Cats on a warm tin roof

Heading out for our concert yesterday lunch time I had to smile as I walked out of the front door and saw this mob on the roof of the courtesy car that we have on loan while our faithful ancient Nissan 'Skyline' is in the 'mend'.

I think that all this crowd have featured on 'Little House' at some stage over the past few months so they need no introductions. But what was the attraction of the car roof I wonder? Probably been catching the morning sunshine and it is out of the wind. Their usual 'hangout' is in front of the flower pots in the lane outside Aoki-san's place. They took some gentle dislodging, they weren't inclined to move until we had finished loading up.

I love the way that a families of cats will all 'chill out' together, snuggling up to each other for warmth and company. Maybe it is something that we humans should learn to emulate a bit more.

I will miss the lot of them while I'm in England, but especially the one-eared mother cat who sometimes snores away at nights in the little 'lean-to' shed outside our bedroom window. She isn't particularly 'touchy-feely' with humans, just never has got the knack of it when she was younger I guess. She'll let me stroke her these days but she isn't what you would call 'keen' and I don't push it. We belong to each other anyway, who needs to touch? To be honest I think she is perfect just the way she is.

Spring Concert

Public holiday here today and we held our Spring Concert over at our usual haunt at Hasunuma. It was a great day for it, sunshine and breezes and to be honest it was more of a party to see me off to England than a formal 'concert'. We did about a dozen items and then the recorder players had a turn and after a solo singer gave us half a dozen songs. We didn't really advertise it much and there were only about thirty there but it was fine. Here is a picture of us 'warming up' before the event.

Actually I think we much prefer these informal 'do's' where we just sing for fun, it gives the kids there a great experience of live music. And it feels like that over the years we have discovered a lot about the deeper meaning of making music and the quality of true harmony that comes out of it.

After the music-making we over we had a buffet tea and then I got everyone on their feet doing some 'Country Dancing - in this case the 'Gay Gordons' and 'Lucky Sevens' to the music of 'The Dashing White Sergeant' We rounded it all off by getting the audience involved in some singing. Lovely to see the young ones going at it enthusiastically.

Once everyone had left we tried a few pieces that some members will be singing later in May and just to give them a hard time I nagged three of them into singing Thomas Weelke's madrigal 'Strike It Up Tabor' with just one voice on each part. REAL madrigal singing! They were cracking. To be honest it was a wonder to hear, somehow we have reached a special place in our ability to sing together. Probably you only get a chance to sing with friends in this way once in a lifetime.

Always monogamy lurking somewhere.

A few days ago I was talking about Matt Ridley's fascinating book 'The Red Queen: Sex and The Evolution of Human Nature" and since then I've been reading about all the neat things animals and plants do and the theories geneticists have about it. This last couple of chapters though he's been getting into human social behaviour and that is even more engrossing than the rhesus monkeys and starlings were.

Anyway last night I was reading something that really did get my attention. He was discussing the universal tendency in ancient civilisations for emperors to have large harems. In fact the actual definition of the ultimate autocrat in such societies is to have more women than anybody else. This is a universal rule from China to the Middle East to Central America. One of the Chinese T'ang Emperors is known to have had ten thousand wives. Now being a statistician this poses some questions in my mind, most of which (no laughter at the back there!) circle around the central one of what would would actually want ten thousand wives for. Beyond a certain number, maybe around a thousand or two, it surely all becomes a bit abstract.

But the interesting point in all this is that in ALL these civilisations there is ALWAYS a 'chief wife' because a clear distinction was always drawn between on the one hand the concept of primogeniture and inheritance and the transfer of power between generations, and on the other the wider motivation to spread your genes as widely as possible by having as many children as practicable. So within even the most spectacularly polygamous societies there is always a component of monogamy.

Well, I thought it was interesting.

'Little House' e-mail problems

Several of you have written to me in the last 24 hours worried that you are getting messages from my Japanese ISP service that my e-mail isn't working. What is worse, bits of this message are in Japanese.

Just to re-assure everyone that if you do get this message in the next day or two not to worry - everything is working fine and I'm getting mail. The problem has been caused by the deletion of an old UK University e-mail address that had a forwarding arrangement set up against it. I have now hopefully cleared every link to it, and so it should not be causing any further problems.

Famous last words eh?

'Cheer up' they said, things could be worse ...

I'll remember this March and April for a long time to come. They seem to have been one of those seasons when just when you think surely nothing else can come off the rails or go wrong then it does. I'll be glad to get on the plane for 'Blighty' on Monday, and I'm hoping things will start to 'look up'.

Tonight heading for choir practice someone reversed into me just by the level crossing. Nice lady and it was really unlucky for her and there wasn't much damage, a small dint in my wing and a broken indicator cover. I pulled out onto the main road behind her assuming that she had stopped to let an oncoming car through, and then darn me she suddenly reversed to park, a tight lock and she nearly missed me stopped there behind her but she didn't, just clipped me as she reversed into a space. It was so quick I didn't get my brain in gear fast enough to sound my horn. The problem was she had quite a high 4x4 and we have a very low saloon and somehow in the dark she didn't see us.

Someone called the police assuming that we had to have them there for the insurance and the local 'cruiser' took about 40 minutes to arrive. A nice policeman of around fifty took the details and fortunately for once I hadn't forgotten my wallet with my driver's licence and alien ID card. He was obviously interested to have an English 'client', a change from sorting out the local farmers eh? More an inconvenience than anything although we were nearly an hour late for our last choir practice before Friday's performance.

