Seasonal Epigrams

One of my all-time favourite books is 'Prairy Erth: A Deep Map' by William Least-Heat Moon. I can't think of any other book, except perhaps Thoreau's 'Walden', that is so deeply rooted in an intuitive observation of place. In more than 600 pages he explores the transformation of Chase County, Kansas, from wild Prairie a century ago into an area of windy farmland today, and how this has been reflected in the biographies of families that live in the area. You just want to rush off into the prairie and find a completely featureless bit of it to write about once you have read his work.

Of course, Chase County is interesting in the sense that it is so completely ordinary. You could write a book like this about absolutely anywhere - if you were a talented author with a deep understanding of place that is.

I never saw an writer that made such extensive use of epigraphs, those little quotations that people and especially academics (I guess that they too count as 'people') put at the head of chapters. Sometimes there are pages of them. Just glancing through those above the first chapter now there is one that especially rings true for this work quoted from Gilbert White's 'Natural History of Selbourne'. "All nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is most examined." That is certainly the case with 'Prairy Erth' - look in detail and with imagination and what is revealed within the most 'ordinary' landscape is extraordinary.

I just couldn't resist adding epigraphs to my thesis and I never struggled or contrived to do this; there was always one quotation that emerged that really stood out and encapsulated the sense of the whole chapter. Maybe my favourite is one by the Zen poet Ryokan at the head of the chapter on continuity in the process of using urban space;

"Once owned, they say, by men of long ago -
this lovely vase - and now it's mine!"

This seems to be an epigram wholly appropriate to the season for me. The years have revealed more and more to me this sense of holding for 'just now' things in trust for others, the completely ephemeral nature of any relationship of ownership and 'possession' of objects and relationships in past present or future.

Happy New Year to all 'Little House' readers!

Stealing

Heard a rotten piece of news yesterday. It seems that our railway site at Kirkby Stephen has been targeted by scrap metal thieves, and all the valuable copper and other alloy components from five diesel-electric locomotives under restoration by their owner and his two sons on site has been stripped and stolen. The scrap value of the material removed is thought to be about £100,000 but of course it is the damage caused that is irreparable. Probably now for at least some of these locomotives for which 'spares' no longer exist on the second-hand market there is now no hope of repair.

By coincidence I was also left 'slightly wondering' in the 'Joyful Honda' store at Narita yesterday. At the till I asked the assistant for something I couldn't find and waited while she went to look for it. Somehow I thought I'd put a 1000 yen note on the counter to pay, but it wasn't there when she came back. Had the woman behind me picked it up by some sleight of hand? Or did I put it back in my wallet as I waited? Almost certainly the latter, that kind of stuff doesn't go on in Japan and certainly not involving respectable 50 year old ladies. But the seed of doubt was there in my mind.

"The seed of doubt was there". That is the terrible thing about theft. It seems like a relatively small crime compared with, say, murder or grievous bodily harm but of course it causes untold social damage in terms of the loss of trust it precipitates. Most of us, most of the time, implicitly trust to the decency of the people we live and work with. Then if someone steals your wallet out of your jacket pocket at the office the contract of trust is broken not just with the thief but with a whole circle of friends and acquaintances. If someone is capable of it, then in truth probably anyone is capable of it. And once the trust has gone it isn't easy to find again. You know logically that it is only perhaps 1% that would actually do it, but they damage the basis of trust for everyone.

In the UK now theft seems to have become such a trivial crime. Nobody ever "gets done" for thefts of items worth less than £25 any more, and even stealing more valuable things doesn't result in a significantly punitive sentence until perhaps the fourth or fifth offence. Theft from organisations - employers and the state - are just commonplace. Hard to imagine that in some societies amputation of your right hand is still the mandatory sentence even for a first offence.

The trouble is that we have developed the collective mind set of regarding the relative value of the proceeds of the theft as the benchmark, not the social damage it does. It might be a convenient piece of judicial 'sleight of hand' but it is hard to imagine anuthing more socially corrosive.

Fabricated Histories

One thing the British and Japanese have in common is a love of 'fabricated' history. In England I am becoming very involved in the 'Stainmore Railway' project but of course the outcome of all our labours will be a 'facsimile' of a railway from the 1950's. No matter how 'authentic' in appearance all the component parts may be the orginal artifacts used on site were torn down and sent for scrap half a life time ago. But even if all the contemporary signal gantries and station signs had remained in place they could never have been 'real' in the sense that we actually could know what it was to be like to be here in 1955. The whole world worked differently.

Actually an attractive part of the project is that it isn't 'authentic' - it is primarily an engineering project of our own times that can only be brought to life through our own skills. So we replicate in ourselves now the knowledge and ambition needed to drive a railway from A to B. That is REALLY interesting!

In Japan you find 'historical' sites like Dejima - the 'recreated' trading post on an island at Nagasaki which for more than a century was the only place where Japanese were permitted to have any contact with Europeans. Here you can find modern replicas of the nineteenth century buildings used by the Portuguese on this crucial site in Japanese history although the former 'island' is now a small park completely landlocked down-town near the railway station.

'History' is something that you approach by approximations and only ever glimpse at in mirrors. Even a moment after an event all you ever have are interpretations, other people's opinions and of what took place. There may be artefacts - archaeological ruins, a weapon, a document, even photographs and recordings - but 'history' as such is an interpretation of something we can no longer know directly through our six senses. It really is about telling stories.

And yet we love history. So we should, but we shouldn't mistake it for 'reality'. That only exists here and now.

