Kitchen 'squatters'

In Japan we have small kitchens - actually almost unbelievably small by British standards let alone the North American 'norm'. Of course there are some rich folk out there and especially in bigger city condominiums I guess who have skating rink sized food preparation areas but I think ours is pretty typical of houses around here. It has a double gas ring, a sink with a drainer on one side and a kind of quarter sized drainer on the other about 30cm wide and - that is it! No work surfaces at all, none - apart from a little shelf that you can pull out on the 'dresser' we use to store crockery. There are also four drawers and three cupboards, two of which are under the sink. Plus the fridge and some storage space up at ceiling height. In common with 90% of Japanese homes we have no oven, just a microwave perched on top of a cabinet.

In a space like this you have to work pretty smart and also keep it tidy or things would fall apart in about two minutes. It means that immediately after every meal you wash and dry and put away everything. Easy enough for stuff like plates and hashi (chopsticks) and kitchen knives that have 'fixed abodes' but what about things like plastic containers and food mixer 'bits' and the coffee filter funnel. I realise now that there are always some objects, everywhere, that somehow don't fit into an orderly pattern, co-operate in a wider scheme of things.

And even in the best run establishment there has to be a place for them. Well, in 'Little House' this place is the window sill behind the sink. This convenient ledge does of course have legitimate residents, the jug full of cooking implements, the soy sauce, the nutcracker that looks like a squirrel and the soy sauce bottle. But give me a few days of washing up and I will deposit a whole new layer of illegal 'squatter' items there that I can't be bothered to do anything else with. At first these aren't really noticeable, you can sneak a lot of gear on there. But later the mountain grows and even if 'you-know-who' doesn't spot it first there will soon be an avalanche of plastic lids and jam jar lids and empty cat food tins washed and ready to go to the recycling point.

Haircut time

Hair cut time again. I took a look in the mirror this morning and it is definitely time, I think it must already be eight weeks since I was last there. It is a shame that I'm so virile and overloaded with hormones of all kinds, if I was a bit weedier and less manly my hair would grow slower and I wouldn't have to go so often. Beard needs trimming too, there is a face under there somewhere.

When I first came to Japan and knew no better the only place that I could get my hair cut around here was a very old-fashioned barber's shop in a nearby danchi recommended by a student. There was a little old guy and his wife who used to charge an incredible 2,700 yen for a trim. It had the advantage that, for obvious reasons, there were seldom any other customers there and queues were unknown. Now I go to a '1000 yen - haircut in ten minutes' place in a shop unit next to the supermarket. These have become very popular over the last five years. The first one I found was on a station platform at Tsudanuma where they guaranteed to have you clipped and out in ten minutes in time to catch the next train.

Now these '1000 yen' places are everywhere. When you go in, you buy a ticket out of a machine and then hand it to the hairdresser. The service is excellent, your coat and bag gets put away in a melamine cupboard and afterwards they give you a little white comb. About a third of the staff are ladies. There are the usual newspapers and familiar year-old magazines spread on the table but there are no pictures of Italian men wearing Brylcreemed creations on the wall and nobody murmurs in your ear "something for the weekend sir?"

One nice touch at our local clip-joint is that you get a 'loyalty card' of the kind we love in Japan. Every time you go you pull it out of your wallet and he stamps it and then when your card is full you get a free haircut. So in my case and bearing in mind how often I go there, that should be around 2017, just in time to celebrate my 70th birthday. We love these "points mean prizes" schemes here, we collect loyalty cards for just about everything.

Creature Comforts

Edera was rummaging around for something a bit 'lighter' to try out with two students yesterday. They had just finished their exams so it seemed a nice idea to have a bit of a break from obscure English grammar. The kind of exams they have here involve some weird and convoluted model examples of grammatical usage which I've seldom if ever heard native English speakers actually use. Maybe the experts from the Japanese Ministry of Education could come over to the UK and do a series of programmes on the BBC to help us speak English properly.

Anyway the thing we dug out to share with them was an old DVD on Nick Parks' "Creature Comforts" that I must have brought here about 2003. I'd forgotten it was in the drawer.

Still makes me laugh. If you have never seen one you can find many examples on Youtube, take a look here.

To make the programmes he recorded hours of tapes of people talking about their opinions about completely everyday things and then went away and fitted animal animations to the conversation. Brilliantly done. The relationships between the character of the speaker and the animal is so perfectly examined, people really do sound like over-enthusiastic dogs, irritable cats and somnambulant hedgehogs. And isn't it so interesting what people actually say?

I wonder where the recordings were made that were used in the programmes. Somewhere in the South West, must be. Maybe Bristol or Exeter or even Plymouth.

I find that since I've watched these programmes I have a tendency to listen to people talking and try and imagine what kind of an animal they would be. Are my best friends spaniels, hamsters, pigs or Siamese cats? And who is which eh?

I'll leave you guessing on that one.

Anniversary

November 25th. I offered incense to the memory of my father before breakfast this morning, it is the sixth anniversary of his death. Like all such anniversaries it seems to contrive to be a surprise that it is already so long ago and, yet also to feel like it happened yesterday.