So that is my whole history of road traffic accidents for today. Let's hope that tomorrow I win the lottery, I must be due some of the other kind of luck some time soon.

Yodobashi Camera

Over to the other side of Tokyo with Edera today to help someone sort out some business and then afterwards we headed to Akihabara to get a new Japanese computer. From this summer we'll be spending more time in the UK and running some of our business from there. It means that we will need to have a back up Japanese computer in the house because one thing is sure, there is nowhere that you can buy a computer with a Japanese keyboard in our part of rural Cumbria.

Akihabara -the 'Field of Autumn Leaves' It is the electronics capital of the world I suppose, a whole area of Tokyo devoted to the highest of hi-tech products. The area began to develop as 'Electric Town' in the 1950's around the old Technical University as a place to shop for radios and kind of took off from there. It took quite a bash three years ago when someone deliberately drove a lorry into the crowd and killed seven people, but it seems to have become an even stronger institution now as a result of that tragedy. Certainly if you ever come to Tokyo whatever else you do, don't miss it.

The first place we headed for was 'Yodobashi Camera', a vast six storey emporium and 'Aladdin's Cave' on the Showa Dori side of the station. And we soon saw a nice Toshiba model there which was just what we wanted although we felt duty bound to tramp around a few other shops to see if we could find a better bargain. We couldn't.

I really like Yodobashi Camera. Outrageously noisy and 'in your face' and so totally cheerful too, an army of really nice young well trained staff and just about every quality electronic and camera appliance that you could find anywhere in the world. When I first started going everything was in Japanese and English but now it is Mandarin that you hear walking around the place. Watch out Dixon's and Curry's and Computer World and the rest of you over-priced excuses for computer shops if this crew ever land in Blighty!

(ps. - Was that OK? Do we get the extra discount lads?)

Dentistry 101

My last trip in this season's 'Drill 'till You Drop' dental marathon today and we arrived about 25 minutes early because there was so much traffic around that we couldn't get into the bank car park. Little Miss Fluoride was strapped into her chair for some deep gum hygiene within about fifteen seconds and I was beginning to think it was lucky that we had come early after all but it never works out like that does it? Forty minutes later I was still glaring at the kids in the playpen in the corner. Corner? Come to think of it that playpen takes up more space then the adult chairs and women's magazines together. Whatever happened to those sturdy old concepts like 'respect for the elderly' and - even more pertinent 'children should be seen and not heard'?

Anyway I got in there and there was a girl of about fifteen with 'under instruction' written all over her forehead and wearing 'L' plates on her crisp white starched dental tunic. Just out of dental school last month I guess. And I thought to myself 'Just when I thought nothing more could go wrong this week' and I suppose she thought 'Good grief! A mean looking old gaijin - just my luck!' Anyway we did the usual bowing and greeting and then she got the towel over my eyes and the sucker in my mouth and settled down to business while I listened to the Hawaiian music and thought of grass skirts and garlands of flowers.

But is wasn't so bad. No drilling thank goodness, just a cap to be fixed on and she got it done fine despite her nerves and trying it for size about 25 times before she was happy with the fit. Every time she got it in there I had to grind my teeth around 'katchi katchi kudasai!' while she measured my bite and then the boss was summoned for the final application of glue. I suppose you can only learn dentistry by experience like anything else - there always has to be a first time for everything.

Unfinished business

Heavily into 'sorting out' in 'Little House' today, we need to make some major changes in how we are using space here and suddenly it all needs to be done before I fly back to England next week too. Suddenly this evening I'm really tired. Part of is surely the physical side, I have been on my feet all day and moving stuff around. But a part of it is emotional too, even 'existential' somehow.

I seem to have been wrestling with possessions for as long as I can remember, last year in the UK and now here. Heck! I was writing about this topic more than a year ago!

I think that one thing that I find about it that is even tougher than just 'letting go' of possessions is the constant reminders in files and boxes of my own 'failures' in life. You can't pick anything up without discovering in it something that you ended up never doing, never finishing or often never even starting properly. Moving to Japan a decade ago was in some ways a 'new start' and I seem to have worked my way through an impressive list of failures to do things since then. Still, at least I finished my Ph.D.

It all reminds me of that prayer which I think is by St. Richard of Sussex which has a bit in it along the lines of "it is not the beginning of a thing but the continuance of the same unto the end ..." Can't remember what the 'punch line' here was though. Brag about it in the pub afterwards? Collect my bonus? Anyway there was some advantage in finishing.

On the other hand surely everyone leaves a trail of unfinished business behind them. I'm sure if you looked in the archive of any famous person's papers you would find all manner of references to learning Swahili, learning to do hang-gliding or building model castles from match sticks. I am not the only one.

Not what it seems

This last few days I have been re-reading the first part of Matt Ridley's book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature". It is a very nicely written work, a classic and skilful popularisation of a natural science, the most complex of genetic ideas expressed in plain language.

Understand is one thing, comprehend is another. That is a problem I often come across with this kind of 'plain man's guide'. The language has been skilfully dumbed down so that even I can understand it who never got beyond 'O' level science. The concepts of course remain as ineffable and sophisticated as they ever did before.