Surviving Extroverts

Goodness. Really had my fill of people this last couple of weeks. I managed it carefully up until Christmas Day Night, but a final unscheduled and impromptu party drained the last of my capacity for socialising. And then yet another invite for a walk on Boxing Day that E was happy to head off on soon had me growling and retreating into the peace and quiet of my shed to do some sawing and soldering. A further proposal to have a barbecue on the Beach and camp out overnight to see the dawn had even less appeal I'm afraid. No; no; no!

People not so close - and especially bored extroverts in need of extra company at a time of year when they can't get into the busy office or classroom for their 'fix' - are the last thing I need around now. I'm getting very old and boring I'm afraid. I stuck it out OK two weeks but it is never long enough, people always want a bigger slice of your time than you want to offer or in some cases are even capable of giving.

I'm a terrible introvert eh? Maybe I always had the tendency. It isn't necessarily that I want to be alone, definitely not; there are people whose company I always enjoy, they are always welcome around my door. Nor is it that I 'don't like' the people I can't cope with. What is it that distinguishes people into these 'introvert' and 'extrovert' groups?

Certainly a part of it for me is that I find people who look for any kind of affirmation from me as wearing and especially those who like to draw me into confirming them with some kind of praise. Often it shows up as a subtle kind of blackmail ... "if you don't want to do what I want to do it shows that you don't like me". Maybe they are right. At any rate I can almost immediately feel the anchors going on, it isn't my job to enthuse at their bidding any more than it is theirs to enthuse at mine. I'll promise not to clamber around on their cloud just so long as they stay off the one I'm sitting on.

In situations like this I start to get 'ornery' after about two minutes. It isn't that I have a 'short fuse' - far from it. More that I've learned over the years that it is less trouble to put a stop to it sooner rather than later.

The Relief Map

When I arrived back here in October there was a map of Britain up on our school room area wall. I don't know where Edera came across it, perhaps I brought here myself in 2002 or 2003 and it slipped my mind. It is one of those old fashioned 'physical relief' maps with the contoured topography shown in greens and browns and around the edges out in the deep blue sea are various little features on rainfall and coastal erosion and karst scenery to ponder.

Lovely! This is the kind of map that deeply absorbed my attention when I was eight or nine years old and eventually led to me becoming a 'proper geographer' fifty years later.

What struck me looking at it today were the regions that I haven't been to yet. I travelled a lot during my working life around the UK but there are still some quite big blanks and I'd better start to fill them in soon if I am ever to go to those places. The one that stuck me most was that long coastline from Peterhead right around through Fraserburgh and Elgin to Inverness - a big chunk of eastern Scotland unvisited. Once 'Great North of Scotland Railway' territory. And then I missed out on the far northern coast around the tip of Sutherland too. I've never done the circuit of the Mull of Kintyre. Further south I've been to neither the Lincolnshire nor the Suffolk coasts, and Lyme Bay and Dorset are white spaces on my map.

Not that much though eh? I could fill in these gaps in a couple of months if I put my mind to it, maybe even a month in my little 'Corsa' staying in bed and breakfast

I used to have a stamp collector's fascination with getting all the items in a set, but that instinct is no longer so strong and I don't collect them all for the sake of having them all any more. I don't miss the pink 'panda' nor the lime green 10 cents, just a 'taster' of any design will do. So it is with places. Whatever is calling me there now is more concerned that I may have missed out on a great mystery or serious adventure because I didn't arrived at a right place at a right time. Like 'The History of Mr. Polly'. Somewhere there is a turn in the road, a strange luminosity in an alley, a voice from the shadow of an open cottage door and on the other side of that moment - who knows?

Toilet obsessed feline

Christmas Day eh? I can't ever remember one that felt less like one. Brilliantly sunny day here in Kanto, and warm. This morning I headed over to Cainz Superstore in Yachimata to see if I could find a flat tipped soldering iron in the tools section (something else that you don't realise doesn't exist in Japan until you look for one). But later this afternoon I have to cook a downsized Christmas Dinner 'with all the trimmings' (whatever THEY are!) and then Mika-chan is coming around to help us eat it after the last class at six thirty. And at some stage I'll have to make a couple of calls to England of course.

The day got off to an excellent start with the presently resident cat outwitting me, which isn't difficult. All cats seem to have different interests and our foster kitten's big obsession is with water and especially with running water. This means that the toilet is the ultimate mystery for him, and he's going to work it out whatever he takes. He's had me creased up with laughter watching him on this mission.

So this morning I tottered out of there and hardly was the door open an inch and that airborne ball of fur was through it in the opposite direction and between my feet and hanging over the edge of the toilet bowl to watch that retreating water swirling around. Then with a leap onto the seat he was attacking the spot where the incoming flush water enters the cistern. Hard to describe if you have never seen a Japanese toilet but our water supply doesn't just vanish unremarked into the cistern innards, it comes out of a pipe above and flows down into the cistern through a depression like a small sink with a hole in the bottom - the aim being to let you use the incoming cold water to wash your hands and save the expense of a separate sink in there.

Anyway this young cat is desperate to prevent that water escaping through the hole, he can't fly to a music of a flushing toilet fast enough to do his fleine stuff and stuff his paw in there like a plug. It just looks so funny to see this small furry figure standing on his legs attacking a stream of H2O.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Spaces of sounds

Everybody likes the mainstream 'Impressionist' painters these days but when I was in my 'teens' and studying art history at school there was still something vaguely 'revolutionary' about their use of colour. Maybe there were still a few very elderly old gentlemen around that still recalled being 'shocked' by some of the later stuff by Claude Monet or the extremes of Seurat's pointillism. Anyway our art master, the appropriately named 'Chalky' White, was keen to get us dabbling away in primary colours to experiment with those techniques for ourselves.

