More crying wolf

Well, that was a total non-event then. Literally.

Tropical Cyclone 1014, which has been bearing down on this bit of Japan for the best part of a week turned out to be a complete pussycat.

I've been licking my lips for days now, because I love a good storm. Somewhere down off Okinawa in was clocking in at 935 millibars which is pretty darn deep, and then yesterday morning they were closing the old JR Tokaido line (it runs by the sea in Shizuoka-ken) as a precaution and there were more red warnings posted on the Japan Meteorological Website than you could shake a stick at. Severe winds, heavy rain, ground inundation, land slips, high waves. You name it, by midnight we were going to get it.

I closed the shutters as darkness fell around five and it did get a little bit rainy and windy for about thirty minutes but that was it. Seems that '1014' headed further out into the Pacific than they anticipated. That is always the way of it.

This tendency for crying wolf is getting out of hand eh? If anything it has got worse in Japan than in the UK, they are all scared of NOT predicting something so we get this hopeless over-kill.

I propose that we set up a scheme of anti-bonuses. In future we will have a weather forecasting 'bonus pot' of say 100 million yen a year which is then reduced by say 10% every time they cry wolf and then the storm heads over the horizon to someplace else. That should solve the problem.

Message in a bottle?

An interesting one this morning and maybe it is this season of ghosts but to be honest it felt a bit like a message in a bottle from the past.It was arrived in the shape of an e-mail from my family tree website from someone called Bob Jackson working on the same ancestors and it made my hair stand on end.

All he did was point me to a family tree website that I had been told about before which features my maternal great-grandmother's family. They were originally seamen from Norfolk and ended up in Stockton-on-Tees working in the shipyards in the 1880's. All this I knew years ago.

But then an aspect of the story presented on the site struck me between the eyes, two and two were added together and suddenly made a very large number, pennies dropped everywhere.

Twenty five years ago my great-great-aunt Nora once told me the name of my grandmother's natural father. I stupidly never wrote it down imagining that a) I wouldn't forget it and b) it was all on some birth certificate somewhere. But neither of these was true. Now I do know that it was a name very like Johnson ... or Jackson! Was there a son in this family born in the 1870's who were living near my great-uncle's home at the right time that fathered my grandmother while my great-grandmother was living with her older brother looking for work in Stockton or Thornaby?

Now, I've just checked the family tree there and on first glance there wasn't. But now I see that points to an even darker possibility. Was it the fifty year old Irish-born shipyard rivetter and FATHER of this family of twelve - Robert Jackson - who took advantage of the nineteen year old girl just arrived in town from Weardale and fathered my grandmother? Good grief! Now even today that would be a piece of 'News of the Word' style gossip and revelation that would make your average decent family's hair stand on end, let alone back in High Victorian England. And it would explain why there was no shotgun wedding afterwards involving some nice but careless young beau and it really was NEVER talked about for sixty years. Why every effort was taken to hide the story, even to the extent of not registering the birth.

And here is the missing question that I never asked myself twenty five years ago. How come my great-great-aunt could even remember the name of someone who fathered her niece before she herself was ever born eighty years after the event. Obvious eh? It was somebody that she knew.

Halloween Story

Somewhere and somehow amongst the Halloween 'goodies' we keep stored away in the washitsu and bring out for this week of the year are two plastic tombstones in cheerful fibreglass. I think a friend saw them on sale in CostCo at Makuhari at a bargain price. They are painted grey and have 'RIP' inscribed on them (well, it wouldn't be 'bus stop' now would it?) and you put a battery in the back and then when they are 'turned on' they emit flashing lights and spooky laughter. Maybe I will commission one such headstone for myself, with a photoelectric cell so that it switches on automatically after sunset. That would cheer up the Abbey cemetery.

Ah! But don't laugh. These two headstones are located in the hall to spook small kids when the arrive for class, just near the washitsu door. Well, last Monday night Edera and I had just gone upstairs to bed and switched the light out when suddenly an awful noise started. For a moment we couldn't work out when it was but then we realised that one of these gravestones had turned itself on downstairs and was flashing away in the dark.

Or been turned on eh?

So of course I turned to Edera and said "Hey! You had better go down and turn of that gravestone of yours!"

But here is the rather spooky thing. It was only the next day, checking the little book we keep on the family altar, that we realised that it was exactly a year and a day since our old cat Tora died. Now a few times I've felt Tora around here, indeed the week after he died we both clearly heard what sounded like an elderly fat cat trotting around in the hall when we were reciting morning scripture at exactly the spot where this recent incident happened.

So maybe Tora is paying us an occasional visit. He's welcome if he is. It would just be like him to find a way to wake us up like that, he was forever scratching at the bedroom door in the night when he wanted a bit of my attention.

Party time

Halloween parties in full swing this week. The box of 'goodies' is down from the shelf in the cupboard in the washitsu and the place is festooned with witches on broomsticks and jack-o-lanterns and the occasional skeleton hangs from the picture rail. The bat on the string we bought in Milton Keynes in 2000 is still doing sterling duty flapping around in circles in the genkan and the two plastic 'Sleepy Hollow' style tombstones someone bought us in CostCo at Makuhari a couple of years ago are making their usual spooky noises (and more about THAT maybe tomorrow!)

The party programme includes some of the usual things too - putting strange things in your mouth to taste in the dark has caught Edera's attention this year. Other old favourites - the spooky room and the spooky story - have yet to appear on her agenda.

The same individual kids are scared in the same ways too. Those with vivid imaginations curl up into ball and cry 'kowai!' (scary!) on cue one more time, while those without charge around making too much noise.