Reading a book like this is a surprise because there are always so many ideas that you THOUGHT were what modern science was about which were dumped as theories years ago. Ideas such as 'survival of the fittest' and that there is 'progress' in evolution for example. One of the basic questions he asks is why are some organisms sexual and some asexual - which has the advantage and why? All that stuff you were told about sexual reproduction being a better way of engineering genetic change - it just isn't true. Actually it isn't as efficient as asexual cell division for example. The truth of it is probably that it mainly has some advantages in respect of keeping ahead of parasites and predators.

The book comes to my mind because parking up the car tonight a few minutes ago in the dark the frogs are going nuts down in the paddies behind the house, it is THAT time of the year for them again. But the evening is very cool, almost cold. The frogs respond not to the temperature as you might expect, is is the length of the day and humidity that makes them horny. And other frogs of course. Same with the cherry blossom that was cleared off the trees by the rain last week. It isn't the warmer weather that brings out the blossom, it is the lengthening days. You just can't assume that the obvious answers are the right ones eh?

Hawaiian anaestheic

Amazing just how tough some weeks can turn out to be, and this has been one of them, a real 'shiner'. Actually the two trips to the dentist's for deep fillings on Monday and Tuesday turned out to be 'light relief', a rare and welcome chance to relax and doze off in his 'high tech' chair for half an hour while he got down to some serious work on my molars. Amazing stuff these modern anaesthetics eh? "From where he's drilling now this should be total agony!" I thought to myself as I stared dreamily at the soft sunlight filtering through the pink flower-patterned roller blinds.

But it wasn't the choice of modern window coverings that was putting me at my ease, so much as the music being pumped through the audio system. Now that I have been there four times already at more or less the same time of the morning I am getting to know the melodies quite well. They are Hawaiian Guitar compilations, you know, that 'slide guitar' stuff that they used to play at the cinema when the Ki-ora and choc-ice attendant came around in the interval. Sorry - 'intermission' - let's not forget the magic of Hollywood. All those 'slidy' chords and vibrato.

We have been friends for longer than I can remember so I'll let you into a dark secret. I always fancied a Hawaiian girlfriend, very plump and with a grass skirt. Well built but definitely NOT the kind of physique for shovelling snow in felt boots with an overcoat with a red armband on. She could dance 'hula' for me and put a garland of flowers around my neck. You don't think it is too late do you?

Those loudspeakers

Election time around here at the moment, and one of the things that I truly HATE about elections in Japan is the crazy and intrusive use of loudspeaker vans in the two week 'run up' to the election.

They are not 'vans' of course. Mainly 'people carriers' with a 'team' of around half a dozen supporters dressed in bizarre costumes; I have even seen Mickey Mouse and pink bunny suits around here. What they all share in common is the covering of large 'Votez!' signs, the fact that they don't seem capable of travelling at more than a snail's pace and that they are all equipped with multi-megawatt high performance amplifier systems.

But that isn't the worst part. Oh! No Siree! These mobile public announcement systems are manned by shrill middle aged women who shriek and babble meaninglessly for hours and hours. They Sound as if they are perpetually teetering on the edge of some almighty mind blowing orgasm, a fearsome climax which is compelling them to scream "Oh! Thank you! Thank you so very much! Remember us! Please be so very kind to us!"

You can hear these cars coming - which they do about every twenty minutes - at least a kilometre away. Three or four may be circulating the neighbourhood at any one time, their insatiable squeals echoing from our silent hills and forests.

What the heck is it all for? I mean - they really are just incoherent. All I can ever catch is "Thank you so very much!" Even knowing the names of the candidates I can't distinguish a word they say, one party from another. And if I could it would make me take a solemn vow NEVER to vote for anyone who could do this to the community. The patient and tolerant Japanese will put up with a racket that in England would bring out angry householders armed with pitchforks and cricket bats intending to silence their amplifiers forever.

Passing these cars on the highway the urge to wind the window down and give them a 'Vee sign' or worse is almost to great to endure. But I'm supposed to act with responsibility and dignity eh? I know, I know ...

Dark Secrets

People in Japan see generally much more conservative about sharing personal information with friends and colleagues. In the choir for example I have one friend who very openly shares her feelings and emotions about things going wrong in the family and at work but actually she stands out a mile because she is the only person I know that does it. No surprise probably that she works in the caring professions and is very much a 'bunny hugger' kind of a person. Bless her.

This cultural difference really struck me when our cats died. Somehow nothing was said at choir for about three weeks and then after rehearsal one night I mentioned in passing to our conductress in an ordinay 'passing the time' conversation afterwards that I wasn't feeling much like singing because of the dead cats. Somehow within a few minutes it developed a life, a formality of its own, she promptly announced it and people expressed a kind of obsequious sympathy. It was OK but it felt like it hadn't been good to do, perfectly normal in British culture but something that here might have been 'private'.

The boundary between 'public' and 'private' is often very rigid in Japan. It is expressed in the two very common 'concept'words 'tatamae' - our public facade, and 'honne' - how we really feel. I am not sure that the boundaries are less rigid in England, we just articulate them differently. It feels like we are open, but in truth how many people do you tell even if you lose your job? Let alone someone in the family doing something bad and landing in gaol? We feel it reflects on us, it remains a 'dark secret'.