This week I've sometimes found myself contemplating very deeply the experience of 'dimension' in sound and it brought back a lot of that stuff. If you lie barely awake in the earliest morning, or meditate in the deepening dusk, you soon become aware of how the character of sound reveals and 'enables' the dimensions of unseen spaces. Just like the primary colours of a painter's pallete applied as minute dots of primary colours reveal space and hue in a different way to mixed paint.

The sound that gives the clue to this world of the ear around here and for me is the distant barking of dogs. In Japan dogs say 'wan!-wan!' and they really do because of the way immense forests change sounds. When the mind is very still the ear locates these sounds not so much in terms of co-ordinates (though it does) but rather by the 'layer of distance' that they are reflected from. A sound located by the heart the conforms to an invisible geometry.

And perhaps one that is indescribable, can only be experienced. Because ironically this kind of natural sound has no relationship with the audible and written symbolisms of speech. You just can't talk about it or describe it. Only know it like a lover, you have to touch it with your whole being.

Listening, we don't do enough of it.

Trip to the vets.

Got the foster kitten across to Ogawa the Vet's this afternoon for his Feline HIV 'jab'. Actually we took him over last Wednesday but he needed to have been in the house for a week before they would treat him. So today he first had an examination and blood test to see if he was OK and then the inoculation after.

Yes, he was completely fit and 'clear' thank goodness. Considering he spent at least some time out in there in the fields he was lucky, Feline HIV and other 'nasties' are completely endemic in the local 'stray' and feral cat populations. I had the feeling he would be OK - four month old kittens have the same kind of immune system 'bounce' that human babies have. But it was still a bit nerve racking waiting for the result, it just needs one scratch or bite from an infected animal. Now he is immunised but we can expect a day of fever for him while his system builds up the necessary antibodies.

Hopeless trying to keep a cat healthy around here without these precautions, I'm sure that most of the visitors to our French windows are suffering from one or more of these nasty incurable ailments that would probably 'see off' a British 'moggy' in hours.

He did very well traveling in the cat box and during his ordeal with the vet and nurse. I was impressed by the number of elastoplasts and bandages she had on her right hand - you obviously can't combine the careers of veterinary nurse and concert pianist! But she clearly loved working with animals and was a complete professional at getting stroppy and scared felines in an unbreakable arm lock. Like his predecessor Tora his main objection seemed to be to having his temperature taken, you all know what they do to cats I guess. The blood test wasn't what he was looking for for Christmas either.

Still job done. He has enormous dignity and he stays pretty cool, none of the whingeing and lamenting that his predecessors kicked off with as soon as the were corralled in the car. He's a cool cat, very intelligent. And now he won't be catching any nasty diseases in a hurry. Let's hope so.

'Stainmore 150' web site open

A few of you know that one reason I have been rather 'out of circulation' this last few weeks is that I have been developing a large new web site to advertise the 'Stainmore 150' celebrations that we will be hoping next summer in Kirkby Stephen.

There are still many pages the need material added over the next few months but the site is now public and you can see what I have finished so far by taking a look here.

The '150' celebrations mark the 150th anniversary of the opening of the railway from coast to coast across the north of England in 1861. Next August after 13 years hard work we will be running steam trains again on a re-laid section of the line to the west of town.

Whoever and wherever you are I hope you can get along to Kirkby Stephen at some stage during what promises to a really interesting summer.

Still hurts

I often feel that I'm not growing old very gracefully, sometimes not gracefully at all. I was walking along the river this evening under the full moon pushing a barrow-load of angry thoughts along in front of me and I can't pretend it is the first time such a thing has happened.

Just one of those small things, nothing important. Not important at al and yet it hurts eh? One of those times that someone did something, didn't do something, said something, left something unsaid and it was completely unimportant AND it was really important because in the little gap it suddenly created between them and me a whole chasm of difference was revealed, a "trust betrayed". Not in any gross way, just that something you always thought was porcelain turned out to be cheap pottery after all. Naive trust - and then an unforeseen and painful payback. Nothing really to complain about in the big scheme of things, nor even in a small one. And yet a betrayal of trust nevertheless after which nothing will be quite the same.

Life is punctuated with many such moments, thousands of them over the years. Perhaps they mark a 'moving on', a letting go. For me they are deeply influenced by small events in early childhood. This one has brought back to me the pain of an 'official' school photograph from when I was perhaps seven or eight - proudly brought the proof home for my mother to see but she just said that she didn't want it. It seems that I wasn't smiling enough. Still hurts fifty years later.

Cat Battles

Doing battle with this young cat we are 'fostering' around the house at the moment. It is the first time I've parented such a young cat and he's much more energetic and wilder than any I've encountered before. My guess is that he is around 16-20 weeks so in human terms he must be around three or four years old I suppose. Pure ego.

During the night and when we have students here he is corralled in the ofuro - the kind of utility room and entrance to the smaller tiled room where the bath is. He has a sleeping place there and a litter tray. When we have the house to ourselves then he comes into the living area with us so that he can learn some social graces.

He is a very intelligent cat and his reactions (and teeth and claws!) are razor sharp. Like most young cats his live consists of around 90% sleeping on the most comfortable chair in the house and 10% bursts of outrageously frenetic manic activity involving jumping everywhere he shouldn't and leaping on passing ankles, shoe laces and ribbon ties on cushion covers.

