sorry about the delay, trouble at mill.

Japanese Culture at its best

Japan has a long history and a culture to match. Everyone knows this. Every application form I ever read says the person is interested in teaching in Japan because they are interested in the culture (this is, of course, complete nonsense, they are interested in good looking girls and making money (if they are men at least). I was. That's why I came out here. Naturally I put 'Japanese culture' on my application form as well so it just goes to show I am as original as the next man).

So, the long varied history has bred an interesting and diverse culture that is just waiting to be dived into. And luckily for you, I found some great examples this week...

It's snot what you think

Great one this. A sweet manufacturer has had a patent revoked by the Japan patent office this week due to a complaint from Todaiji Temple in Nara. For those not in the know, Todaiji is one of the (if not the) biggest wooden structures in the world and holds a jolly big statue of a Buddha. Nara itself is an old capital of Japan, is a world heritage site and all round spiritual place to be. And has lots of deer. Anyway, the sweet company had been sufficiently awed-inspired by this colossal statue that they had made a sweet in its honour. They are gob-stopper sized, black, and are called...

Buddha Boogers!

What a great name! (for those again not in the know, a booger is the American term for a lump of nasal mucus - haven't you been reading your Calvin & Hobbes?).

Apparently they had been making these sweets for about three years and selling them in local souvenir shops. And very popular they were, apparently. But then some officious monk type person spotted the aforementioned confectionary and, it would appear, took umbrage at the assumption that such an august figure as their Buddha could possibly have a nasal mucus problem. 'Disgraces the image of Nara' apparently, these sweets. Seems to me this attitude does more damage as now everyone thinks worse of the po-faced monks of Nara. Anyway, I also liked the quote from the company spokesman, "We never intended to insult the Buddha statue. We hoped it would be accepted with open minds..." Fat chance, but, luckily, they have no plans to cease production. Orders via email please.

Combat Food

Now anyone who reads any Prattchett will know all about the offensive possibilities of dwarf bread, but now we have better options.

On TV a week or two ago there was, as usual, a programme about how dangerous it is in Japan and this one was all about food and drink. First up was a bit about drinking from plastic (PET) bottles. (PET as in a type of plastic rather than a bottle that is kept as a pet (although I wouldn't put that past some Japanese)). Apparently, if you drink, say, half of the juice directly from a pet bottle, not from a glass after pouring, and then leave the bottle somewhere warm for about a week, it will explode!

No really, and they filmed one to prove it. By all accounts the germs and bacteria in your saliva start eating the juice with relish and gusto and, as a by product, start to fart prodigously. Such is the voraciousness of the bacteria and the volume of their gaseous effluent that the pressure builds and builds in the bottle until BANG! It goes up with no small amount of violence. Quite possibly an environmentally friendly anti-personnel drinks bottle could be developed for the deserts of Iraq...?

But it gets better.

Pickles are very popular in Japan and none more so that Kimchi. Now I realise this is getting into Korean culture, but it was on Japanese TV and that's good enough for me. Kimchi (again for those not in the know, and my, there must be a lot you didn't know but do now) is a Korean pickle made by getting a whole cabbage, bunging it in a pot with a *lot* of chilli, vinegar and other pickle making paraphernalia and then burying it for a year (well, the good stuff anyway). You get the picture.

Now with the explosive pet bottle potential you needed the influence of a bit of saliva to get everything going, but it appears that with Kimchi you don't even need this. So the TV show, again in the best traditions of investigative journalism, put a plastic tub of kimchi on a window sill, rigged up a camera and waited. And in less than 7 days the tub exploded! The tub, which must have weighed half a kilo (that's a pound in old money) leapt about 2 feet in the air, showering everything spicy red goo. Excellent televisual entertainment. Again the TV show said is was due to bacteria in the kimchi which, if left unopened in the jar, begin to ferment and fart out all the gases, leading to the explosive conclusion if the pressure isn't released.

It even works if you leave the kimchi in the fridge, although much more slowly. I, for one, will from now on be checking the sell-by date on my kimchi purchases...

Assignment #2

As you may remember, at the end of March I completed assignment 2 for the mba, the one all about motivation. This was the ironic one as I was completely unmotivated to write it and, although I tried my best, just couldn't really get into it. Well on Saturday I got it back, marked, from the university. Obviously I need to get more unmotivated for my next assignment as number 2 was awarded an 'A'.

I impressed even myself with that one.

And finally

Josh, over at BondiBooks is trying to lose me my job. First, a while back, he found a golf game that was really annoyingly addictive. Now he has found this.

Enjoy

Back to the Scandals

As we all know, well, anyone who lives in Japan or reads this blog regularly knows, Japan, as well as being the land of the rising sun, is also the land of the rising public and/or political scandal. And we have two more this week.

Mitsubishi...

is first up. Yes those lovely chaps who bought you world rally championships and...and...oh yeah, Zero fighters that kamikaze pilots used in WW2, have been hitting the headlines recently in what can only be described as the plot to a John Grisham novel.

Essentially what happened is this. Mitsubishi Motor Corporation, as well as making cars, are a bit of a dab hand at making big trucks. They have a decent market share and are one of the major players in Japan, and I guess the world, of trucking. Anyway, a couple of years ago, in the mid-nineties, there was an accident where a wheel came off a mitsubishi truck whilst the truck was travelling quite fast. It rolled down the street and hit a couple of pedestrians, killing a small kid or two and injuring a few others.

So, usual story, govt called for an inquiry, MMC did some tests and said "not our fault, truck was fine so must have been dodgy maintenance by the owners". But they lied, the cheeky buggers, as the real report found there was an inherent fault with the wheel hub which meant that they were prone to do this sort of thing. So the good bean counters at MMC did their number crunching and, as in the John Grisham novel, decided that a cover up was the cheaper option than recalling all the trucks with this defect.

But now someone has found out, at last, and all the top brass at Mitsubishi, especially any of those to do with trucks, are now getting very edgy indeed whilst some, like ex-MD Akio Hanawa, have already been arrested on charges of telling great big whoppers. Soon he will have to stand up in a room full of people, bow a bit, say he's really sorry, maybe squeeze out a tear or two and then he will be let off, as that is how major corporate scandals are dealt with in Japan. Then he'll probably go and commit suicide.

Anyway, one very important and unforseen outcome of this Mitsubishi scandal, perhaps the most important issue really, is now the Guru will never let me buy an Evo...

And in Politics

As you may have read here before, somewhere, Japan is heading for a serious problem with an aging population. This is much like the rest of the Western world really, but unlike a lot of countries in the West, Japan doesn't really like foreigners so doesn't really want them here to bolster the work force.

Anyway, all this is old ground but one area we haven't touched upon before is pensions. Again like the west Japan is facing a big problem with the number of people paying into the govt pension schemes isn't sufficient to blah blah blah. You get the picture.

So obviously the govt. are exhorting all and sundry to keep up their payments and if they haven't started yet, to get on with it. One reason they are panicking is that young people seem disinclined to pay into the schemes as they think, quite rightly it would seem, that they are never going to see any of the money they pay in as it will have been frittered away by the baby boomers.

Now in the UK it seems pretty straight forward, you have a job, you pay national insurance. But in Japan there appears to be a way around it, although I don't now how (although being a gaijin is a pretty good way of getting by). But now it appears that quite a few govt ministers have been found out - they haven't been paying their contibutions. And not just a few back benchers in the ruling LDP. This seems to have been across party lines and almost to the top. On Friday last week, Yasuo Fukuda, the LDP Chief Cabinet Secretary, resigned over non payment. Fukuda, as Chief Cabinet chappy, was really the right hand man to Koizumi and in a very powerful position.

His crime, like the MHI chaps earlier, was to lie about it in the first place. Back in April he said that he had paid all his dues up to the age of 60, but then in May this suddenly changed to "oh, except for 2 years in the early nineties and a few months in 1995, but that doesn't really matter, does it?" But thankfully it did as finally the Japanese people, again as mentioned here before, are starting to reject the 'do as I say don't do as I do' attitude that has been around for so long. And good on them I say.

Looking on the bright side...

