting that it might take that long. I go in for the geologically kosher 'stratigraphic' approach to the use of space, adding one layer on top of another so that a skilled investigator could actually determine the sequence of my thoughts just be observing which layer of books and papers and maps lay on top of another.

I've remembered once more that the top of my desk is black oak (hello desk!) and also that I have one of those glass paperweights from Venice. As usual I have taken a solemn vow; 'no more mess until the next time'.

Somewhere towards the bottom of this 'pile of unknowing' I came across a 'coaster' that I use to put my coffee cups o until the mounting pile of notebooks renders its function superfluous. It is from a set of six that we bought in Paris when we were there a couple of years ago and it shows a series of pictures of the Eiffel Tower under construction, taken from some nearby vantage point. In the first picture the steel rises only a few metres from the foundations and by the last picture it is complete. This mat shows the tower in August and September 1888, just as they were completing the second observation platform and starting on the upper part of the tower. Steelwork! You need a head for heights!

I always think that sets of photographs like this are invaluable, showing sequences of events, stages in a process. They are powerful evidence, if we ever needed it, that the world is a fundamentally processual place, nothing here is 'bolted down' or 'set in stone'. I always try and add to this genre, I can't resist pointing my camera at anything being constructed or demolished. I also like to go out into the city, set my camera up on a tripod, and take a sequence of pictures at, say, two minute intervals so that I can watch reality speeded up. I'd love to have one of those video cameras that does this automatically, takes a frame at fixed intervals so that you can watch a whole video of daily events, the shadows moving across the street. But which pile would I keep it buried under?

I've never been up the Eiffel Tower. In my student days I visited Paris but it always seemed to cost a fortune even to make it tot he first level (and what is the point of that?). Now I definitely ought to treat myself the next time I'm there!

'Stray' comments

You read some depressing stuff on the internet sometimes. There is one site in particular covering Japanese news that never fails to wind me up. I don't know why I read it and maybe I will stop. It often has Japanese news stories in English that I don't pick up elsewhere but the editing is lousy, the comment moderation totally undisciplined and the standard of comment by readers there makes my hair stand on end. Phew! I feel better for that.

Yesterday there was a sad story about a 70 year old man in Funabashi who had murdered a 64 year old woman. According to the story she had been feeding stray cats and the two of them had previously 'had words' about it. After the row he stabbed her. Later it turned out - not unusually - that the agency had got the story completely wrong. He had been the one feeding the strays and she had picked the argument with him about it. One way or the other it doesn't matter so much I guess. It comes down to a 70 year old running amok and killing someone with a carving knife after a confrontation in the street.

It wasn't so much the story that got to me as the comments afterwards. Bored American servicemen from various bases around Japan seem to be 'regulars' on this site, all Sarah Palin supporters to a man I'm afraid. Soon the stream of comments predictably degenerated into a tirade, not against the killer (obviously one for 'the noose') nor the victim but against 'strays'. 'Stray cats' became 'feral cats' and 'feral cats' became 'vermin' in short order, something to be destroyed by all means available. "Disease-ridden pests" one and all. One contributor even went on to argue that "People who regularly feed stray animals are heartless fools with no friends. They need the "affection" of animals who come to them for food. And more often than not ... they have a violent streak and are infested with hatred of fellow humans".

It is interesting how many people simply can't see animals in any other context than in relation to themselves. To them if it has no useful and defined role it obviously is a pest and needs to be destroyed. If you can't eat it and it ain't cute it needs killing. It never occurs to them for a moment that creatures have as much right to be here on this planet as we have and that it is our own use and abuse of the world that usually turns four-legged beings into starving refugees.

It doesn't take so long to move from that point of view to treating people in the same way. If they don't shape up and fit into our view of the world, maybe they need putting down too. You would be a 'fool with no friends' to waste any time on your 'enemies', to try and see their perspective. They will only take advantage, better just to nuke them now and have done with it. Isn't it obvious?

Round Houses

I came across this picture recently squandering my time on the internet. I think these days it is known as the 'Abbey Bridge' or maybe the 'Dairy Bridge' and it crosses the River Tees about a mile downstream from Barnard Castle, just close to Egglestone Abbey. You can find it on the road between the 'Bowes Museum' and the A66 at Greta Bridge.

It is one of the most beautiful places I know. Walter Scott used to go hiking around here

"Brignal Banks are bright and fair and Greta woods are green
And you may gather garlands there would grace a summer queen ..."

Scott described this exact spot beautifully in his poem 'Rokeby'

"That mighty trench of living stone
And each huge trunk that, from the side
Reclines him o'er the darksome tide
Where Tees, full many a fathom low
Wears with his rage no common foe ..."

That describes this place very well. The bridge, built in the 1770's crosses a formidable gorge hidden beneath the trees, the river below dark, bottomless and to be honest rather scary.

But I have my own special childhood memories of this place and I must be one of the very few left who remembers now. To me this was always the 'Toll Bridge' because a woman used to live here and collect tolls from pedestrians and cars right until about 1960. Her living room - which doubled as a little cafe for travellers where you could enjoy tea, home baked cake and scones and lemonade at her dinner table - was in this circular 'flower bed' in the front of the picture. It was a little round house with a smoking chimney in those days, just one perfectly round room with a table, some chairs and a couple of arm chairs. One the other side of the road, which was closed off with a white-painted toll gate, was a similar little circular house which was her bedroom, but I never saw inside it. When we stopped there for some lemonade and biscuits on our way back from a walk she'd chat away to my grandmother but she was always having to dodge out to collect a penny from a car or a cyclist. To my annoyance I can't remember where her toilet was, maybe I never needed to use it!

Then one day, I can't remember if it was before or after my grandmother's death in 1960 but it was about that time, the toll gate was gone, bought out I would guess by the County Council. And now only those two little round flower beds identify the houses, hard to even imagine that somebody lived there, criss-crossing the road in all weathers. It would make a wonderful setting for a story, the dark dangerous river and the two rooms divided by a road and the smoke coming out of the little chimney like the witches house in 'Hansel and Gretel'.

Crying "Wolf!"

We had a fair bit of excitement down here in leafy Chiba-ken on Tuesday morning. The Japanese Meteorological Agency have all kinds of sophisticated equipment set up to predict earthquakes and some of these instruments work by detecting tiny high frequency shock waves that travel faster than the main force of the actual event itself. So the system can give an 'early warning' of when a 'big quake' is about to happen. It might be just a few seconds but it is enough to alert emergency services and turn off nuclear reactors, that kind of thing. I've heard that they are also intending to install alarms in schools to so that kids have a chance to get under their desks and avoid flying debris (though not, I guess, 'flying desks').

Anyway on Tuesday morning around 6:20 while I was typing 'Little House' here and so blissfully unaware of it all our warning system in Chiba-ken was triggered. The advance shock waves of a big forecast Shindo 6.6 earthquake with an epicentre in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast at Choshi were picked up and bells started ringing the length and breadth of the entire place. But then nothing happened.

This was all hot news on the early morning NHK bulletin and of course 90 minutes later this wasn't simply of academic interest. Were we all teetering on the edge of some huge geological UXB? Was some tectonic plate about to tip off its shelf and bring down half the Prefecture in the process? I think everyone felt nervous.

Well, yesterday they announced the results of the investigation into who cried "Wolf!" and guess what the problem was. A programming error! It turned out that on Monday the company that looks after these instruments had loaded some new software into our local piece of kit and that some bored young programmer had made an error that hadn't been picked up in testing. The program worked OK but he or she had got a decimal point in the wrong place and it made the system a thousand times more sensitive that it should have been. So the first time a tiny tremor - which happen all the time - was picked up by the sensors it was interpreted as a 'big one' on the way.