Neither time nor space here to reflect much on our relationship but it was certainly a very unusual one. I lost contact with him when I was seven years old and then for the next forty eight years he was quite unknown to me, I had no idea where he was. Then he found me again and for eighteen strange months we became very close, before his sudden and unexpected death and the consequences afterwards caused me a lot of grief and anger.

That short time certainly taught me a lot about "who I was". In some ways we were remarkably alike, in others utterly different, but it was certainly clear to me for the first time where I had inherited tendencies and characteristics which I think of as "me". At the time so much was set in context, for the first time I could see myself within a particular bigger picture.

Today I know that things have moved on from that moment. There are still an awful lot of raw feelings about it all, stones left unturned. But life has continued, the raft has floated a long way downstream in the intervening years, borne along by the current around new bends in the river. The events of that time now no longer feel like they are my current reality, they have become a place that I passed through, another of a lengthening series of milestones in my life.

I could write much more on this but why do that? I just wanted to note the day.

She who fights then runs away ...

Labour Day yesterday and somehow - it was all a bit 'spur of the moment' - I ended up down at the local arts centre where Edera said that a performance of 'The Magic Flute' was going to happen. Huh? Who in our neck of the woods that I didn't know was going to be singing a Mozart opera? I just couldn't resist.

To be honest I loathe opera. As far as I'm concerned it is an overblown and contrived art style and much of the usual repertoire has me reaching for the paper bag in the pocket in front of my seat. Oh! I just love being a Philistine, better even than um ...eating forbidden chocolate. If you want to put people on stage and tell a story, then write a play. And if you want to sing, then sing. That is what I say. Jeez. Mind you, once upon a time I even liked Wagner myself but no worries, I was prescribed a course of antibiotics and then I was OK.

But Mozart I'll make an exception for. And Gilbert and Sullivan of course!

Well I went along full of curiosity and I wasn't disappointed. To be honest I was in a very low mood yesterday morning, the trouble with being a bit of a manic depressive is that there are troughs as well as peaks to encounter. But this performance was so bizarre that it really cheered me up. Who were they? Still not sure, but they must have been from Chiba City somewhere, they weren't locals. There were just the nine of us sitting in the big four hundred seater auditorium plus about twenty five of them on stage including the conductor and their excellent accompanist and the girl in the wings with the mike who read the continuity notes.

There were many many bizarre things about this event. For a start there was an odd mix of 'semi-professionals' and complete amateurs singing, and you never knew which to expect next. And then there was the lighting. Spotlights up and then down, footlights changing from red to blue to green at the end of every few bars, it was like being at the Blackpool Illuminations.

Later I found out the reason for this from K-san. It seems that this wasn't so much a performance as a public rehearsal, what some might call a 'workshop'. And the MAIN purpose of the event was not the singing but to let anyone interested in experimenting with stage lighting 'have a go'.

Ah! You want to know about the 'Queen of the Night' bit don't you! A lady in an amazingly low cut red satin dress and every bit as well endowed as a coloratura soprano should be. As soon as she kicked off on "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" the inevitable question arose in my mind "Is this wise?" I'm a chicken I know, I don't like the sight of blood, I have to look away. As that first top 'F' loomed I was on the very edge of my seat and sweating. She screwed up her hands, rolled her eyes up to heaven and ... she didn't jump. Nope. Her voice went no higher than 'C' it seems. It was her maximum altitude.

It all felt like 'Little Injun' in the Beano when I was a kid. His motto I remember was "He who fights then runs away, lives to fight another day."

Morning invasion

We've been 'taken over' this morning. Around eight there was suddenly much blowing of whistles in the lane down from the tarmac road and that beeping which signals the arrival of large reversing lorries. The 'pole' men had arrived to do some work on our electricity supply. Or maybe it is the telephone connections. The poles seem to be shared by all the utility companies and I'm not sure who does what for who.

Anyway, within about a minute the military style invasion was complete, tanks parked on the lawns and checkpoints set up all around the 'banchi'. Three men in blue uniforms and white helmets were deployed with red flashing batons to direct the (completely non-existent) traffic and orders were being barked to drivers and men in hydraulic hoists. There is something deeply uncomfortable for me about the way this is done in Japan, I feel an urge to rush out with a banner and shout "Hey! This is OUR lane, Don't wave your baton at me mate!" But of course such a thing would be forbidden, not permitted. Silly me.

This whole area of "public space - private space" and the appropriation of space by authority is a very interesting topic and one much researched by some geographers. Just how the appropriation of the circulation network by utilities takes place is very different from culture to culture. We don't go in for such military style occupations much in England, at least not if the bailiffs aren't involved. Usually with us it is two hard working Polish guys with a shovel digging a hole, not an airborne tactical brigade with clipboards. Of course wherever they are they are just doing their job, it wouldn't be Japan if there wasn't a plan that covered every angle and defined clear and indisputable rules about the whole business. And everyone was wearing a clean blue uniform and white helmet.

But they don't seem happy. My romanticised memories of working life forty years ago contains images of the times when we could relax for fifteen minutes, sit in the hut, drink tea, smoke a 'fag' before getting back to it. Here the chain of command is everything, orders get 'barked', 'gaffers' never turn blind eyes to anything. There seems to be no pleasure in life at all.