Get well soon

First up this week goes to my uncle William. I got an email from my mother at the backend of last week to say that William, or uncle William as I know him, has recently had an operation for bowel cancer. The offending bits have been removed and all, apparently, is well as can be expected. So come along William, get well soon, that sort of thing, soon have you up and about. And, whilst we're here, hats off to the NHS as apparently they went from first inkling to recovery bed in less than a month. Well done. This leads in no way at all to...

Hols

As mentioned last week, the guru and I had a jaunt to Nagano pref. and Kamikochi in particular last week as part of the Golden Week hols, which come to an all too soon end tomorrow evening. Nagano is a jolly sort of prefecture, all outdoors stuff, hearty pursuits and even heartier foodstuffs (bear meat stew, anyone?) and was, of course, the site of the winter olympics in 1998, more of which later. In the two days that we were away we visited a temple, Zenkoji, looked at a bog that is particularly famous for flowers, did the kamikochi thing and even got to visit a winery. So first up was...

Zenkoji

Zenkoji is a jolly important temple for all things Buddhist, as associated halls in the temple grounds are the headquarters of a number of Zen sects such as the Jodo and the Tendai, which means that pretty much every Japanese person has heard of it. Interestly, there is also a family connection. The guru's family, on her mother's side, come from Nagasaki prefecture, home to the famous city (for all the wrong reasons) and the family owns, or runs (I'm not really sure which) a temple on one of the many islands just off the coast of the prefecture. The bit of the famaily that now does the temple thing is quite a way removed, but had the guru's mother been born a boy, then he would now be head priest or something, but as she was a woman and women can't be priests, it went to another branch (pay attention, I will be asking questions later!).

Anyway, the family temple was part of one of the sects that held Zenkoji as important and so all of the members of the family that went into the priesthood went at some stage of their training to Zenkoji to receive instruction in how to be a good monk, or whatever it is that they learn at that time. I keep having images of David Carradine in Kung Fu spring unbidden into my mind's eye as to the sort of thing they learn. I know it isn't true, of course, but that is the power of television. (It's either that or Monkey, take your pick...)

So it was good to visit there and have a poke about. The best thing about the place is a great way of scamming money from people. For 500yen you can walk the path of enlightenment. What you do is walk down some stairs into a passage way underneath the temple. It is completely dark, not a flicker of light to guide you, so you walk and, with your right hand, feel along the wall trying to find the key to Buddha. Once you find and touch the key, which sits directly under the statue of the Buddha, you will attain paradise. So, walk through a dark passage, find the key and you will be eternally blessed. Seems like a pretty useful way to use that oh-so-difficult area beneath the temple. Martha would be proud. This sounds a tad irreverent, I know, but I really do think they have hit on a good way to get some more cash out of people, it's original, so why not. During the walk in the dark you are meant to let go of worldly concerns. I failed as I was very concerned with the decidedly worldly issues of not smacking my head into something, not stubbing my toes and not walking into the person in front of me. Must try harder next time.

The bog

Not much to say really. We went to this bog, it is famous for flowers but as Nagano is emergent from winter, especially up in the mountains, there wan't much in the way of flowers to be seen. Nice try though. And the melting snow was pretty in a last-vestiges-of-winter kind of way. No really.

Hakuba

We stayed the night in Hakuba which was made famous by the 1998 olympics. It was something a little bit personal for me as it is related with one of the best experiences as a gaijin in Japan. I remember that, on that fateful day in 1998 I had gone to the gym in the morning before going off to teach in the afternoon, this was at the Sports Square in Gyotoku. The morning sessions were always very low key affairs as the gym was full of older and retired folk, mainly as everyone else, except English teachers, was at work by 11am. Anyway, as usual the tv screens were showing sports and on this day it was the team ski jumping event. Japan has a decent record in ski jumping and hopes were high. And luckily the chaps didn't let the nation down. As the competetion wore on, more and more people in the gym stopped their pumping of iron (or considering the age group, pumping of hair tonic) and were watching the drama unfold, yours truly included. Now ski jumping is not the most exciting of sports to watch, usually, but this was enthralling and it all came down to the last jump of the competition by a Japanese veteran, Fukuda I think, who had fluffed an earlier jump and fluffed something in the individual competition and it all came down to him and the snow was falling heavily and the wind was blowing strongly and they thought they might have to cancel the competition but no he said I'll jump and in best disney style he did and he flew and he flew and he flew and he did it and they won and the gym erupted and we danced and they cried and we all hugged and for the briefest of tiny flickers I felt part of Japanese society because we were all united in our happiness at the reult of the team ski jumping competition. And then composure reasserted itself.

So we went to Hakuba and we saw where it all happened and now I have an even more profound and deep respect for anyone willing to throw themselves off a mountain like that. Mad, the lot of them.

Kamikochi

The following day we went to Kamikochi. It is a lovely place where the overstressed denizens of Tokyo and other big cities can get away from it all and be closer to nature.

With 12,000 other people.

But that's not really being fair. Everyone knows it is a popular place and therefore is going to be busy, especially on the first saturday of the golden week holidays. That's why the people who really want to get away from it all take the bus to the car park and then head off into the mountains for some real hiking, which I really wanted to do and had some real angst issues that I couldn't and then I looked up into the mountains and then looked again at the equipment the hikers had and realised that they weren't hikers at all but were climbers with serious gear (ice axes, crampons, rope and abseil equipment) and thought "ah, maybe into June or July would be more appropriate for me". The mountains around Kamikochi are in the 3000m range, about double anything I've ever climbed before and looked like they had some serious 'up'.

So like evryone else we did the walk up the river valley, we marvelled at the scenery and breathed in the deliciously clean and fresh air and tied to blot out all the other people (as they, I'm sure, tried to do with us). And it was good, in itself, but am now getting very itchy 'climbing' feet. But at least we got to visit the...

Winery

Ever tried Japanese wine?

Don't.

They make nice grape flavour ice creams though.

er... stream of consciousness time

All a bit quiet this week and have not had the kind of 'ah, that will be good to write about in the blog this week' type thoughts that often fill my long commute to and from work. This could be because by brain is gearing down for Golden Week, which starts on Thursday and lasts, luckily for the name else it would be entirely inapt, for a week. Am sure the brain is powering down as I tried to study yesterday for the first time in about three weeks, thought I'd better start some reading for the new module (not that I can remember what the new module is), but it made my brain hurt, then made it shut down as I fell asleep at the kitchen table surrounded by text books. This does not bode well for the rest of the course. Anyway in GW the good Guru and I are off to Kamikochi for a couple of days. I do not know why we are going there, or what we will do once there, but I have been informed that I must be present and correct at 7am on friday morning in order to get a long distance coach from Shinjuku station. Shinjuku station is a funny old place. It is one of the busiest stations in the world, with over a million people passing through it on a busy day, most of them with cricked necks from trying to look at signs behind them whilst being forced along in a direction they definitely don't want to be going in. I don't think anyone really knows where they are going in Shinjuku as there are so many bullet train lines, regular JR lines, subways, private railway lines, local and long distance lines that no-one can possibly know where they need to be. But the Guru, who has the directional sense of a compass on acid, can navigate through with precision and speed, a juxtaposition that is somehow right and proper. My father, on one of visits here, likened Shinjuku station at 5pm on a frday afternoon as one of the missing levels of Dante's inferno, which I think is about right. But I was a little naughty on that one as the Guru and I had left the parentals in Matsumoto (so they wanted to explore, it wasn't out of spite!) and when I arranged their travel back to Tokyo, made sure they arrived at rush hour on a friday afternoon - not nice, I know, but gave them a real taste of Tokyo life. And talking of hell, the 3 Japanese who were abducted in Iraq were finally let out this week (or maybe last week). But the weird thing is that far from symapthy and warmth and 'oh you poor things', the general public has actually been quite negative towards them, following, I think, the lead of this blog (see 12 April entry) in thinking they are really just a bunch of silly buggers. And the best thing about it is that the govt is going to bill them for the rescue! I think this is fab and they should do it more often. The govt is basically saying 'we had a fly a lot of people out to Iraq to negotiate your release, and then fly them, and you, back to Japan again. This cost a lot of taxpayers' money so we are going to get abit of it back - let's just call it a fine for being really, really stupid and not doing what we tell you'. The Japanese are well into this kind of compensation money. If you were to knock someone off their bicycle whilst driving your car, you would be expected to hand over a lot of cash as a 'sorry I bent your wheel' payment. Stranger still, if you top yourself on the Tokyo subway or a railway, the company running the trains will send an invoice to your estate for the inconvenience caused to the other passengers. So your family, wracked with grief, remorse and 'I should have seen it coming...' are then hit with a bloody great bill, especially if your spouse did the really inconsiderate thing by jumping in front of a train at 5 pm on a friday afternoon in Shinjuku. And of course now there are plenty of scams to get this compensation money. I once wrote...somewhere.. about these phone scams, well one recently happened where a chap called a late middle aged woman and said something like 'this is the police, your husband has caused a car crash and done some pretty serious damage to someone, if you don't want this to go to court, please pay 12 million yen [that's 60,000 quid] into this bank account right now'. And she did, not thinking this to be strange in anyway. And only then did think to call her husband to check. And course he was at work, perfectly fine, no car accidents in sight. So I think the Japanese have a very strange attitude to money - they will save and save, looking after the little one yens, but then if someone tells them to, or they feel in the slightest bit obligated to someone, they will give it all away with barely a murmur. Probably also goes to show why the Japanese never, ever hold doors open for anyone (er... the bit about not wanting to be obligated to anyone, not the bit about giving away their cash). I remember the main character from 'As I Lay Dying' by William Faulkner was dead against being 'beholden' to anyone. Central tenet of his being, and the book I shouldn't wonder. Hated that book, absolute load of old nonsense. But then again, I seem to remember I felt that way about most of the books I read for English Lit at A-level. Nothing like a bit of literary criticism to ruin a good book for you - thank god I didn't do English at university, which was once a plan. I might think I got slightly off the point there, but I'm not sure there was a point to begin with. But talking, as we weren't, of plants, the ones here are now a mixed bag. The success story is definitely the rosemary, which is healthy and hale. The basil is just tall and gangly now, with few leaves but lots of flowers. It hasn't died, as I'm sure some nay-sayers neighed before, but it is not happy. The lavender is fighting a rearguard action against death, a couple of the sprigs look as if they are well up for the battle, but the majority is thinking of suing for peace. The olive tree continues to sprout new leaves in prodigous amounts, but has had an alarming attack of 'leaves going yellow and brown at the tips'. This may be a lack of zinc so plant food has been purchased and dispensed to all pots and troughs. The tulips almost got to flowering but then seemed to give up the ghost, go pale and slowly fall over. I thought they might be drunk, as it sounds a little like I get, I don't really think so but am marking my bottles to make sure. Lastly the thyme and sage that was planted recently seems to have taken hold, but I am not counting chickens until the fat lady has made an omlette.

