Day to remember

Well, that's the 'Big Weekend' pretty well done. I've been watching this one looming up for some time. Yesterday the happyoukai, then a rehearsal with the band in the evening, and then another rehearsal this morning followed by the big concert with the band this afternoon. About as much 'spotlight' as I could manage for one weekend I think.

I'll write about the happyoukai as soon as I get a chance to sift through the pictures I took, maybe we can even post a bit of video here. But today I'll write about today because it 'had its moments' and also it is fresh in my memory. After Edera's 5:00 am start yesterday morning we all took our time about getting out of bed today, not least because we had the tail end of a small typhoon passing leafy Chiba-ken and it was a nice morning to lie in bed and enjoy listening to the weather together. But not TOO long - this morning's rehearsal kicked off at eleven.

Just before we left, a friend who lives in Kujukuri close to the beach rang to arrange to stop over for a few hours while the tsunami warnings were in force. Not having seen the news earlier we hadn't realised that the wave from the Chilean earthquake was forecast to be so big here, but JMA were warning of three metres in Tokohu and about half on the Chiba coast. When we arrived at the theatre NHK was running on the monitor in the 'green room' and it really was 'wall to wall' tsunami warnings with cancelled trains on coastal lines and endless videos of deserted harbours. The arrival of the first wave around here was forecast to be pretty well at exactly the time we were launching into 'Cavalliera Rusticana'. I have to say that Japanese emergency warnings are pretty darn sophisticated, with all those TV simulations and warnings everywhere you went you couldn't have missed out on the news that something big was headed your way.

Anyway it turned out - doesn't it always happen? - that by the time it had made it across the Pacific to Honshu the tsunami arrival was a bit of a damp squib. Can't say that for us though - we were into our performance with the best of them, F-san bouncing those top 'C's off the back wall of the auditorium like medicine balls. We don't hold back when it comes to Italian opera choruses if we are lucky enough to have a band and an amplifier system all laid on for our fun! In fact wherever you are I'm surprised that you couldn't hear us!

Where is Ryokan's hut?

A lot milder this morning, I'm even typing away here with no cardigan on and our bedroom window open. Probably won't last but let's enjoy this Spring weather. All the hardest stuff that I had to write is sent to England at last. I'm not 'free' yet but now I just have a few days 'tidying up' to do before everything is printed, bound and in the post. It is hard to know what to do with my 'freedom' - I feel like someone about to be released from gaol. It has always struck me that the last few weeks of a prison sentence must be a strange time, when suddenly you realise that the remainder of the sentence is something finite at last. And that what had seemed for ever no longer is.

Anyway Edera and I were debating what, if anything, we would do this Spring. How about a trip to Okinawa for a couple of days? Or perhaps the cherry blossoms at Nara in April. At the moment the slightly preferred option seems to be Ryokan's hut.

To be honest I'm not exactly sure where it is, somewhere up in Niigata-ken near the Sea of Japan coast but where exactly? According to his poems near Mount Kugami and the village of Shimazaki, wherever they are. I'll have to get out some maps, take a look a the Niigata-ken road atlas.

Ryokan (1758-1831) was one of Japan's great poets. Soto Zen monk and hermit, he really did live in an old hut up a mountain for years. In the last years of his life he had a deep and I guess very 'spiritual' relationship with a young nun called Teishin and she helped to organise his work and to publish it after his death. Without her efforts few would ever have heard of him.

Niigata feels like a good trip. Not too far, we can drive there in not much more than half a day if we get up early and avoid the Tokyo traffic. Perhaps spend a couple of nights and take a good look around the area.

I'll let you know how our plans progess. If they do, of course!

Missing Goffman

I've been struggling this last week to keep an eye on where essential books for looking up references have got to. It has been such a cold and windy February that I've abandoned my study and 'set up shop' on a small triangular table that I built into the corner of our bedroom right under the air-con/heater. It is a good place to work although maybe only twice the size of my laptop. At least I don't have the distraction of looking out of the window, the only view here is of grey wallpaper, a small photo of me with Edera, my sister-in-law and niece dressed up in kimono, and another picture of C-chan in kimono on her twentieth birthday.

So the only place for books is on the bed. At the best of times I'm not good at managing the avalanche of reference books that builds up while I'm writing, my study floor gets covered to ankle height in about a week usually. But the added disadvantage with dumping them on the bed of course is that at the end of the day they have to be re-dumped in piles around the room every evening. The place soon gets to look like a secondhand book shop of the worst kind. Then as if by magic, one disappears and I waste thirty minutes trying to track it down.

One book I wanted yesterday is still eluding me. It is my copy of "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" by Erving Goffman. This bloomin' paperback ought to be obvious enough, it is dog-eared, heavily annotated by a former owner (even on the cover!) and wrinkled because it arrived here in a typhoon and got soaking wet in the mail box. It is what you might call 'a book with character'. It cost me about ten pence on Amazon secondhand and took weeks to arrive from America but it is one of my treasured volumes now.

Interesting cover too. A black and white picture from the nineteen forties which I think shows three American transvestites arriving for some social event. They are getting out of a car dressed in ball gowns and tiaras. But the picture could be real, they might actually be just rather masculine looking New York society ladies in their sixties. There is something deliciously doubtful about the image and of course it isn't explained anywhere, it is up to the reader to write the story behind it for himself.

Goffman was a kind of academic precursor of Desmond Morris but his writing is much more subtle than anything in 'Peoplewatching'. Maybe when I've finished this lot I'll take that kind of 'deep observation' up as a hobby, ride around on Tokyo trains all day watching people. Or maybe not, something to think about.

Good News Bad News

Did I get my Chapter revision finished last night? No I didn't. I worked through until after eleven and I got close - seven pages to go - but then I ran into a section that needed some serious re-writing that involved going back and checking the original sources. I admitted defeat and went and ran a hot bath.

That was the 'bad news'. The 'good news' was that when I read the emails that I'd had on the topic it was clear that the person in the UK with time constraints to read the work was planning to read it on Wednesday evening, not Tuesday evening. That's the trouble with this whole international working malarkey, you start to get very confused about who is on what day where. I was saved by the bell, I have the whole of today until choir practice this evening to finish the last few pages and even give it all a final run through again. Still a lot of work to get through on my own in the rest of the week though - and with happyoukai looming on Saturday morning! I'm not into 'multi-tasking' much these days. When will it all end?

I was vaguely reminded of good old Jules Verne by all of this. Whatever happened to him? In his novel 'Round the World in Eighty Days' someone takes on a bet that he can journey around the planet in ... um ... now how long was it? ... because he'd read it in the 'Times' newspaper, so it must be true. That shows how long ago it was, when things in newspapers were true. Anyway he FAILED in this bet and was ruined, he was a few hours late back to London after all. But then his manservant noticed a newspaper and of course it was a day earlier that he'd expected because he'd travelled across the International Date Line west to east. So they rushed to his Gentleman's Club and he won the bet after all.