Another 'only in Japan...' story

There was a touching item on our TV News yesterday, one of those little reports which had you thinking "only in Japan ..." Our local big-league baseball team, Lotte Marines, have just won the national championship and the fans decided that they were going to organise a 'ticker-tape' parade through the streets of Chiba. Well, it wasn't actually the city centre of Chiba to be honest, it was in the new bit of Makuhari down by the Bay Shore, but the aim was clear, It was to be a New York style parade with a blizzard of paper thrown down over them from the skies.

To organise this a group of seventeen fans spent three days cutting up one and a half tons of old newspapers into a million and a quarter 4 cm strips. Or was it three fans spent seventeen days? No, that can't be right. Well, a heck of lot of people neatly cutting up a mountain of newspaper. And then they had finished they had the parade and it really was exciting with all that paper falling out of the sky like a snowstorm.

Then, when it was over, all the fans organised a massive litter pick event and picked up every piece of paper then had thrown and had a major recycling operation, with trucks taking it all to the city recycling plant. A couple of hours later the place was back to its usual spotless self and the job was complete.

So you see what mean by 'only in Japan'. I was just trying to imagine say English Premier League football fans organising an industrial scale litter picking project but it IS hard to imagine it, isn't it? Right.

Workers we were

I was working on a web page last night dealing with the task of clearing snow from a railway line across northern England long ago. Most winters there would be some problems with the weather on that route but about one winter in five would be very severe and trains could be disrupted for days. In the exceptionally bad winter of 1947 no trains ran for eight weeks and they even tried using jet engines mounted on a railway wagon to blast the stuff out. It was completely ineffective - blew lots of loose ballast and stones around but the packed snow stayed where it was. The only way to shift it in the end was the tried and trusted way of digging it out with shovels.

In 1955 there was another bad storm and that year 'British Transport Films' sent a documentary crew up to record the rescue of a train that was stranded. The ten minute film they made is a minor classic and if you go to the page I was working on yesterday here there is a link at the bottom that you can use to watch 'Snowdrift at Bleathgill' for yourself. You will enjoy it. I should warn you though that if you navigate away from the page you will soon find lots of missing bits and links that don't work as the site is only about 30% complete.

Watching this short film again yesterday for the first time in years I was fascinated by two things. Firstly the whole style of production is just so utterly different to anything we could possibly make now, there is a kind of edge to the director's portrayal of the world which I guess is closely related to 'socialist realism'. They had learned a lot from Soviet documentary makers in the 1930's. And yet it is also a tiny and self-satisfied world he describes. These days you couldn't even get announcers with that kind of a plummy voice any more.

But the other really interesting thing are the images of the men at work, the social relationships between 'gaffers' (who had heard of 'managers' then?) and 'the men' evident in the easy way they come together in the backbreaking work of shovelling snow in Arctic conditions. Actually I don't think that you could find a group of men in Britain that could work in quite the same way now, because almost all those digging had experienced real hardship on active service in one World War or the other. Also this kind of labour had social status and value them, it wasn't something that got left for migrant labour to do. 'Workers' were who we were.

Looking at images like this it amazes me that this world existed in my own lifetime, it was my own childhood. Barely a stone's throw back in time, it is like looking back into the Victorian Era now.

Making Deliveries

A few people I know seem to have been struggling with the UK's "Royal" Mail service recently (and does the Queen actually have much to do with it any more now or is it just a badly managed business?). Anyway, always one to be happy to point out what lousy and overpriced services we have in the UK here's one up my sleeve to have all browbeaten Brits grinding their teeth.

Edera has been trying her hand recently at doing a bit of online trading. Nothing ambitious - a few books and CD's here and there, and as we have more unused books around the house than you would need to stock a municipal library with we could use the space.

The first few times she used the Japanese Post Office which usually delivers packages the next day but charges around 200 yen (£1:60) per item. But then she checked prices and go wise and so lately she's been using the Kuroneko Yamato (Black Cat Japan) logistics service.

In Britain logistics parcels delivery services like UPS and DHL are basically services designed to make bulk collections from businesses for delivery to consumers. But in Japan for all kinds of historical reasons they are quite different. I guess the main reason is that people use cars much less and for long journeys usually take the train so they want to send luggage in advance. Also Japan has a 'gift culture', people are forever sending each other boxes of cakes and bottles of cooking oil.

So firms like 'Kuroneko' have strong local networks that go everywhere. Our local 'Kuroneko' depot is in a small shop unit in the village, not on some industrial estate in Wigan or Milton Keynes. And if you aren't in for a delivery no problem, they leave a card and you give them a ring and usually the parcel is with you within the hour. All part of the service, which operates seven days a week.

But here's the really amazing thing. As they are out all the time delivering stuff in the local area if you want to SEND stuff you can just ring them and they will call and pick it up! So say we have two books to send, we just wrap and address them and phone the depot and then on the next round the little yellow and green van pulls up outside. The guy gets his sophisticated hand held terminal, taps in the details and gives you a receipt and they are on their way. Delivered to the other end of Japan the next day.

And the cost for this door to door service? Yours for 80 yen an item - around 55p (70 US cents).

Not a good prediction

Publishing stuff creates a permanent record out there, and once it is out in the 'public domain' there is no 'recalling' what you wrote. "The moving finger writes ..." and all that. You sometimes come across comments in old books that make you laugh because the author says something that turns out to be completely contrary to a subsequent reality that you know with the benefit of hindsight.