and in this week's (archived as they are on holiday and/or too busy) Friday five

1. Laying on your back and facing the ceiling, which side of the bed do you sleep on? on the right hand side, nothing special I think, but it is the side furthest from the door, which apparently means I am not doing enough to protect my wife.

2. Do you have to have covers (blankets and/or sheets) at all costs, no matter the weather? no, far, far too hot in summer in Japan for that kind of nonsense. If I were in the UK, probably

3. Sleep nekkid or no? Why? oh yes, far better that way (and I'm always too hot in bed whilst the Guru is always too cold, so the duvet is arctic strength for her benefit)

4. What's under your bed? nothing, we sleep on a futon so it's on the floor

5. If you have pets, do you let them sleep with you? Why or why not? no pets, but wouldn't anyway as not enough space on the bed

it's not only me

saw this on ureshiidesu and thought I'd share as it kind of ties in with the stuff below. Must be a popular topic right now - finger on the pulse me...

Japan, Gaijin and the Constitution

This week's ramblings have all been in and around the news recently so will be well known to those of you here, but might be new to those of you who are not, so we'll go with them anyway.

As I may have mentioned in the past, the constitution of Japan is a pretty ropey old thing. It was, according to good authority, knocked up by MacArthur and a few others in 1945 during the victory party: written on the back of a beer mat and was only saved by a Corporal going through the bins the following morning, so most of the big things are there - equality, be nice to other people, make sure the trains run on time, that sort of thing. But some of the little things, that can become big things later, were a bit over looked - such as the separation of church and state and the role of the Prime Minister vs the Emperor as the head of state (well, not really that small then...)

Importantly, one thing that MacArthur did was keep the Emperor as the head of state which, in the eyes of your average Japanese (as one theory goes, I hasten add, this is not the definitive word) absolved old Showa of having any responsibility for the conduct of Japan from the pre-war days right through to the end. This has led to the assertion (accusation?) that the Japanese therefore kind of shrugged their shoulders after the war and thought "well, it wasn't the Emperor's fault as he is still there, so I guess we can't have done too much wrong" and so Japan, unlike say Germany, never went through a period of national hand wringing and self criticism before entering the second half of the 20th century.

"So what?" some may query. Well, it means for a start that Japan has never apologised for its conduct in WW2, or for the war itself, which as you can imagine angers most of the other nations in Asia, especially the Chinese and Koreans. Indeed, some of the more unsavoury areas of Japanese military history, the Rape of Nanking for example, are airbrushed Stalin-like out of the history books in Japanese schools. Not a good way to teach history, denying your past.

"Where is this going?" I hear you cry. Well, as MacArthur absolved the Emperor of his guilt/complicity in the war, it also got a lot of the generals off the hook as well. Now earlier in the blog there was a small mention that Koizumi, like most of the post-war Prime Ministers before him, every year troops off to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to pay his respects to the war dead, bit like the Queen at the Cenotaph. But Yasukuni, whilst being home to now long-dead war heroes, is also home to many of the generals who ran WW2 and who were, or are viewed as, war criminals. And as you can imagine this pisses off a lot of people, all of whom are non-Japanese (especially when just over the road from Yasukuni is another shrine that honours the war dead, has no 'war criminals' and contains the Japanese tomb of the unknown soldier but is the path much less travelled).

Now the bit about the constitution is this. Recently there have been some lawsuits crawling through the Japanese courts, non-Japanese suing the govt for Koizumi's action of attending Yasukuni Shrine in his official capacity as PM. They say it is against the constitution as the church and the state are separate and therefore he's not allowed to do it officially. He says, "ok, I'm doing it a private citizen". But last week a court ruled that no, he wasn't doing it as a private citizen but in his official capacity and therefore what he was doing was unconstitutional. The real giveaway, said the court, wasn't that he used an official car but was that he signed the guest book 'Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister'. A pretty dumb thing to do really.

So the court upheld this suit by some Koreans living in Kyushu, but refused to pay them a million yen each for the emotional distress caused. But even better than this was Koizumi's reaction, which was, essentially, "I don't agree with your ruling so I am going to keep doing exactly what I want to do. Yah boo sucks to you too!" (some of that might just have been made up)

So that's right folks, the PM of the 2nd biggest economy and 3rd or 4th biggest armaments buyer is told by his own national court that he can't do something but he doesn't agree so he tells them to bugger off. Bit odd that. But because this is Japan a lot of the newspaper editorials agree with Koizumi and then refuse to print any dissenting voices from, say China or Korea.

Hmm, this one could run and run...

Gaijin

We're a funny old breed, us gaijin. We're happy to call each other gaijin, you know, "wassup my gaijin?" that sort of thing. But catch a Japanese calling you a gaijin and a lot of us start to take umbrage (not me, I hasten to add - what's in a name?), and it's all down to translation. Like most words in most languages, it can be translated in a number of ways. It can be, for example, 'foreigner' or 'outsider'. Now the people who take umbrage are the ones most likely to take offence at this translation of the word.

A letter in the paper recently said that a chap got jolly angy when he heard Japanese using it in this sense, especially when they were outside Japan. He overheard a Japanese lady saying (in Japanese) "my what a lot of gaijin there are here" whilst on holiday in Hawaii. Now personally, knowing how many Japanese there are on holiday in Hawaii, one western face could seem like a lot, but no, she meant there were lost of big nosed white people around. So he went up to her and said (again in Japanese) "no, you are the gaijin here", to which he received a shocked and horrified look from the lady and to which he felt suitably happy and vindicated.

But my point here is that gaijin can also easily be translated as 'non-Japanese person', so the shocked and horrifed look he received may well have been along the lines of "what do you mean I'm not Japanese, foolish American person? Of course I'm Japanese and these people are not."