The last two days the climax has come mid-morning when the outdoor cats show up for food. He forgets everything he has been told, leaps onto the table and even on top of the piano. I have now taken to planting books and papers on the keyboard lid so that both they and him go flying if he tries it, at which point I get REALLY mad, grab him by the scruff of the neck and hurl him flailing and protesting into the ofuro 'sin bin' for a 20 minute cool-off. On his release his adrenalin is back to normal and he settles down on my knee for a cuddle. I really am his 'dad' it seems.

Young cats are just like young kids really, you have to set boundaries - he added hopefully. No point in not being optimistic eh?

Seasonal Singing Done

So, that's the choir's Christmas Concert over and done with. I always have ambivalent feelings about this 'build up to Christmas' time although in truth it really isn't such a big deal here as it is back in England. It is a classic period of the year for hopes to be raised and then dashed in eh? That's the problem with attachments to things, the boat soon sinks and when you least expect it.

But how different to last year eh? Last December our choir was in the dying days of being led by someone with whom, in all honesty, we were definitely not well suited. Tight discipline and a right and a wrong way of doing everything; traditional but not us. So it was nice this time to read many comments on the feedback sheets along the lines of "we REALLY enjoyed the concert tonight, it was so much better than last year and you all seemed to be having such more fun singing". It made us feel that we have come a long way in twelve months and also that all that progress was due to our own efforts. When you have sung with people for a long time and you are good friends you can trust yourselves to be flexible and experiment, take risks and just relax in front of an audience. Of course we also need good input on 'quality' too - are we blending OK, in tune, breathing in the right places? We need more guidance around that.

Last night we really DID have fun. Using some of the material we learned at Hexham in the summer we had the audience walking around the hall singing in three parts. And then when they were on their feet I got everyone to dance the 'Gay Gordons' with Keiko-san banging away on the piano - a 'Hundred Pipers' and 'Scotland the Brave'! It was great to see all the little kids there really going for it and singing at the tops of their voices.

So it was a nice end to the week or start of the weekend - and tonight Daniel's party where I have to be Santa's helper for the evening and eat too much. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick as they say.

Hungry cats

Third week in December, never an 'easy' time. We are into that dark penumbra around the Winter Solstice but we still don't quite have the (at least intellectual) reassurance that we have got to the dark mid point. Actually in Britain I find the first week in January worse; somehow there we are into the 'New Year' but there is still no improvement, the worst of the weather is to come (or arrived!). And the days are not yet demonstrably longer, the evenings have not yet begun to 'draw out'

In Japan the length of the days doesn't change as much, there is more winter daylight. And around here in Kanto the January weather is not usually so different to December. We get the chance of warm bright sunny days at any stage during the winter. But the cold and wet can be just as oppressive.

We still have our'guest kitten' very much in evidence here. He is very cheerful, boisterous and intelligent and he makes us cheerful too though there is always the dark thought there that it is just impossible for him to stay here during the summer when we are in England. So he has to find a new home, what other options are there? We'll inoculate and neuter him and then see if we can find him somewhere to live. Often a barrier to taking a cat in here is the initial expense at the vets. Sometimes looking at him sitting on my knee this week I've just felt so sad for him, whatever did such a young, innocent and defenceless being do to be torn from his feline family and end up so dependent on providence? And if he goes it will be pain in our hearts already.

Every day we also have a small sad queue of visitors at the French windows too, coughing felines with bleary eyes and urgently in need of the calories provided by their small group of human benefactors around here. There's nothing to catch, if we didn't feed them something over the winter they would starve to death, they live from moment to moment with no knowledge of where the next meal comes from, nor even if there will be one.

Abandoned and shivering hungry cats seem so vulnerable compared with us eh? But the impression is purely illusory, the truth of it is that we are every bit as vulnerable as they are, we just stumble through life often under the impression that thanks to our alleged wisdom and foresight this isn't the case. Until we discover otherwise. There's a line somewhere in Thoreau's "Walden" along the lines of "you can trust to the benevolence of others to exactly the same degree that they can trust themselves to yours." That's the truth of it.

Christmas is next week.

Hey! It is Christmas at the end of next week! I was just checking the calendar today and there it is - a week on Saturday! Why doesn't anyone tell me this stuff? Komatta na?

At least we are pretty well free of the iron fetters of your average English Christmas here in leafy Chiba-ken. Since I've lived in Japan I have ended up spending only Christmas 2006 and 2009 in gloomily festive Lancashire and I was feeling gloomy myself after the queues in the supermarket car park and at the queues at the supermarket tills. Not much changes there. I have a vague recollection of queuing for an hour to get out of the Sainsbury's in the square in Crawley in 1964 and nearly half a century on it is the same but longer. Here I can happily go into JusCo at 7:00 PM on Christmas Eve and the place is fully stocked and there is sure to be a checkout free.

But the thing that I really don't miss is the lemming-like compulsion to buy loads of presents that are never going to satisfy their recipients. Goodbye to those demented Christmas Eve trips into town of yesteryear. Parking about two miles from the High Street, wandering in a daze around the place with a hundred thousand others trying to buy something, anything, that might satisfy at least some expectations on Christmas Day morning. Preston on 24th December was like the Seventh Circle of Hell. And then when you finally got home the late night wrapping, Yuletide bickering. Bah! Humbug!

I shouldn't be such an old curmudgeon, there are some things that I remember with affection about those times, the pleasure on kids faces and the rest of it. Oh! And the cat going crazy at the Christmas tree and attacking me when I played the melodion. Cats hate change, they are very wise. But certainly one thing here is that the whole Christmas experience works a couple of gears lower, there is no herd compulsion to buy. Japan really is a 'gift society' but at Christmas people are quite happy with a nice pair of socks or some Irish linen handkerchiefs. It is the thought that counts.