Just shows that when you are developing computer systems to respond to events and threats that don't happen often there is always going to be risks like this, software only ever gets completely and reliably 'de-bugged' through use no matter how diligent you are. What if the error had been the other way around - and the system was a thousand times less sensitive than it should have been? Bad enough in a case like this but if you put your trust in 'Star Wars' technology rather than good old diplomacy you must be nuts.

Outdoor practice

A real touch of autumn in the air here yesterday. It was hot and sunny enough but not TOO hot - quite a nice breeze and the humidity was low for a change, it could have been an English summer's day. Actually this August hasn't been so bad compared with some I've sweated through since I first came here. We have been up to 35 degrees a couple of times this year but I remember one awful August when it never seemed to be lower than thirty at night for the whole of the month. And that was when we only had an electric fan in the bedroom.

Autumn always seems to kick in very soon after O-bon. In England too; by the third week of August the summer is almost done. I have a recollection of sitting with some friends outside a pub near Kirkham after a meal one evening and the mist drifting across the meadows and that is pretty well how it is here now. We did a couple of circuits of the park in the middle of the afternoon and already the leaves on the cherry trees were just starting to drop.

There was a young guy playing the saxophone in the park and being English my first thought was to wonder "is that permitted here?" Sad. In Britain there would be a bye-law about it I'm sure. No trannies or musical instruments. Maximum penalty under this bye-law on summary conviction fifty pounds, three months imprisonment for a second or subsequent offence. We really know how to spoil each other's fun back in Blighty. "You can't do that here sonny!" But here it seems that you can because the 'parkie' was strolling around in his 'admiral-of-the-fleet' uniform and walked right past the player in the middle of a bit of Bach and seemed to be enjoying it. Probably the guy can't practice at home, I mean a saxophone is a bit dodgy, no? I've seen people practising shinobue - Japanese flutes - in the park too and probably for similar reasons. Music outdoors.

When I was a teenager I played both the French Horn and the Tuba at various times and our neighbours didn't like it. A kind guy who was the parent of one of my classmates offered for me to use his music room which he had built down at the bottom of his garden and so for quite a while I used to go around there with a tuba lashed to my back with a white plastic covered clothes line two or three times a week and oompah away in his soundproof shed. That was in the autumn too come to think of it, I remember the leaves falling and the muddy Weald clay on my shoes. Goodness! Crawley could be a muddy place once you stepped off those paving stones.

Landrome

Often after my evening clockwise circuits of the park I have to head across the road to Landrome to buy something for tea. Or snacks and diet coke of course. In my right hand, the Mr. Nice Guy bag - natto, tofu, butter, some delicious looking broccoli and a nice tray of lean fresh sashimi. In my left hand, my sinister side, the Mr. Creosote bag full of contraband to be smuggled upstairs when the coast is clear. Peanuts, Pringles, some of those saltine crackers and a bottle of pop laced with acesulfame potassium and aspartame which makes you foam and the mouth and want to bite the rump of passing corgis. I know, I know. Edera tells me every day of the week ...

I'm very well known at this supermarket, believe me. I've made it my business these last few years to chat up every single till assistant in the place. Far be it from be to indulge in even the faintest hint of self-praise but I'm sure they all giggle and poke each other in the ribs and smile whenever my plump tall and masculine form looms out of the car park and in through those automatic doors. I'm like a little ray of sunshine. And those bobbing yellow head scarves and green and red overall straps have my pulse racing too, at my age I should know much better.

I love to prowl up and down the aisles. In Japanese supermarkets it can be a bit like living in an episode of a science fiction movie. Ours does actually play the Star Wars theme tune for tired farmer's wives to push their trolleys around to, an effortless transition from humid rows of sweet potatoes to the mystery of deep space. Every so often a spaceman-like figure in white overalls, a face mask and big yellow wellington boots will come bursting out of the fish preparation cold room or vegetable store into the shop hollering 'irrashaimase!'('welcome!) to everyone in sight. Bizarre. Recently I spent a happy few minutes waving and gesticulating to one of these mysterious hooded figures in white through the plate glass window of the vegetable room under the impression she was one of our students before I realised I'd never seen her before in my life.

But what I really wanted to tell you about was the man on the tape! Yep! They have a continuous tape running in there in the meat and delicatessen section in place of a real man in white in big wellies. And this recording rabbits on all day about the latest offers. Did I say rabbits? 'Drones' would be better. but it is so very comforting, who needs to take life changing decisions about which mackerel to buy when the tape will tell you? Turn down the gravity on the serious nature of reality a bit, go with the flow. To be honest it is just too interesting too, better than Shakespeare. I have to stop and hear what the guy has to say about the latest cuts of pork from Canada or the new fish they just had in from the Philippines, he is so interested in the stuff he sells. Amazing what these foreigners do ... yes this mince is very popular with Amerika-san, seems in the United States they just lap it all up and for the amazing price of only 180 yen per 100 grams you can own it.

Childhood reading

A comment here this morning from Norman mentioning books that were important to him when he was young. It set me thinking, and to be honest I can hardly think of ANY specific novels or stories that I read when I was young that I can say had an influence on me.

That is a bit shocking for me somehow! Because I certainly read loads of books as a child - I think! I could read by three or four, can't remember when I couldn't. And there were always books around the house but come to think of it now not a lot, people didn't own lots of books then. These days our house has more books in it than the local library, book cases fill every suitable wall and a couple that aren't too. Even our bedroom is completely book lined. But back in the 1950's most people had only a modest bookcase supplemented by trips to the library. We had a library in Middlesbrough of course, but not when I was living in Barnard Castle. Yes, come to think of it books were scarce.

The one thing I can remember reading as a small child was - you've guessed it! - railway books. I still have them all, stored in a cardboard box in Lancashire. "The Modern Book of Trains" and "How to Draw Trains" and a nice book of railway watercolour illustrations by Ahrons. And certainly I did a lot of reading out of a 1930's eight volume set of Newnes Pictorial Encyclopedia. There was everything in there, from Greek and Roman legends to how electricity works and the wonders of radio valves. But fiction? Stories? The only thing I can recall is once reading Jack London's 'White Fang' and a similar canine tale which was even better because it not only had a dog but also big steam trains, set somewhere out in the Rockies along the Canadian Pacific. Always seem the ideal life, stuck in a log cabin in the forest with a dog next to the railway, later I might have added a woman, a cat and some Walker's crisps into the equation but they would just have been the icing on the cake. Now what was that novel called - can any of my North American friends help me out?

I'm starting to feel ashamed. No childhood Dickens, Scott, Brontes, Buchan, Rovert Louis Stevenson. That was all 'girlie' or purely 'grown up' stuff to me, sometimes inflicted on children in incredibly po-faced productions on the Beeb on Sunday afternoons. Nicholas Nickleby, Jayne Eyre - yuk! But I did read Shakespeare plays because we had a copy of his 'complete works' on the shelf, I should get a 'gold star' for that. Later I read an enormous number of 'public school novels' - Jennings and Bunter - just because a friend had them all. I worried about the dangers of having to go to 'public school' - would I get 'ragged in the dorm'? - but that is one hazard that passed me by in life, so far.

It explains a lot doesn't it? Basically I read what was there, and I've continued to do so. Now I read everything and I do read 'literature' but it tends to be people like Franz Kafka and Alan Bennett that talk to me rather than Thomas Hardy. I'm a reincarnation of Mr. Gradgrind, I like facts. Sorry!

Comments please! Anyone's favourite childood books??

So much for Dr. Suess

I was padding through the back of the teaching room to the kitchen yesterday morning to make myself my umpteenth mug of coffee While Edera had a class with two young boys. They were all happily enjoying it, busily reciting that book by Dr. Suess called 'People House'. I read it my own kids in England about 25 years ago.