Maybe it is just one of those things that I can't seem to get too worked up about, but a lot of people do as they attach all this impoprtance to labels that the Japanese really just don't get as, I think, there isn't really anything to get. I mean really, the Japanese people using a Japanese word to describe something that isn't Japanese. How dare they?

And the vote

This is the last one today about gaijin and their whinging. Again in the paper recently there has been a run of letters bemoaning the fact that gaijin with permanent residency status aren't allowed a vote in this country and isn' that jolly unfair. Now I am all for a revision of the laws so that someone born in this country is entitled to a vote, such as all the Koreans dragged here during WW2 who never left but are still counted, as are their children and grandchildren, as foreigners - that's wrong and needs to be addressed.

But for some foreigner from the UK or US to demand the right to vote because they have chosen to live here but not renounce their citizenship of their own country seems utterly crazy in my view. One chap from the US even went so far as to say something like "no taxation without representation is as true today as it ever was". Idiot. Doesn't seem to have crossed his mind that he chose to live here, or that he has a vote back in the US should he choose to exercise it, or that the tax paid in the 1770s all went to foreign coffers. Oh no, he's taxed by the Japanese govt because he works here and that is bad.

If these people want the vote here in Japan they should become Japanese. Seems to me that if you want a say in how the country is run, you should be a citizen of the that country. Now there could be an argument for having a say in local elections as one is a member of the local community and, paying local taxes, one might be granted a say in how things are done, especially if you have children in local schools, for example. But votes for foreigners in national elections? Don't think that would be right somehow, even with Japan's dodgy old constitution.

Murakami

Am reading some Haruki Murakami right now. If you haven't already, give him a try. He is one of my favourite Japanese authors...no, he is one of my favourite authors full stop. Very odd, some of his books, but well worth it. This one I'm reading now is a good one, but also try 'A Wild Sheep Chase' and 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicle'.

The beautiful Game

Am feeling a bit tired and shagged out today as, in response to a cry of need, I played football yesterday. The cry of need came as it was a 9am kickoff in Yokohama and, as such, not the sort of hour on a Sunday that most are up and about, unless it is returning from a night on the sauce in Roppongi and therefore not in a state to kick a ball around.

So we played the bottom of the league team (we are comfortably mid table) and, even though we only started with seven players, gained a 3-3 draw. We could have won. Perhaps we should have won, I don't know. But I didn't embarrass myself, as I am more than capable of doing on a football pitch, so I was happy in the end. Also, we played at a rather swish place called the Yokohama Athletic and Country Club, which was nice in a 'they-wouldn't-let-us-in-here-if-we-hadn't-just-played-football' kind of way, especially after we sat around afterwards drinking beer and enjoying ourselves and, I suspect, being quite loud into the bargain. Home team didn't stick about though.

Panic

You may have read about the 3 Japanese who managed to get themselves kidnapped last week. Well, silly buggers, if you ask me, the whole lot of them. Silly kidnappers who wanted to make a stand against the imperialist powers but only managed to get some random Japanese, whose soldiers in Iraq do actually seem to be trying to do something positive. Silly Japanese for being there - noone seems to know who they are or what they are really doing there, except they claim it was humanitarian aid (one of them was 18, for goodness sakes) even though the Japanese govt had obviously told people not to go. And silly parents who demanded that the govt accede to the kidnappers demands and pull all of the GSDF troops out of Iraq in 36 hours and then get really angry when Koizumi refuses to speak to them and refuses to follow the demands.

And then the sill kidnappers say 'hang on, these guys are Japanese! Sorry, thought they were Americans. Bugger, ok, you can have them back' and then not actually let anybody know where they are.

All a bit of a shower really.

Bits and Pieces

No big theme this week, more a collection of randomness that crossed my path in the last seven days or so...

The Music Man

This was a strange experience, to say the least. Occasionally, of an evening, I am prone to fits of activity which generally result in my strapping on the running shoes and going down to the riverbank for a jog. Nothing wrong with that, very sensible really. But I am not, of course, the only one. The riverbank, as I may have described before, has a lot of space between the river and the actual embankment. This is taken up with a small golf course, baseball and football pitches, a barbeque area, that sort of thing, unlike Japanese houses, which are jam packed into as small a space as possible. This means that anyone with a potentially annoying-to-the-neighbours hobby must go elsewhere to practice it, so you get musicians down there.

Prior to last week, the oddest experience was to find a bagpiper practicing his wheezy way through a selection of Scottish classics. As you can imagine, that was strange enough in the middle of Tokyo, I mean the Scots only play the pipes to annoy the English I'm sure, so why a Japanese would want to play, who knows. I digress, so on Tuesday I was rumbling along and passed a middle aged trumpeter giving it all he was worth. He was ok, I suppose, and as I passed on way he was trying something suitably jazzy and upbeat. On my way back, however, when all was dark and the bats were starting to flit, the trumpeter had finished the Miles Davis and moved onto infinitely more depressing...the Last Post. I have no idea if he knew the significance of it, but it sent shivers up my spine and I had the distinctly uncomfortable impression that he was playing it for me and, one completion, was going to whip out a rifle and do away with me. Well, I was running, lack of oxygen to the brain i suspect, but it was a spooky one all the same.

The doors

This week's unnecessary scandal is all about doors and is a very sad story indeed. If you remember a few weeks ago I wrote about Roppongi Hills and the delights therein. Well, the weekend before last a young kid, 6 I think, was racing to catch up with his parents and tried to dive through a gap in one of the big revolving doors that are the main entrance. As you can probably guess the kid didn't make it and unluckily got his head caught between the door and the frame. These doors are huge metal things and through 2 design flaws had an infrared sensor blind spot from about 15 to 70cms from the floor (about the size of a small kid) and also the pressure sensors don't stop the door from moving until it has travelled another 20cms round. As you can imagine, this was not too good for the boy, whose neck was broken and the poor kid died.

The scandal is the fact that this was not the first time this had happened. Indeed at that very door there had been a couple of dozen cases since Roppongi Hills opened, but the door company and/or Mori had done nothing about it. Even worse was that all the cases involved little kids and worse still, three of the accidents were serious and involved the kids being trapped in exactly the same way as the kid that died. But worst of all, these doors have been in operation at the Landmark Tower in Yokohama for a good few years now and the same things have been happening there as well and the door company has done nothing to change its designs. Seems a pretty poor show to me, but it has led to safer...

Playgrounds

In the usual knee jerk over-reaction that comes after these sorts of things, some kids were playing down on some playground equipment in Osaka when a bolt came away from a bit on a roundabout. This created a small hole that children, as is their wont, could stick their fingers in and, if the roundabout was turning, get a painful nip on the end of their finger (or maybe taken a small piece out of). So the local police, swinging into action as they do, closed every single playground in the prefecture whilst the Prefectural Task Force (Playgrounds Division) inspected every piece of hardware available to ensure the children's finger safety. This took up a good 20 minutes of the national news on (I think) Friday evening. But this led to Saturday's...

Hanami

Or Cherry Blossoms. More words than there are cherry blossoms have been written and more pictures taken than there are fish in aquariums regarding the sakura season in Japan. So ok, it's pretty, it is a good opportunity to get drunk in a park and...and...that is about it. But the Japanese go head over heels at this time of year. It is meant to evoke the samurai spirit of a short but beautiful life apparently, but it seems to me that someone being cut in half with a four-foot katana would be a better symbol of the samurai, but maybe it is just me. Anyway the Guru and I went to Yoyogi Koen on Saturday, along with two thirds of the population of Tokyo. It was very pleasant in the quieter bits, but the busy bits were really busy and I can't really see how people could enjoy themselves - except, of course, Japanese are used to living cheek by jowl with everyone else so I guess it makes more sense.

It was nice, anyway, and we explored the park, something we haven't really done before. Yoyogi Koen also houses Meiji-Jingi shrine, you see, so everyone really goes there as it is a magnificent structure. Then we walked through the backstreets from Harajuku to Shibuya, poking through the alleys and byways, which was excellent. So all the business I wrote last week about Tokyo not being a city to walk in, ignore it, I was talking crap. To get home we used the new, improved...