This last few weeks there have been many cases of children in elementary schools around Japan shunning new classmates who have been evacuated from Fukushima on the grounds that they are 'radio-active'. On my recent trip to Hiroshima I was talking with someone I know who is a 'hibakusha' - an atomic bomb 'survivor' who was within a three kilometres of the 'hypocenter'. He was telling me that for decades afterwards they were strongly advised never to mention it because people would discriminate against them, in fact he still does. So there is one 'dark secret' that still lives on three generations later it seems.

The Tudors

This last few weeks I have been giving one of our students some lessons outlining the history of the Tudor dynasty. In one way this has been a bit of a nightmare because it has involved a lot of reading and also rooting around on the internet for material and images. But it has certainly been interesting, and a welcome change from some of the other stuff I have been writing. They say "a change is as good as a rest" - I'm not sure that it is true because I'm getting so that I don't remember what a 'rest' is any more.

Who can fail to be fascinated by the Tudors? All that history crammed into just three generations. It is the 'formative period' in the emergence of early modern England, there is so much in our national outlook that you can see originating at the this time. And if you are inclined to see experience in terms of cause and effect, karma and vipaka, action and result, then there is such a rich seam of evidence to explore there.

I think that is what has struck me looking at the evidence this time is the extent to which the character of successive players in this unfolding drama was influenced by the motivation of those who they followed. And so it all leads back to the grandfather and founder of the dynasty, Henry VII, and his life after he seized the English crown at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. He is the one I know least about, I always thought that he looks kind of 'devious' somewhere in the way that consummate politicians so often do. Maybe 'shrewd' is a better word. Francis Bacon wrote of him "what he minded, he compassed". Not a 'great' king perhaps but a successful one. His marriage to Elizabeth of York was a happy one and he brought stability to England after thirty years of civil war. In truth he consolidated his power by often being compassionate to many of his former enemies.

Maybe I'll write more about some of the Tudors here over the next few months ... and especially this aspect of 'continuity' that has really impressed me coming back to this period after so long

Yet more baseball

Grinding my teeth at breakfast this morning ... Grrr. Yet ANOTHER action packed review of the world of baseball back in 1994. Another? For about the last three weeks now all I see when I turn the NHK BS News Channel on is darn baseball.

Seems that somebody at NHK has decided that the news needs 'turning down' a bit. After about ten days of appalling images from the Sanriku coast and incoherent TEPCO managers being harangued by Japanese journalists (I know! Incredible eh? Japanese journalists ...) we have clearly had our ration of nasty news for the foreseeable future. At least until there is some good news to report. Otherwise we might start asking awkward questions.

Of course not ALL news has vanished from the airwaves, that would be much too blatant. We get cheerful little pieces about dogs being rescued in mid-Ocean. And yesterday we had the Emperor and Empress making a visit somewhere up in Iwate. To be honest I was impressed that the had shown the 'savvy' and sensitivity to hold back until things were getting more organised, I'm not sure that it would have been so in the UK.

But with 80,000 people rendered homeless by hazardous levels of radiation in Fukushima where are the 'who is to blame for all this' features? You can only play the 'that's tasteless and not the important question for now' card for so long surely? Actually it IS the important question. This isn't the first tsunami to hit the Sanriku coast, there was a big one in living memory in 1933. And a bigger one even than this year's catastrophe in 1896 when 30 metre waves killed more than 30,000 people. And yet some politicians and bureaucrats back in the dodgy days of Ikeda, Sato and Tanaka still signed off on a project which they were told clearly was in a dangerous location, they simply discounted the record of disasters still within living memory. Tokyo needed the electricity. Actually they should have built it in Tokyo, it would have been safer there. But no doubt that was too close to their own constituencies and homes.

Yep! Let's find out who was to blame. Fear of being 'fingered' and serious disapprobation and condemnation is the only way lessons get learned I'm afraid.

What to sing?

At the end of this month we have a 'Spring Concert' looming at Asobimura. It was set up back in January as I won't be around in Japan and able to sing with the ladies in the choir in public again before Christmas. We have been rehearsing in a pretty casual kind of a way which has been nice, really I think it will be more of a party than an 'event'.

With all the events up in Tohoku we did consider cancelling three weeks ago, but we have continued with it in a way as a small act of faith in the future I think, a kind of sense that things have to keep moving. Maybe it was around 60%-40% in the end, if you had asked us a few days before probably we wouldn't have done it.

We only have around 30 minutes of material and we were hoping that the men's choir would contribute a few items too but they didn't rise to the bait. So an impromptu recorder ensemble will perform a couple of items and I have to do a couple of solo English songs.

Just can't make my mind up. There will be some kids there so I think one might be "What shall we do with a drunken sailor" and then they can learn a bit about sea shanties and do all the actions etc. But the other one, I am torn between a song from Shakespeare or a folk song and the field is wide open. Any suggestions anybody?

Past my sell-by date?

I was looking at the cap of the sauce bottle at lunch today, funny how sometimes almost anything seems more enticing than a meal-time conversation with 'You-Know-Who'. And there was the 'sell-by' date on the end to read, absorbing stuff. Although in Japan I think it is the 'use by' date and in Britain now you often see 'BBE' - 'best before end'

Interesting how quickly the expression 'past your sell-by date' has become a commonplace in the English language around the world. It set me thinking as to when the term came into general use. It wasn't so long ago. Perhaps the 1970's, before that food shops (and then they often still were food 'shops' with stuff behind the counter on shelves that you asked for and the assistant passed it down to you) used to rely on little 'date codes' stamped on products like bacon and pork pies. How 'fresh' is this item? Easy - it must be on display here only until 'QB5vNX'. Of course it must be OK because if it was already too old to be on the shelf or in the fridge the shop-keeper would obviously have thrown it in the bin already, wouldn't he?