As a statistician I feel very uncomfortable with this story, it encourages fecklessness and dishonesty. Although the DATE was eighty days on he had in fact travelled for n+1 days, not so? So he'd made it around the world in 81 days, it just looked like 80. He should have been a politician, probably was later in life. At least I've escaped all that.

Two jobs nearly finished

Pretty well at the 'desperate' stage of editing the last few chapters here. I'm determined that it must all be in the post by Wednesday of next week, this has all just gone on much too long. But today is a really key day - the last Chapter that needs some re-reading and comments by my supervisors being e-mailed back to the UK this evening. so this is really 'crunch time'. I don't think I'll be going far from this chair.

The last couple of days the late afternoon has been sunny and I've taken a quick walk down by the mighty Sakuta River to look at another big job almost complete. The new path on the opposite bank is pretty well finished and usable if there are no contractors around, but the stretch to the south still needs surfacing. The length along by the driving school is OK to use and so there's already one nice little walking circuit there that wasn't available last year. All the heavy civil engineering at this end is complete and they are digging out the last of the 'centre' of the new river channel now, perhaps another fortnight and it will be done.

It all looks very smart. More like a motorway than a river with the usual gurgle that is the mighty Sakuta trickling down the middle about an inch deep. I can't imagine that even in the worst of typhoons the water in this channel is ever going to be more than around 50 centimetres deep, why on earth is it so enormous? Still, I'm looking forward to seeing a roaring flood crashing down there some day - in typhoon weather I'll be there all the time.

I can see that there's a certain logic about it all. If you are going to spend billions of yen on two new four metre high stone faced retaining walls the cost won't vary much no matter how far apart you put them. But over the next few years this twenty metre wide channel is going to become a twenty metre wide strip of woodland unless it is carefully maintained and cleaned out regularly. It is going to be a real 'Forth Bridge' job for some civil engineering contractor to see to all that.

Hmm ... maybe that is the idea. A licence to print money. However I certainly don't intent to be continuously re-writing my thesis!

Bullying

All these stories in the UK News about the behaviour of our present Prime Minister and whether or not he has been guilty of seriously bullying his staff must bring up a lot of unpleasant stuff for a lot of people about their own experiences of that kind of stuff at work. Most of us have some experience of being leaned on to an unacceptable degree by managers, and it is often difficult to pin down the boundary between what is reasonable pressure to improve a less than glittering performance and out-and-out bullying. So much depends on circumstances, working culture and the personalities of the people concerned.

I've had three managers try and bully me during my time in employment. Not in any high profile way and in one case rather unsuccessfully, I think I left a lot more teeth marks in his leg than he did in mine. In the other two cases it had more to do with personality than any real 'content' - they were people determined to get their way and also felt that they had to use the perceived failures of others as some kind of an 'example'. One of them - the most dangerous who I'll call 'HJ' - was a weak manager (and even weaker leader) himself. He was also seriously alcoholic which made his behaviour even more bizarre. In a sense it made it easier to manage the situation because you knew when to steer clear of him and that threats made under the influence of drink never really had any weight behind them. There was always queue at his office door around ten in the morning - his staff trying to get some coherent time with him after his first 'Underberg' pick-me-up of the day but before he reached for the gin in his office drinks cabinet (well - it was a brewery, and he was a director!).

Nevertheless I had some bad times with him. Bullies love procedures. I once got a bawling out and an 'official written warning' put on my file for having an untidy store area after he had been rummaging in there 'under the influence' for 'optics' and brought down a pile of cardboard boxes on himself. It gave one of my subsequent managers a good laugh before he kindly tore it up. The nadir of my time with 'HJ' was the day he came banging on the toilet cubicle door because there was some information that he wanted that couldn't wait five minutes. It soon escalated into a shouting match with red faces and my card was marked after that. But his problem was that so was everyone else's and luckily worried more senior management got to him before he got to us.

It is a fine line to walk through, once you have a bully as a manager. Where does reasonable pressure end and bullying start? In the end you have to fight back and in my experience better sooner rather than later. You are going to have that row at some point, why delay?

On Stage

Watching a couple of people rehearsing for our 'happyoukai' on Friday night - well, one especially to be honest! - it sometimes surprises me how naturally some people take to being on stage. Like young spaniel dogs getting into the water for the first time, they don't even have to think about it. They just start to swim no questions asked.

At the same time it is a bit sad that they never discovered this talent much earlier. How come that they never did this at school forty years ago? If they had been given that chance to find out something new about themselves then, maybe they would have made a great actor or actress. Musical talent is something that has to be trained and trained, nobody knows if you will ever be a really great concert pianist until you are already in the top 0.01%. Raw acting talent on the other hand is often obvious in complete newcomers. It might take years of 'pruning' and life experience to mature but it has something to do with confidence, where your heart is and the ability to imagine. And if you find the opportunity, it can give you such confidence once you do it.

I don't think that schools in Japan do this kind of stuff well. For a start it certainly doesn't help to break secondary education into 'Junior High' and 'High School' - there isn't the range of enthusiasm and maturity in one institution. But then the teachers don't seem to get involved in any "whole school" productions. If you want to do acting or stagey things you have to join the drama club. C-chan was a drama club member, she was interested in stage lighting, and I think that it was really the biggest attraction about the whole High School thing. She was always on the last train home. But if you do something else - basket ball or English club - then you'll never be on stage.

In our old school we had a couple of masters who were excellent at motivating students in taking part in plays, and every year we put on some production that anyone in the school could take part in. These plays weren't easy stuff either - I remember acting in W.H. Auden's 'Ascent of F6' and Sheridan's 'School for Scandal'. Every other year the Music Department would also be involved and we would do an opera. On one occasion we performed Handel's 'Saul' oratorio as an opera. The Art Department were kept busy making papier mache armour for weeks!

I feel a bit of 'something new' creeping up on us in the shadows here but I'm not sure yet what form it will take. Amateur theatricals are scarce anywhere in Japan which is a shame really, especially in a place with so many nice local theatres and halls.

Happyoukai looms

Our 'happyoukai' dress rehearsal last night. For weeks we have been drilling our students and cajoling them into remembering their lines and then suddenly last night it all started to come together! Four hours of rehearsals and now it is just a week to go before the 'Real Thing' next Saturday.

A 'happyoukai' is a kind of public open day where students are put through their paces, 'do a turn' we would say in England. It is the fifteenth time Edera has held one around this time of year but until now we've been rather conservative about our programme for the day. The venue has always been the small 'music room' in our local leisure centre with an audience of around fifty and we have only included our school students in the programme.