I know I've definitely got to the 'nostalgia ain't what it used to be' stage of life but there are some real quantifiable changes that I do see compared with ten years ago. Kids in Japan are really changing, somehow the younger ones don't do things as a bunch together in quite the same way they one did, there is much more hyperactivity around, kids get 'stroppier' quicker and don't inter-relate so easily. Me, me' is the cry. Basically they aren't as well behaved as they used to be.

Why is that? Fewer kids around, many more 'only children' in the mix, quite different cultural influences and social pressures - you name it. Basically they are 'spoiled' more and indulged more and yet probably get less attention from parents and certainly less contact with grandparents and extended family. But I can certainly see it in the flow of Halloween parties - there is a range of 'rougher stuff' I wouldn't do at events now because it would all just get too hyper and out of hand too quickly. Social change in progress before our very eyes.

Our cats

With the cool damp days of autumn the cats that live down the lane have been paying us more serious attention - and more regular visits. They are nobodies cats in particular and are rather wild although A-san keeps an eye on them. There seem to be around half a dozen survivors from the Spring. The FIV retrovirus appears to be endemic in the feline population around here so I guess these are the tough ones, the one with some genetic resistance to the condition. And apart from one of them who gives us concern they do seem pretty strong but with the occasional 'snuffle'. It isn't curable but cats can enjoy many years of normal adult life before they succumb to the disease.

These cats make up a lovely little family and they really look out for each other's welfare. At night they sleep with A-san's ancient Akita dog, who is their big buddy. He's a bit senile now but recently Edera saw the mother cat in the group walk up to him in the road and give him a loving nuzzle. A cats best friend, it seems, is their dog.

The weakling is a beautiful little greyish white cat with big yellow eyes. She is 'our cat'. She is very petite, the runt of the litter and by far the most aware and intelligent. We struggle to get enough nourishment into her, she is a slow and dainty eater and if you don't watch out the other cats have it while she is thinking it over. But recently she has got quite crafty at nipping in through the French windows and then we close them and feed her inside.

The mother cat is the one with the very distinctive face markings that featured in 'Little House' in the Spring. She has no fears of us now and occasionally even tolerates a quick fondle around the ears if she is in the mood. Her left ear has been wrecked in a fight with some enemy - she looks like a pirate now and I expect her to show up with a parrot on her shoulder.

Just occasionally the father cat shows up - a large mild-mannered Tom who also lets me stroke him. He reminds me strongly of my old cat Tora. He's got a big face and does a good line in sitting on the window ledge at meal times watching you eat.

So that is the history of 'our cats' at the moment.

Naruto Vocal Ensemble Site

I know that serveral of you have been waiting there with bated breath for me to finally get around to creating our 2010 UK Tour album pages and now at last I have got around to it. My eyes are still watering from checking so much translated copy

You will find them in the section on the right hand of the menu bar and they are arranged by county and date. You can link to them from this page.

Hope you enjoy them and especially the ones with your own pictures in!

Iain

ps. For friends in Japan - put the 17th of December at Asobimura in your diaries please. 6:30 PM

Another one bites the dust

Driving Edera to the station yesterday morning I was surprised to see that a house at the corner of our lane was in the early stages of being demolished. Another one bits the dust. I just headed down there to take a picture this morning because it will probably be largely gone by this evening, it doesn't take long for a couple of men to clear a site of a house here. I can hear demolition in progress as I type.

It shouldn't surprise me because I've just spent six years studying how transient Japan's urban fabric really is. But I'd guess this house isn't more than 20 years old, certainly not more than 25. And the guy was cleaning his car in the car port only last week when I walked past taking the garbage to the recycling point. There is always something a bit shocking in it - wasteful of materials if nothing else to 'build in' that amount of sheer obsolescence. But something deeper too, sad to think of a home used to bring up children vanishing so quickly afterwards, who can develop roots in that kind of world?

My guess is that they have moved out to redevelop the site with something bigger, probably they bought one of the adjacent vacant lots and something newer and larger will get built on the site.

In this little danchi you can see the impact of Japan's low birthrate and falling population at first hand. Although it is only five minutes from the station it is too far from Tokyo or even Chiba-shi to ever be fashionable. This is the third demolition around here in three years, and another three properties are empty and one only used as a 'country cottage' occasionally. So more than a quarter of the locality has become defunct in the eight years since we moved in.

Nodding Dogs

I've had my nose back into Greek philosophers this last few days as a first step in getting down to beginning to draft an academic paper on 'processes'. Plato and Aristotle started the whole 'substance' based thing and are coming down off the shelf again and yesterday I was reading part of "The Republic".

I don't know why it caught my eye so strongly, but I found myself getting wildly distracted from the argument by the 'stooges' in the plot. Glaucon in particular was really 'getting to me'. Take a lookee at his contribution here ...

Soc: "Blah blah ..." : Glaucon "I see it."
Soc: "Blah blah ..." : Glaucon "Necessarily."
Soc: "Blah blah ..." : Glaucon "By Zeus, I do!"
Soc: "Blah blah ..." : Glaucon "That must be so."
Soc: "Blah blah ..." : Glaucon "What you say is very reasonable."
Soc: "Blah blah ..." : Glaucon "That seems likely."

What a creep eh? I mean - what is this guy on? He is one of life's nodding dogs, one of nature's perpetual brown-nosers. If he was Japanese he would be forever mumbling 'sumimasen ... wakarimashita.' There is Socrates banging on and all he can do is make mild approving interjections. He is the Stan Laurel, the Ernie Wise of the Ancient World. "Here is another fine mess you have gotten us into Glaucon ...!". "Sumimasen ..."

On bad days when the sky is grey and the drizzle incessant the world seems to be full of Number Twos like him. I turn the page in eternal hope that he is suddenly going to explode with a "Socrates that is just complete cr*p!" or even better "None of your b*oody business, I'll think what I like!"