Then the government introduced some legislation which insisted that the date on fresh food had to be - a date. The British Food Retailing Association fainted with shock. You couldn't do that, people wouldn't know what the date meant, they would make the wrong choices based on misinformation, would make crazy assumptions that dusty stale pork pies three weeks over date were probably not a good buy.

And even then it was only fresh food that was dated. Tinned stuff and sauce bottles? Don't make me laugh! Obviously that lasts forever. Whoever heard of throwing away a bottle of tomato sauce that had been in the pantry for years? You just gave the top a wipe with the floor cloth and carried on eh?

NOWADAYS of course with all these EU regulations you can't have a jar of pickles open for ten minutes without keeping it in a fridge and consuming it within 24 hours.

Anyway, a nice day yesterday and to cheer us up after more than 400 earthquakes in a month the blossom is out at last and clearly I'M not past my sell-by date which in case you are curious is 'KL51dM'. So watch out.

Innocence lost?

Another five earthquakes since last night here, including a bigger one at breakfast time than the one that prompted the 'we are OK' message that I felt I ought to put out on 'Little Paddy' yesterday evening after reposts on the BBC. We even had a tremor that shook the surgery when I was in the chair at the dentist's this morning. She just paused for a minute until we both stopped moving around and got on with it.

Anyway I gave them a good laugh there. Seems that my mouth is a museum of dentistry, I am a walking repository of dental history. "Come and take a gander at this amalgam guys! I don't think they have used this one in Japan since before I was born!" Makes me proud of the sterling quality of dental work we received in Stockton-on-Tees back in the1950's.

I can really sense now the kind of longer term deep stress all these earthquakes are producing both in myself and other people. It is a completely unprecedented thing to have so many 'aftershocks' continuing for so long. I am no seismologist but it feels to me that this is more like an ongoing movement of tectonic plates in progress, more like a volcanic eruption than a single large quake followed by aftershocks. It is taking more out of people than outsider's realise. It could last for months or even years. Maybe we haven't even seen the worst of it.

One marker that I always follow is the value of the yen. It has declined a few percent this month, but finanical markets seem obsessed with calculating on the basis of 'known experience' - they are looking to the rebuilding after all this as creating more wealth. Because that is the way market analysts are trained to think. They believe their own mythology.

I don't believe it. We are all losing confidence in ourselves here, it will take years for things to get 'back to normal' whatever 'normal' might mean. I think that in years to come this couple of months will be seen as a major turning point in Japan's modern history, a kind of moment of 'innocence lost'.

Yet another quake

Another large quake in these parts just after 5:00 PM but nothing of course like the massive one of exactly a month ago. It was Shindo 7 up in Ibaraki Prefecture about 80 miles moth of here, around Shindo 4-5 in our part of leafy Chiba-ken.

You can see the details here

We were coming back from our walk along the river and just arriving in our lane so I had the chance to experience this one outdoors. The neighbourhood cats were scared stiff.

Anyway no problems, just a few piles of stuff tipped over indoors.

You can hear the babies moving

After writing yesterday about the 'Mother Cat' kipping in our garden to get away from the snoring and farting of Aoki-san's dog in his kennel at nights I had to laugh at this little scene unfolding in our front garden this morning.

Cats love garden railways. A nice high ledge running conveniently around the place where you can 'chill out' and watch unsuspecting intruders and potential prey from the vantage point of a high comfortable platform. This is the domestic cat's equivalent of the Jaguar's perch in a jungle tree or a cougar's eyrie amongst some high rocks.

Just as the morning was warming up (and it DID warm up this morning - lucky that I am off to England soon!) - then two of the rest of the gang turn up. And they don't just want to crowd you out of your solitary spot, they also it seems want to lie where they can listen to your babies moving around. Like right on top of you or next to your bum.

I had never appreciated until I got to know this bunch just how very affectionate cats are to the rest of the members of their 'gang'. This is nothing to do with feeling cold and everything to do with loving touch. Felix felix is a very sociable and loving animal to others in the group, it is just the way that we isolate cats and bring them up as 'solitaries' that makes them appear so. I can sympathise, I was once one myself.

Right angled scratch

The mother cat was around early this morning looking for food. Recently she has taken to sleeping in the shrubs near our air-con extractor in front of the teaching room. I guess the milder weather makes sleeping outdoors on your own more attractive, no need to put up with the snoring of Aoki-san's elderly Akita dog. In winter all the cats seem to pile into his kennel and they sleep together for the warmth.

She is heavily pregnant now, no doubt she will vanish in a week or two to give birth under one of the sheds on the waste ground. I find myself contemplating it all often. Babies, babies, inevitably they will be born with some dodgy viruses, have short lives on the wrong side of the tracks living down around the feline poverty line, maybe get around to breeding themselves if the are lucky and then die. Birth, old age, disease, death. If you start to look at it objectively you wonder 'what the heck for'. just another case of the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', nothing to see here, move along now. Wouldn't it be better if they just never were?