This year all that changes. E has been hankering for a while to book the 400-seater hall with the proper stage and proscenium arch downstairs in the library building and this year at last she's done it. Also for the first time we've included our adult students in the programme.

So last night we all got put through our paces on-stage. Very interesting! Pretty chaotic of course, lots of kids like startled rabbits in the beams of a car headlight and much rummaging around as microphones were handed around and switched on and off. But you expect all that from a rehearsal, that is what they are for. We can get some pace into proceedings on the day.

What was really exciting last night was to see some of the stuff only attempted so far in our tiny school room actually coming to life on the 'boards'. We have some talented kids learning English with us and it is just so nice to see them 'taking wings' and using their skills in an auditorium. The other nice thing was to see our adult students all together in one place, chatting and getting on with each other just fine. Of course some have known each other for years but others haven't had the chance to meet their counterparts before. Somehow it all made life a lot easier too, suddenly three or four others were hurrying around with props and ushering kids on and off stage. And all having a good time! There is nothing quite like a 'show' for stretching people's talents.

Me? Well, last night, apart from my four 'on-stage' appearances with various students, I spend a lot of time in the control room raising and dimming spotlights and projecting 'Powerpoint' presentations onto the screen. But on the day I have to be the 'laugher' and 'clapper' in the audience to get them moving. A bit like those old black and white American 'sit-coms' on TV of yesteryear. Edera is having me fitted out with a volume control on the back of my head so that I can weigh in with a [Haw! haw! Haw!] and [applause].

I have my uses.

Last Master Plan Meeting

The last meeting of our 'City Master Plan' consultative group yesterday. We have a plan! It is a neat little document - around a hundred pages with lots of schematic maps and flow diagrams, the sort of thing that planners love. It all gives a sense of 'progress' eh? Our route from A to B! From little old 'here' to that bright new future due in ... um ... about twenty years time. Now we know where we are headed.

Well, it is bound to be maps and flow charts of course, these things all follow a similar conventional format. What do you want, an epic poem? I do sometimes have dark little fantasies about a City Plan written in Pam Ayres doggerel format. That might be interesting - you would have to only include policies that would rhyme and after a couple of hundred lines you would be so desperate to get anything that 'scanned' that rhyming couplets would dictate your whole policy platform ...

Who cares cares a fig for natterjack toads
What we need in the forest is lots of new roads.

And so on. Somehow I felt a bit sad after the meeting was over. For me they have all had a certain comic aspect. In Japan everyone goes to this kind of formal gathering mob-handed, we play our 'parts', it is a bit like a production of the 'Mikado'. Yesterday on the other side of the room there were sixteen men in dark suits busily annotating their agendas but only three actually ever spoke and one of those was to give the vote of thanks. I was reminded of the pictures that you see of the shogun's court, nothing changes except that people don't wear swords any more.

Somehow I felt that I could have, should have, given more to this whole process. But the only way to do that would have been to disturb the pervasive sense of order and harmony. Everyone talked earnestly about taking the views of local residents into account but to achieve that you need local residents who care about what is going on. In England you can often get more feedback than you could shake a stick at and especially when you p!ss people off, it is our skill to be argumentative, curmudgeonly. But it is not their culture here and it is not my place to tell them that what they really need to be doing is anything that will provoke and promote a stronger civil society, anything that will grow a bigger crop of trouble-making people with axes to grind. Only from aggravation and confrontation does concensus grow.

And there's the difficulty. All those nice bureaucrats are the very people who can't promote a more assertive civil society, except by accident. When it comes down to it they are part of the problem, not a part of the solution.

Vanished View

Good Grief! Another murky and snowy dawn today, Not a lot of snow, just an inch or two but snow so late in February! Usually it is only in the first two or three weeks in January that we ever see it. It doesn't do much for the 'Global Warming' case and I notice these days how much more this is becoming packaged as the 'Climate Change' debate.

A couple of years ago something had me thinking about all that. For the first time in a long time - probably thirty five years - I visited a spot on Birkett Common in the Upper Eden Valley in Cumbria. It used to be a great place for watching steam trains on the Settle-Carlisle line, just at the northern end of a short tunnel under the hill. There was a low stone wall there from which you could get a photo of trains emerging from the tunnel, just a hundred metres away - the 'perfect shot' really except that you were taking 'north to south' and so on very bright days you would be taking 'into the sun'.

I arrived at that place OK armed with my camera and - no sign of the railway at all! Over three decades a thick screen of trees had grown along the embankment, and you would not even have known that there was a railway line so close. Also on th public side of the wall, once typical couch grass and peat bog, there was now a rather dense pasture with many shrubs.

It was all really prima facie evidence for a warming of the climate, the place appeared to have ceased to be paleoarctic moorland and to have become something much more temperate and I've thought a lot about it since. Of course it isn't as simple as it looks. The main change at work here is that there are no more steam trains (or hardly any) using the route, so no periodic grass fires from flying cinders to keep the cutting sides free of trees. Also no need for maintenance staff to cut this growth back in summer to avoid the risk of fire spreading outside railway property. That means the the rest of the area is suddenly sheltered from wind and rain from the west.

The other element here is that the former moorland outside the railway boundary is probably no longer grazed much. Thirty years ago upland farming still provided a reasonable living and as many Swaledale sheep were grazed on the common as the land would bear. But that generation of farmers has died off and it has often become more of a hobby these days, keeping up the old traditions but not with flocks the size they used to be. So marginal land is grazed less intensively, and is becoming lusher.

There you go. What seems to be evidence of climate change in this case is probably not what it seems.

Kalinin K-7

Somebody recently sent me this interesting picture of a Russian K-7, a 'top secret' design prepared in the 1930's by the engineer Konstantin Kalinin at a factory near the city of Voronezh. The plane was intended as a heavy bomber but the design could be adapted as a passenger aircraft - a kind of large early Stalinist version of a Boeing 747 I guess except that most of the passengers had to sit in the wings (really!). Work began on constructing three aircraft but only one ever flew - the other two were left incomplete after the first crashed on its eleventh flight.

Looking at the technical specification for the plane I see that the top speed was around 140 knots - exactly the same as the landing speed on a Boeing 747. Even though it could outpace Russian trains of the day by two or three times compared with today it would have been pretty slow progress - nearly a whole day to fly from end to end of Britain or Japan.

Smell a rat looking at the picture here? Well, you should do. The plane was real enough and in outline it looked very similar but in reality it was only about half the size. The original only had seven engines, it was certainly formidable enough but nothing like as formidable as the specimen in the picture. This photo is a skilled modern forgery, a kind of ultimate plane fantasy. If you search for 'Kalinin K-7' on the internet you can find others in the set. I could look at them for hours.