I turned up one such case yesterday, getting some material ready for choir practice. I was rooting through my old second-hand edition of "The Oxford Book of Carols". It is a 1953 reprint of the original 1928 edition, compiled by the English socialist clergyman Percy Dearmer and the composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw. I bet they had a bundle of fun sitting in some back room in the Bodleian Library back then with a pile of music manuscripts on the table, debating what to include in it.

Anyway on page 271 at the bottom of one carol a footnote caught my eye. Seems that the editors didn't like this item at all! To summarise their opinion:

"This rather confused narrative owes its popularity to the tune 'Tempus adest Floridum' ...blah blah ... one of his less happy pieces, which E. Duncan goes so far as to call 'doggerel', and Bullen condemns as 'poor and commonplace to the last degree".

Which of the three editors wrote this we don't know, but whichever it was he concluded:

"The time has not yet come for a comprehensive book like this to discard it, but we hope with the current wealth of carols for Christmas singing it may gradually fall into disuse".

And the carol from Piae Cantiones that they all hated and were sure would best be soon forgotten? Well, it has since become perhaps the second best known carol around the world. I even heard it playing out of the Santa's grotto behind the Christmas tree in the Sogo Department Store in Chiba last Sunday. It is 'Good King Wenceslas ...'

Nice lunch

Nice lunch yesterday. Time was when we always went out for lunch on Wednesdays and had a leisurely time of it on our days off but lately we haven't done it so much. Partly it is an outcome of the awful sterling/yen exchange rate just now, we really have to economise where we can for a while. And partly just a function of being so busy with so many projects together.

Anyway we have been so 'closeted' recently that we felt it was time to do something different so we took a trip with a friend to a 'French' restaurant out in the country about ten miles from here. We were there once before, about five years ago, but it has changed hands since.

We arrived about 30 minutes early and it was a lovely warm sunny day so we took a walk together out along a lane across the cropped and bare rice paddies admiring the wild flowers by the road and a little patch of woodland with some crimson maples. Beautiful.

And the meal - excellent! Actually maybe the best French cooking I have tasted anywhere outside France. Normally here in Japan 'French' and 'Italian' restaurants are nice enough but bear little resemblance to the real thing. The manager here though was someone who had actually spent time working in Burgundy and both he and the chef really knew their stuff.

Do you know, the three of us managed to sit around that table chatting away for three hours over that meal. A kind of embrace. Perfect cooking, perfect service, and the company of the wife I love and another close friend with whom I feel completely in tune with and share my most intimate thoughts, feelings ideas. Maybe you can't so something so nice too often, it would devalue it somehow.

It is interesting growing older. Your emotional range expands infinitely, even a bit dangerously perhaps, conventions slip away and you can be like a bunch of little kids playing in the sand pit with no inhibitions nor secrets. And this sense of togetherness stretches out in all directions too to embrace so many others not present. If only I had time and opportunity to talk like this with them too eh?

Beam me up

This last few weeks life seems to have become so busy that I'm more or less nailed to my laptop up in the study all day. What happened? All my own fault of course - volunteered to help with certain projects and at the moment a lot needs to be done. So that I don't forget what Edera actually looks like I've taken to carrying my laptop downstairs and using one of our little folding teaching desks between the kitchen sink and the piano. When there is no teaching to be done we both seem to be constantly hammering on keyboards within the same couple of square metres, competing for the printer connection when we need it.

Whatever happened to those days when father sat in front of the fire whittling a stick or making fishing flies in the flickering candlelight while mother darned a few socks of an evening? Now we are both so utterly dependent on our laptops in daily life that actually I realise that we could much more easily manage without a car. At least we could catch a train or walk up the hill to the supermarket. Without a laptop we are almost literally blind, deaf and dumb. How and where did that happen? Mid 1990's I think. And it isn't that we carelessly fritter our time there in chat rooms or that kind of stuff, in fact it would be nice to actually have the space to Skype friends from time to time.

Even though I used laptops at work since the year dot I never quite saw this dependency coming. I remember Garrison Keillor writing once about seeing television for the first time at a Minnesota State Fair in nineteen forty something. "You could see your own moving picture on a little flickering screen" he mused, "interesting but difficult to see why you would want one if you had a mirror ..."

I always like to think what it would be like to take a laptop back in a time machine and type away in a coffee bar or library say 50 years ago. Would anyone actually notice? And then there's the other question - if someone travelled back from the future to now, what would they do that would simply bemuse us? Mind reading maybe? Or a "Beam me up Scotty" machine. Or maybe biro pens that worked OK what you tried to use them?

Naruto Vocal Ensemble - Toryanse

Download Naruto Vocal Ensemble - Toryanse

As part of some general work I'm doing on combining multimedia with websites I'm developing at the moment I thought that I would try some links from 'Little House'out to different things from time to time

Here is my first experiment, just a simple HTML link to one of our repertoire of well known Japanese songs.

I really like this song from the Edo Era. The words are about going through the crowds to the temple to take part in the 'shichi-go-san' (7-5-3) children's festival. But like so many children's songs it has a dark and sinister ending, because we learn that although it is OK going to the temple "it is scary coming back!" Why this is so is never explained ...