Peripatetic laptop

This winter I have been working on my laptop downstairs a lot more. It doesn't seem so long ago that you had no choice in the matter. Thinking about it my use of computers at home goes back twenty years now.

The first computer I had at home (An IBM AT) belonged to the company and lived on a large desk in the extension for me to do spreadsheets on. It had no internet connection of course, and took about ten minutes to 'boot up' using floppy DOS disks. Then came succession of what were laughably called portable computers including two versions of early Toshiba machines. I remember being 'wowed' by the capacity of a T1400 whose mighty hard drive was a massive 40MB - about enough now to store half a dozen modern digital photographs. Then came a few wildly unreliable IBM 'Think-pads'

Since around 2002 I've been buying my own and I think they have all been Toshiba 'note books' of one kind or another. Not always reliable, I had one dud, but I like their designs and touch wood this 'Satellite' is running OK.

The first Internet connection was just a standard dial up modem in the mid 1990's and I progressed to a company ISDN line at home about 1997. Even though the internet speed improved yoy were still nailed to a box in one corner of the house until WIFI arrived around six years ago.

When I started off writing my thesis I built a little desk unit in the kitchen on the other side of our little dining table from the piano. Japanese houses are small. It was cosy but you had to shut your ears to the students practising English around the corner and shift your books onto the piano to lay the table. So when circumstances allowed I shifted up to the draughty back bedroom, Arctic in winter and Amazonian in summer but at least quiet. Hallelujah! Tora kept me company there for five years, occupying the best chair.

This autumn it has felt important to re-connect with the 'real world' again and also be more sociable and 'around' and involved in household things so I'm working with my laptop downstairs most of the time and only heading for the 'study' when the noisier kids are here for classes or if I need to use a lot of reference material. Money is also a consideration - if I'm down here we only need to heat one room.

So far it is working fine, I'm not easily distracted. At times I've given E a few hard stares as she pokes her head around the corner of the whiteboard for the twentieth time in a lesson to ask "In England do you say ..." but it has settled into a feasible working routine.

Thank goodness for peripatetic laptops eh? And WI-FI! Now it would be easier to live without the car.

Faithful Dogs

I was getting on with life while Edera was teaching yesterday - peeling potatoes, cleaning her boots, that kind of thing - when I happened to overhear that the kids in the class were reading a piece out of a textbook that was supposed to be the story of 'Greyfriars Bobby'. If you have never heard of him you can look it all up here.

It was interesting to spot just how many details of the tale had been changed to dramatise the story for children. It had been transformed into a work of fiction. In this text book version it all happened in a "little old town" rather than in Edinburgh, and Bobby was found by a "kind old gentleman" like me not a "forty year old policeman with tuberculosis" who needed a watchdog. Oh! And they "lived long together", not just the two years in the real tale.

I always wonder about this story. Couldn't happen today, no dog now would ever be aware of the whole chain of causation involved, see its master put in the box, the lid screwed down and then follow the box and see it buried at a particular place.

But more widely - even assuming it is all true - what do people find so admirable about a dog that hangs around sitting on someone's grave for fourteen years? There is an obvious counter-argument that you can take 'loyalty' too far. Maybe this pooch should have had a darn good howl and then got on with the rest of its life. Doing useful dog work; chasing balls, chewing bones, growling at strangers.

It seems that we need urban myths like this. The myth was already in the making within a year of John Gray getting 'planted'. People came to take a 'gander' at the dog and no doubt feed him treats at the graveside, thereby reinforcing behaviours. In Japan we have basically the same story with Hachiko hanging around for years outside Shibuya Station. And then there's the story of Ruswarp and his dead master on the moors.

Interestingly all three dogs have had bronze statues made of them, become a kind of icon about fidelity, if they can do it then so can we. Does it all point to an extraordinary and deep bond of love and respect or just that in each case the dog couldn't think of anything better to do at the time and then a pattern of behaviour became an accepted norm over the years?

Don't know. But if I have shattered even a single illusion here it is a job well done eh?

Komatta na?

Good grief! Komatta na? What to do eh? I went out to the men's choir practice last night as usual and when I came home there was a loud 'meow-ing' going on in the 'o-furo utility room just to the left of the front door.

It seems that while I was away one of our students came around with the kitten in her arms, and that she was very upset. She'd rescued the abandoned kitten a day or two before - people here just seem to dump unwanted litters by the roadside rather than have them 'put down'. But a new cheeky young cat had not gone down well at home, her mother had insisted that the cat went. Our house was the absolutely last chance.

So here he is, curled up asleep on the chair next to me. He is a very beautiful cat (well, aren't they all?). Maybe about 16 weeks old, wonderful coat,vivid tiger-like markings. And very friendly. And so many of his gestures and mannerisms are the same as those of my old and much missed cat Tora. Even his tail is the same little stump. A 'tanuki' cat.

Oh! But what to do eh? There is a refuge here for him for now but in the longer term it just isn't practicable, we aren't here in the summers, I have been taking great care NOT to get this kind of commitment and then in a moment here it is. I love cats, if we were in a position to look after them I would have a house full of cats. But we aren't. I have other even more serious commitments coming up this summer.

We are just going to have to trust that something is going to turn up here. When it is a matter of life and death then I don't feel we have any choice, but that doesn't mean that he can live here with us forever.