The Russians back in the 1930's really loved to 'doctor' photographs of course, they were experts at it. Stalin used to keep his own personal photo editor, a man so skilled in the art of airbrushing people in and out of official photographs that you just couldn't tell the difference. It was a skill in demand in those days, you could be sure that in any political 'group portrait' a few would have fallen into disgrace and been shot within the year.

Not that all that stuff is in the past, nor only in Stalin's Soviet Union. It is only a couple of years ago that the Metropolitan police in London were caught out photo-editing the official picture of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes that they shot in error on an underground train. Seems that they were hoping to make him look a bit more 'Asiatic' and evil by tweaking the shape of his eyes a bit. Shamefully these people are still employed by the police. Says a lot about Britain I'm afraid.

Routine and biography

Watching the skating 'sprints' at the Vancouver Winter Olympics while eating my porridge this morning I was surprised to find myself 'rooting' for the Chinese skater over the Finn. Where did that come from? I guess I've got more Chinese friends than Finnish ones now eh? I've lived in East Asia too long ...

But that wasn't what I was going to write about. Yesterday evening I was looking back through some work by Georges Gurvitch, a French (well, Russian-born) sociologist who wrote a lot about kinds of "social time" back in the 1950's. He was one of the first to explore thoroughly the idea that our actual experience of time as 'duration' isn't the same as the physical reality of 'clock time'. This idea was developed in a slightly different direction by Anthony Giddens and it is one I have pursued in my own study.

There are lots of aspects to this but an interesting one is our experience of the distinction between what I prefer to call 'routine' and 'biographical' time. Routine is what we experience each day and we can't live without most of our lives being structured in this way. It is our direct and immediate apprehension of 'who we are'. When we eat breakfast, use the bathroom, go to work, watch a 'soap' go to bed, then 'that is us' ... in the words of the theologian and poet John Keble "The trivial round, the common task, is fit to furnish all we ask". Routine time feels 'recyclable' - we happily use our lives following the same rhythms again and again, all our habit energy is expressed in it, it is 'what we know'.

And so this time feels immutable to us, it seems hard to change routine. But of course it isn't hard at all; a new brand of cornflakes, a new train timetable, a change in the TV schedule and it changes - just like that! Actually we absorb all change directly into the context of 'routine'

Biographical time on the other hand is not recyclable, it runs in a straight line from conception to dust and it is cumulative. We don't really experience it directly apart from the big events that happen within it; births and deaths of people and relationships, milestones like beginning and leaving school, changing jobs. But everything is inscribed here, it is where 'the moving finger writes'; it is at a deeper level "who we are". The structure of biographical time is fascinating and perhaps you need help to map it accurately because your vision of it is like looking down through the wrong end of a telescope.

Monopoly Game

I got myself involved in a three hour game of 'Monopoly' last night. I'm not sure that it was how I would have planned to spend a Sunday evening but it was what some friends who invited us to dinner wanted to do, and it was all planned and agreed in advance. In fact there were eight of us altogether, including three kids, so it was quite a rowdy and cheerful evening.

I don't suppose I've played Monopoly for thirty years. As a child it was the only 'grown up' board game we had in the house, I would guess a 1940's Waddingtons edition. It was an English board of course - Old Kent Road, Vine Street and Pall Mall - and the stations included King's Cross and Fenchurch Street. I was expecting a Japanese board to feature last night - Ha! Well, that would be an interesting one, eh? Hardly any Japanese streets have names so you would need to base the squares on some of Tokyo's 23 ku (wards) and suburban centres, or more likely the next level down of local identity - the Tokyo 'chome'.

But when the board came out of the box it turned out to have American locations, places like Illinois Avenue and Charles Street, and the equivalent of the London termini were American railroads. And the game was run in dollars, not yen. It is the first time I've seen an American board and it was interesting to compare the look and feel with the English equivalent. "Old Kent Road" for example translates as "Mediterranean Avenue" and both sound like dodgy districts to me.

The game was originally invented by an American Quaker, Elizabeth Magie, to teach people about the evils of monopoly capitalism. Having just spent the last couple of years doing nothing else much but write a thesis deeply concerned with the consequences of political economy I was deeply impressed last night just how effectively the game brought to life the inevitable consequences of uncontrolled competition, how even the smallest tactical advantage over time can lead to the whole situation being dominated by one interest.

Did I enjoy it? Not a lot. Alarming really how quickly ten year olds can pick up the principle and become ruthless in demanding rent. How enthusiastically they gloat when some hapless player lands on their hotels. I found myself increasingly playing to prevent monopolies happening, but you can only take it so far or the game would last forever.

I guess I'm not very competitive, sorry! I never was and I've got less and less that way. At the bottom of it being competitive is about measuring yours worth against other people, pure herd instinct. Who has so much time to waste? Even if I lived for a million years I could find something better to do with the time.

Cavalleria Rusticana

Managed to remember to go to the rehearsal last night. In a couple of weeks time we are performing with our original 'mentors' - the local area Wind Band, something that we do once a year. Usually we join them to provide vocal backing for the climax of something vaguely operatic and Italian. Last year it was excerpts from Nabucco - or was that the year before? Anyway, this year it is excerpts from Cavalleria Rusticana, a kind of Wind Band 'Intermezzo Plus'.

This kind of work is a million miles from our usual a Capella fare. From our point of view it is all gloriously under-rehearsed, I found myself getting onto the stage last night with only the haziest notion of what I was supposed to be singing. Only four of us turned up for practice too but we are kind of 'competent' to sing in single figures these days, we really have metamorphosed into an 'ensemble' rather that a 'choir' now and we have the confidence to jump into any harmony, right or wrong. After one run through we pretty well had the gist of it, the hardest bit is hitting the first note which is a 'G' following four bars of two-two tubular bells ending on an 'E'. Luckily a double bass somewhere to my left has the same note so if I don't land squarely on the deck the first time I can rapidly slide up or down to make sure that I hook onto that catapult wire.

Cavalleria Rusticana! There's something strange in the relationship between the plot and the music for me, what geologists would call an unconformity. Girl marries boy, former boyfriend returns and beds her friend. Girl beds former boyfriend. People start 'spilling the beans' like they do, Sicilian-style with chili peppers. Husband is definitely not happy. Passion-Sex-Death. It's an old old story; too many hormones, too little time. If not here, where? And if not now, when? And all set far away in the country, somewhere far out beyond the last bus stop, Italia profondo. Provincial lives of little account and soon forgotten, which somehow makes it more poignant. Maybe that is why I find the music curiously 'at odds' with the plot, the music is somehow about the small world of emotions in a sweet but confined place. Passionate, beautiful, but it has boundaries. And I'm a sucker for sentimental music.