Subway

We're all stupid, us foreigners, and can't use the subways properly, so the powers that be have put a new plan into action. No longer do we have a subway, now it is the Metro. And no longer do the staff wear boring olive green jackets, now they have natty blue ones. Not much here, I grant you, to make life easy for foreigners, so in a brainwave of fantastic proportions, the Metro decided that all stations would now have not just a name, but an identifcation letter-number combo. So now Nishi Kasai, were I work, is T6 - T for Tozai (line) and 6 as it is 6 from one end. Where I change, Iidabashi, is T16, so I can tell it is 10 stops from T6. Great. The problem, it seems to me, is where you get interchanges, as Iidabashi is T16 and also N6. Otemachi, which has about 8 lines running into it, is a veritable alphabet that you need an enigma machine to decode. Anyway it all seems to make the whole scene a lot more confusing to me. Uh oh, I've been here too long...

and lastly

I've been getting bored with plants I have so yesterday I increased the herb yield potential by planting sage, thyme and a cutting of mint. Updates to follow as event warrant.

Internationalisation

Hey, get this. Arakawa is now a truly international organ. Check out the comments on the 19th March post and you will meet Heine, a Norwegian living in Denmark. He (...I think he is a he, but I realise that this is just an assumption, of you are a she, apologies, please let me know) is a remarkable person on three counts:

1. He has read this blog from start to almost finish in almost one go. This is dedication above and beyond the call of duty.
2. In a comment he referred to Danes as 'daft punters' which is fantastic use of language, especially for a non-native English speaker (and he also describes the blog as 'expert description', and as we all know, flattery will get you everywhere).
3. He seems to find my ramblings interesting.

All this has earned Heine first prize in the Arakawa Riverview Challenged Cup. This entitles the winner to a free beer or three, please come to meet me in Japan and I will happily provide the necessaries.

Anyway welcome Heine, good to have some Scandanavian input.

The other side of Japan

So as mentioned in the last post, I was off on a business trip this week, down to Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu. The Guru and I have been down to this neck of the woods before, in 1999 I think, when we flew to Fukuoka and went on a bus tour around the whole island (never again, by the way, for a Japanese bus tour - it was an experience that everyone should try once, but never again). Anyway that time I never went into Fukuoka, so it was virgin territory.

Getting to Haneda airport I was able to take the Tokyo Monorail. I thought this would be crap, but it was one of the best things about the whole trip! It runs from Hammamatsucho on Tokyo Bay and sort of follows the bay round to Haneda, which sticks into the Bay around the bottom of Tokyo where it joins Kawasaki. The route is great as it goes through Shimbashi and Tennozu waterfront areas, past OKeibajo, which is bloody great horse racing stadium in the middle of the city, and then down past the industrial/petrochemical bits that make Middlesbrough look like an advertisement for clean air. The best thing is the monorail runs about 20m off the ground so you get this great view of the whole area. It doesn't sound like much, but if you live in Tokyo and you see is grey concrete everywhere you go, it was a real eye-opener to see colours and contours and, well, life. Hmm, waxing lyrical there, better get to a rant.

Planes

During one of my visits to BA recently, we discussed the fact that the skies over Japan aren't deregulated like they are over Europe. So where in the UK, fo example, it can work out cheaper to fly from London to Liverpool via Frankfurt than to use the trains, here the same isn't true. No EasyJet or RyanAir to bring the prices down so my return flight to from Tokyo Haneda to Fukuoka cost over 60,000yen - that is 300 quid! This was with ANA with whom, last month, a colleague flew return to the UK for 62,000yen! OK, I wasn't paying so Iwasn't too bothered to be honest, but then this really got me - 300 pound flight and if I wanted a beer on the plane, I had to pay for it! I found this totally shocking. And even worse, when ANA tried to set up a budget style airline called Skymark, no-one used it. Weird, these Japanese. Anyway, I showed my absolute displeasure over the paying-for-a-beer issue by maliciously not buying one. That, I think you'll agree, showed them!

Fukuoka

Is a most pleasant and compact little city. So much so that I was rather taken with the place and had a short but nevertheless strong desire to move down there. The nicest thing about it was, I suppose, that it is walkable. Actually thinking about it, this is more a shortcoming of Tokyo, though shortcoming seems the wrong word as, if you are going to walk anywhere, it is more of a longcoming. Anyway it was nice to be in a place where you could walk around the city, where the interesting little side streets held interesting little shops and restaurants and bars and where they still have trees on the pavements which must make the summers a little more bearable. They also have two small emporia that made my stay much more enjoyable. First, on the way back to the hotel was a cracking little yakitori shop that was perfectly placed for me to stop and have a beer with yakitori whilst writing up my notes from the day. There is nothing quite like a really cold beer with some barbequed chicken at the end of a long day. Anyone who bangs on about sushi and sashimi as the height of Japanese cuisine is talking rot, give me beer and yakitori any day. They also served, free of charge, a dish of raw cabbage with the beer. Now this sounds odd, and if you had told me before I would have politely declined. But no, it is a really good little combination, and much healthier than crisps or peanuts. Sounds strange but no, beer, yakitori and raw cabbage - winning combination.

The other place was a little bar just round the corner from the hotel. Normally you take you wallet in your hands when you enter an unknown Japanese pub as it can easily turn out to be a hostess bar, which will charge you anything from a small fortune to a very large one just to sit down, let alone have a beer or, even worse, a bowl of peanuts. Anyway this one looked ok as it had a sign for Abbot's Ale outside. No really, first time I have seen anything like it in Japan (Guiness, Kilkenny and Bass are about the best you can usually get). In the end I only got one opportunity to go in to this place, and the night I was in there was absolutely dead, no-one else at all. But this was great as I got to chat to the bar owner chap. He was really into all things English and was in love with Abbot's Ale, hence being the only place in Japan to regularly stock it. But even thought this chap was into Englishness, he couldn't speak a word and has never been there, so our long chat was conducted all in Japanese, which made me happy, if confused at times. But the best thing was he kept giving me free samples of beer to try! What a nice chap, but I think he was lonely. Anyway I got to try a whole load of beers made by local micro breweries on Kyushu, which was great as it really difficult to find a beer in Japan that isn't made by one of the big 5 breweries. The best one was made by a brewery called Suginoya and recently won first prize at some international beer competition thing. The worst was a strawberry beer that was very similar to cough mixture. So we chatted away and he kept *forcing* me to try all these different beers and we were getting on famously. Then three middle-aged Japanese men came into the bar and, with all these glorious beers on offer, ordered asahi superdry. Oh well, the spell was broken and I wandered back tothe hotel, gently bumping into things as I went. But I really hope this guy and his bar succeed, mainly so I can go back and ask his name.

But that was about it. The work was worky, the people very nice and a good bunch of trainees to boot. The hotel room was small and to say the most, functional. Anyone who has lived or stayed in Japan will know all about breakfasts in hotels here and, rest assured, this one was up to the usual high standards. I don't know what it is about breakfast here, but the Japanese really can't do a 'western' style one and a Japanese style one just seems to be the leftovers from last night. Economical? Yes. Tempting at 7:30 with a hangover...?

Innovations

The Guru and I had a lively discussion this week and it all started with sellotape.

Or Scotch tape, for those of you who know it by that nomenclature. The Guru subscibes to a weekly email newsletter from a Japanese woman who lives in England. She has been living there for years and so offers sage and timely advice for those Japanese women who, or who want to, live in the UK. One of her many valuable contributions to the sum of Japanese housewife knowledge of the world is to point out, in no uncetain terms, that English people do not all have a full afternoon cream tea at 4pm everyday, and for this she has earned my undying admiration (as well, I suspect, the vitriol of Japanese tourist agencies trying to flog over priced cream tea holidays to the Cotswolds).

Anyway, in her last missive she started having a go at British sellotape. It is crap quality, you see, always breaking in the wrong place, twisting, difficult to handle and generally a bane in her life. The Guru nodded along with wholehearted agreement. "Useless" she laughed, casting amused looks in my direction (as I had anything to do with it! (But at 1 pound for 5 rolls in Brixton market, what did she expect?)). But the crowning turd, as it were, was the fact that the rolls of tape don't come with a built in cutter. In Japan, apparently, rolls of sellotape come with a small metal clip type thing that is actually a cutter and means you save valuable nanoseconds when wrapping your presents (not that Japanese ever wrap presents, the department does it for you!).