Actually I'd struggle to be like this, I always want my two-pennyworth. It is not necessarily a virtue. I tell myself that I should try to be more of a background person occasionally.

The trouble is that it is so often the Glaucons of this world that get put in charge of things. They represent a "safe pair of hands".

The single street light

Got along to our local male voice choir last night after four months' absence. Actually glancing at the register it looks like everyone took a holiday in July and August so I didn't miss so much. Also I still got billed for September even though I was in the UK. The monthly subscription isn't cheap and with the appalling exchange rate between the pound and the yen now I think maybe after this winter I'm going to have to 'retire' when I go back to England next summer. I have to face up to economic realities here, until the yen gets a bit cheaper I need to just focus on necessities.

It is a pity though because the group last night was down to six. Not sure why two tenors were missing - if it wasn't just a temporary glitch maybe they need to think about throwing in the towel, two years ago we were fielding fourteen singers. One reason I have stayed on is that male voice choirs are rare here and I felt it was a good thing to support, something worthwhile.

The quality is very 'so-so' - none of us is Paul Robeson or Mario Lanza - but there is a special emotional quality to singing in an older male group. I find myself wanting to write some kind of a fantasy story based on what I could only describe as mild 'visions' that spring into my mind when I'm singing there. The material for men seems to fall into three groups - the 'marching down the road of life' stuff, the 'little birch tree in the forest turning golden in October' songs and the 'here's a joky story about what happened next' genre. Perhaps this is because men used to sing as they marched on military service far from home. They probably don't sing much in today's army.

Lurking somewhere in the world of experience expressed by each of these three genres I feel there is a single dim bulb in a street light swinging at the end of a small lane on the most distant outskirts of town. It must be fifteen minutes walk from the station at least and if you catch the last train and make for this place the roads will be deserted. This place with the street light - it represents our lives - fragile, very localised, intimate. In summer the sound of frogs and crickets keeps the sixty watt light bulb company and in autumn the leaves blow around it and in winter the snowflakes and in spring the cherry blossom. This light bulb at the end of a lane is our whole life, it illuminates just one small gentle place.

Goodness, music has immense power to express the reality beneath appearances doesn't it?

The true value of people

A nice sunny day here in leafy Chiba-ken after a damp autumnal start to the morning. I hope that it is a good omen. A very dear friend of ours goes into hospital today and next week will have surgery for a serious condition. She is likely to be in hospital for two weeks.

Let's hope that the problem has been identified in time to realise a good outcome and that her condition is treatable. If you have a home altar please offer a stick of incense or a prayer for her recovery. I'm sure that every bit of merit offered at the moment really helps.

It is at times like this that you deeply notice the true worth of people's lives, even if you thought that you knew them well before. You appreciate the extent that they make offerings of themselves moment by moment in their daily routine, the sheer quality that they represent. When they let it flow and manifest their capacity to express compassion, love and wisdom in what they do and make an offering of it to others then it is truly awesome.

A tremendous strength there, the power of a good heart and loving purpose. And yet at the same time always potential frailty, weakness. A fundamental malfunctioning of biochemistry, an unlucky co-incidence.

When we all met up this week I realised just what an iron wall of love and support was surrounding and defending her in her danger. Nothing special spoken, just the familiar routine of the evening, and yet you could have reached out and touched the strength and energy with which we were surrounding, protecting and nurturing her.

Tail end of mosquitoes

Getting towards the end of the mosquito season here, I hope. I have had occasional bites in December and even I think on a warm day in January but the little blighters tail off in November as a rule and don't wake up until late March.

We take great care that they don't get into the house here and the windows in Japanese homes usually have metal insect screens. But they still manage it. Even into the bedroom where we take extra special precautions. In bedrooms they are especially crafty, lurking in the curtains until the light is out and you are asleep and then setting about their work. You wake in the middle of the night covered in bites.

Last night it rained and got a lot milder and we had such an interloper. They always come after me, there is something about my blood they like. I woke in the dark to hear the familiar noise of a dive-bomb attack in progress and as I couldn't switch the light on and locate the insect spray without waking 'you-know-who' up and making her growl I just crawled deeper under the duvet so that there was nothing left to bite sticking out.

Usually a good strategy but not last night. It has got a lot milder and our 'mega-tog' duvet was frankly oppressive. Soon it was like a Turkish Bath in there and outside the attacks continued. To make matters worse the hotter I got the more E thrashed around and dumped the duvet from her side on the bed onto me as a second layer.

Nothing for it in the end but to just throw that bedding off and let the darn mosquito have its wicked way with me. Resistance was useless. OK, I won't say it, if there is any conclusion to be drawn from this story probably it is best not articulated just at the moment!

'Single Island' Hypotheses

I guess that this is only something that will keep other obsessive geographers out there awake at night but there you go, it was keeping me awake last night for at least five minutes. I don't often use our downstairs loo, I'm a second floor person it seems, but I did yesterday and 'you-know-who' has a map on the wall in there that she bought in Paris. "Ma premiere carte du monde". You can't go anywhere in our house without being educated and especially into rooms that students might use. We are relentless.

Now, pay attention. The thing that I noticed was this. We think of islands as being somehow 'self contained', and having boundaries created by nature and I'd aways assumed that a single large island was a very common and characteristic form for a 'nation state'. Here we are, the Zogs and we live on the Isle of Zog in Zogland, and thank God we are surrounded by water; that class of thing.