But you can't treat the saha world as an 'object' can you? It and you 'are', you are not separate, there's no difference at all between your experience and hers. You are both brush strokes in the same big picture, links in a single chain. This time it is you with the bag of dried cat food under the piano, another time who knows? The more you look into this the less it seems possible to articulate an 'answer'.

Anyway she gave me a laugh today. After eating she scratched a flea behind her ear and she was SO large with babies that her skinny hind leg had to kind of reach around the bulge at right angles to get to the itch. It did look silly. Full of dignity she gave me a withering glance and was on her way.

Missing small links in the big picture

In every major disaster or crisis there are always so many little details that confound the impression and idea that things happen 'neatly'. They are small links missed in the big picture, evidence if it were ever needed that you can't ever make assumptions, everything needs confirmation.

The case that always comes to my mind is something that my history teacher at school mentioned to me once. It seems that about a week after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 some local mayor in a small mountain town in Albania turned out the local band to celebrate his birthday. In that remote place and in those distant times the news simply hadn't got through that Europe was being plunged into World War by his death. Nobody had told him.

A similar if much grimmer story was in the news here yesterday, a kind of Orwellian parable really. While the public version of reality has suggested that the evacuation of the 20km exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi reactor was complete long ago, it seems that Tokyo journalists have discovered a 75 year old man stranded in his isolated and cut off house within the danger area. Kunio Shiga said that he had been there since March 11th and had no idea where his wife was. The narrow lane to his house was blocked with mud, debris and the rotting carcases of dead pigs strewn up the little valley by the tsunami. His legs weren't up to walking out and his car wouldn't start. The surrounding area of Minami Soma was an empty wasteland whose only other living residents were those pigs which had survived the cataclysm and which were now noisily foraging for food.

Although the police in their white radiation suits had been in the neighbourhood searching for bodies it seems that they had missed his remote and relatively undamaged house in dealing with the bigger picture

Lorem ipsum ...

Another large 'quake' here last night about 11:30PM. Shindo 7.4 up north but around here only Shindo 4, not even enough to tip anything over, just loosen your bowels a bit. You still know it is a big one somewhere though because of the way the ground moves - it becomes soft and plastic underfoot and you can actually feel the waves pulsing through. Also they last longer and of course always trip the alarms on keitai (mobile phones) and on TV.

I had just taken a bath and was I finishing the stew for today's evening meal. This last three weeks before going to England is so busy that I find I'm shifting stuff to early morning and late evening slots just to get it shifted somehow. Always the same when you move between continents, you put down one life and pick up another. Working under pressure I can detect that there are some times that I can rely on my energy and others that I can't. For me the good times are from after breakfast until lunch and then later afternoon and early evening. Before breakfast I'm positively dangerous, and after lunch like a baby I need a nap. Later evenings I start to 'space out' but a good intellectual read goes down well at these times, just so long as I don't have to write the stuff. I happily read away by the light of my small bedside lamp until the tossing and grunting next to me starts to become more animated and relentless and then I take the hint and settle down and switch it off.

Focusing on 'producing the goods' in those two productive spells is the key. You can only do so much, better get used to it. And if you keep at it you will get through it. One nice thing about writing AND laying out a publication together is that with modern computer technology you don't have to stare at blank space for the bits you haven't written yet. You can fill those pristine virgin columns with a single click by adding 'placeholder text' - what we used to call 'Greeking' or 'Lorem ipsum ...' in the days when you put publications together in hot metal or with the aid of scissors and paste.

The original text comes from Cicero's 'De finibus bonorum et malorum' ('On the Boundaries of Goods and Evils') and the bit printers use means "Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure."

Ha! Well he obviously lived in the far off days long before the internet didn't he. "Nor is there anyone who loves pain" indeed! Today they have clubs for it down every leafy suburban street. What planet did he live on? He needs to get out more.

Business Management 101

One of my friends here 'in a state' last night about problems with a business she is setting up. She's a professional 'carer' and setting up a new day care centre and like all such enterprises it doesn't always go according to plan. Being a very caring and straightforward person she never realised the extent to which her previous employer would object to what she wanted to do. Competition.

Setting up and running businesses is a process that fascinates me. I know from our teaching and translation efforts at 'Little House' that whatever the dream it is all so much hard work and also 'high risk', there is no infallible strategy, no guarantee of success. This month for example we have struggled because so many of our adult students cancelled because of the petrol shortage and the general sense of depression in the community that has resulted from what has happened further north. Who could have foreseen it? Of course that doesn't stop the bills dropping into the mail box.

These days I can hardly walk past any business without wondering how much they are making and I'm amazed at the number of dodgy looking enterprises around that somebody relies on. All those little shops in third or fourth league country towns with a few dusty trinkets in the window - who buys those, how do they manage to pay the gas bill and buy bread at the supermarket? Some business types seem to be effective 'earners' - like plumbing for example - where you seem to be able to pick your work and hold everyone to ransom on price. Others - many small shop businesses - seem to be little more than sidelines and probably just augmenting pensions. Then there is the role and power of capital in all of this.

One way or another if you start working for yourself the 'dream' quickly meets 'reality' but that is where the interest starts if you ask me. Like feral cats, you have to make your own way in the world rather that rely on someone else.