I have started to hide a few other traditional Japanese songs round our website here.

School Cleaning

I was drilling four of our students this evening and checking their contributions for the looming 'Essay' publication. They are a really nice bunch of girls and I've known them since they were way down in elementary school grades so they are well used to my teasing and capable of giving as good as anything they get from me.

One of them was talking about cleaning the school. In schools here kids are responsible for keeping their own buildings clean and tidy and they have to 'set to' after class every afternoon and clean the place for thirty minutes. I think it is a great practice. The schools are absolutely spotless and of course they take good care to keep them that way as it makes less work at the end of the day. Also it really teaches responsibility for that kind of thing more generally too, kids here always take care not to tramp dirt around or leave the place looking like a shambles.

Well, I just couldn't resist probing M-chan's grip on this stuff so I asked her if kids outside Japan do the same thing. "Of course!" she snorted. Obviously kids everywhere clean their own schools every day, it is a well known fact! Iain-sensei at his tricks again!

I hesitated for a moment and debated it with myself but anyway I said "Well, kids in England don't! In fact as far as I know no students anywhere except in Japan clean their schools every day!". They were gob-smacked. At first they were puzzled as to when the students DID clean the place. Did they only do it every other day for example? But when they heard that adults called 'cleaners' actually cleaned the school as a job they were astonished. Hard to imagine such a world.

So I added that actually I thought it was a brilliant idea that they cleaned the place for themselves, and that they made a such good job of it. And there were broad smiles all around. Clearly the idea of someone else doing it for them just didn't feel 'right', it was their responsibility. You should do your own dirty work.

Good for them.

Essay Time

It is almost that time of year when we publish our annual collection of student essays. There is usually a theme to the collection, and this time it is "English and Me", quite a suitable topic for students at an English teaching setup such as ours to write about eh?

So I thought that I would get away with it easily this time, just run off a few paragraphs along the lines of "Nice language, I have spoken it for long time etc" but it seems that won't do. I have to write about an equivalent experience. Well, my grasp of Japanese as she is spoke is probably best glossed over, so in the end we decided that I should write about "French and me" as this is the nearest equivalent that Edera could think of.

I suppose I could let my imagination run riot here as there are few around - but some! - who remember my schoolboy French and could contradict me. Of course I was stunningly good at it all at the time and to prove it I even once passed an examination. Well, OK, it was at the second 'go'. But you just HAD to succeed at a language then, there was no possibility of university if you didn't have a language at GCE level. In fact just a few years before Latin had been a mandatory requirement.

Well, I passed that French exam back then in the Stone Age but it was only later in adult life that I started really started to learn French. I made a few camping trips to Savoie and picked around in the bakers and supermarket as you do but then at work I had the good luck to get into a class put on to teach aspiring managers French at a time when we were planning to invade the French lager market. Our French teacher - Florence - was from Lyons and very beautiful and very nice too (for a French person!) and she focused 100% on getting us speaking and then after speaking arguing which is something the French do so well.

Amazing what a difference it made in the end. That pleasure of walking down a street somewhere in the 'boonies' and being aware of the buzz of encounters going on around you. And also picking up some styles of literature, for me mainly country stuff around Burgundy which is now my favorite part of France. So it is a good topic for me to write about. All I have to do now is to do it.

My Life with Alarm Clocks

If I had an academic mind set hell-bent on exploring exhaustively some obscure and completely irrelevant topic (which of course is far from true!) then one that would suggest itself to me as a likely candidate to me is the subject of 'alarm clocks'. Of course the truly cloistered researcher couldn't just leave it at that - 'alarm clocks' - they would have to narrow it all down considerably. Perhaps 'Discourses on alarm clocks in socialist realist literature 1919-1926' - something along those lines. But in the wider interests of the science of horology I'll be a martyr here and remain a 'generalist' on the topic whole topic. "My life with alarm clocks"

'Alarm clocks' have caught my attention because Edera has mine over on her side of the bed at the moment (which is the right of course, do any men sleep anywhere except on the left?). Hers has got dodgy recently, it doesn't ring. I think it is only the battery but changing that seems like too much of an intellectual challenge right now. I get as far as the little spring clip on the back and then need a rest or I get nosebleeds. Being a woman hers is rather feminine but mine is one of those macho small black cubic jobs made by Matsui and I bought it the first time I came to Japan. Looking at my 'life chronology spreadsheet' - what I did and when, an indispensable aid one day for my biographers - I see that it was on 1 July 1997. I got it in a shop in Akihabara - the 'Electric Town' shopping district of Tokyo - and I remember being rather cross because on return to the youth hostel I thought it was a fake as it has some plastic numbers stuck on the front. It was just part of the packaging of course.

Anyway, that alarm clock has travelled the world with me since. America, China and of course all around England, Europe and Japan. the first five years it travelled with me in the course of my work to endless business hotels. More recently it has enjoyed a rather relaxed retirement schedule. Sometimes it even doubles up as a timer for meditation periods, suitably buried under cushions of course to reduce the sound by about 95%.

So this alarm is an integral part of my life. They say that people grow to look like their dogs but I'm sure that there is a similar aspect to alarm clocks, they share all the intimate moments of your personal routines.