There's something uncomfortable for me about this book. Good grief! Am I starting to suffer angst about doggerel for children these days? Anyway I cannot tell a lie. If you never encountered it and don't know the plot it is about a 'know all' rodent - representing structured knowledge, the process of definition and naming, political power and authority - who invites small avian - representing innocent ignorance, naivety, virginity - to visit the interior of human habitation - clearly a metaphor for our increasingly complex social world don't you think? The American publishers describe all this as "When a spunky mouse (sic) invites a passing bird to see what's inside a 'People House', chaos ensues while beginning readers learn the names of 65 common household items - and that people are generally not pleased to find mice and birds in their houses!" A post-colonial perspective if ever I heard one.

There is a huge logical fallacy lurking in this text for all us happy deconstructionists to get our molars into. For example, when the rodent character asserts that

"Bananas, bathtub, bottles, brooms...
That's what you find in people's rooms".

Clearly the listener can only share in an understanding of this hierarchy and designation of objects IF he/she already has knowledge of what these labels refer to. To put it another way you don't know it is a banana unless you know what a banana is. Ha! Got you there! I've started, so I'll finish!

I just don't understand what eight year olds see in stuff like this. do you? What are they looking for in life? Fun?

By the way, did you know that Dr. Suess (actually Theodor Suess Geisel) wrote his books back in the 1950's because he read a report that said that children's literacy was declining because their books were boring. BORING?!? What kind of an excuse is that? When I was a boy we read boring books and were grateful for them. If they thought THOSE were boring they ought to try reading this blog.

Robinson's Theory

Another barren-ish day chained to my laptop. Do you remember that scene in Lawrence of Arabia where he comes riding out of the parched wilderness of the Nefud Desert just before they attack Aqaba? Well, that wasn't me today, Desert Exiters 'R' Not Us I'm afraid, there was no emerging from aridity and heat for me.

But I can't complain because I did have a bit of a 'whizz' idea. Really it is so straightforward and blindingly obvious that it must have been written up before but for some reason I've never seen it. I was trying to describe transformation in the 'life span' of people over time today but what I was writing we just boring, even though it is an interesting topic. If you go back to the twenties and thirties in Japan the average life span was less than sixty years. Basically most people just had a brief childhood, six years elementary education and then worked until their health gave way and they died around sixty. But now medical intervention and nutrition are so good that the average Japanese lifespan is around eighty two. At the same time average 'working lives' are now about thirty five years so most people spend more time in education and retirement than they do at work. It is as if they have a couple of 'old lives' added together

One surprising consequence of this is that some of the most enduring elements in urban Japan are the people who live in it! They last much longer than the buildings!

But here is the thing that dawned on me today. One of the consequences of longevity is that towns just have to get bigger. In the old days you needed a house to live in, an elementary school and a place of work. But now you need a kindergarten, an elementary school, a junior high school, a high school, a university, a (much larger) home to keep all your Western-style furniture and belongings in, a place of work, a station to commute to and from and when you retire a park, a garden and a golf course. Amazing eh? Of course you don't use all these things all the time but perhaps one of the consequences of longevity is that you live twice as long and use four or five times more space. I'll call it "Robinson's Theory" I think, it has a nice ring to it.

Down 'Memory Lane'

Down 'Memory Lane' yesterday, my past rising up to haunt me. One of my thesis 'supervisors' is in Japan next week and he'll be in leafy Chiba-ken on Sunday and he wants a 'Cook's Tour' of the area I've been studying. Yesterday, just so that I could be sure that I remembered my way around the old place, I did a quick circuit by car to check on a feasible route. A 'dry run'.

Lucky that I did too. What I thought would take around three or four hours actually took six and that was without making any stops in the city centre. Looks like lunch is going to have to be at Makuhari-kaigan, the 'technopole' city area where all the high tech internet and communications technology work gets done.

This was a curious journey. I walked every bit of more than a hundred square kilometres of the city over two years from 2005 to 2007 and my knowledge of it is still pretty encyclopedic. I didn't take any wrong turns even though I wove my way through the proverbial maze of small streets and lanes. Probably I'm the only person around who could put such a trip together! This is one of those excursions that shouldn't even be awarded an 'adult only' certificate! Positively a 'Nantucket Sleighride' of the lanes and roji of not-so-old Chiba. Edera's eyes were closed in about six minutes and she didn't wake up until we stopped for lunch. (Only joking!)

What is strange about it is that it is all so fast! If you are used to walking the streets at three miles an hour to be driving around at five times that speed is somehow just bizarre, a word that I have come to love so well along with the reality of the experience.

There is no structure in this trip at all. In the so-called 'ideal world' we would begin our voyage of discovery in the middle of an ancient village now surrounded by urbanisation and then perhaps move to some panoramic view - say the Port Tower - before descending to work our way through successive urban landscapes from the Taisho and early Showa (sadly all bombed or demolished) through to the state housing schemes of the sixties, the detached villas of the eighties and your modern high rise condominium. But it isn't like that out there, so much for primitive idealism. Everything is mixed up, no two bits are in any kind of order. If you thought time followed a sequence you haven't been reading enough social theory recently, off to the 'naughty step' with you!

It isn't 'authored' - that is the word I'm looking for. You might be able to take the city as a text but nobody actually wrote it. Obviously. Do you want to join us in the back seat of my ancient Nissan Skyline time capsule for the ultimate 'roller-coaster' ride of urban history? Sure I can't tempt you?

Eight Hour Night

I sometimes wish that I had taken much more notice of my sleep patterns over the years. My grandmother used to tell me - I think it was always 'conventional wisdom' in the UK - that I needed eight hours rest every night. Actually she used to make sure that as a young child I had more, perhaps ten hours, to bed no later than nine and up around seven. But that figure of eight hours has stuck in my head all my life.

Most of the years I was holding down a job I would wake around 7:30 and get to the office just before nine, although in the last ten years of my career my lifestyle and travelling were just so crazy I could hardly have been said to have a 'pattern' at all. Probably then I was getting not much short of eight hours nightly. How do we manage to get up so late in the UK? Must be a combination of latitude and and longitude - we are so far north that there is no set daylight pattern that we get accustomed to, days just vary enormously and in winter the darkness is spread pretty evenly both sides of midnight.

Here in Japan we are nearly thirty minutes adrift, with more darkness before midnight, and also our day length only changes by around three hours because we are so far south. So people's habits tend to be much more regular. When I first came here staying in bed until 7:30 seemed eminently reasonable and I used to get pretty angry that so many people were phoning the house - even banging on the front door! - before seven. That was one of my first 'cultural adjustments', the penny hadn't dropped that not everybody slept the same hours that the English do!

These days writing my thesis seems to have pushed getting up earlier and earlier. I'm usually moving around by six, often well before that, although it is a good idea to avoid talking to me for the first hour. And I'm a 'night person' too - my mind is at its most active late in the evening and I sleep late. This means my normal sleeping time has shrunk to about five to six hours.

But I do seem to have got in the habit of compensating for this. Straight after lunch is 'siesta' time for me pretty well every day. The air-con and fan are switched on in the bedroom, I settle down for a 'read' and then soon I've dozed off for an hour in that deliciously cool air. So I guess I'm still sleeping for around seven hours anyway, just in two installments now.

Union Pacific Country

My bedtime reading this last few evenings has been Robert G. Athearn's "Union Pacific Country" - a book about the nineteenth century development of the Union Pacific Railroad. I must have bought it on a trip to the United States sometime in the 1990's - I see inside there is a brown card bookmark with the name of a bookshop in Salmon, Idaho written on it. But I have no recollection of the place. Under the name of the shop is written "On the banks of the River of No Return" - Goodness! Aren't we all?