But looking at this map it suddenly dawned on me what a very rare form of nation state this 'one island' was. How many can you point to? Iceland. Jamaica, Madagascar, Cuba? It is a short list. There are two much commoner forms. One is an archipelago of islands - like Japan with four main islands (Honshu, Kyuushu, Hokkaido, Shikoku) or New Zealand (North and South). The other is an archipelago shared by two or three nation states (the British Isles - Ireland, Scotland, England), Cyprus (Greeks and Turks) and Sardinia/Corsica (France/Italy) etc.

Of course us geographers are never content to remain empiricists these days, no 'mere description' will suffice for us. Once we have noticed this kind of stuff we can never say "I dunno!", in a trice we are theorising it all, pulling out sheets of (preferably double 'log') graph paper from our desk drawers and thirsting for some formulae that will some how 'explain' it all. Or if not explain, then at least rationalise into some predictive relationships. Or if not identify predictive relationships, at least make a pretty pattern I guess, something that makes us feel comfortable when assailed by doubts.

Dead but won't lie down?

Watching the early news on NHK this morning there was a little feature that had me glued to the screen. It was about a family moving from Fukuoka down in Kyuushu up to Tokyo and bringing all their family belongings with them. Including their dead relations.

Graves here are a 'family generation' affair rather than just for one deceased person and everyone is cremated. There is usually a single granite marker and in front a little chamber sealed only by clay and which is easily opened to take in new jars of ashes over the years. Typically a whole generation of brothers along with wives and unmarried children end up in one grave, which is then tended by following generations of descendants. It is all a very important part of Japanese culture, people take it seriously and it is nice that they do. But recently many cemeteries in distant parts of Japan have become overgrown and neglected as descendants have migrated to cites looking for work and just eventually give up 'going back home' when family ties dissolve.

Like most Japanese families the one featured on TV liked to keep the tradition of visiting the family grave at the spring and autumn equinoxes and also I guess at O-bon and New Year too. But Fukuoka is a long way from Tokyo - about six hundred miles - and so when promotion took them to the capital they decided to move the family grave too, to take their dead relatives along with them. It cost about £2000 to 'close' the original grave, £1000 to put it all on a lorry and drive up the highway to Kanto and then a whopping £7000 to buy a new grave plot in the Tokyo area. So around £10,000 to complete the move, but not so much more than a standard house move I suppose. Also there are big savings - for a family of four the shinkansen down to Kyuushu would cost about £1000 for a round trip, so in a very few years the saved cost of trips home to the family grave would pay for the move.

It all needs some thinking about. Is it OK to uproot your deceased relatives like this every time you get a promotion? Who is the grave actually for - the deceased or the descendants? Of course in Britain, where we have separate graves and often actually bury the body it wouldn't be practical. But in Japan it is very practical. And you can see what the next logical steps might be too. Let's cut out the middle men, start off with a portable tomb like a travelling altar that can be shifted just like the washing machine and refrigerator. Or you could keep the ashes stashed somewhere for safety and have a kind of a cyberspace grave marker, a kind of modern version of a prayer wheel driven by voltage rather than the wind. It could all be done very tastefully I'm sure.

Lazy Sundays

A lazy start to Sunday - somehow I have quite got out of the habit of getting up a bit later in the mornings. In fact although we have managed to dodge Sunday morning classes for a while until recently we have always had students in the middle of the day. For a time we even had one - another of my adoptive 'Japanese daughters' who is far more than 'just a student' to us both - coming around regularly for Sunday lunch so that we could squeeze a class in for her early in the afternoon.

Well, at least for a while we have Sundays to ourselves even if we can't afford to rush off anywhere and spend money filling those leisure hours with activities. Now we have two days in the week where we don't work, although Wednesday evenings is taken up with choir practice.

It has got me thinking about good old fashioned English Sundays of yesteryear. Here in Japan as far as shopping and leisure goes there is no difference at all between Sundays and any other day (libraries for example generally open Sundays but close Mondays). However in England we do still make a modest distinction. Supermarkets other large shops for example can only open for six hours and are usually closed by 4:30PM. In many parts of Europe - certainly France and Germany - there are still strict rules about what is allowed on Sundays and they are enforced too.

In England before the law was changed in 1994 Sundays were pretty well a desert if you were after fun of a kind that wasn't home made. The pubs were only open for two hours at lunch time and three hours in the evening. Not much else moved. There was a classic episode of the BBC radio comedy 'Hancocks Half Hour' devoted to this very theme of sitting around on rainy Sunday afternoons with nothing to do. You can find it here.

Now though I find the idea of a quiet Sunday different to the rest of the week something to look forward to.

TVW

Whenever people appear strongly in my dreams I wake up wondering if they have just died. Last night I encountered such a shady visitor but surely he must have been dead for ten years already - if not then he would be well into his nineties. How come he came knocking on my door?

Well, I won't mention his name, the internet is far too searchable. But he was a Welsh lawyer and a senior public official and my boss for five years. He was also what could fairly be called "one of nature's gentlemen". We got on OK - as OK as might be expected between someone for whom discipline, dignity and appearance were everything and an untidy and disorganised character like me. I'm not ideal public servant material. It wasn't that we had much in common, more that we could see the strengths in each other.

What has always interested me about my memories of this man is his tireless and impartial devotion to public service. He could make things happen and he really did have a well developed sense of public duty. Canny and every inch a bureaucrat and yet with a subtle sense of humour he was interested in making administration work. And nobody could have been around in the years he was working as a kind of 'officer class' operator in the South Wales mining valleys without having their superficial exterior burnished by a radical sense of 'fair play'.

That is how he slipped in and out of my dream, in his kind of cheerful "Well Mr. Robinson and what do you have for me today" mode.