Dental Work

Off to the dentist's yesterday - a new place to try in Naruto with the recommendation of Keiko-san (though she hadn't actually been there ...). This last few years I have gone to a surgery in Yachimata but we felt that it was time for a change, something which would be inconceivable under our British Health Service where you have to queue for years outside in the snow even to get onto the waiting list for new patients. Here you just turn up with you national health insurance card and 'Bob's you uncle'. Job done. Please step inside Sir!

It was a pretty cool place too, nice modern wallpaper with yellow circles. Big flat screen computer monitors too which instantly display hugely magnified images of your molars before your very eyes as you relax in the chair and the dentist explains it all to you as he makes a 'movie' of inside your mouth. Whatever happened to all those belt drive 'Black and Decker' lookalikes of yesteryear and the smell of burning chicken feathers and anesthetic drifting around the waiting areas to help you relax? No more do bloodstained patients getting stretchered out after extractions and dumped on the marble floor in the lobby to recover it seems. This guy was so tender and gentle that if I'd have been a woman I would have fallen in love with him at once. He was in there for twenty minutes at least and it was as it were a dream, I didn't even feel the injection he gave me. When he got down to serious business he put a pale blue cloth over my eyes. I felt like a racehorse somehow. You know - valuable.

Anyway here is the funny part. After all those lectures I get around here on healthy lifestyle from 'you-know-who' it seems that her teeth are in much worse shape than mine, she's going to be almost living down there over the next several weeks so that they can put her mouth to rights.

Laugh! I almost split my sides!

I say! I sway! I sway!

I was writing yesterday about the strange impact that the experience of so many earthquakes is having on everyone here. It must be like this is a war zone - I can see that after a while you must just 'get on' with things. Something to do with sensing things through your body, you finally accept that there is no such thing as 'safety', some kind of a different perspective arises.

We had an even stranger example here this evening. In fact utterly bizarre, the stuff of your craziest dreams, you could write a 'Dr. Stangelove' style 'sit-com' out of this material.

There was some kind of a contest running on TV to find the best pair of 'stand up routine' comedians, a form of theatre that somehow really suits Japan. The Japanese language spoken very quickly is perhaps even more suited to "I say! I say! I say!" style patter than English is. These guys would have done well on an English Music Hall stage even if nobody could understand a word they said. "Eat your heart out Morecambe and Wise!" was the thought that went through my mind. The repartee was fluent, even faultless.

Then, right in the middle of an avalanche of 'gags' and roars of laughter from the audience, the broadcasting earthquake alarm was triggered. The programme was pre-recorded and the alarm is completely automatic and broadcast across the whole of Kanto. So in the background and around the edges of the screen the jokes and chortles continued as Chiba and Ibaraki-ken turned red on the flashing map in the middle of the picture. A large black cross marked the forecast epicentre of an imminent 'quake' about to happen around fifty miles from here in the ocean just north of Choshi - a very definite 'hot spot' that I have noticed appearing several times on the JMA site which you can find here.

Komatta na? What to do eh? Well, after turning off the gas and the kerosene stove so that the house wouldn't catch fire if it suddenly tipped over we just got on with the boiled eggs we were having for tea. After about 30 seconds the confirmation came through that a Shindo 3 quake had occurred in Ibaraki-ken. Shindo 3? What the heck? Don't waste our time! That isn't even breaking wind...

Don't fidget, don't doze.

Over to Sojiji Temple in Tsurumi yesterday with a friend to attend the Sunday afternoon zazenkai (meditation) session. It must be nearly two years since I was last there, can't afford the fare these days! As ever in Japan the builders have been in the old place since I last went. A rather 'basic' concrete and 'breeze block' extension built maybe in the 1970's has been gutted for redevelopment. As it is the place where visitors usually stow their stuff before heading along to the zendo it meant that the 'routine' was changed, we had to park our bags on the other side of the site.

A very fixed routine, you have to learn to do just what you are told. No more, no less. Basically, just sit completely still for forty minutes while keeping a bright, clear mind. No fidgeting, no dozing off. Easy to understand. Fidget or doze and a monk will hit you with the large kyosaku he carries as he pads around. How we sometimes struggle to do something so straightforward.

Luckily they let me use a chair there, my ankles are long past managing on a zafu (meditation cushion). They have a few put out around behind the altar but usually I'm the only one occupying them. Yesterday one of the kind junior monks brought me a chair in the lecture hall afterwards too and I was glad of it. Unlike the zendo you can relax when you sit cross-legged on the tatami there and fidget if you have to, but an hour is a long time especially when you hardly follow a darn word the lecturer says and I was certainly grateful for a chair. Once I would have felt self conscious looming over everyone else but I have got past caring about all that now.

Tokyo and Yokohama were gloomy, half the lights off to save electricity (people are so conscientious about it too!) and of course all the neon signs switched off. It felt like travelling back in time to the 1920's. And then blow me, just as our train pulled out of Tsurumi, the alarms on everyone's keitai (mobile phones)in the carraige went off. Mobile phone messaging services here have a special audible alarm triggered by earthquake warnings; usually they go off about five seconds before things begin to shake.

The train rocked a bit as we crossed the Tsurumi River but it wasn't much of a quake in Yokohama, the epicentre was far to the north west somewhere up around Niigata. The TV screens above the carriage doors were soon flashing messages that the Joetsu shinkansen services were affected. What really struck me was just how matter-of-fact we have all become about it now. So many earthquakes that actually we don't even stop the conversations we are having when the alarm sounds, they have become a part of daily life. This is unusual even for Japan I think, 2011 seems to have changed everyone.