I just love getting my nose into railway and railroad books and histories, can't resist either buying them or reading them. My collection must now number many hundreds, thousands if you include all the magazines I've picked up around the world. As railroad histories go this one is 'so-so' - it is written by a historian rather than a railway 'buff'.

I've maybe read it two or three times before and it documents well the political and financial wheeler-dealing that surrounded building the first American transcontinental railroad westwards from Omaha on the Missouri River across Nebraska and Wyoming to Utah where the construction crews eventually met up with the Central Pacific crews working east from the Pacific coast. It seems that money men then, as now, only took risks that were well underwritten by the State, This is as much a book about bankers playing poker on a vast scale as it is about railwaymen grading and laying track. In those days the perception was that everything west of the Missouri was the "Great American Desert" - it was only when the tracks were laid that people began to appreciate the finer distinctions between sage bush and prairie.

The thing that has really struck me on this reading is contemporary perceptions of these vast Western spaces as 'empty'. Nothing there but bison, deer, wolves - and 'savages'. Yes, 'savages', that is the universal description used by the men quoted in this book. How to cope with "the Indian problem"? Nobody seems to have considered for a moment that these 'savages' were people from a different culture whose title to these spaces was better than theirs. It was a mode of thought that simply didn't exist. Or was it? I need to do some more reading on this topic. After three centuries of experience of native Americans east of the Missouri, surely someone, somewhere, saw that there might be a different perspective on all this. I'll have to research it.

But it makes you think. What are the contemporary issues like this to which we are as completely blind? Well, there's the whole inter-species question and meat eating for a start. But what about just within our own species? Where are our blind spots do you think?

Looming 'Conclusions'

This last couple of days I've been seriously getting to grips with the last chapter of my thesis. That isn't to say that civilisation stretches in one unbroken line yet from the first page to the last. But Chapter Nine, which covers the last fifteen years in the development of the city I'm studying, feels that is is pretty well like Chapter Eight and the important thing now is to discuss with my supervisors 'what it all means' when I see them early next month.

'Conclusions'. Now let's 'conclude'! "And in concluding can I just say that ..." I start to wonder if I know what 'conclusions' really are. The train is arriving at the station, the driver applies the brakes as it enters the platform, the train stops, the power is turned off and the journey is 'concluded'. But where are we? At one level that is already one kind of a conclusion - the ride comes to an end. Yes, but which station exactly, where have we arrived at? I peer through the dirty glass nervously seeking clues. If you are seriously researching something then the unspoken assumption - and maybe most of the time it is a complete fiction for most students - is that you don't know which station you will inexorably arrive at, which airport runway you will 'touch down' on. But for me it always has been a genuinely open question. Scarily - and to mix my metaphors even more and who doesn't - my wheels are bouncing along the tarmac, the throttles are closed, and I STILL can't read the name of the place on the sign on the terminal building.

I have a feeling that someone - an examiner! - waits for me to say not that "they all lived happily ever after!" but at least "so it seems that A here was caused by B! Quelle surprise!" But the one thing all this looking and reading and writing has shown me is that there is no easy correlation at all, the emergence of cities is an infinitely complex process, a function of millions of lives. Sure, I can see how things like principles of capital and new technologies fit into the big picture but these are not the REAL drivers, the REAL driver is the human life span both striving for the security of routine and hungry for new experiences. Processes, processes. Things endure because we reproduce them in the way we live our lives or don't because we are a shifty, restless bunch for whom the grass is greener someplace else. We could push off someplace else, write poetry, build cathedrals, watch eagles flying but we don't. Because, because ... and there's your conclusion! I now have a very good 'road map' as to how one particular city has come about, the fascinating complexity of it all. And not surprisingly it represents pretty exactly the concerns and the priorities of the people who lived there who never heard of Heidegger or Marx or some contemporary and fashionable spotty Italian philosopher. So much for theory.

Yes but what CONCLUSION can you draw from it all? WHY are we doing all this?

Food vocabulary

Choir summer barbecue yesterday evening. I've lost count of the number of barbecues I've been to this summer, my social life seems to have become one long party these days. How did that happen? I guess looking at it objectively it probably adds up to about once a month but to a gentle introvert like me it feels like living on a Universal Studios film lot during a perpetual promotional party surrounded by a cloud of starlets.

Nice though, it is such a relaxed group to be with and I wasn't even the only man in sight for once. A long absent tenor and bass who are trying their hand at a 'Beatles' lookalike act were there too and even gave us a couple of songs! Hmm ... maybe a case of 'fools rush in where angels fear to tread' there - strumming away in front of a professional musician and her pitch-sensitive choristers - but we had a good laugh. And the weather was perfect. Most of 'the gang' had a sleepover after but I seem to have arrived at an age where I prefer my bed and 'beauty sleep', once we get to midnight I turn back into a pumpkin. Anyway, I'm a 'boy' eh?. Not that that makes much difference the way we pile our small mattresses around the floor here, communal sleeping is a part of Japanese culture.

Before the eating got underway we had an hour's 'English' and an hour's rehearsal. The 'English' consisted of people bringing back projects they had been working on as 'homework' and someone had been looking at vocabulary for food. It was really interesting to see the things she had listed there. Most of the words were fine, although I'm not sure where one would look for fresh octopus on the shelves in Tesco's and if you did find some radishes they wouldn't look much like what you were expecting!

But the interesting things were those that were missing! The whole host of puddings and pies that English ladies love to eat for dessert didn't appear at all, no mention of custard or Black Forest Gateaux or 'Death by Chocolate'. Japanese ladies love their 'afters' too but it is usually a discreet slice of beautifully made cake, people here are not familiar with our Saxon passion for gross excess in everything. Soon their eyes will be opened I fear.

Cicada mania

One of the characteristic features of the countryside around here in August is the sound of cicadas. They are absolutely everywhere around the place. Fecund, prolific and even omnipresent. We don't have them in Britain but I've grown used to the sounds of our feeble European species of cicadas on various over-priced Mediterranean holidays. Here in Japan they make quite a different noise ... virile, manic and seriously loud.

Looking on the Internet I see that there are more than 2500 species of cicada around the world. The commonest one around this bit of leafy Chiba-ken is the higurashi - Tanna japonensis. I'm told - but I guess it is just a myth - that the larvae live in the ground for seven years and then they emerge and climb the nearest tree and do what cicadas have to do there and then die. Sad. It is the males that make the most noise, the females keep pretty quiet. Not like humans then. It must be fun being a male cicada and you get to rub your legs together all day too. Well, for ONE day that is, all your pleasure at one go, cicadas don't have a big literature on romance and eternal love it seems.

The sound of the higurashi is very sad somehow, the kind of sound that whispers in your ear "summer is almost over friend, the nights are drawing in, typhoons will come soon, leaves fall, we all get old, life is passing us by". And they sing especially loudly when it is a gloomy outrageously hot and humid evening as you stand sweating by the mosquito netting and watch the moths flittering around the single yellow bulb of the street light down the lane and wonder however it was that you washed up on the shores of Japan. Yes, truly an insect song to slit your throat to, a kind of insanity lurking in the midst of it. There is a recording of it here but actually it sounds even louder than this as night draws on.

There is another cicada around here that is just amazingly loud and sounds like a demented electricity transformer or maybe an electric shaver with severe voltage control problems. Sometimes I lie awake and listen to it when I'm having my after-lunch nap on dull afternoons. If I can find out what it is I'll blog about it, another treat in store for all my morose friends.

Mukae-bon

Last night was the end of O-bon around here, the festival where we welcome our ancestors back into our homes. We had a couple of students around for tea but one had to head back early for the ceremony of okuri-bon in her household. On the thirteenth when Edera was driving back from Narita around dark she saw many families out with chou-chin lanterns for the ceremony of mukae-bon but I was here hunched over may laptop and so never saw it this year.