Cats in Winter

Coming back from my evening walk along the river yesterday it was already getting pretty dark when I turned into the lane but in the last of the light from the western sky I could see three small furry feline figures in the distance near our gate. Seems that they know my habits better than I do. They watched me with anticipation as I headed in their direction and then when I was about 20 metres away they charged off up the garden path and around to the back of the house. They were heading for the French window by the kitchen in the hope of a feed. Who could ignore such trusting and innocent hopes eh?

It has got much colder this last week and the 'strays' around here have definitely got hungrier. A month ago they would show up around lunch time but now they are here early in the morning and show up whenever we are eating during the day. They must be using twice the calories to keep out the cold. But touch wood they seem to be keeping in good shape.

Interesting the web of relationships on which they rely. When they get here in the morning they have a definite 'dog smell' about them because during the night I think they are hanging out with A-san's old Akita dog. Presumably they are all crowding into his kennel and sleeping together in one large heap to keep warm. They are certainly all very good friends, I see them hanging around in the lane with him curled up to enjoy the afternoon sun. Once I saw the mother cat walk up to him and give him a very loving nuzzle while he just stood there puzzled.

Shiro - "White Cat" - pictured above sticks close to our place during the day, she definitely thinks of LHIP as "her house" and if other cats show up she draws our attention to the fact that there is another hungry feline looking for lunch by scratching loudly on the garbage box. I'm touched - she is clearly doing it for others, not herself, it worries her to see other cats hungry. And these days she is very friendly to me too. Not so long ago she would hiss at me to make sure I kept my distance but now she comes looking for a stroke and a caress behind the ears, actually it is the thing she looks for first before the serious bit about eating.

The Wrong 'Hanko'

What with the sterling to yen exchange rate being as abysmally bad as it is, for the last two years I've been living on savings in my Post Office book here rather than transfer money from England. But this week that source finally dried up and it was time to withdraw some cash from my Chiba Bank savings account. I haven't used that bank book in two years.

Tuesday I headed to the cash machine in the kiosk next to the supermarket to get some money out for groceries. And of course when I put the PIN number in - it didn't work. I knew what I THOUGHT it was, but it was wrong. But I ALWAYS use that number

Yesterday we phoned the bank. I was expecting that they would ask a couple of security questions and then they would send me a reminder through the mail, just like they do in England. But of course not, not in Japan. Nothing could ever be so simple here. You have to turn up in person with various bits of ID and then they have to issue a whole new card.

Today we headed for town with everything we could conceivably need and it was only when we were actually into the bank that Edera realised that we had brought the wrong 'hanko' - the little family seal that you use on formal documents. Here you have to seal everything rather than sign, seems dodgy to me as it must be much easier to forge but of course if you live in a culture that writes with brushes you don't have a 'signature'. She had brought the new one, not the old one.

Yep! I was cross! We had to drive all the way home again and luckily we just had time to get the right 'hanko' and get back before they closed (at 3:00 PM!)

But here was the curious part. On the way home I was giving Edera some friendly advice about putting the right 'hanko' in her handbag and I happened to mention that she herself should know what the darn pin number was because she opened the account for me four years ago while I was in England. She chose the PIN for me herself (here you choose a PIN personally, unlike England where you get issued with a number which you can then change for yourself in the machine).

Now it seems that she'd quite forgotten this, and immediately remembered two old English PIN numbers of mine no longer in use but which she had once used to get money out of my UK bank accounts long ago. Maybe she had used one of these numbers on my behalf.

By this time we were on our way back to town again with the right 'hanko' but when we got there, there were five minutes before the counter closed and so we quickly tired both numbers in the machine and - the second one worked OK!

We just had to have a good laugh about it all on the way home, like you do eh? Speeding half way around leafy Chiba-ken with the wrong 'hanko' wondering why a PIN number wouldn't work. It all sounds like a 'Wallace and Grommit' episode - "The Wrong Hanko".

Only in Japan eh?

This story just caught my eye this morning and it seemed very relevant to the theme of 'negativity' I have just been banging on about too...

ICHIKAWA —

An argument on a Sobu line local train caused turmoil for tens of thousands of passengers in Chiba Prefecture on Tuesday morning. The incident involved two men arguing over the use of cell phones and caused the train to be delayed, which in turn affected dozens of other services running in both directions.

According to Ichikawa police, the incident started at around 6:40 a.m. Two office workers were sitting in the priority seats, speaking on their cell phones when another man sitting opposite them scolded them for their bad manners. He told them to get off at the next station and finish their call there, witnesses said.

One of the pair reportedly took exception to the suggestion and a dispute broke out. When the train pulled in to Ichikawa station, another passenger disembarked and sounded the emergency alarm situated on the platform.

The two men continued to argue on the platform. The man who had been admonished for using his cell phone called the police and accused the other man of assault, alleging that the latter had seized him by the wrist. The pair were taken to the police station and underwent questioning after which they apparently reconciled.

According to JR East, the quarrel caused delays to 47 services on the Sobu line, the maximum delay being 19 minutes which affected 28 services. JR East estimates that some 70,000 commuters were affected.

Nineteen minutes! In Japan we don't have 'road rage' - here it is 'train rage' it seems.

I should explain that 'priority seats' are signed as being priority use for elderly and disabled and mobile phones are forbidden in case anyone has a heart 'pacemaker'

Negativity

I have been reading (and also having my own two pennyworth!) in some 'debates' here on the Internet recently. I wonder why we even bother to say "debates"? A real debate in best Aristotlian style involves valid syllogisms, something that these days is an endangered species. The best most people can manage now is a mix of half baked prejudices and ad hominem attacks. Oh! And a bucket or two of negativity thrown over the soggy mess. Nobody wants to respond or engage any more. Just win.