My grandfather had a large clockwork alarm with a tin case finished in a vibrant peacock blue. He must have bought it in about 1920 and the tick was so amazingly loud you could hear it through brick walls. In days when going on 'early turn' meant 4:00AM rising you certainly needed a pretty turbocharged bell and you could hear his going off from the end of the lane at least.

Death by bullying

I was reading a news report today about a 12 year old girl who committed suicide last month after being bullied in school. It seems that she started to be bullied last year after her mother - who is a Filipina - attended the school in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, for a parents' event. Characteristically the school at first denied any bullying had happened, and then in the face of mounting evidence changed tack and did the usual formal apology stuff to he parents.

What the heck use are apologies? I'd ban them myself, they have no face value, no capacity at all for 'righting wrongs'. Better just to move straight along to the retribution if you ask me. There isn't enough of it around these days, people don't reap what they sow so much. In the good old days negligent public officials didn't just loose a bit of face, the received brief instructions to fall on their swords. It made for more careful exercise of responsibility.

In this case the school had clearly known for a year that the child concerned was being racially discriminated against through bullying and did nothing effective to stop it. Disgraceful.

Hard mind. We have had brushes with a couple of cases over the years, though not in our bailiwick. I remember one of our juku students a long time ago being asked in a lesson what she didn't like (yoghurt? maths homework?) and her answer was 'Koreans'. Knowing the family it was no surprise. And another 'Junior High' student I knew so effectively bullied a classmate (not on our property) that she never returned to school and it destroyed the family. Girls especially seem to be very effective at this kind of professional and considered cruelty, ostracising today students who were their friends only yesterday.

It isn't unique to Japan of course, but they can make something of a speciality of it here. In past times in villages they exercised the murahachibu as a punishment - ostracism to the extent that only limited social contact was permitted to the degree necessary to avoid starvation.

That is where I sense it as different in Japan. In England I was often on the receiving end of bullying at school but the bullies were tough children with absolutely no respect for authority who were attempting to establish a 'pecking order' of their own. In fact bullies were often from minority groups, their ethnicity was part of their strength, and they came after 'good boys' like me.

In Japan that would be impossible. Here bullies are conventional, the 'good boys and girls', and often the children of parents who express prejudices at home which their offspring then actualise at school. Or at least that is my suspicion. Deviation from the norm is not tolerated, why should you be allowed to be different, or 'better' to us? And often institutions tacitly support this kind of perspective by turning a blind eye to trouble. Who won't avoid trouble if they possibly can?

Slippers

Early in the morning seems to be the time for very old memories to arise in me and sometimes they do so with terrifying power. It is as if all the barriers later dragged across the highway by conscious thought are blown down around then, and you feel the stuff rather than merely recall it.

But other morning memories don't carry the same emotional charge and they can be triggered even by objects in the bedroom. And so it was today. Usually I'm very careful where I leave my slippers. In part this is a practical issue - I often neeed to find them in the dark to creep along the landing to the toilet during the night. But it is also a safety thing with me, like knowing where the car keys are when I go to bed. If we get a 'Big One' during the night and the house collapses around our ears I want to get something onto my feet and get us out to the refuge of the car. I have to know where they are. Part of the mentality of living in Japan eh?

Well, these mute slippers by the bed in the early dawn suddenly reminded me of an artist who used to live just around the corner from us in Montalbo Terrace in Barnard Castle. My grandmother was a latent 'Education Mama' and when I was about seven she had hopes of this poor guy teaching me to draw and paint and me becoming a great artist with works displayed in teh Bowes Museum. I think I only had one lesson from him and looking back I can see that he was a hopeless teacher. He wanted me to draw a ball and then get the light and shade right. Of course he wanted to teach me draughtsmanship but what seven year old knows about that? Somewhere I got the muddled impression that to be an artist you had to work from the bottom upwards - this week spheres, next week pyramids, next month the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus kind of thing. I was dutifully drawing balls for a month, nobody in our street could afford oranges back then

Slippers? Oh! Well, this chap was famous in Barnard Castle because every year for a month he made a trip to France to sketch and do watercolours. France was pretty well the eauivalent of the moon for us back in 1954, people would go to the station to watch him begin his journey it was so interestng. And here's the thing. Being creative and forgetful, also not ucommon down our way, he once started off on one of these foreign trips by arriving at the station in a taxi in his carpet slippers because he had forgotten to change into his shoes. Someone had to run back and get them for him.

Excitement eh? It was the talk of the town for weeks, maybe years. Setting off for France in slippers! Good greif! We certainly saw life in Barnard Castle back in those days.

Home Made

We have been struggling with the bread maker here a bit recently. Actually Edera now thinks that the problem might be with the yeast we have rather than the machine itself which we have had for seven years and which, I guess, by now has made well over a thousand loaves of bread. Even if it is a 'goner' we have certainly had our money's worth out of it.

Anyway yesterday we had homemade soup for tea and so as not to waste the somewhat 'dodgy' looking dough we had from earlier tests on the defunct machine we put it in the oven and baked it. It was pretty well unleavened bread but it was delicious hot, and a very nice crisp crust to it too. Real 'home made' bread!