O-bon is the time of year when you clean up your family grave and go up to the graveyard at dusk on the thirteenth to invite your ancestors back home, to return for a short time into the family circle to see how the old place is getting along. During the week before out here in the country people are busy cleaning the area up (not that it was dirty of course!). You want them to see it all again looking properly cared for. There is the sound of strimmers in the air everywhere as verges are tidied up and the wild-wood trimmed back from the lane a metre or two. In many places they do bon odori - a slow folk dancing accompanied by taiko drums - but not around here. Then on the evening of the fifteenth, the visit over, you accompany your ancestors back to the grave yard. See you again next year!

The details of these days vary quite a lot around Japan - exactly what is done and exactly when. But it is a festival I really like. In England we think of ghosts as somehow 'scary' but of course family ghosts love you just as much as they did in real life, you would look forward to meeting them at the grave yard just like you used to do at the railway station or the airport. Nice to see you again, to have you back with us.

I've never done mukae-bon because I don't have any family grave around here but I heard an interesting variation yesterday that made me laugh and also suggested a way forward for me. The family of one of our students comes from Ichikawa and that is where the family grave is. Rather than catch the train over to the other side of leafy Chiba-ken every O-bon when she was a child they just used to go down to the end of the lane with their lanterns because they were sure that their ancestors knew how to make it that far. It was only necessary to go out and welcome them in.

Maybe that is what I will do next year, go down to the station and wait for the evening train and my ancestors will just have to be sure to catch that one. My dad did a couple of times arrive there on a train so he knows where it is. Somehow in the years since he died I haven't yet found it in myself to welcome him back but it is five years now, I should try it. Maybe.

Borrowed Books

I spotted a news story on the internet yesterday that kind of appealed to me. A Mrs. Iris Chadwick had borrowed a copy of the 'musical' Rose Marie from the Cubitt Town Library on the Isle of Dogs in East London and had eventually got around to taking it back. The thing was that she had borrowed it when she was thirteen back in 1939. He excuse was that "the drama of war breaking out" had distracted her and she had forgotten it was in her piano stool.

Good grief! What kind of a pathetic excuse is that? Seventy years overdue! Just because she's an 'oldie' no special treatment for her! - I hope they 'throw the book' at her! Even at a penny a day that has got to be a few hundred quid owing in fines there, that should all take some pressure off the Tower Hamlets library service budget. I'll tell you something else Mrs. Chadwick - it doesn't say much for your devotion to piano practice either does it? If you haven't opened your music in seventy years you are going to struggle to get your 'Grade 8' one day aren't you?

Occasionally browsing along my bookshelves at home I come across some misappropriated book, something that I never got around to returning. And often stuff I got secondhand was sold on after being withdrawn from library collections. Still, there are a few of mine lurking on other people's shelves too...

But here in Japan I have an interesting one, one of those bits of serendipity that manage to lurk around in life. Actually, come to think of it, it is actually here next to me on the desk as I type because I was just transcribing some music into 'Finale' yesterday evening from it. It is an old green cloth bound copy - 'Tenth Impression' 1953 I see - of "The English Hymnal". Always my favourite hymn book - the first edition was edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams back in 1906. he would have been in his early thirties then, an up-and-coming young musician. I've even heard the story that he had to partly fund the cost of the first edition himself.

My copy of the "English Hymnal" is a 'survivor'. Inside the front cover it has the words stamped "St. Nicholas Church, Worth. NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY"in faded blue ink. St. Nicholas is a small Saxon church in Sussex and one of the oldest in England, a place that might have more memories for some 'Little House' readers than others. But here's the thing. That church was badly damaged by fire in 1986 and had to be extensively rebuilt so my guess it that this 'borrowed and not yet returned' copy taken from the organ loft there about 1966 is probably the sole survivor of the old 'St. Nicholas' hymnbooks. And here it is on my desk in far away Japan. You just never know how things will turn out.

Godwin's Law

I've just been reading about the hassle in America about health service reform. Sure hope you guys get some health care soon! Seems that a lot of Obama's opponents are pointing to the 'nightmare' of the British 'communist inspired' National Health Service. This has provoked quite a backlash in British newspapers. We might enjoy criticising our own health care but we can do it ourselves thank you very much, we don't need any help from a bunch of right wing nutters from the other side of the Atlantic. I get good health care here in Japan but I''m reminded about the difference between the two systems every time I get my wallet out at the doctors surgery. In England we don't need our wallet at the doctor's surgery.

An interesting (and certainly depressing!) aspect of this hassle is the way in which some of these Republicans have begun comparing Obama with Hitler. There is a 'scientific law' about this you know - 'Godwin's Law'. Mike Godwin, an American lawyer and author suggested "Godwins Rule of Nazi Analogies" back in 1990. This 'law' proposes that the longer a debate - or internet discussion thread - continues the more certain it is that whoever is on the losing end of the argument will compare the other side to the Nazis or Hitler.

There are some variations on this. I noticed in the American Election the opposite occurring, any Democrat who was even mildly liberal was getting branded as being Communist and like Stalin. And where a neither of these epithets is appropriate 'arrogant' is a popular alternative and much loved by women in my limited experience - as in "That is just typical of you, you are so arrogant!" Oh! and 'ad hominem' is creeping up on the inside rail too. Recently on a Guardian website thread somebody angrily demanded of me 'Do you only do ad hominem arguments?' To which I'm afraid I replied "Some of my best friends are consenting ad hominems and they can still string a better argument together than you can ..." Silly I know, very arrogant of me too. Sumimansen.

I frequently see on that Guardian site references to 'debates' as if somewhere, some time a bunch of us are going to sit down and forensically discus the big issues of the day, finally collectively agree on one outcome and then go away and do something about it. But when did that last happen? When did you last say to someone "well, I used to think exactly the opposite but now you have convinced me I was wrong, in future I'll agree with what you just said, thank you for putting me straight!" I often think that people should be locked in a room or stranded on a desert island and never allowed off until they finally agree on things but then on a global scale that exactly how it already is, isn't it? Nobody is going to let us off this planet until we learn how to rub along with each other, reach some kind of a consensus on 'reality'.

Two quakes

It has been a shaky week so far here down in leafy Chiba-ken. Teatime on Monday the whole of Eastern Japan got bounced around by a Shindo 7 earthquake out below the gulf of Sagami - one of the deepest that I ever saw the charts here. The epicentre was on the Philippine plate about 80 km off Japan but 300 km down - so it shook the old place from Kyoto right up to the north of Honshu, around 1000 kilometres. It lasted about two minutes too. Just as I as buttering my toast I had that familiar feeling that the room was not as it should be and as things started lurching around I went and wedged myself against the china cabinet in case things really got too lively. I don't know what has put that into my head, just that we have some nice things in there I suppose. And I have some of those security jacks fitted so that it is firmly wedged by the ceiling. Anyway it never got more than about Shindo 3 with us, enough to get the curtains swaying around but not to do any damage.

Then blow me! Yesterday morning at 5:21 I'd just made a trip to the loo en route to padding along to my study and then everything started jumping around again. About the same size but much shorter and checking on the JMA site it was another Shindo 6.4 quake but much shallower, out in Suraga Bay near Shizuoka. Quite a lot of damage, tiles off buildings, walls collapsed and windows smashed and around forty people injured, even a small tsunami. But nobody killed. It says a lot for the sheer attention to detail that gets paid to all this here, the care taken with design. In most parts of the world a tremor that big would have flattened a city. Down there they had the shinkansen running again within two hours, hardly a pause to draw breath. They even have a special engineering train that can quickly check the tracks for any alignment problems so that they don't have to wait for engineers to walk along the track.