Endless fun there being crammed into the back of the Band, along with the ladies in the percussion section. It all reminded me of happy days in the school orchestra, a forest of music stands and pages of scores with lots of bars to count. How come I walked away from it all for so long? And some real 'hikes' to negotiate in performance - this bit in centre stage without 'mikes' next to the tympani, then unobtrusively five paces right and that bit over behind the tubular bells 'miked up' twenty bars later. It's like a dance hall back there!

As ever in life the best bit is the climax. Just eight of us pitted against a fifty piece band going full belt supermegafortissimo through those last powerful chords, singing ourselves hoarse. No subtlety there - just all the volume your lungs can muster. When we finished the echo off the back wall of the theatre reverberated for about five seconds. Great! Now that's what I call music! Encore!

Punishment

My bedtime reading at the moment is Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" Sounds like 'savage amusement' I guess and in a way it is. It is one of those classic books that all social scientists are expected to read not only because of the quality of the methodology but also because of what it says about the emergence of discipline, surveillance and control in society. If you ever though that prisons, schools factories, barracks and hospitals share a lot in common, indeed they do! Mr. Foucault is your man for getting to the bottom of all organisations that control your body through methods of controlling the use of time and space.

But what has really caught my eye reading this book again after many years is the author's careful analysis of the anatomy of crime and punishment BEFORE the modern era - how these things were dealt with three or four hundred years ago. The underlying philosophy then was very different in many ways. For example torture was routinely used almost everywhere by magistrates making an investigation, it was a carefully graded part of the justice process intended to reveal the 'underlying truth'. Often, like the central figure in Kafka's "The Trial", the accused had no idea of what they had been charged with, such knowledge was believed to actually hinder the legal process. So if you had been accused of stealing a jacket, or of blasphemy, during your 'ordeal' you might be answering the questions put to you with little idea if what you said was absolving or condemning you.

In our present society punishment is generally invisible, for most of us, most of the time. Just a theoretical concept. But until the eighteenth century it was considered as political theatre, transparent, visible and 'out in the open' - literally. Criminals were seen as having "waged war on the Prince" and the drama of retribution was in turn perceived as the Prince - or his servants - finally winning that battle against wrong. Punishment had to be visible and audible, an 'atrocity' meant to educate and terrify, inform and teach both victim and observer.

Many people in self-styled 'civilised countries' feel very uncomfortable with this perception of crime and punishment now. We like to think of 'justice' as being abstract and hopefully humane. But interesting how quickly the State has been caught out recently in human rights abuses and the use of torture in pursuit of their enemies around the world - people with different cultural standards - over the last few years. And how unapologetic the State is. And how little so many people seem to care - just so long as it isn't us being tortured! "Their rights aren't worth the life of a single 'XXX' citizen/soldier!" and all the rest if it.

Despite the veneer of civilisation I think we are probably all about fifteen seconds away from being part of the baying mob familiar to our forefathers, screaming for 'justice' and revenge in the right (or wrong) circumstances. It took a long time to arrive at our conception of 'humane' punishment but it doesn't take more than a minute to dump it in the trash can when the mood takes us there.

And on that topic

Someone sent this press cutting to me recently. Made me laugh.

Marriage Statistics

I noticed this morning some data on the 'Guardian' web site about marriage in the UK. It gives statistics on marriage rates per thousand unmarried population going way back to 1862 and it makes for interesting reading. The rate is always higher for men because, with women marrying younger, the remaining pool is significantly smaller. Otherwise the pattern is remarkably stable over long periods with around 60 men and 53 women per thousand marrying in any one year. There is a peak in both 1915 and 1940 as men leave for war service - "now is all the time there may be" - and also in 1919 and the late 1940's when they come home.

After 1972 the rate starts to decline relentlessly, from a high of 78.4 per thousand down to 21.8 today. Birth rates also complicate this but put simply it means that only about a third of the people that would have married thirty years ago do so now. That's a huge change in social attitudes in less than two generations, but the numbers don't surprise me. Who gets married these days? It has become the exception to the rule, something almost quaint. In Britain there is technically no advantage, you have the same legal rights concerning children and property whether you are married or not.

But I think that is a symptom rather than a cause. There is a similar trend here in Japan which is harder to explain because here people tend to neither live together easily nor have children outside marriage, they either continue to live with their parents or live alone. They simply don't ever get around to settling on a partner. In Britain holiday advertising usually illustrate either young couples or lone adventurers on 'gap years' but in Japan the brochures often feature two girls - probably colleagues! - on a trip to Europe or Bali together. Or an elderly couple on a 'trip of a lifetime'. Who takes a husband or kids on holiday?

There's a long term trend here about trust in the future and caution about commitment, but I do wonder if in Britain the unavoidable Christian-style marraige ceremony has something to do with it. Even if you don't marry in church there is a strong "till death do us part" element invoked in the whole event. It isn't a feature of Asian marriage, in Japan to be legally married all you have to do is go down to the City Office and sign the form at the same counter where you sort out your local tax bill. Of course many people and their mothers then do rush off and spend a fortune on Shinto priests and banqueting suites at the Green Tower Hotel but you don't HAVE to, nor do you have to take public oaths of fidelity which I think in a curious way makes it more likely that you probably will stick to the commitments you do make.

Tallis' Canon

Last night in choir practice we were getting down to some serious practice for our visit to England in July, and about half the evening was spent on two rather 'simple' pieces of sixteenth century music. One of these was one of my favourite hymns (no coincidence!) - the well known Tallis' Canon, a melody that appears in most traditional hymn books used in Christian churches. If you don't know it well you can find the setting we are using and a midi file to play it here.

Thomas Tallis fascinates me, in my view he is the greatest of English composers and yet despite his long lifespan - his eighty years was very exceptional in those days - and his involvement with 'the great and the good' in Tudor society, very little is known about his life outside of the music he wrote. I suspect that this is because he was a rather quiet and self-contained person, happily married to his wife Joan and living down in Greenwich. As a professional musician he was a 'Gentleman of the Chapel Royal' and wrote music for four monarchs - Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth I. That would be extraordinary in any circumstances, but the years of his life were a time of huge political and spiritual swings between Catholic and Protestant forms. Yet his music managed to encompass both.

He wrote this Canon during his fifties and it first appears in Matthew Parker's Psalter published in 1561. Melodically it is extremely simple yet somehow timeless, something that angels might sing for a century or two before supper. Last night only seven of us were singing - it was F-san's birthday and so we were a soprano light - and so it gave us a chance to really carefully explore the progression of chords on the first beat of each bar. These are the really important harmonic 'footsteps' of the piece that are resolved later in each phrase,although they are not the elements of the music emphasised by the later text written by Bishop Thomas Ken.

The more I sing this music the more it becomes a meditation on the sound and phrasing for me. And yet although the words were added more than a century later they are an important part of it all, I'm sure Tallis would have approved of Thomas Ken's hymn. It sets this canon firmly as an evening prayer, yet there is something disturbing for me about the second verse, a kind of koan lurking in the sense of it.