It brought to mind the number of times I have seen those politically correct words 'home made' around the place recently, including even in the supermarket on the wrapper of a sliced loaf baked I am sure in a large factory in Chiba-shi not a million miles from the docks. Can't imagine anyone calling the spot 'home' unless some of the baton waving peak-capped 'security' guards who frequent the main gate have a camp bed in their lodge.

I rather favour a rigourous interpretation of the words 'home made' myself. If I ruled the world even shop-keepers and hoteliers that used the expression might meet a sticky end. Hotel kithchens and even the smallest professional baking oven do NOT constitute 'home' baking no matter how delicious and organically friendly their output may be.

Nope! If something is going to be home made is should be cooked in a domestic oven in some one's umm ... home.

Passive resistance?

Coming out of the car park at the supermarket today I had to pull up and wait for another car leaving the parking area and turning right in front of me. He was so incredibly slow that to be honest I was sure that he was taking the p*ss out of me. There was no way that he needed to move so amazingly slowly, I didn't realise that you could drive an automatic at such a snail's pace. a family of tortoises crossing in front of him would have had ample time to make the kerb safely. Such was the slow motion quality of this moment that I was reminded of that classic 'Father Ted' Over 75 Priest's Football Match. You can see a bit of it here.

Of course I know better not to react to this kind of thing (umm ... usually) - you don't know the situation and in any case it would represent a big 'loss of face' here eh? I keep my reactions if not to myself then at least within the confines of the car.

I do REALLY wonder though if some people in Japan do see this as a kind of passive resistance, a way of getting their own back on a culture that so often pressurises in subtle ways to conform and to 'perform'. Let's just slow reality down by say 20%, walk through life at three miles an hour or even two - not enough to provoke a reaction but just enough to irritate.

It usually isn't so simple. In fact this is a complex cultural area you could certainly write a wonderful anthropological thesis about if you could develop a good methodology. And you come across it in many areas. In shops for example staff are usually extremely polite but if you come across someone 'shelving' in a local supermarket or running a floor cleaning machine down an aisle expect to have to stand aside because the status of "doing an official job" will trump your status as a customer. They expect YOU to get out of the way, their possession of space carries more authority.

Another influence on this is that Japan is a society where original thinking is sometimes not encouraged and mistakes are better not made. 'Komatta na?' people will ask - 'What to do?' If we are doing something and we get outside of the comfort zone world we stop, consult people, if possible pass the choice up the line but at least spread the responsibility around. It is just the way it is. And to be like this you need to move slowly.

Aerial cats

One of my friends here was telling me about the difficulties of looking after three young cats for someone for a week. She also keeps dogs so this is an inter-species social situation that takes some handling. The cats and dogs it seems didn't mix easily but the cats are happy with the garden shed, it is their first time out into the big wide world and so the 'great outdoors' is exciting stuff.

One of the things that has really got their attention is climbing trees for the first time, but of course being young they all have to learn the hard way that 'what goes up must come down'. In England our fireman used to be famous for their willingness to turn out to rescue cats from trees, but in the Japanese countryside I doubt that this is a tradition, especially as all the firemen are volunteers with daytime jobs.

Anyway she managed to get all those cats back on terra firma without accident. In my experience it just means that they will get stuck higher up next time and meow more piteously from a greater altitude.

Back at 'Little House' one of our 'strays' was also doing some mountaineering yesterday. She is gnarled and battered and has one ear missing and I don't think she has much left to learn about the hazards of the world but she is always cheerful (and greedy!) and she makes me very cheerful too. Anyway she has discovered the route via the South Col and the north face of the sloping shed roof up onto the transparent roofing over the timber decking, a 'super severe' climb pioneered long ago by that ace Alpinist Pero. To make the most of the morning sunshine she was up there yesterday sunning herself on the transparent corrugated plastic. As I typed away here I could see her tail flicking from underneath as she surveyed her Empire down below.

There are many nice things about cats but this love of taking an aerial perspective on life is one of the nicest. Maybe next time I will climb up there and join her.

Hosing down the road

I was sorting stuff out in the ofuro this morning and I could hear the sound through the open window of a neighbour hosing down the roadway further down the lane. Scary. He often does it, to the extent that you could almost call it a 'hobby'. On fine days out comes the hosepipe and away he goes. Needless to say the road outside his place is spotless.

Of course we all do this kind of thing sometimes. But usually not a couple of times a week eh? There comes a point where this kind of obsessive cleanliness crosses an invisible boundary and becomes a form of compulsive behaviour. Nor is it 'harmless'. A few years back he got into a terrible row with an elderly neighbour who had a small tree overhanging the road on the other side of the lane. This tree had the temerity to shed leaves in autumn. Somehow in the hassle that tree got cut down by one or the other, and then not long after the neighbour had a stroke.

I've got to notice recently just how often apparently completely 'rational' behaviour has a very bizarre component to it lurking just under the surface. I can see that I have travelled through a lot of life usually taking people's motives at face value and primarily, if not exclusively, governed by well intended and considered choices. As an initial assumption I think that is still a good starting point in any new relationship or situation.

But you can only take that hypothesis so far. I can see now that even the most apparently 'logical' positions defended by people are often fuelled by deeper and darker psychological mechanisms that I can only guess at. Opinions especially are seldom held on the basis of rational consideration no matter how much we might pretend they are and justify them as such. They are so often simply deeply held ... well, what exactly? What is being grasped? Whatever their root they become fragments of ourselves to be defended at any cost.