Now I have tried to use these little cutters and cannot get the hang of them, and nor has a friend in Japan Steve, so we prefer the 'biting with your teeth' method favoured by, I think, most English. So the argu.. discussion started on the relative merits of Japanese vs English sellotape and then progressed, through a series of logical bounds, to the Guru stating the opinion that the English never innovate. When they have invented something that is useful, apparently, they never try to improve it whilst the Japanese are always doing this, hence the little metal clip/cutter on sellotape here. My point was that firstly, it isn't an improvement and, if it was, it would catch on in England as well, and that, secondly, the Japanese are respnsible for a whole lot of unnecessary crap in the world mainly because they try and improve on things that don't need improving. And here we reached impasse as neither was willing to concede to the other. Then we went out on Saturday evening and met up with Steve and Yasuko, had the same discussion and came to the same conclusions, only double the numbers.

This is one that could run and run, I fear, as now anything useless or unnecessary that I see in this country I point out, whilst the Guru, when she remembers things that used to drive her crazy in London, doesn't shirk from reminding me. I am willing to concede her views on occasional, small things, like the London Underground, but she will not budge from her view. This made me happy the other night, though. She was washing rice in it's cooking pot when I mentioned that it was easier to wash rice in a seive under running water. "This is the way it's been done for thousands of years" said she.

I don't like to keep score, but that one went on the fridge door.

(The Japanese woman who started all this off, by the by, lives in Margate. Enough said.)

Fukuoka, Kyushu.

I'm off on a business trip!

That's right. Tomorrow I have to troop off to Haneda airport and fly down to Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu. We have a new franchise set up there so I have to go down to do some interviews/orientation for a bunch of new teachers who have been 'selected' by the franchisee, and then do a couple of days of training with them as well. Get to stay in a hotel that I don't have to pay for and get extra money for doing my job. Marvellous.

I am looking forward to this as it is a chance to see a new city, meet some new people and generally not be in the office for four days. Sounds like a great deal and should all be smooth as silk as luckily the franchise department isn't one of those where all the staff received, and used, DIY lobotomy kits for christmas last year. Oh hang on...

Full report next week.

and in this week's friday five

If you...

1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve? often thought about this, but never really settled on a definitive style, so probably a bit of everything that I like, so a bit of Japanese, some Thai, a touch of Mexican and your usual Euro/French/Italian stuff. I hate the word 'fusion' in cooking, so better to be pick n' mix.

2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell? often thought about this as well. Definitely a combination deli/coffee/book shop. (This one, one day, will happen).

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be? i'd like to think a series of wry, occasionally humourous articles on the oddities and strangeness of living in Japan. But probably a fantasy novel.

4. ...ran a school, what would you teach? I work for a school, we teach English. So anything but that.

5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it? have never thought about this as I am so totally unmusical, a bit like Steve Martin's character in 'the jerk'.Although having said that, I love music. But the choice would change depending on the day, week, month, hour etc. Listening to lots of led zep/stones/ black crowes right now, so if i recorded an album this weekend, it would probably sound like them.

Musical differences

Here's a strange thing. The Guru and I were having a spot of dinner the other night and a piece of music started up on the old cd player. It was a classical piece and as it started the Guru slowly got a wistful, faraway look in her eye and murmured natsukashi. At the same time my thoughts wandered off, stimulated by the music and slowly an amused smirk spread across my face. The music, I'm sure you're dying to know, was the bit from the old Hamlet cigar ads (the name escapes me just now, and the cd has been replaced on the shelf). I was thinking of the ads, specifically the one in the restaurant where I think the waiter knocks the chap's toupee off, much to the amusement of his younger date, whence the waiter gives him the cigar and strikes a match on the back of his head. So like most English people my connection with the song is wryly amusing.

Natsukashi, for those who don't know, doesn't really translate well into English but is a sort of wistful nostalgia, "that takes me back" sort of idea. The reason being, you see, is that the same piece of music is the one played at all Japanese graduation ceremonies, so as soon as a Japanese adult hears it, they are suddenly transported back to school/college/university and those halcyon days. I just smirked. This could, of course, prove embarrassing in the future when, at my childrens' very solemn kindergarten graduation ceremony, when I should be crying with pride or something, I will be happily smirking to myself thinking of Hamlet cigar adverts. Must learn self control.

But of course there are many more examples of this sort of wholly different cultural reaction to music. For example whilst we in the west are somewhat pissed and spluttering "I love you, yur my besht mate, no really" at new year to the tune of Auld Lang Syne (or whatever the spelling is), here in Japan it is known as the 'Firefly' and is played to tell you that the supermarket or department store you are in is about to close. Curiously, the image I have for Vaugh-Williams' new world symphony is the Hovis kid walking with his bike up a steep hill on his way home in Yorkshire or the Cotswolds, which is spooky as it is the music they play over tannoys at around 5pm in towns all over Japan (well in Kawaguchi at any rate) telling kids it is time to go home. Maybe it has a deep psychological resonance about returning to the bosom of ones family. Or something.

Spring is almost here and the sakura will be in full bloom next weekend, so the colours have changed to usher in the new season.

and on this week's friday five


1. What was the last song you heard? haven't been listening to a lot of music this week, the md player has remained at home, but I think it would be 'when the levee breaks' by Led Zeppelin

2. What were the last two movies you saw? that would be Love, Actually and Lord of the Rings pt 3. (and surprisingly love, actually wasn't as awful as I thought it would be)

3. What were the last three things you purchased? apart from lunches, a load of Harvey Nicholls toffee (going cheap at Sogo dept store which was given to the ladies in the office for White Day), 4 books at Bondibooks over in Kichijouji (thanks Josh) and a lot of beer last night.

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend? haircut, study, recover from hangover and study.

5. Who are the last five people you talked to? The good Guru (in a drunken state last night and a hungover state this morning) and then 4 others from the office - Dave, Helen, Sally and Simon - with whom I drank too much beer and probably put the world to rights (lucky old world!).

It 's the new War

Dave, once of Tokyo and now of Bangkok has a new blog, The Hundred Day's War, detailing his new offensive against complacency. Please pop over here to see it and support him in his endeavours.

What's in a name?

Quite a lot really, if you are Japanese....actually quite a lot for anyone really, but as this blog is all about Japan we're going to go with this theme.

I saw an article in a magazine this week that was all about naming children and the fun you have to go through in Japanese. I had never really thought about it before, but as this is something I will be doing for real (hopefully) soon, I read the article with gusto, and it turns out that it is not simply about choosing a name you like for your offspring. Oh no, that would be far too easy. There is a lot more to it than that. A lot. But before we begin this I think I should give you all a brief guide to the complexities of the Japanese language (for those of you in Japan and who know all this, you may want to wander further ahead. Or you may not, up to you really).

Kanji and all that

So Japanese, in a nutshell, is this - why use one alphabet when you can use four? That's what someone over here said a few centuries ago and everyone thought it to be a jolly wizard idea. So for starters there is kanji which a lot of can be seen at the Kanji Site link on the right. Kanji is the writing that came over from China a few millenia ago and is the one with the pictographs (or maybe pictograms) and pretty much everything old or major has a kanji. Some of these are quite literal and you can see how they developed - for example Kawaguchi, where we live, is made up from a square (meaning guchi, or mouth as it is in the shape of an open mouth) and three vertical parallel lines (meaning kawa or river, from the banks of the river with water in between). Put them together and you have Rivermouth, and there is a river mouth here, so it all makes sense. Unfortunately this is an isolated case and most kanji bear no resemblance to the thing they are meant to repesent. Kanji are not phoenetic, so you can't really try to work out what they mean, especially as you can put two together and the sum of the parts bear no relation to the original bits.

Because Kanji came from China so long ago, they have also become Japanized, so each kanji will have at least two different ways of being read - two if you're lucky. So if you see a kanji you can never be sure how it is read and therefore what it means, which creates a lot of scope for confusion. This is especially true with names - if you find a random business card you won't know who it belongs to as you won't be able to read their name until they tell you. And place names, like nishi kasai, where I work, is made from 2 kanji, the first, 'nishi' and the last, '-sai' are the same kanji, but pronounced differently. Sound a bit silly? You bet.

Even the Japanese realised this, so about 500 years ago hiragana was developed (actually it was developed by a noblewoman at the Emperor's court to send secret messages to someone, somewhere - I forget). So anyway hiragana is phoenetic, unlike kanji, so it was jolly useful for writing under kanji to show what they meant. Now it is used for particles and articles, defining tenses and the like. So that is two alphabets.