Forgive me Lord for Thy dear Son,
The ill that I this day have done;
That with the world, myself and Thee,
I, ere I sleep, at peace may be.

Is it SO easy to find peace at "the end of the day", is it OK just to ask for forgiveness and then roll over and doze off? If your intentions were pure but you just screwed up, then maybe. But if your intentions were driven by self, then watch out because you might have a few shedfuls of additional suffering and sheep counting coming your way before sleep arrives.

Days at Croft

I came across a photograph of the old railway station at Croft yesterday. The photographer is credited as 'W. Rogerson'' and I'll have to see if I can find out more about him, I frequently come across his work. He was active in the 1920's, taking many fine photographs along the East Coast Main Line between Darlington and York, but the "Down Platform" at the small country station at Croft seems to have been his favourite spot and I can understand why. Several times back in the 1960's I lingered on this platform myself on sunny afternoons. About five miles south of Darlington it was a great spot to watch trains because it was just a few hundred yards from the viaduct over the River Tees and so at the 'bottom of the hill' for expresses approaching from either direction. They roared through the small station there at a great rate of knots. And it was sunny too and sheltered from the east wind - and had a nice bench where you could eat sandwiches, and read a book.

Croft was a complicated place for stations, it would make an interesting in-depth study. It had its first station very early - back in 1829 just four years after public railways began. This was at the end of a small branch line built By the Stockton and Darlington railway, and it was down by the river in the village, next to the old road bridge across the Tees. The place was used take farm produce and lead from Swaledale out of the area - a kind of 'transfer point' for much of North Yorkshire's economy. Then in the 1840's the Great North of England Railway built the present main line and they followed the Croft Branch for a couple of miles south of Darlington before keeping to higher ground to the east to cross the Tees. The new Croft station of 1845 was at the top end of the village, but because of the presence of the old branch and goods yard it never had any of the usual goods facilities provided.

I knew this area first as a very small child. During the War there was an airfield a couple of miles south of the station but most of the air crews used an alternative station at Eryholme a bit further down the line, so Croft was a quiet platform with a very occasional service. At some stage the place had picked up the name "Croft Spa" and I'm curious to know if the village ever attracted visitors as a spa resort. There certainly wasn't much entertainment to be had around the area - unless you were a train spotter of course! If you were a train spotter it was pure nirvana.

There were no 'local trains' along the main line after 1959 but the station survived another ten years thanks to the military camp at Catterick which kept the Richmond branch trains running. Now you wouldn't see any evidence of where it once was, unless you knew where to look and what to look for.

Failed the 'security test'

I had a taste yesterday of what it would be like to have your identity stolen. Checking my Nationwide Building Society bank account on line it looked like a payment had not been made, and so I phoned their help desk in Northampton to check if there had been a problem. But I immediately failed the 'security' test. It seems that Nationwide policy in such cases is to pass you onto another agent, but I failed the test with her too. And nobody would tell me why. Once I'd failed the test they wouldn't speak to me about anything else.

Luckily I could go back to my lap top and check my accounts on line, and there I discovered that a completely wrong address had been included in my record. According to Nationwide I was living somewhere in Oldham and not at my real street address in Cumbria. Suspecting fraud I was back on the line in a moment, and of course this time I could pass the security test by giving the wrong address.

It wasn't fraud. Some half asleep clerk in Nationwide's address administration section had wrongly edited my record instead of somebody else's. And by luck no statements or letters with my account details had been sent out to that wrong address since the mistake had been made in January.

But for half an hour nobody at Nationwide would speak to me to say what the problem was. And if I hadn't been able to use the internet to check and see what the problem was it could have been an error that remained undetected for weeks, in fact it already had. I would never have known that someone had make such a serious mistake.

It was a classic case of 'more security' actually being much less security. Nationwide would have let that error remain indefinitely if I hadn't been able to quote the incorrect address back to them. What they should have done of course was, once I'd given so many correct answers about date of birth and accounts held and the like, was to seriously investigate why I wasn't giving them the correct address, check who had amended it last and why. But that wasn't the 'procedure'. They couldn't spot their own mistake.

Scary stuff. If it can be as bad as that simply due to administrative carelessness imagine how it must be when somebody has compromised your identity and is seriously attempting fraud.

Pregancy

That got every one's attention.

Someone was telling me recently about how they had passed on the news of her first pregnancy to her parents. They were young, different nationalities , living on the other side of the world and hadn't actually known each other very long. The spontaneity of youth and 'first love' eh? Anyway they sent a postcard to her parent's home bearing the news. It was one of those 'jigsaw postcards' that you can get that you can mail in an envelope, it was the only one they had! The pieces make a picture of some well known tourist attraction and you write your message on the other side. But to see the picture or read the message you have to make the puzzle.

Anyway when it arrived at her parent's house her kid sister did the puzzle, read the message and pretty quickly decided that she wasn't going to 'pass on' the contents to her dad. So she took it apart again and left the bits for him to put together himself which he did and turned white as the last piece was pressed into place. In future I'll be cautious about completing such puzzles!

It made me think how news of every pregnancy essentially always comes as a surprise. Even for the most virile and fecund of young couples deliberately trying to conceive a child there is a big difference between possibility and actuality, between action and result. Nor from the other angle is contraception as reliable as it is cracked up to be, there is always that lurking element of chance in the equation even in the most cautious of relationships.

When our two children were conceived I don't think that self administered tests were easily available at pharmacies, certainly I don't remember them featuring in the process. You had to go to the doctor for the testing, your GP was the one who passed on the news. And then three of you were privy to the information - or actually of course now four. But what then? Who did you tell next and when was a good time to do it? Too early and there might be some complication, better to be as 'sure' as possible. Too late and all the spontaneity would evaporate. It all seemed such a 'big thing' - well, it was a 'big thing', none bigger. Birth and death are part of and yet so outside of the mundane flow of daily life. In Buddhist thinking they say that the "child chooses the parents" and not the other way around. However the deeper aspects of it work, it is certain that from that first moment this news is available the world changes forever.

Sunshine and cats

Woke early this morning but didn't feel impelled to act on it. Well, it is Sunday. And a bright one too - even by seven the sunlight was streaming into our bedroom out of a cloudless blue sky. We are out of the 'sun lurking behind the forest in the mornings' hours that we get here a few weeks each side of the Winter Solstice at last. You can feel Spring coming just around the corner somewhere.

Cats are 'early starters' in the annual round of breeding cycles and the first thing I heard this morning was a local 'Tom' hollering to attract the attention of any females he might not yet have paid attention to, ladies he might have overlooked. Felines are just so darn enthusiastic about what Father Ted would refer to as "that kind of thing". But it is so intense, all packed into about two weeks of frantic action. I'm reminded of that hoary old joke about the man who had sex only once a year and when asked why he was still smiling so much replied "and tonight is the night". That is the way of it with cats. Tora always used to look so confused at this time of year, he'd been neutered as a kitten but he knew that there was something in the air that he was missing out on.