It is the contemporary impact of negativity that has been striking me. If you want to pull something down why bother with arguments? Better to just attack by any means, and the easy way that anyone can manage is to devalue and scorn. And then pretend you are doing everyone a favour by exposing the pathetic deluded 'varmints' for the deceitful arrogant fools they are. Level 'playing field'? Better just to trip them up and get the boot in fast and kick them to death and any half truth will do.

It would be interesting, if very depressing, project to track the course of this 'negativity' through history. My impression is that way back it was never a big feature of serious and formal social intercourse. But of course back then naked violence was much more easily resorted to, you didn't need to discredit someone when clubbing them to death was an alternative. It was during the Renaissance and under the influence of Machiavelli that 'doing your opponents down' really took off.

I'm sure that things have got as bad as they have thanks to the influence of the American political machine. If you have to buy air time to win votes what better and more cost effective way than to tell everybody what an evil and despicable person your opponent is? Once this kind of approach takes off it seems that it is quite unstoppable, it becomes the only way of exercising influence. Sad.

Christmas plans.

Well, that's Christmas sorted out then. First the carol singers and the plum pudding and too much sherry, and then the sleigh with the real reindeer, and then Santa down the chimney with the three sacks of 'prezzies' followed by the big turkey and boar's head and crackers and a couple of cases of Cabernet Sauvignon.

No, not really. It is just that people in England are starting to ask us now "what are you doing for Christmas" and then seem surprised when I say "Oh! We are working of course! It is just an ordinary working day here!" Saturdays is one of our busiest days for students, if Christmas fell on Wednesday then we could take a holiday.

It isn't quite so Spartan though. After the last class is over at 6:30PM we will have a 'Christmas Dinner' and I can send some time preparing for it during the day and having the added bonus of driving all our students crazy with nice smells drifting from the kitchen area into the teaching room. They don't have far to drift, about two metres!

Oh! And probably my 'adopted daughter' will be coming over too, and perhaps another friend as well, so if not a 'houseful' then at least it will be cheerful. And we have a 'houseful' planned for a party on the 23rd so we will have more than our share of company.

What are the best Christmases you can remember? I can remember a couple of sweet and a bit romantic ones as a teenager, and then some when the kids were little and my granddad was still alive. And Christmases here have been fun with so many kids around and all the dressing up as Santa.

One think is sure - next year is likely to be oh! so different.

Fancy photography

Went over to the 'Cainz Home' superstore at Togane yesterday. Edera has been trying her hand at 'selling' on the Internet - an activity that isn't as easy as it might look. Of course it is pretty easy to sell stuff at a loss, anyone can do that. It is the whole business of having a 'nose' for buying at a good price and selling at a profit that is a challenge.

Anyway one item on our own shopping list was to buy the 'makings' for a sort of a three sided white 'box' with a white floor to take pictures in. The idea is to put plates, vases and the like in there so that we can take them against a completely neutral white background.

Even this isn't as easy as it looks. I thought that to begin with we would have to buy a big sheet of plywood and cut it into four, pin and glue it and then paint it with several coats of white paint. But we have ended up with four large plastic tiles which we have to tape together and it should work OK.

I always wanted to have a go at some real studio photography, with a room with a neutral background and some good spotlights. And then to take photographs of people using some of the classic portrait lighting techniques.It must be fun, especially if your camera is fixed on a tripod with a hand-held release and you can just chat to your subject and click to catch their expressions without even interrupting the flow of the encounter. Or maybe using one of those fancy units where you bounce the flash off a white umbrella.I wonder if I can find some second hand units.

Well, I can dream anyway. But just for now I'll have to content myself with four white plastic tiles and some Wedgwood cake stands.

Kingfishers

I've been watching two kingfishers down by our 'mighty' Sakuta river recently. We used to see them regularly a few years ago but then they started work on a vast civil engineering project to transform what wasn't much more than a rice field drainage ditch into a six lane twenty metre wide 'superhighway' for immense floods.

When they started construction work on the new concrete lined channel all the old cherry trees along the river were ripped out and burned in a minute. It was the kind of rape of the natural environment that would have resulted in pitched battles with armies of protesters if any planner of bureaucrat in Britain had sanctioned it. But in Japan they love big engineering solutions and don't ask first and people are much too polite to make trouble.

I thought that the scale of the engineering work would have seen the kingfishers off but it seems not. They must have retreated up the neighbouring 'yato' and there is certainly enough cover for them still in the thick reed beds that have survived along the northern side of the valley.

Anyway, they are back on this stretch and happily hunting the new 'reach' created by a pile of sand bags left as a small dam to raise the water level a little. Most evenings when I head down there for my 'constitutional' I see a flash of blue over the water or in the islands of grass starting to sprout in the new shallows. But all of this now four metres lower down in a concrete lined trench designed to cope ever with the rainfall of even the worst conceivable mother of all typhoons.

Edera and I were walking along the bank the other day and there was one of the little blighters perched cheekily on the very edge of the path just a couple of metres from us surveying the river below, like a little troll with a big beak. As we drew level with him, he darted nonchalantly off and plunged into the water after a fish.

Clinging on

Recently I've been following controversy on an Internet forum. The context isn't important here, but some of the threads involve stories of situations and relationships that, a long time ago, didn't work out and caused pain for the authors. They also focus around criticisms of someone who has long been dead and so cannot answer.