The third is katakana, which was developed more recently, in the last hundred years or so when lots of new foreign words started appearing in the Japanese language. This was a problem because, unlike English, there are no spaces in between the words in written Japanese, so if there suddenly appeared a foreign word spelt out in hiragana, the reader would not know where the word started or what it meant. So katakana is essentially the same as hiragana, except that where hiragana is soft and curvy, katakana is angular and sharp, so when reading a sentence you can see where the words change. This is quite a sensible idea really, but confusing for the average foreigner as katakana takes no account of where the foreign word comes from - so lots of English speakers have been very confused by their studebts saying 'I have arlbeit' - they mean, of course, they have a part-time job, from the German, but no-one told the Japanese that, they just think of Japanese and 'foreign'.

So that's three. The last alphabet the Japanese use is this one, the roman alphabet, called romaji in Japan and not really used very much, except in train stations which is very useful if you are going somewhere new.

So back to names

So first you have to choose the name you want for your kid. This is the easy part as there are lots to choose from. So far so good.

But then you have to decide how you want to write it. Now we can assume that the surname is going to be the same as the rest of the family, but what of the first name? Well, you could write it in hiragana, the curvy phoenetic script above, but where is the fun in that? Now in English, if you want your kid to be called John, you have little choice but to choose one 'o', one 'n', one 'j' and one 'h', out them in the right order and hey presto, you have John. But with a name like Akira, for example, reasonably popular especially after the post-apocalyptic dude, you will have at least 25 different ways of writing it in Kanji. 25!

So just pick a nice looking kanji that means something nice like 'strong-warrior-salary-man', yes? No. You've forgotten the strokes! and we're not talking noveau rock pop here. All kanji have a set number of strokes and an order in which to write them, and woe betide you if you get either wrong. This is important because you have to add up the number of strokes and see if you get good numbers or bad numbers - but not just the total number of strokes, that would be too easy, you have to look at:
Jinkaku - the number of strokes in the last character of the last name and the first character of the frst name. This will tell you the child's talent or character.
Tenkaku - all the strokes in the last name. This will tell you about destiny and the influence from your ancestors (surely the same for everyone in the family?)
Chikaku - all the strokes in the first name. This will tell you about the kids life up to middle age, including marriage and health, but not after middle age, that is from...
Sokaku - which is all the strokes in both names.

With it so far, well then

Get your number of strokes in the sokaku and deduct the jinkaku, this will give you the gaikaku, which will tell you how society will perceive your child, his or her sincerity and self-confidence. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

So what does it all mean. Well, if your sokaku (that's all the strokes in both names) adds up to 19, your kid will be artistic but rebellious and tempramental. In Japan this is not a good combination so it is to be avoided at all costs apparently. You can just see it...
Dad: what about Leonardo?
Mum: hmm, what does it say in the book?
Dad: Artistic but might get a bit angry.
Mum: Ooh I dont like that, how about Kevin?
Dad: happy go lucky, bit of a dreamer, steady.
Mum: that's nice, Kevin da Vinci, has a nice ring to it and none of that rebelliousness...

I digress. So you have to employ the services of a fortune teller to make sure that the name you have decided upon is going to be an auspicious one for your progeny. And you have to be careful as the number of strokes can change unexpectedly when you use a kanji for a name rather than its normal usage, for no good reason whatsoever, except, as with all of this, to confuse foreigners (although it is pretty good at confusing the Japanese as well. When the guru and I wed at the local ward office, the desk bound chappie admonished the Guru for spelling her name wrong, something she had been doing for thirty odd years as her father had chosen an alternative kanji that changed in name usage but then he had basically forgotten to tell her!).

And then, of course, there are the forbidden kanji. There are only 2230 kanji that can be used for naming your kids, out of a total of many tens of thousands that are out there, the 1945 Joyo kanji, which are the sort of everyday ones that everyone can read (yours truly excepted) plus 285 special kanji for names. That is it. Back in the nineties a rather deranged chap wanted to name his son Akuma, which means evil or devil (using the kanji he wanted to use). Now he was a silly chap, but his local authorities actually took him to court and won, meaning that he was legally not allowed to name his son what he wanted! Now although I think this chap was being a bit of a prat, I am shocked at the principle that you can't name you kids what you want to. And who chose the 2230 kanji? No one seems to know.

But there you have it. Seems to me that if you eant to do this sort of thing properly you need an advanced degree in calculus to work out the stroke permutations and then a direct line to Russel Grant to chack everything is sweet in the heavens.

Think I'll be giving my kids English names...

and this week's friday five

What was...

1. ...your first grade teacher's name? Not sure about first grade as we don't have them in the UK, but the first teacher's name that I can remember is Mrs Kenyon - old, pinched face, bit of a harridan sometimes but basically ok.

2. ...your favorite Saturday morning cartoon? Battle of the Planets with G-Force, and their spaceship called the Phoenix that, cunningly, went all fiery in times of need, which was actually 'Gatchaman' here in Japan, for Japanese it was. (After asking the Guru what the Japanese name was, she has just sung me the theme song - bless her!)

3. ...the name of your very first best friend? James Milne - whatever happened to him...?

4. ...your favorite breakfast cereal? As a kid I have a very vague recollection of Golden Nuggets, which I suspect where lumps of sugar with yellow food colouring (which luckily covered all the major food groups for a four year old). If not, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.

5. ...your favorite thing to do after school? Too many to write down but 'bugger all' and 'not doing homework' come close to the top.

Truth for today

There is always space for one more person on a rush-hour Tokyo subway train.

The Police State

Interesting story in this week's news about the police, which I thought I would share. Now personally I have a lot of time for the police in the UK, they seem to be a hard working lot, over stressed, criticised from all quarters, that sort of thing. I haven't had to much to do with them, to be honest, and long may that continue, but they seem to be trying to be doing a good job. And before anyone gets too irate in the comments section, I am looking at them from 5,000 miles away with little in the way of domestic UK news, so I may be wrong about that. I am also looking at them in comparison with the Japanese police, who are, I think, pretty shite.

I mean sh*te in a sort of useless way. Not bumbling incompetence, like the jolly laughing policeman, but a kind of arrogant, don't mess with me but if you do mess with me I won't really know what to do about it sort of way. If you take my meaning.

Anyway what got me thinking was a story in the paper. Apparently a week or so ago, a woman was out and about when suddenly she started screaming at the top of her lungs, someone had snatched her bag, you see. Now the police, far from their usual policy of waiting for two weeks before checking anything out, actually arrived at the scene as the woman was still a-screaming. (Perhaps she was near a koban or police box, which is not, as the name might suggest, a law enforcement protective, rather it is a little box-like shed found next to most railway staions where the police can relax after a long morning's doing nothing by drinking coffee). I digress, so the local coppers turn up, at which point the woman stops her screaming and, pointing, shouts 'it was him'. Keystone Cops-like our intrepid heroes turn and apprehend the larcenous individual. This proves to be a 68 year old gentleman laden with shopping bags in both hands - hardly the type to have just snatched a ladies handbag, seeing as he doesn't have a ladies handbag on his person and couldn't carry anything more anyway, let alone run, the favoured modus operandi of bag snatchers, or so I am led to believe.

Pleased with themselves, the coppers drag the bewildered shopper back to the screaming woman, only to find her gone, with out so much as a by your leave and leaving not a trace. 'Oh well', think they, 'but at least we got our man'. So they drag said man back to the koban, on, you remember, a hysterical accusation by a now disappeared woman. Unfortunately the chap, obviously not used to this sort of thing, is now bewildered and extremely stressed which, I'm afraid to say, pushes his dicky ticker into overdrive, giving him a massive coronary and leading, very shortly, to his untimely death.

All very sad, but what makes it worse is the fact that the police refuse to apologise for anything. Apparently they had a suspect who had been identified and accused by a victim and that, sadly, is good enough for them. Doesn't matter that the 'victim' has disappeared, or the chap was an elderly gent laden down with shopping, or most importantly, for the chap at least, that he died in police custody. Nope, he was obviously guilty, so they got him.

Hmm.