These behaviours are sometimes easy to see in others but so difficult to notice in yourself. What is my equivalent of hosing down the road? I can think of a few candidates.

A future November?

Very warm and sunny here yesterday, almost like summer. But today is a lot cooler and greyer. I love days like this. Sunshine has its place but a lot of the time I need to soak up the softest of pastel colours, shades of grey that contain just a hint of hue. Colour is such an emotionally complex thing - and physically complex too.

Days like today an ancient project comes into my mind to be in the northern woods at this time of the year. During those few weeks when the sun departs from the sky but before the first significant snows of winter arrive. I feel like I want to be 'holed up' in a serious romantic novel, sharing a moss clad log cabin deep in the forest with someone. Where is this magic cabin? Not sure. Perhaps in Manitoba, or Sakhalin? Or more likely Finland or better still further east in Karelia. Something from the pages of Pasternak.

Anyway, to get to this place you have to drive north from civilisation, and then after a while turn onto a gravel track you could easily miss. It leaves the highway and within a few miles you are surrounded by mature birch forest and then here we are! When you switch off the car engine only the sigh of wind in the woods. Get a log fire going in the grate, a scent of pine resin. And slip out for a short walk in the wilderness because it is almost dark already - as we step into the a clearing the first stars in an azure sky. Complete, complete delicious isolation to taste, nobody comes here except the rutting deer and the solitary barking dog-fox. Breathe that air! Here at last there is space to savour, we have taken two steps beyond the edge of the world and have only ourselves and the singing of the kettle on the stove for company.

I have been to this place many times in dreams. The northern woods. Been intoxicated by the dove grey skies, the watery mauves dappling the shadow under the branches and the cool umbers of distant hills. Heard the twigs crack in the leaf mould under my shoe. But will I travel there soon in the 'real time' of a future November? Who knows?

TV man cometh

Lots of action around here this morning. As I type there is the sound of drills and hammers around the old place. Even better, it is all for free.

I'm a bit vague on why and how all this is happening; it is the kind of detail that for a gaijin in a foreign land passes as a bit of a blur. But the underlying story is that NHK are never going to have a transmitter that gives and adequate digital signal in our remotest bit of the 'boonies' of leafy Chiba-ken and so before they switch off the analogue signal they are providing us with a free 'dish' to give us reasonable TV reception. They are just screwing it onto the roof over the corner window of the schoolroom and running a cable around to the corner by the dining table now. So hopefully in future we can watch without the picture vanishing every time a breeze blows.

Being a suspicious person I'm sure that we'll have a call soon from NHK Sales offering us a never to be missed 'Gold' service for just 3000 yen a month more (minimum contract seven years, terms and conditions apply) but for now cash does not change hands.

As usual here in Japan five guys have turned up to make the installation. One to hold the 'dish', one to hold the ladder, one to hold the screwdriver, one to connect the cable and one to wield the clip board. I'm surprised that they haven't got a couple of flagmen in the lane to control the traffic, even though their van actually blocks the place off. The 'time and motion' men have never hit 95% of Japanese business, only those hyper-efficient parts like car and electronic manufacture that the economy depends on. Observing work in progress I noticed a couple of uneasy yet dismissive glances at the 'Little House' railway shed of the "Oh! my God! Who botched THIS one!" kind beloved of workmen the world over. DIY is but in its infancy in Japan. What kind of a world would t be if people actually did their own carpentry and painting and stuff eh?

Three Visitors

Our Halloween party yesterday afternoon. Actually although I say "afternoon" it stretched into the evening too until around eight. If friends and students hang around the place that long I guess they are enjoying themselves, you wouldn't just be here for the food for example. Perhaps it is our habit of playing old-fashioned party games on such occasions. I groan inwardly at the thought of it when Edera starts organising everyone into circles and producing paper and pencils, but once we get into charades and musical chairs I'm as much a big kid as anyone else.

Even though I really enjoy these events I find they completely drain me of energy now. My batteries are soon utterly flattened. However did I make it through 25 years of socialising with customers and sounding so 'up for it' in sales meetings. I can't imagine? Yesterday evening after everyone had gone and the washing up was done I just wanted to sit in a corner and suck my thumb. By eleven I was deep in a dreamless sleep.

Around tea-time Y-san dropped in with a carrying cage containing three beautiful kittens. Well, what kittens aren't beautiful? They are starting to put on weight and size, the last three to be housed of a hand-reared litter discovered under a bush in the summer. When they came into the busy room they all sat still in in the middle of their container looking at us with saucer eyes but after a minute or two they gained confidence and began to explore. Two very pretty females and a bold little Tomcat - called Tora - who inevitably settled onto my lap for a stroke. But he was soon off to stake out the rest of the schoolroom

Goodness! It is amazing how beautiful young cats can be eh? Breathtaking. At such times I feel so happy to caress and at the same time so sad that our increasingly peripatetic lifestyle between Japan and England means that we can't offer a much needed home to one of these young cats - indeed I would be delighted to have all three around the house. Young cats are so vulnerable, they need a stable and secure home as much as kids do. But at the moment we aren't a stable home at either end, there is no escaping the fact. Oh dear!