Do people like him still exist in local government in Britain? Amongst the stridently political and the basking sharks on six (now even seven!) figure salaries I'm sure that there are still some. Certainly in Japan I come across them. Here the tradition is different, it isn't the lawyers but the career bureaucrats that occupy this kind of ground in society. We would struggle to manage without them.

Recognising places

I was looking at a photograph the other day of a 'magic tree' at the edge of a forest on which students had hung balloons and presents for their teachers as part of a special event. Nice images but what I especially noticed was that it was obviously northern Russia. Well, perhaps if I hadn't seen the caption I might have said 'northern Scandinavia' but it obviously wasn't the UK, nor even Canada - neither the people 'looked right' for that kind of location.

It is an example of a topic that fascinates me as a geographer. What 'clues' do we take from images to identify places? Of course if the Acropolis is in the middle of the picture, the Grand Canyon yawns off to the right or Big Ben is ticking away over somebody's shoulder then it isn't too difficult. But even if the place is completely anonymous we can usually tell a lot about it from small clues.

In this case for example the background was mature birch forest in autumn, the lighting was soft and grey and so that immediately put the place about 60 to 70 degrees north. The people "looked European" - no check shirts but overcoats and some flat caps in the group. And the event - a 'magic tree' had a subtle relationship with troikas, fairy stories and such like.

When I was doing my study a year or two ago I got very focused on this question of association with place. It is often wonderfully specific. For example as a 'northerner' I'm fine tuned to the different styles of nineteenth century terrace housing that you find in England - how could I ever mistake a Preston street scene for Middlesbrough or Tyneside?

And what is the 'minimum currency' that enables us to identify just one specific place? Perhaps as little as the texture of two walls, the relationship of the eaves of one building to a shrub. Japanese cities apparently 'all look the same' on first acquaintance but after a year of walking the streets daily I would dream at night of a specific view and wake up smiling as I realised exactly where it was and what lay around the next corner.

Five Sen

Rooting around in my pocket for some change the other day I came across a Japanese 5 sen coin. I've never seen one like it before and I nearly missed it because in general appearance it is quite similar to the modern 5 yen coin with a hole through the centre. Somebody must have given it to me in my change, but somehow I doubt if it was 'passed off' deliberately. Japan isn't usually like that and foreign coins don't circulate here like they do in England.

Five sen! And in very good condition too. There were 100 sen to one yen, and the coins vanished from circulation in 1953 - about the same time as we were abandoning the farthing coin in Britain. I took a close look at this one and it was dated Showa 13 - in Western terms the year 1938. It made me feel rather happy because I'm always strongly aware of holding history in my hands when I turn up an old stamp or a coin. Of course in Tokyo - especially around Asakusa and the park at Ueno - there are specialists who trade in this kind of object. But generally in Japan pre-War items like this are seldom seen, there are not usually the little bowls of old pennies and foreign coins around that we find in England in charity shops and on market stalls.

1938. I must get out my history books and check what was happening in that year. Dire events I'm sure. Deep embroilment in wars in China, fighting in Quingdao and along the Yellow River, and later down south in Guangzhou. Fighting with the Soviets in Siberia. Japan marginalised by the League of Nations and then thrown out; American sanctions and then more sanctions. The Japanese economy on a complete war footing. When you read the history of that time you can't but be reminded of the present situation with Iran.

I wonder how this coin found its way into my pocket. My guess is that some elderly lady around here was rummaging in a drawer for some change to buy something in the local supermarket. This coin has been pushed into the back of a drawer for seventy years and suddenly is on its travels again. Now it can live in my drawer for a while.

Garment Hire

I seem to have a lot of dreams that make me laugh these days. Better than the other way around, no point in waking up feeling sad in the mornings.

I think that 'money' has been lurking in my subconscious since I got back to leafy Chiba-ken, hardly surprising with the current value of the yen setting new 'all time high' records day by day while the pound sterling lies prostrate at the bottom of the swill bin at the far end of the back lane. Anyway, that little voice inside my handsome sleeping head seems intent on giving me a nudge by offering a few helpful suggestions., and last night the best it could come up with was garment hire.

You know the sort of thing. As a youngster I used to get down to Dormie Dress Hire to hire a 'penguin suit' to take my beautiful 'Cinders' along to the ball, it was all part of growing up in those days before transistor radios. A company long ago 'taken over' by Moss Bros I'm afraid but I see on the internet that you can still hire their kilts with regalia. Get thee behind me Satan ...

But this isn't what I wanted to write about. Nope! In this dream E was doing her 'sales pitch' to a prospective customer who wanted to hire a suit, but the only suits we owned were my old ones in our cavernous walk-in closet. Of course there is a range of sizes there because I was skinny when I was younger. My part in all this was to ensure that the selected garment was clean and presentable, I was deep in that moth-balled world with a damp cloth struggling to sponge off fried egg and tomato sauce and gravy stains. Would the customer notice that red wine mark on the front of my bowling club blazer badge? Or the hole (only small!) in the elbow of my sports jacket?

So there is angst and existential anxiety lurking even in the most sartorial of dreams, I just knew that there would be.

Time was that such a business might have been a neat little money spinner though. I'm sure that I saw a scene just like this in a Laurel and Hardy movie a long time ago.

Learning process

This last two days despite my scrambled brains I've been trying to refresh and hopefully improve a bit on my extremely rudimentary skills for developing web sites. Over the next month or two I have four that I need to do some work on. In a way more crouching over a laptop keyboard is the last thing that my body needs, I would be better off learning to use a chainsaw or kendo, but I don't have any special use for those kind of talents at the moment, not until I have a forest to cut down or feel like attacking somebody with a sword eh?