Pretty tasteless

Just spotted this comment on a piece on the Guardian website about complaining in shops and restaurants.

Well, it made me laugh!

i remember kicking up a fuss about the wine and food i was served...my family and friends all turned on me and said i was obnoxious with no respect...looking back complaining about the holy communion during my dads funeral might of been a bit tactless

Commonwealth

I have been doing some re-reading recently of sixteenth century English history to put together a short course for one of our students. I might have more to say about the 'Tudors' later but the word that has been catching my attention often is what I have been reading is 'commonwealth' - or 'common weal' as they would have said at the time. Such an apparently familiar idea that its significance often totally passes us by.

'Commonwealth' was a term used later in the seventeenth century by Cromwell and others to describe a particular form of government. And in our own times it has been used to describe a community of states that were formerly parts of the British Empire - although how long this latter use will outlive our present Queen I wouldn't like to guess.

But in its original sense 'commonwealth' referred to the idea of a common concern for the collective assets and well-being of the nation, the idea that there was something more in terms of tangible assets of society. An individual AND a collective responsibility for each other beyond that which could be expressed in terms of balance sheets and rights of property. In fact when the idea of 'commonwealth' first gained currency in the fifteenth century for most there was no right to enjoy title to property in anything like the 'absolute' modern sense. The 'strays' around our back door intuitively understand the principle of 'common weal' when they voluntarily back off the food bowl to allow weaker members of the group to have a turn. Just because you are stronger doesn't mean that your snout always has to be in the trough.

Now we live in a society which has equality and redistributive legislation coming out of every orifice but I feel many don't really understand at a personal level the relevance of 'common weal'. In fact institutions are usually a mechanism for ducking personal responsibility for the people that fall into and out of our lives. Modern international capitalism is structured to work on exchange values rather than use values, it is how our societies are programmed to work now.

Not sure where this leads, it is such a huge question that we can't stand far enough away to get a clear perspective. But it IS a question that only finds an answer in the way in which individuals live their own lives.

'Points mean Prizes!'

'Remember! Points mean prizes!' is a popular catch phrase from the very funny programme "I'm sorry I haven't a clue!" on BBC Radio 4. Sometimes I think that it could be Japan's national motto because everyone here is obsessed with getting points on everything. Naming no names but 'you know who' is as obsessed as the rest of them, she can't walk into a store without pulling a points card out of her purse. In the days of intelligent smart cards rather than just the crappy old bit of cardboard that the shop assistant used to stamp with a rubber stamp this sometimes - quite often in fact - requires more credit to be added onto the smart card at the till and then immediately debited again to pay for the item. You don't get a discount it seems but you do get 'points'. You simply don't understand Japan if your purse or wallet isn't stuffed full of these loyalty cards.

Of course challenge anyone to explain exactly what benefit accrues from these cards and when it happens and nobody can tell you. But the more Byzantine the scheme the better. Our local supermarket offers a 'pink receipt' mechanic where if you go on Fridays you get a pink receipt. Collect just 20,000 yen's worth of pink receipts within two months and you can take them to a service counter where a harassed assistant with a battered calculator will add them up and if you qualify will refund you 1000 yen - a 5% discount. Interesting eh?

Now it happens that one of life's little barometers for me is the price of a particular cheap brand of processed cheese and I always check it in this supermarket. It seems to vary pretty well every time I go in there, sometimes 169 yen, sometimes 179 yen and - yes, you have guessed it - on Fridays 199 yen. So hurry along on Fridays and you can pay 18% more and get 5% of it back. Neat.

Doesn't anyone else check this stuff out in the stampede for bargains?

I guess not.

Museum of Meteorology

When the kids were small we used to make at least one trip a year to France to go camping, usually in June when things were cheaper. An aspect of provincial France that I loved was the variety and eccentricity of some of the smaller museums - the "Museum of Wallpaper" at Mulhouse was a favourite of mine. It used to be a family joke that somewhere there was probably a "Museum of Seaweed" but I never found it. I'm sure that there must certainly be one in Japan somewhere, maybe on Shikoku or up north in Hokkaido.

Japan is just as good at strange small museums as France, and last weekend I added another to my 'trophy list' on my prowls around Hiroshima. It was on Etayama, a steep rocky outcrop at the end of one of the peninsulas that form the most southern part of the city along the coast. A hundred years ago this probably still was an island.

Up on the top of the outcrop is the 'Etayama Museum of Meteorology'. The building is still the local Japan Meteorological Agency weather station and before the days of sophisticated computer driven weather forecasting systems it was used as a regional forecasting centre.

I love old fashioned weather forecasting with white Stevenson screens full of expensive thermometers and whirring anemometers. But how do you make a museum of all of that. Well, to be honest, there wasn't that much to see, you couldn't sell many season tickets. Photographs of clouds, copies of weather maps and some old computers and shelves of books gathering dust. Oh! And a 'tornado vortex machine' that you could stand in for the experience but I didn't know many of the kanji written on the big red buttons and so I thought I had better give that one a miss.

The view from the roof though - amazing! Well worth the 100 yen entrance fee. South out across the bay to Etajima and Miyajima and north right across the centre of Hiroshima to the mountains.