I heard one fight over females somewhere near the irrigation ditch last week but in general the boys seem to be getting a clear run this year, there is plenty of fun for all to go around. Whatever virus finished off our two felines in the winter seems to have done for most of the local cat population. I haven't seen Mew-kun since November and the cats that used to lounge in the lane near the allotments have vanished. The 'Tom' that makes most of the racket at the moment is a blue coated 'brindle' and he is very shy and unused to people. Whatever sickness local cats around here caught it seems to have been the pussy equivalent of the plague, with no survivors. Now cats are colonising the territory again from neighbouring danchi.

Well, let's hope that we get a good crop of kittens in April to make good the loss. The place isn't the same without a parade of cats slinking through the yard and peering at us through the windows when they think we aren't watching.

Conforming to discourses

This week I'm well into the tedium of making a last thorough revision of my thesis text. The 'final final' deadline looms at the end of March but I want it out of the way by the end of this month, I'm really deeply 'fed up' with it all somehow, and I worry that this lack of enthusiasm will be evident in my revisions. I got a lot from doing the study but not from this final bit. Let's hope that I feel that it was all worthwhile later.

Not really being very well informed about what this sort of work entailed I naively assumed that you got on and did your studies and gave it your best shot and then wrote up the research and that people would judge the results. But a lot of the last twelve months has been invested in chasing up other material in the field quite unrelated to Japan and - none too successfully in my case - trying to integrate what I've written on Chiba into that wider framework. Part of it is simply that Japanese cities really ARE different to the 'Western' ones that most Anglo-American scholars study and so debates on issues like gentrification and racial segregation of housing are not especially relevant. But part of it also is that I feel I'm being encouraged to 'conform' to some invisible 'standard' for work in the field, that they want me to 'think like them'.

It is a difficult one. On the one hand you can't start every study at square one. How far would we have got in research into astrophysics if everybody began studying astronomy my grinding their own telescope lens and making their own star map? It feels sensible somehow that in science you build on the work of others - spend twenty years reaching the edge of established knowledge in a particular field - say some aspect of protein research - and then add your little bit of original work to the top of the pile. But to be frank even in the physical sciences it isn't so clear cut and most original thinking is savagely resisted by others with an interest to promote in the field. If you don't believe this try and get a straight answer to the straight question "Is global warming really happening?"

In critical urban geography it feels like you can't express any view without relating it back to the opinions of some long dead French Marxist philosopher. Academics would tell you that this is so that you are demonstrating knowledge and understanding of 'key discourses' in the field but to me at the moment 'discourse' feels very much like a process of demanding conformity, the price of entrance to a kind of club. Originality is tolerated only insofar as it takes place within a controlled structure. Who cares what dead French intellectuals thought about cities? We can make up our own minds.

AND I can also see that there is some point in this. The whole thing about language is that it is a shared convention, we can only communicate here in English because we are already agreed on syntax and vocabulary, what would the world be like if we didn't start from shared ideas and skills?

It's a difficult one. And I'm feeling a bit jaundiced and tired I guess. Roll on March!

Planning concerns

I see that yesterday an English High Court judge decided that a farmer in Surrey must tear down some 'improvements' he recently made to his farm. The appropriately named Robert Fidler spent two years building his 'dream home' which includes a fake castle-style facade, a conservatory, marquee. wooden bridge and decking and a 'tarmac racecourse' - presumably for go-karts - in the middle of a green belt conservation area. Then he hid the whole lot under hay bales for four years, intending to exploit a legal loophole which says that unauthorised construction can remain if an enforcement notice to demolish it is not issued by the city office within that time.

The judge commented that Fidler was 'not entitled to benefit from deception'. Not sure why he should suffer because the likes of Tescos get away with it all the time when it comes to dodgy planning deals but there you go. Money is power. The sainted Farmer Fidler (of 'Carry on Camping' fame) will appeal it seems. Don't they always, when did a rich go-karting Surrey farmer ever hold up his hands and say "Sorry Guv'nor, it is a fair cop!"?

I'd guess there will be a 50% chance that when it hits the House of Lords or the European Court of Human Rights it will be overturned and that then there will be large piles of 'unexplained' hay bales the length and breadth of England. The ordinary householder on the other hand will of course will get a thumping great injunction on the door mat if he or she even dreams of erecting a small lean-to store to keep the lawn mower in. That's how 'Planning' works in the UK.

This all caught the attention of my mischievous snow regarding eyes because yesterday my "Gauge '0' Guild Gazette" quarterly magazine arrived from England. This publication is for sad people like me who like to spend their quality time hunched over a work bench with soldering irons and miniature lathes building 1:45 scale model trains. And blow me there were not one but TWO letters where 'planning consultants' were suggesting that in the UK one 'might' (when were such rules ever made clear and transparent?) - one 'might' need planning permission to put down even a loop of 32 millimetre gauge track around your garden and run a model train on it on sunny afternoons. You can see why I'm sure. Apart from the sheer scale of the civil engineering earthworks involved in an embankment or cutting through the rockery there's the whole Health and Safety aspect of regular bridge and track maintenance. Are operators properly insured against damage to their fingers from passing trains? Is the Tyler staff system properly installed for single line working.

Hard to imagine in a world that features Wajiristan, Northern Rock and Farmer Fidler that someone in your local city office is watching what you do with toy trains in your garden. But believe me, in England, in 2010, they really are.

Underwear purchase

Goodness! Another thin layer of snow over the place this morning. The rice stubble is poking through a white blanket that covers the tanbo behind the house and I'm sitting at my desk wrapped in an outdoor coat again. But the sky is blue and hopefully once the sun gets over the forest behind our little danchi it will all soon melt.

It started snowing on the way home from choir practice around ten last night although to begin with it was more like a hailstorm with sheets of frozen rain sweeping across our headlights. It is fun driving in a warm car through weather like that, I love the way that the storm seems to emerge from a single point in front of you and hurry towards you mischievously. Edera said that the hailstones seemed to be like tiny cheerful children tumbling out of the sky and hurrying excitedly past the car.

However I'm not to be caught out so easily now. After shivering for days I went into JusCo yesterday and bought myself a new pair of 'Long Johns'. They had a fetching grey thermal pair but when I saw that they were 3380 yen I soon settled for the 780 plain old conventional white pair. Several other kinds and colours were available but not in my size; I count as an 'LL' down here in leafy Chiba-ken although by English standards I'm not especially big.

This dazzling array of thermal underwear in local department stores is no accident. Japanese houses don't have central heating and once you stray far from the kersone stove heated living room you are soon into icicle country. It is one of the better kept secrets of Japanese living and it has always been thus.