To make matters worse for Shizuoka they had a typhoon raging at the time, TS0909 'Etau' was headed through the Gulf of Sagami bringing torrential rain and thunderstorms, so if your roof came off if the quake you got very wet, and all before breakfast. Actually this typhoon has proved much more dangerous than the quake, killing ten people down in Kyuushuu. Because the ground was so wet in Shizuoka-ken they had a big landslide that has left a section of Japan's main motorway - the 'Tomei Expressway' - hanging in the air with a thirty metre hole underneath. They say they will have the road open again tomorrow but they will have their work cut out. In Britain I'm sure a job like that would take about a year.

Deja vu all over again.

It is deja vu all over again eh?. I don't know why I let myself be 'grabbed' by software but I'm just such a sucker for it. Yesterday I managed to 'blow' around six hours (me! six hours!) at this crucial moment in completing my academic masterwork to fiddle around with a trial copy of "Finale Allegro" to try and get some sheet music prepared for choir barbecue on Sunday. Did I succeed? Of course not!

Remember the olden days when we used to use a piece of music manuscript paper and a pen and write it out in about fifteen minutes? Long gone I'm afraid. Come to think of it I couldn't even afford a piece of manuscript paper some of the time, I used to make my own with a ruler and pen. By gum! We were lucky! And we were grateful too!
This 'Finale' software comes in various shapes and sizes but 'Allegro' seems to be the first size that does what you actually need for a proper score. And it is quite impressive too, if I had a leisurely week to sit back and watch the on-line training videos and carefully read the printed manuals then I'd be a happy man. The problem is - and isn't it always the problem with learning new software - that around 80% of it is pretty intuitive but then you come up against something - a 'double bar line' perhaps or a 'pickup measure' - that isn't intuitive at all and then you squander an hour trying to find it in the manual.

There's the other problem, there's a lot of stuff in music that I know but don't know the correct term for. So I can't find it in the manual because I don't know what it is called. And in the evolution of all this fancy software it seems that many of the terms I learned forty years ago have been 'sharpened up' and added to.

Still, it is all very kawaii as we would say in Japan - just darn 'cute'. That ideal of logical perfection that infects all software. The way you can play what you write through as a MIDI file so easily. I can see that if you like music you are going to have hours of endless fun, and especially if you can link your laptop to a MIDI keyboard and amplifier.

Or is it? Another part of me looks very sternly at all this and wonders whether Bach would have approved. Well, Bach would approve of course, he was forever purloining good melodies from somebody elses chorales, he would have been 'cutting and pasting' along with the best of them. But someone moodier with more hormones, a Chopin or a Brahms for example. Probably not, they would have wanted to get their fingers on some flesh and blood instruments with a bit of vibrato. 'Alt' and 'Ctrl' would have no place in their encounter with the body and soul of music.

All singing from the same hymn sheet

I spent half of yesterday writing up some historical notes on hymns. It is one of three 'papers' I need to get finished by mid-week so that Edera can translate them in time for our choir barbecue next Sunday. One on the general history of church music, one on the background to nine hymns I have chosen to include in our 'repertoire' and one - still to begin - on English musical terms that aren't familiar in Japanese. They are all quite short and introductory - this one perhaps four pages - but thank goodness for the internet! Where else could have I assembled all the information so quickly? And pictures too - I now have pictures of almost all the composers and hymn writers involved.

Which hymns did I choose? Well, they were all favourites of course, no point in rehearsing something you don't like! And I tried to get a 'spread' across British church history from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, from Tallis to Primitive Methodism. Nothing 'modern' of course and certainly nothing remotely 'happy-clappy' which I understand is the current idiom. Ugh! My earliest is 'A safe stronghold', both the words and music of which were written by Martin Luther around 1521. My most recent is 'Cwm Rhondda' written for a Welsh chapel jamboree in 1907. I realise looking at the music that I've nothing much there from the eighteenth century, rather a sterile time for me, too flowery.

Even though I'm not a Christian all these hymns say a lot for me and many have specific associations too. "Cwm Rhondda" for example was our 'unofficial' school hymn. The headmaster joked that place had only recently been built in the middle of a sea of Wealden mud and the line "pilgrim in this barren land" seemed appropriate. Sometimes I'm a bit uncertain as to version of a hymn to teach my Japanese 'sisters'. 'Monks Gate' has always been a melody very close to my heart but which are John Bunyan's original words? Did he write "He who would valiant be" or

"He who would true valour see, let him come hither
Here one would constant be, come wind come weather"

I'll have to check. I think the latter. In any case the important part of that verse comes later

"There's no discouragement shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent to be a pilgrim"

Nor hers neither.

I've been surprised how very emotional writing this stuff about hymns has made me. I 'fill up' very easily, always did, I wonder if I can even get through one of them a cappella, just our voices, without a good cry. You just take everything for granted when you are younger, sing melodies day in and out without noticing, not looking at what is there. Doing a job like this history sheet makes you realise the depth of understanding they reveal, the quality of insight and the love and courage that went into it all. And it was all done at a price, people gave their lives, metaphorically and sometimes literally so that it could be.

Anjin-sama

I was lying in bed yesterday morning early in that nice 'around dawn' frame of mind when all kinds of things pop into your head and for some reason 'Japan' popped into mine. The whole experience of living in a new country and culture. I don't like the term 'ex-pat' at all , for me it has overtones of sitting around with a bunch of other 'ex-pats' drinking gin and tonics and comparing critical notes about the shortcomings of the 'natives'. This seems to be a peculiarly and unlovely British habit. No, I was thinking more of the experience - which creeps up on you unseen long after the strangeness of it all has evaporated - of just 'being there' and 'being a part of it'.

There are various routes to this place and being married into the place is probably the most extreme of them. First your relationship with just one person deepens, then through that with one family, and then through that with the whole environment. You are eventually completely absorbed into it, your life IS there, you have ties of 'belonging' quite similar to the first ties you had to your home country and that can be a wonderful experience. You are committed. And yet you are not OF that place and culture, you never will be, you are foreign to it and yet it is also very much pat of 'you' now.

Englishmen living in Japan is an interesting variant; it is 'unusual', you can either do it or you can't. I find myself wanting to learn more about others that have done it. The famous one of course is also the first -Will Adams who provided the inspiration for the character 'John Blackthorne' in James Clavell's novel 'Shogun'. He was born in Gillingham in Kent and trained as a sailor, geographer and navigator and arrived here after a harrowing nineteen month voyage in 1600 - even worse than British Airways I guess. He got on very well with Tokugawa Ieyasu and became a key advisor in his government and also built warships for the Shogunate. For a long time Ieyasu wouldn't let him go back to England, he was just too valuable, but he was given a Japanese name - Miura Anjin-sama - and the samurai rank of hatamoto or bannerman. 'Anjin' in Japanese means 'pilot'. When Ieyasu presented him with his swords he commented that "Will Adams is dead and Miura Anjin is born"

Maybe he meant to for a long time but in the end he never made it back to England. He married a girl from Yokohama, had two children and eventually settled in Hirado near Nagasaki where his family grave is.. The area of Tokyo where his house used to be is still known as 'Anjin-cho' and there is even a railway station in Yokohama that bears his name - Anjinzuka.

He really understood what it is to feel comfortable in your own skin in a different culture, he could almost be the 'patron saint' of all foreign residents . Two lines stand out for me from his published letters - "Most of us are just about as happy as we make our minds up to be" and "Faith is a continuation of reason". Either of these would make an excellent motto for a someone making their life in a different culture.

Goodness! He really looks like me too doesn't he?

Circle of doubt.