All this has focused me in on what educationalists refer to "the learning process" and makes me more aware of what works for me. I was often sent on computer courses in the latter part of my career as some new and fashionable software product was introduced to solve all the problems of market research and I was always seriously appalled at the fees that were charged - sometimes £600 or more a day. I felt that I would have managed a lot better just left on my own with a manual and my laptop, ideally closeted in some charming rural hotel near a busy railway line.

Complicated software is an area where you really do need completely explicit instructions during training. But the same wider issues apply as in any other 'learning' situation. You have to be able to 'play' with what you have, try out all the options that come to mind, just like a kitten exploring the potential of leaves for concealment and attack. And then you have to be able to reinforce your discoveries and memorise them through use. Then finally you have to 'problem solve' using this new understanding. There is no alternative to these three aspects to developing new skills, they are the only way to internalise new knowledge.

I find that for me this all has a practical importance in absorbing knowledge from books too. One of the research topics around 'process' I'm interested in at the moment calls for a better understanding of formal logic and the text book I'm using caters for repetition and practice well enough but the 'playing' element you have to invent for yourself as you work through the text. Using books is hardly ever a linear experience, if you aren't bobbing around and forever heading back around a loop you aren't using it properly. Why did it take me so long to spot this?

Japanese 'Father Ted'?

Up to Iioka near Choshi yesterday, and then back down Highway 126. It wasn't really a day for making any trips but we were definitely suffering from a combination of 'cabin fever' thanks to the deluge of the day before and the 'red mist' stage of jet lag which turns my mind to scrambled eggs and my brain to concrete.

Never been to Iioka before, it was one of those bits of leafy Chiba-ken that I've always felt safe to pass by and I was right. Northwards the road follows the coast but you don't see much of the Pacific Ocean which here is pretty well barricaded with tetrapod walls offshore to hopefully foil any approaching tsunamis. The sea was in pretty ugly mood in any case after the storm of the day before.

I did spot one young 'gaijin' improbably wandering along the sea wall observing the grey waves and sky outside the little restaurant we lunched at in Iioka, but he passed me on the other side with eyes averted. E said he was looking for somewhere with French fries - absolutely no hope around there where if you don't eat rice, fish and vegetables you will go hungry. Another story we'll never know the beginning and end of.

Coming back south we went through a couple of places I'd better not name I guess but which struck me as some of the weirdest places I'd been in around Japan in a long, long time. Eight storey shopping malls in bizarre neon-lit post-modernist styles stranded in sodden pylon-strewn rice fields that extended from horizon to horizon. Well, all that is hardly unusual I guess but there was something especially sad around this place on a wet Sunday, and the people all seemed so short in stature and driven as if by clockwork. Overpriced branded goods surrounded by rice stubble and full brown drainage ditches. Where was any pleasure?

Put it down to the jet lag, I'm not usually so unsympathetic. And I did get a nice grin from one curious little girl in front of me in the queue for the till in the supermarket.

Still, it did set me thinking, there is the makings of a kind of Japanese 'Father Ted' series lurking out there set in the sales counters amongst the paddy fields. If I was to write that kind of thing then Western audiences might understand the actual reality of urban fringe Japan and as ever, truth really is stranger than fiction.

Semiotics and Akitas

Very heavy rain here during the night - in fact it has been falling now since yesterday lunch time so we must already have had sixteen or seventeen hours of deluge and perhaps 300-400 mm or rain. I hope all the cats around here have found good shelter somewhere, I'm sure that at least two of them are probably curled up in the little 'lean-to' that I built on the side of the house next to the school room.

Yesterday evening I had a big hug from one of our High School students who was so pleased to see me back again. She is kind of 'family' to us, a third (or fourth!) Japanese daughter. Later Edera was showing her part of the Helen Keller film, and I sat with them. There is a deeper underlying theme there that I encountered many times in thesis writing which eventually goes back to Saussure and semiotics and the relationship between 'signifier' and 'signified. But let us not go there this morning.

Not many people these days outside Japan remember that Helen Keller made a trip here to Japan in 1937. On that visit she was greatly taken with the story of Hachiko, the Akita dog who waited every evening at Shibuya station for his dead master to arrive back on his regular train. She was given a dog - 'Kamikaze-go' - to take back to America with her and when that dog died she had a second - 'Kenzan-go' officially presented to her by the Japanese government, so she played an important part in the introduction of Akitas to the United States.

She loved the gentle and trustworthy character of Akitas. I agree with her. I don't know if our old dog Kuu would have passed muster as a 'proper' Akita or if he would have been considered a 'Chiba' or more likely just a brown mongrel Japanese dog eh? But he was always tough and friendly and happy in life and especially where there was no thunder around and there were female dogs within scent range with for him was about five kilometres. And he just kept on going, going, going full of enthusiasm until he got old and one day had a heart attack and I had to carry him back home in my arms. Nice to have known you Kuu.

Here we go again ...

This last couple of days when I haven't been sleeping - which DOES seem to have been most of the time - I have been having the usual crop of 'back in Japan' moments flashing before my eyes. In fact, as I've been away for four months they seem even stronger this time around, because I've had time to forget aspects of the experience of day to day Japanese living.

There is nothing especially deep about any of these 'insights' but here are three that will be familiar to all Japan watchers. The one that hit me between the eyes even before we left the airport (because it gets so deeply under my skin) is the tendency for 'micro-management' of others by minor bureaucrats and indeed also people with no particular status at all. Even before I made it through immigration someone was railroading me officiously into 'Queue 28' and I had the pleasure of being able to object in a loud voice "But this queue is closed!" as the passport stamper headed off for his bento break. One minor blow struck for anarchy there but no sooner were we out into the car park than there were all the 'traffic directers' with their orange batons. I realise now that all this goes back to an ancient tradition of town watchmen doing similar pointless tasks in the Kamakura era - as much a part of Japanese culture as sashimi and soy sauce.