There are always two sides to stories eh? I don't know how authentic their recollections are, but even if everything they wrote was 'true' in the bigger scheme of things to me they appear as relatively 'small potatoes'. Nobody died, people got on with the rest of their lives afterwards. Bad things happen every day.

That is the aspect that really strikes me at the moment. How come, after more than half a lifetime, people continue to find this stuff important? We sometimes even consider it as a virtue. Why haven't they put it down and moved on? What is the use of discrediting a long dead person?

This is a practical problem that everyone faces. It is easy to say 'move on' but not so easy to do. But how long does it take for you? So far in my own life there are two sets of traumatic events caused by the wilful acts and omissions of others that registered pretty big on my emotional and psychic Richter scale. One involved a deliberate and very bad turn done to me at work, and the other was the mess my father inadvertently left behind him. In both cases the white hot anger burned for about a year, came back at times for the next two years and I'd pretty well let it all go in maybe four years. It seems like I was lucky.

But how can you leave something unresolved with yourself for thirty, forty years? I just don't know, it must be exhausting to be carrying stuff around with you like that.

When people are involved in truly awful things - in battles, massacres, concentration camps - often they just really want to drop it, put it down. If the principals are all dead there is nothing to be done, nothing but nothing can be put back status quo ante. Calls for 'restitution' and 'justice' usually come from a second or third generation who relate to these events as reported experience, not a terrible reality.

Maybe when people carry events and anger around all their lives something similar is happening, the reality has been transformed into an 'object' of some kind, a totem.

Anyway there are certainly no easy answers.

Tomisato-shi

Our trip over to Joyful Honda on Wednesday took us to Tomisato-shi, the area just south of Narita where the store is located. In Japan 'shi' is usually translated as 'city' but anywhere less like a city than Tomisato would be hard to imagine, most of it consists of fields full of peanuts, onions and broccoli interspersed with big polytents full of strawberries and other delicate crops. In reality 'shi' here used to imply somewhere at least urban-ish but since the 1960's the label was a kind of 'prize' given by bureaucrats to areas which agreed to be amalgamated up to a population of over 60,000. Now pretty well everywhere is a 'city', including some places much more deeply rural than Tomisato. The term has become meaningless, as meaningless as the road signs that you sometimes come across pointing to "Central Tomisato City". Such a place never existed, they mean the traffic lights where the council offices and library stand amidst the cabbages.

It I was writing a thesis over again I think that I might write about Tomisato, it seems to encapsulate everything there is to discover about the Kanto landscape. Big areas of open fields with intensive horticulture, the occasional 'yato' valley with rice fields and cedar forests. Old Shimosa farms and straggling village streets, crowded housing 'danchi', industrial estates, motorway junctions, love hotels, retail sheds, crowded traffic on a network of lanes from another era. Everything that is gloriously messy about the real Japan, it 'ain't often pretty but it sure is interesting when you get to know it.

And the people that live in these places. Some still essentially peasants,working in teams out there on the 'hatake' dry fields with their boots on the rich loess soils and dressed up against the heat. The men in overalls and wearing forage or baseball caps, or wandering along the road in a battered white pick-up truck loaded with wooden boxes. And then suddenly there they are in the DIY store queue in front of you clutching a bag of weed killer and looking slightly uneasy.

Yes this is the real Japan sure enough. Moving from there to here, roots in the country of the past and yet already absorbed into the urban world that sprawls in an untidy fashion across older spaces, facilitated by speculators, investors, real estate developers and dodgy politicians, their kids working on factory benches or in beauty salons or offices. Something real to write about.

Copying Day

It is that time of the year when we publish our annual collection of student's essays, and so yesterday Edera and I headed over to Tomisato to go to the 'Joyful Honda' store. That name always makes me smile, it reminds me of that line in Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" where on unpacking his new motorcycle kit delivered from Japan he finds the instruction book inside the crate and discovers that the first one reads "Assembling Japanese motorcycle kit requires great peace of mind."

It is worth the trek across to 'JH' because they only charge 5 yen a sheet for copying but we could have planned it all a bit better. For a start if we had done it the day before then the price would still have been 4 yen, they just raised the charge. Then there was a queue at the 'reprographics' counter of about a dozen customers shifting from foot to foot as others gave the three assistants there their orders for New Year cards. December eh? - and people are buying New Year Cards - who would have thought it?! In Japan people send shedfuls of cards at New Year and these are ordered by the hundred pre-printed with your own address, message and cute picture of a bunny in a basket, 'Hello Kitty' or snowing white crane flying across moon above Mount Fuji. Take your pick. One of these order-makers, I swear, was there nearly two hours with a long list of special requests and instructions ... "gold leaf reverse only on thirty with the two chrysanthemums and block printing with the second picture of my wife on ..." the assistant all the time writing this stuff down in longhand on the three part form while the queue stretched out into the car park.

Being an assistant in the Joyful Honda repro. department in December is clearly no fun at all. A good time to take all your annual holidays. Oh! And don't expect Christmas or New Year cards from us this year, not at those prices! "It is the thought that counts! and so here is the thought; enjoy.

Anyway we at last got the free run of the copier and promptly 'blew' 50 yen on mistakes as we 'sussed' how it printed back to back the same way up and then how to paginate it all (should it be 1 and 2, or 2 and 3?). But after that it all went smoothly and we rattled off 44 copies of 80 pages in about ... um 90 minutes. So we built up quite a queue of our own of disgruntled juku teachers hoping one day to photocopy half a text book for their students. Well, at least they could listen to Edera and I cussing and arguing in English and improve their own vocabularies, I would hate to think that their time was wasted.

We didn't charge them for it.