Edera back from Hiroshima yesterday afternoon. It all feels a bit like that first part of "The Wizard of Oz". Things were happily running along in black and white and then the cyclone arrives and Dorothy gets hit on the back of the head with the bit of 'two by four' and then suddenly everything bursts into technicolour. Yep! She's been hitting me with the furniture again! - No, only joking, it is all just 'metaphorical' you know, the old silver thread of paralogical metaphor, 38D cup metonymy and synecdoche that runs through the warp and weft of my dodgy version of reality. She didn't really hit me with anything. Honestly.

That's what I've been suffering from this week I think. Once the heat and humidity get turned up to full throttle and the odd English word or phrase disappears from the flow of social intercourse I'm easily disoriented, the warp and weft just waft away it seems. Somewhere on Wednesday I realise now that I lost the thread of what the rest of the gang were talking about in choir not just once but twice. I was headed for the hills on the horizon and my imagination soon got busy to fill in the blanks. That's the problem when you only understand about 80% of what is being said. Or 50% or 30%.

"And your point is?" as they say on "The Guardian" website. Let me think. Well, it's this familiar old business of logocentrism and a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning isn't it? Derrida and deconstructionism and all that stuff. Back in my 'Mr. Manager' days we called a spade a digging implement but now I can see the truth of it really is that things once written down depend on the reader for interpretation, there is no fixed meaning out there even if you are discussing the starting time of a barbecue.

If your grasp of the language is at best - well, 'tentative'- this all gets magnified. it isn't so much reality getting turned up as reality getting turned down. Everybody should have the fun of this experience, to live somewhere where they only have a hazy grasp of the language. When you do then you realise that at best of times and even with your native language the same thing applies, it is never 'completely clear' what is happening, you just thought it was, everything is kind of 'provisional', only what you 'think' is happening at that time. Of course in your own language the fuzziness may be less, the circle of doubt may be smaller. But don't count on it.

A package arrives

A terse 'one-liner' from 'Thee House on The Hill' in my e-mail this morning. "The enemas have arrived now". That's all it said, but I immediately had a vision of that convoy rolling up in the grey light of dawn. The police outriders, the armoured car with Jack Hawkins playing the 'Major' and then the convoy with the unmarked delivery van sweeping through the gates accompanied by the men in the white germ warfare suits. You can't hide anything from me.

And Heihachiro Okawa playing the 'Commandant' behind the barbed wire, barking orders with a hatchet face as nursing staff scuttle to unload the long grey tubes with markings in Russian (or is it Chinese?). Anyway there they go, carefully stored away in the guarded hut in the middle of the compound awaiting the arrival of Hattie Jacques as 'Matron' Some of you were wondering when matron would arrive I know and now here she is, sleeves tied up and rolling on those rubber surgical gloves (why is it that the ones from Tesco's just don't feel the same I wonder?).

My mum I see as a bit of a Steve McQueen character in all of this, she has that tendency. She's already got that motorbike revving up to vault the perimeter fence. Maybe enemas and flights on airborne motorbikes are an unwise choice taken together but she didn't get her red beret for not taking risks. "Who dares, wins!" as my other parent used to say.

Reading between the lines - and who doesn't? - I think the plan in all this is that we - "The Family" - do a subtle 'selling job' over the weekend. Handy that my English daughter is a sales professional! I wonder what her strategy will be. There are just so many available you know. Usually sex is a good approach ("Take an enema and go to bed with Robert Redford!") but in this case I feel somehow inappropriate. Then there's the usual carrot ("Take an enema and get some delicious Black Forest Gateaux!") and stick ("Take an enema or God will get you!") options but this is all Sales Strategy 101 stuff, even Tora can improve on this. We could always go for the subliminal approach ("I overheard two beautiful women in tiaras at the opera the other day talking about the wonderful time they'd enjoyed at a Swiss sanatorium and you'll NEVER guess what they went there for!").

No on balance I think we should go for the straight 'frontal assault' approach. "Mother! Take your $!*&% enema NOW!" Call me cruel, many have and with better reason than you, but I've always been much too inclined to beat about the bush. I realise it now.

Clearance Sale

Somehow a particularly fractious rehearsal evening at choir last night. We don't have any aircon at the place where we meet and humidity has long since gone through the roof and off the dial. Dancing around in various Yoga postures to 'warm up' doesn't help much either, my shirt was soaking in about fifteen seconds. Why are we doing that? Who the heck needs to warm up when it is around thirty five and a hundred percent humidity? Surely it can't get any worse that this? Yet Edera was telling me on the phone that down in Hiroshima 'it's a lot hotter'.

And then when I got back an e-mail from the residential home where my mum lives. It seems that she hasn't been taking her laxatives. A second wasted journey to the consultant on Monday at great expense I'm sure ("Horrible Man" she says - one of her favourite adjectives). Now he's prescribed five days worth of enemas from the district nurse before he sees her again to take a look at a 'persistent problem' that is - well, persistent. It seems that she doesn't believe that she is constipated so she sometimes takes against having the medicine and that is that. Actually it is more that she's afraid of 'accidents'. Who wouldn't be?

Oh! And now it seems that she wants a bigger (and digital!) television, a typewriter and a mobile phone. She did have a phone in her room before at the other place but she phoned the cops in the middle of the night and they arrived with flashing lights and a heavy hammering on the door so we are kind of nervous about phones of all kinds since then.

Anyway there you go. When I saw the e-mail I had to laugh, those lines from Dylan Thomas popped into my mind

"Do not go quiet into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

This always strikes me as a deeply and even deliciously un-Buddhist sentiment and not very good advice at all but heck why not, if you want to burn and rave then burn and rave away and then accept the consequences, the opportunity is a limited one-time offer. The 'rage against the dying of the light' clearance sale is now on, everything must go, once it's gone it's gone, absolutely final bargain basement closing down opportunity on not being quiet.

A part of me wants to be like this, even looks forward at some future moment to being like this. My kids had better know the brutal truth - if they think they are going to get those enemas and laxatives into me uncomplainingly just so that some overpaid quack can shine a torch up my anus think again. I was much too meek before, now I've done with it

Home Alone

'Home Alone' for a couple of days while Edera takes two of our students down to Hiroshima for the Memorial Ceremony on Thursday. Well, not alone of course, I have two very persistent 'indoor cats' and one even more persistent 'outdoor cat' and a geriatric Java Finch on the payroll. But no human company for a few days, apart from choir practice this evening. Something to look forward to.

Time was when I happily lived on my own in England but now I'm not so used to it and especially here where most of our social relationships tend to be 'joint'. The first thing I notice whenever I spend even a day on my own is the lack of a personal routine, any kind of a timetable to work to. Of course routines soon emerge, and there are elements of existing routine that I continue to follow - going for a walk in the park, feeding the animals. But most routine here involves each other, from the first hug and cup of coffee a dawn through to bath time and reading in bed before settling down.

Part of the fun of being on my own is doing all the bad things I never get to do any other time, pure sins like reaching into the supermarket freezer cabinet for a bag of frozen chips. But I realise that I'm sadly diminished even in that department now, whatever happened to the pleasures of wine, women and song? Trips to pubs and bars and eating curries late at night are all distant memories these days, I count myself lucky to get a glass of diet Fanta with a couple of ice cubes.

It is good to be on your own sometimes though, perhaps even often. Allowing yourself to get defined by routine is as destructive as believing that you are what you do. Even if some structure is wise for our mental health and hygiene you can overdo it. Once the door is locked and the curtains are drawn you can get down to some serious transactions with yourself, put aside the playthings of children and not allow yourself to be distracted. In the end all the other stuff passes you by sooner or later. Routines, friends, pets, significant others, these can all evaporate in a moment. If you aren't comfortable in your own skin what hope is there?

Game shows

Lately I've been finding lots of recollections of old fashioned television popping into my head. Scents are said to be the things that unlock our deepest memories, especially strong triggers like lavender and sweet peas, but I find that a glimpse of an old TV programme often does it for me just as powerfully.