Insight number two was remembering just how small most people are here, and especially out in the 'boonies' where taller, younger people have moved to Tokyo for better jobs. In the local 'Landrome' supermarket I was once again looming over everyone like an Irish Guardsman in a kindergarten classroom.

And last but not least that great 'pushiness' that we indulge in everywhere, and especially involving 'oldies'. Waiting to get into the department store on Thursday morning I was first at the door eight minutes before opening but by then time the clock struck ten at least a dozen elderly ladies had managed to wedge themselves between my chest and the glass pane. How do they do that? Part of it is an ability to creep in from the sides, others just make it by dodging under my armpits, even probably between my legs when I'm not looking. In the larger scheme of things it doesn't matter much at shop opening time but over the years I've become ruthless at railway stations where on your slickness at train door opening time might often depend the coveted prize of a seat. At these times I use my size, gaijin scowl and pointy elbows for purposes for which they were originally intended ...

Feline snores

Over to Togane yesterday to get some big sheets of tracing paper from the stationery department at JusCo. What do I want them for? Don't ask! I need to re-draw an ancient photocopy of a nineteenth century company crest and scan it to produce some artwork for a web site I'm working on. A real little hive of 'busy bee' creativity in process around here you know, despite the overpowering jet lag. This morning I was awake and on the go by three because I was ready go nuts if I had to lie in bed open eyed a minute longer.

But at least that ended up making me smile. I trudged downstairs to make myself a cup of coffee in the dark and while the kettle was warming up on the stove my ears detected a loud snoring coming from somewhere near the school room window. Probably the white cat curled up in the 'planter' just outside but for a delicious minute I thought it might be Tora's ghost back to haunt the old place. That was exactly where he used to crash out on warm sticky nights although on the carpet inside of the window near the blue curtain.

Whoever it was I decided not to investigate further, I was very happy for either or both of them to be snoring away on the property.

Cute cat this white cat. A bit ragged but wonderfully elegant and so 'sharp' and sensitive. Completely wild of course, a 'hisser' if you get too close and scare her but within limits she trusts us and often she manages to hiss and purr at the same time, a bit schizophrenic. She'll never be tame, the best she'll ever manage will be to sit near us and keep us company I guess. And she already loves to do that, lingering on the decking after we feed her enjoying the sunshine and just watching me through the French Windows with those large, intelligent green eyes. I'm not complaining.

Flight East

Back in sunny Japan. I must have looked quite comical coming through immigration yesterday with all the accouterments of autumn in the north of England - cloth cap, anorak, tweed jacket and check shirt - and out of the terminal at Narita into twenty four degrees and brilliant sunshine. This is certainly the time of year when the contrast between my two homes is at its most striking.

Not a bad flight either. This time for the first time in around ten years I flew Virgin on the long haul 'leg' of the journey, using BMI on the first 'leg' from Manchester down to Heathrow. To be honest I think I'd rate the overall experience more stressful and tiring than my standard British Airways flight 'offering', but when I booked my ticket during the summer their staff were still bickering about striking. The main flight was better than the usual British Airways offering, but the rest wasn't so easy - the cramped connecting flight, the hour it took me to get across Heathrow from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3 and the long wait for the connection in an overcrowded airport.

As an ex-manager it interested me as to what was actually perceived as 'better' about the Virgin flight compared with British Airways. The seat seemed about the same - perhaps slightly more leg room - but the in-flight entertainment wasn't as good, with far too many third rate American TV and film choices (do I really want to see yet another 'Schreck'?). The food portions were tiny too. So it was nothing physical

No - it was something to do with management style prevalent in the business. Actually all the flight attendants believed that they worked for a good operator and were enjoying their work. So many times recently I've met with British Airways staff too angry about life and who under a very thin layer of civility seemed to genuinely despise me, the passenger. Signs to me of decades of lousy people management for which only senior management can be to blame.

How do you put something like that right? No easy task. Sack the worst ten percent and then listen carefully to the rest might be a good start, and then very positive engaged leadership and careful supervision. Good grief! I'm glad I don't have to do any of that stuff any more. I don't know though, perhaps it was fun.

Telltale evidence

My last trip up to our heritage railway project for a while today. Despite the appalling weather - the monsoon season has arrived in the Vale of Eden it seems - work was in progress. One volunteer was applying knotting to the timber in the new platform doors we have had delivered and which will need installing soon, while the hardier types worked outdoors in waterproof orange suits on various track projects. This week our recently reboilered 'Peckett' steam locomotive passed its crucial hydraulic boiler test and I spent part of the morning with scrapers and wire brushes cleaning scale and soot off the firebox doors and de-greasing them ready for painting. There is a real 'buzz' around the place as we begin to get ready for our big events next August.

Old stations always attract the attention of stray cats and we have a nice black and white one with green eyes known as 'Quaker' because she first turned up on the old Darlington platform (The 'Quakers' is the nickname of the Darlington Football Club). At first she was very shy and wary but now she is getting pretty cheeky and confident, a real 'railway cat'.

About ten minutes after I'd begun serious work on the bench I realised that I hadn't signed in, and so I went around to the mess room to add my name to the book. As I walked through the door there was a flash of fur and Quaker headed out and under the nearest coach. At first I was puzzled because she's quite tame these days but then I saw the telltale evidence of wrappers on the floor and the penny dropped. That cheeky cat, not content with her own tin of meat, had been rifling the waste bin to check if there was anything worth having in the leftovers from various bait boxes.