One of the best descriptions I read of this was in John David Morley's "Pictures from the Water Trade", a loosely biographical novel based on his years living here as a young man and by far the best book I ever read on Japan. At one stage in the plot his 'hero' ends up staying on a farm somewhere up in the north - Tohoku or Hokkaido? - with the family of a friend during the winter. The arctic starts about two paces from the cooking stove, everyone lives like Inuit camped out not just in the same room but in the same part of the same room.

Well, 'Little House' isn't quite so bad as that. Once the kerosene stove is lit we at least have the run of the living room, but other parts of the house are definitely 'Long John' territory at the moment.

Close the Gate

I've had my nose into Ed Soja's book "Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and regions" most of the day. It is useful stuff for digging my way out of my current revising 'hole' but the title seems odd to me. 'Cities and Regions'? All Ed Soja's books are about Los Angeles and this one is no exception. But at least I've understood most of the text this time, his earlier book "Thirdspace" had me wondering what the heck it was all supposed to be about.

Bits of this book I found very depressing, and especially the two chapters on 'The Carceral Archipelago' and 'Sim City'. The first especially, dealing with 'Homeowners Associations' and 'Common Interest Developments' and all the sophisticated technologies of 'gated communities' left me wondering where the 'Fortress America' scene will finally finally end up. 'In tears' I guess, but it will get a whole lot worse first.

I'm sure there must be many 'gated communities' in Britain but I haven't come across any, they haven't become the norm. There are certainly a few here in Japan and I've always wondered why. Hard to imagine anywhere safer than Japan but I guess that it is simply companies that sell the security angle in America trawling their wares over here. There is always a market for it.

In America of course it is becoming, if not the norm, then at least commonplace. Soja reckons that about 4% of Americans now live in gated communities. Compounds with high levels of security and round the clock 'protection' by armed guards defending residents against the rest of society. There's the rub of course, once this kind of apartheid technology spreads there is no 'society' in the conventional sense any more. Through numerous stratagems the residents of such areas redefine administrative boundaries to avoid all social obligations to pay taxes that would fund services for other people.

Sad case lefty liberals like me assume that the tide must turn sometime but I guess not. We managed to get through a few centuries of the Middle Ages like this, locking the city gates to keep out 'undesirables' and letting people die of disease and starvation in the gutter. Taxes were low back then and the rich didn't pay them at all. I expect that we can go through all that again and we probably will.

Snow in the night

I was really feeling the cold badly last night and eventually retreated into my outdoor coat, cap and a sleeping bag. By ten I was just worn out too and it took me all my energy to creep into bed, a bit alarming really to feel so tired.

But this morning I feel fine and, even if I've still got my coat on, then at least the reason for the sudden drop in temperature is apparent. During the night there was a couple of centimetres of snow down here in leafy Chiba-ken. Looking at the weather chart I thought that it might make its way across Kanto, but I didn't expect that it would get this close to the Pacific coast. It isn't lasting long. It is a sunny morning with a big blue sky and already the covering on the roofs of the houses at the back has melted. Only the gullies and shady corners bear any evidence of the night's covering.

I don't feel inclined to get out there and make a snowman, even if I could find enough of the white stuff to do the job. I have seen enough snow this winter already, it has got into my bones and now I'm looking forward to some warm Spring days. Let's hope that they arrive soon! I have lots of painting, decorating and maintenance chores to be getting on with. The outside of the shed that I built in 2005 is already looking seedy and we have a leak along the washitsu wall which might be either the balcony floor or more likely the original external paint job showing its age.

Maintenance of buildings here in Japan is other one of those things that is quite different to anywhere else, and I'm only just starting to get the hang of it. For a start people tend not to maintain - not even to paint. The first year I was here I was astonished to discover that there were no tool hire shops; any kind of sophisticated DIY is completely discouraged. If you want a long ladder you have to buy your own. And the actual structure of buildings is quite different too. For example there is a much bigger gap between the ceiling and the floor above to permit extra bracing to withstand quakes, but this means that all 'under floor' work is handled not by lifting floorboards but by crawling underneath. If I attempted that I would soon get stuck!

So I'll make the most of this late snow and get on with some thesis editing and re-writing safely wrapped in my outdoor coat. The serious work begins as soon as the sun returns.

Lonely deaths

We were watching a sad documentary on NHK last night about people dying alone in Japanese cities, and the difficulty that sometimes arises of finding a relative willing to take responsibility for the funeral. Occasionally the difficulty was largely financial - 'well to do' uncles or cousins not prepared to fork out for the cremation of someone who "didn't share their family name." But often it was simply that any 'blood linkage' had been forgotten. People who had migrated to the cities in the 1970's perhaps and never been in touch with the brother or sister they had left behind in their furusato ('home town') decades ago. It was said that in the latest year for which there were statistics there were around 36,000 such cases in Japan.

Actually I thought this number rather low, I would guess that in the UK there are many more such incidents, at least in respect of those where no next-of-kin willing to take responsibility is concerned. But there is a big cultural difference of course. In Europe we don't expect extended family to take responsibility, officialdom is more willing to organise and pay for funerals. Here the ideal is that the family takes responsibility for everything but in the West we lost that connection generations ago. It is hard to generalise about the differences but I would say that in Britain family ties in practice remain stronger for longer, people make an effort to keep relationships over generations. In Japan there is a more formal dependency on extended family - even sometimes for things like finance for housing - but often warm and continuing extended relationships are not so common. Until the 1960's here in Japan the family was the only safety net there was. Part of the difference is the lingering perception of who strictly speaking is formally in your 'ie'. But a lot of it is surely simply because of the relative expense and difficulty of long distance travel in Japan. Inter-regional family trips are an expedition - grandma is not usually just an hour's ride away by car.

The really striking difference for me is the different role that 'civil society' plays in all this. In any society it is all too easy to become reclusive, keep yourself to yourself. And once you step away from family relationships and the workplace where you once inverted all your efforts it is easy to vanish into anonymity. But there is a big difference between Britain and Japan. In Britain we have a well developed 'civil society', both formal and informal. You can go down the pub, go to church, join a gardening circle, a bowling club. Here those opportunities are not so frequent, people rely either on the workplace or circles of acquaintances that have persisted for decades. But these no longer exist when they have to retire or move home.

What struck me about this programme was not that loneliness and isolation was so much a problem for the very elderly - who by definition get watched by state agencies - but vulnerable people in their fifties and sixties. Once they loose their job or parents they have no relationships, no money, no resources and nowhere to go. If they die they may lie undiscovered for months because who would have them on any check list except utility companies and tax collectors? Only civil society can address this really, and even if we smile and pass the time of day with only one neighbour it makes a big difference.