And perhaps the most powerful of all this pageant of the small screen are the game shows of yesteryear, those black and white 405 line epics that had me glued to the screen somewhere between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Of course back then we didn't realise that we were simply being fed British versions of rather stale American fare, we thought that all this stuff was strikingly original. Or I did anyway! I didn't realise the on the other side of the Atlantic people had already been watching the same kind of material for twenty years already. We used to rush into the classroom before register to share recollections of the drama of the previous evening.

Michael Miles! Remember him? Or was it Hughie Green? 'Take Your Pick' or 'Double Your Money' - it is all a blur now! If I remember rightly contestants used to have to get three questions right and then pick a box number. Then there followed a strange little option where the compere offered them unimaginably large wedges of cash - £20 at least, maybe even £50! - for the key to that box. At this point you could 'sell your birthright for a mess of pottage', maybe you were one of those sad people for whom a 'bird in the hand' was always going to be the most that life could offer. But if you hung on in there and avoided the temptation to take the money then you got to open that box and see what was inside. We were all on the edge of our seats - was it something splendid or just sad old 'Dusty Bin'?

And then sometimes that wonderful moment! "You have turned down thirty pounds but you have won ... TONIGHT'S STAR PRIZE! A Kenwood Food Mixer complete with a set of sixty two attachments!" Or perhaps it was a real foreign holiday - a four day cruise to Brittany for two! Or a two day cruise to the Hook of Holland for four! But who cared? It was the magic of the moment that mattered. All the drama of life was there, the common man pitted against the Fates.

Later I sort of got to want to mentally challenge this "some you win, some you loose" formula. After all these were fake fate, invented odds. If you are struck by a typhoon or strike gold in Alaska - well, that is real risk but when it comes to putting cards into sealed envelopes all must have prizes!

Pleasure Quarter

My bedtime reading this last few days has been another biography of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu - quite an old text by A.L. Sadler first published in 1937 but very well written. And all a bit of a revelation to me. He's one of those figures in seventeenth history who you vaguely know altered the whole direction of Japanese society but apart from big events like the Battle of Sekigahara you aren't quite sure why. Well, this text really fills in on details which give a much more rounded account of the quality of the man himself and his skills as a leader.

One incident that made me laugh concerned the consequences of the establishment in Sumpu of that very Edo-period institution the 'Pleasure Quarter'. The Tokugawa government established these districts in cities ostensibly to provide entertainment and brothels but as access was limited to one gate in fact they were an excellent means of observation and control because the police watched all comings and goings very carefully. However the local magistrate was very uneasy about the place and was minded to move it several kilometres out of town. But Ieyasu gently pointed out that it was good for the townspeople to have such an attraction in the city and rather than being a hazard to local law and order it might actually encourage it by avoiding unsupervised trouble elsewhere.

Later Ieyasu heard that some young samurai were spending far too much of their stipends on wine and women so he arranged for three nights of dancing by townspeople to be held at the castle, and as part of the event insisted that the courtesans from the pleasure quarter came and danced for everyone. At the end of the evening he thanked them all very much and then a little later sent his secretary across the room to collect the names of the prettiest ones and to mention that he was doing it "because at some time in the future my master might have need of your services ..."

Of course the news of this got back to the young samurai in about five minutes and they were all appalled at the thought that their shogun might soon be sharing bedroom confidences with the same women that they had been so indiscreet with themselves. It seemed that after that they lost all interest in spending their evenings in the Pleasure Quarter and spent much more time at home with their wives.

Wrong stage

Another performance yesterday; we have been having a 'run' of them but this was the last for a while. We had been asked to provide some introductory entertainment at a seminar about road safety organised by a lady whose seventeen year old son had been killed just three years to the day before.

When we arrived at the venue I went and scouted around to assess the stage and auditorium while the ladies changed. A big hall - six hundred seater and to my surprise I found that a very large school brass band was playing too. I went and stood in the centre of the stage, about a hundred of them waiting back stage. We'd have to wrap ourselves around the rostrum but it was OK. Tried a few bars too - the acoustics weren't good, no choice but just to sing out loud. Some nice ladies in the wings asked if they could help me but I explained that it was OK, I was one of the vocal ensemble members.

Then back to the dressing room where another nice lady came and collected us and took us to a completely different three hundred seater auditorium at the other end of the building! It had me chuckling for the rest of the day! So none of that first lot had the courage to ask a strange gaijin "what vocal ensemble?" it seems! No surprise there. They must have been rehearsing for some later youth orchestra event.

Things went fine, a medley of Japanese songs we are working on for our English trip next year. Down to just seven and no conductor and it put me in mind again of the hoary old Aer Lingus joke but somehow we kept on flying. Just how many less before we fall out of the sky I wonder? Also on the programme at the end of the talking that followed up was what I think in Britain we would call a 'light entertainment artiste' is such still exists, more the kind of second division Shirley Abicair side of life that was once the highlight of any trip to Morecambe Pier. Fun to watch through. And I liked the Snow White costume too.

The event as a whole I wasn't so sure. One reason we were so 'light' was that some felt it wasn't good for the organisers to link music and such a campaigning topic and although the event originated locally it drew much of its support from families elsewhere in similar circumstances. The stone hearted statistician in me felt that there was some subtle misdirection in progress, a focus on issues like drinking and driving when most of such tragedies here are caused by a very poor secondary road system coupled with inadequate road safety training for children let loose on the highway to walk or cycle to school. How you campaign about issues like that is not so obvious. Also it was all raising for me a deeper question around remembrance and moving towards 'letting go' that I hope I never have to encounter in reality myself but (or 'and') there is always a point where 'letting go' is good. I think. In my limited experience 'letting go' begins to happen when you can let it happen. But there is surely no short-cut.

Doe-Eyed Gaijin Game

It's about time I 'grew up' I know but life would be boring if you did wouldn't it? Where would we be without all these little fun routines and games that cheer up our drab lives? I was at it again last night with the 'Doe Eyed Gaijin Game' when I called in at the drugstore on the way home from choir. A new assistant on the till was all it took to undo my will power it seems.

I noticed here a long time ago that many Japanese women of all ages are just fascinated by gaijin men. It is the thrill of the unknown and untasted I guess, a kind of emotional "Is it true what they say about your kind?" as Madeline Kahn murmurs to Cleveon Little in Mel Brooks' 'Blazing Saddles'. Sometimes it is quite dramatic. Once a while back in Tokyo three girls in their thirties were crossing the road towards me and one literally froze when she saw me walking towards her. It seems that her legs turned to jelly. Honest! I had to assist her to the kerb or she might have had an accident. Goodness! What to do? Nobody looked at me this way in Luton...

Anyway a while after that I evolved the rules and tradition of the 'Doe Eyed Gaijin Game'. When you are in a shop paying some pretty young assistant at the till and she's rummaging around in the drawer for change you let your eyes soften into a Bambi-like gaze, the pupils dilate and adopt a soft concerned smile and just stare like you had fallen in love with her at first sight. Then as she hands over the change she glances up at you and ... Kepow! She is straight off balance, it is as if you had hypnotised her!

Once on a high and windy hill, in the morning mist
Two lovers kissed And the world stood still
Then your fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing ...

Frankly these girls ought to get this kind of personal attention at least a dozen times a day but Japanese men have no imagination somehow, too interested in reading manga and playing video games. I mean it isn't even as if an admiring glance costs anything. Just amazing the little spark of recognition that I get back too; to be honest it is very nice to look into the heart of a complete stranger and get a smile in return.

And then of course before they have time to even recover their balance it is a quick 'arigato gozaimasu' - 'Thank you very much!' and out of the door leaving them with a grin on their faces.

Life isn't all bad.