I had to laugh. Cats have a very finely tuned sense of right and wrong but it doesn't stop them doing wrong when it is quiet and they think that they can get away with it. Sometimes in Japan Edera would come downstairs in the morning and think "I'm sure I left some dried fish in the water in that pan last night to make soup stock" and then notice a content innocent appearing cat asleep nearby on the chair. They are just so good at looking inscrutable eh?

My last 'Little House' from England this time. Tomorrow I'll be on the road and Tuesday I'll be headed east back to Japan.

Job done for this year

Well, that is pretty well the end of the work I'm going to do here this year on 'sorting stuff out'. Tomorrow needs to be about house cleaning and then Monday morning will be just getting my case finally together, logging on to the internet to confirm my seat and the rest of it and then after lunch I will be gone. Monday night will be a hotel with a flight early Tuesday.

I'm really fed up of 'sorting stuff', I suddenly feel in need of some light entertainment. I didn't get all the work done, a few unreformed boxes await me in 2011 and the filing cabinets aren't in the order that I want but I'd say the job is around 85% complete. I still need to dispose satisfactorily of many things though.

Somehow this last month I've felt a lot of heaviness around some of my possessions, things have been picked up and put down with a heavy heart. In some cases it is because there is an identifiable association with someone - images in my hand of people now dead, letters they wrote to me, touching something they valued. Is there anything sadder than a pile of possessions that once belonged to someone newly dead? How can you possibly undertake the dismal task of clearing some late relative's home and not be touched by the pathos of it all, not be struck by the sheer valueless nature of once loved things now separated from that connection?

That has been a part of the last few weeks but there's something more fundamental than that. Being around this stuff makes me recognise in an even deeper place that there is nothing that can be grasped, nothing that can be held onto at all, that sooner or later everything has to go and usually it has gone before you even know it. Objects are just like the flotsam left along the tide line by the deeper currents of life and when they eventually do catch your eye you realise that the water has gone already, there is no helping it and you can't whistle it back.

Oracles

I was listening to a programme on the Pythia, the oracle at Delphi, on BBC Radio 4 driving back up from Lancashire last night, and it set me thinking about the degree to which we still use oracles in our contemporary culture. I'm not just talking about 'good advice' here, I'm thinking more of oracles as a source of prophetic opinions who can offer predictions about or precognition of the future. Inspired by the breath of the Gods and serving as their mouthpiece, offering a kind of divination, that class of thing.

On the face of it we don't go in much for oracles these days. Christianity generally took a pretty negative if sometimes ambivalent view of divination of all kinds and especially prediction of the future. Such things were forbidden under Canon Law, in the Middle Ages they could even attract the death penalty. Under com temporary rational empiricism the idea simply draws scorn and mockery.

I'm not so sure - it needs careful examination. Humans rarely discard behaviours that might be potentially important for happiness, even survival. Perhaps we discount the function of the oracle now into a debased currency of probability, forecasts and assumed 'expert' consultancy, and in a hundred other ways rather than a belief in clairvoyance. Although I did hear recently of a woman in Japan whose reputation for foretelling the future had bankers and investors queueing at her door.

I realised to my surprise thinking about this topic that during my life there have been very few things that might have bent my path towards the door of an oracle. Very few wishes or desires or fears powerful enough to have my heart thumping and thirsting with the kind of hope or despair necessary to consult an oracle with the intention of getting something that was so important, or seeking information about the future that might have made something happen, advice to help me reach a place that would otherwise be beyond my grasp.

A very few of course; who doesn't have such wishes that have ruled their lives? And in my case all to do with love of one kind or another, acquisition and anger don't drive me. These unspoken currents make us risk our own little divinations along the way ... "if this happens/doesn't happen before I count to three, go to sleep, drink this cup of tea then ..." And if that is how it works out then there is a morsel of comfort and if not? ... well, it isn't really foretelling the future is it? Just a little game ...

Let there be light

Took my mum over to Blackpool this evening to see the 'illuminations'. She has been mithering me since the end of June so tonight we eventually did get across there at 'lighting up time' at 7:30 and drove the ten kilometres up the 'prom' from Starr Gate northwards to Bispham to rubberneck at all the displays.

The 'Blackpool Illuminations' were first held, I see, in 1879 and in their modern form since 1912. The idea behind them was the extend the seaside holiday season by holding a light 'spectacular' as the chilly autumn nights start to draw in. And over the years this has been a very popular and successful show along the sea front bringing in tourists and evening trippers from across northern England and even from southern Scotland.

My mum was a great 'illuminations' fan in her day, ever since they moved to Cleveleys in the 1990's. She would drive along the prom every year with her late second husband Bill and afterwards they would buy fish and chips in Bispham and eat them in the car. And so it was tonight, except that we gave the fish and chips a miss although I was expecting to buy some.

Chatting away as we drove up the promenade was not just a trip down memory lane but also felt a bit like being in a time capsule. There may be a million light bulbs involved in the display but about 990,000 of them have lit up the town during many previous autumns, only a few of the lights are ever new in any year. I'm sure that a few of them, the not very politically correct 'Redskins and the Totem Pole' and 'The Mad Hatters Tea Party' for example, have survived since the 1950's and I'm sure I saw Ena Sharples on one of the 'Coronation Street' displays last year although the fictional character vanished from the TV soap thirty years ago. Last year my mum was moved to write to the mayor to tell him what a cr*p display and poor show she thought it all was but this year's efforts met with her approval.

Yep. To be honest the illuminations are really, like the rest of Blackpool, a bit 'naff'. And yet it was nice to see the little kids scurrying along the windswept prom in their thick coats and mufflers and gloves this evening getting so excited about all the crazy lights. All new to them of course, if not to us. All part of the ritual and ceremony of growing up in Lancashire and learning to be proper 'Northerners'.