I think it is because the police, when faced with a potential crime against a person, aren't really sure what to do. Most of the crime in Japan is of the white collar kind, as reported in these pages in the past, somewhere, so most police really do sit around in their koban's all day, drinking coffee and giving directions to lost people. Now much of this is because Japan is a safe country, much safer than, say, the UK. Having lived in both I feel I can say this with some knowledge, although anywhere feels safe after living in Brixton. Japan is becomming less safe, mostly through socially maladjusted kids losing it and murdering their peers, or parents, and also Japan has always been a place where sexual harrassment goes uncommented upon - for example men groping women in trains, which has become such a problem that there are now Women Only carriages on trains in central Tokyo of an evening. But Japan is still, I feel, much safer physically than the UK.

So when the police come up against this sort of incident, they don't really know what to do, so they either go a little over the top, as with the chap above, or do nothing. In Nagasaki last year there were numerous assaults on kids around a kindergarten but the police didn't tell anyone, so the attacks continued for quite a while until the police finally thought they'd better do something about it - they did catch the guy, in the end, but a word of warning might have helped. An argument against this, I realise, is that they don't want to cause a panic. Fair enough. But how about this.

This week Shoko Asahara, the Aum Shinrikyu chap was sentenced this week. It was the death penalty for him for the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway (and a lot of other murders, going back about 6 years, some of them using Sarin gas - was he investigated? Have a guess...). Anyway because of this there have been lots of TV news features about ex-cult members and what they are doing now. Most of them are trying to live new lives, leave the past behind, but they can't as wherever they move they have to register with the local police who then tell all their neighbours, everyone in the town, who they are and where they live, so they and their kids are attacked, threats made and houses defaced. All nasty stuff that need not happen but is basically encouraged by the local boys in blue.

Seems to have turned into quite a polemic, this one. But they are pretty useless, in my opinion. Pick on the small guys whilst letting the big fish, the yakuza, swim freely about.

But on a happier note

Let's all cheer for Middlesbrough, who finally won something for the first time in 128 years by beating Bolton in the Tin Pot Cup. Yay!

And also

Saw a very strange thing on Friday. I was on the train - clean, cheap, on time (pogo take note) - and sitting a few yards down the aisle was a girl in suspenders. I had to stop and stare. I could hardly help myself, such was the scene. Now lest you think I am one of the dirty old men mentioned above, this young lady was wearing gentlemans' suspenders, the old fashioned type that go around one leg at about calf height and are attached to the sock by a single clip. Otherwise she was quite normally attired - coat, scarf, skirt, socks and shoes. Most very odd indeed, although it is indicative of the strangeness of the fashion of young women in this country. I mean for heaven's sake, leg warmers are back in fashion right now...

+++ UPDATE +++ UPDATE +++ UPDATE +++

Poor old Yoshinoiya, when it rains...

As reported before, the whole American BSE thing has hit Yoshinoiya's gyudon empire by depriving them of their main source of beef. Now it appears that the Bird Flu in South East Asia has now hit Yoshinoiya's second most important money earner, which was some kind of chicken and onions on rice, as there is now an import ban on all poultry from infected countries.

That leaves, on Yoshinoiya's once extensive menu, pickled daikon and water...

The howling wind

Last week, as is its won't, Haru-ichiban made its presence felt. Haru-ichiban is the spring wind in Japan and the harbringer of warmer weather, so when it blows for the first time in a year, it a sure sign that spring is on its way. It is not really up there with the big and famous winds in the world (the mistral, the sirocco, both my granfathers) but the Japanese like it. Just to give you all a quick lesson in meterology, during the winter a huge mass of cold air squats brooding and resentful over China, Korea and Russia. This air then tries to take over Japan as well, but has difficulty because of the Sea of Japan. So all the cold air rushes off the steppes, hits and sea and slows right down until it hits the Japanese coast, whereupon it sort of gives up and dumps prodigous amounts of snow all over the west coast and the mountains. So if you think of the shape of Japan, you can roughly split the main island of Honshu into two long halves, with the Sea of Japan coast and Hokkaido getting huge amounts of the white stuff from November to March, whereas the East coast, places like Tokyo, get very little indeed. For winter sports enthusiasts, the southern and northern Japanese alps and the mountains of Hokkaido are home to some of the very best powder snow in the world.

Now as you have probably worked out, all this is brought by the winds blowing from the north and west. But then along comes out friend Haru-ichiban, puffing away from the south and blows all the cold air away, bringing the scent of warmth and spring time. Sounds a bit romantic that, it would be if it didn't blow at about gale force 7 (rising steadily). It also brought with it some rain, which was welcome relief as we haven't had any rain for about a month or so, very dry winter this one, so the grass on the river bank was very happy (well, what is left of the grass after the local council had flame throer practice earlier in the week and burnt much of it to ash - now we have black banks, not pleasant to look at at all). So anyway, that was last week, which made Haru-ichiban 18 days earlier than average, which could well mean we are in for a really hot summer this year. Oh great...

Science

Myself and the good Guru were out and about on Sunday, as it was such a nice day with the wind blowing, and we saw some of the whales that Japan catches for its scientific research projects. It was 458 yen per 100grams in Oh! Kawa supermarket over in Todakoen. Bit crap that really. But it did make me think, as Oh! Kawa is not some sort of specialist fish or whalemeat seller, it is just a bog-standard supermarket and home store. So what was it doing with whalemeat on it shelves? Who knows.

Now I do, after having done a quick bit of research - the things I do. I wandered over to the wonderfully biased Japan Whaling Association and had a gander around their site and apparently the Japanese are allowed to catch 4-600 whales a year for their scientific research. Now as this is an expensive business, they are conveniently allowed to sell some of the bits they don't study to supermarkets, who sell it onto the punters in the street, to subsidise the costs of catching the things. Lucky that. So around 2,000 tonnes a year finds its way to the supermarket shelves every year, even in places like Oh! Kawa in Todakoen.

Now my mother always told me 'try everything once'. I'm still recovering from the dabbling in smack and watching snuff movies, but I'm not sure about eating whale. I have eaten some strange things here in Japan, a lot of them only once, some more often (raw horse meat, for example, very nice with fresh ginger, spring onions and soy sauce), but I think there is something morally wrong with eating whales, so for once I am not going to do what my mother says.

And in this week's friday five...

When was the last time you...

1. ...went to the doctor? back in the UK in 2002

2. ...went to the dentist? same as above when a lump of my tooth fell off

3. ...filled your gas tank? never had one of my own

4. ...got enough sleep? what, real, non-alcoholic natural sleep? No idea

5. ...backed up your computer? hmm, the whole thing? heaven knows, mba stuff - last weekend

Humiliation

Just had to post about this as saw it on TV last night. Remember the reality/humiliation gameshow that was 'Endurance' that Chris Tarrant used to show clips of all those years ago?

Now we have a new variety, a sort of reality tv auction. Silly punters with a little too much money go into a studio and bid for items live on camera. Then once they have 'won' the auction, they find out the real price. Marvellous!

Last night a very silly couple, wearing something I'm sure they bought in Roppongi Hills at the weekend, bought a pretty horrible looking afternoon tea/dinner service for 1,300,000 yen and then were somewhat aghast to find the true cost was about 400,000!

My how they chuckled and put a brave face on the fact they had paid three times the price. Ho ho ho went the studio audience. 'Oh no' went the watching gaijin, ' are they really this silly...?' Oh yes.

If you have a beef about something...

In a follow up to the collapse of the gyudon empire that was Yoshinoiya, this little gem from last weeks' papers. A lorry driver wandered into a roadside Yoshinoiya around 9am and, as a livener, ordered a couple of bottles of Asahi beer and, a little later, a bowl of gyudon. After quickly downing his beer he was told, very politely, that the Yoshinoiya would be unable to provide the gyudon as they had no beef left. The chap flew into a rage and started shouting at the staff 'what sort of place do you call this?' etc. Another customer, obviously a bit more clued up, told the chap to sit down and stop causing a ruckus, at which point the driver attacked him and, just for good measure, the person sitting next to him as well! On explaining himself to the impressively efficient police, who turned up on the same day, he said he was unaware of the whole US beef/BSE issue!

So if anyone tells you that the Japanese are the most educated people on the planet, remember that doesn't all of them.

A new blog

have a wander over to pogetry when you get the chance, made me smile, especially about the things parents said whilst driving...

Out and about

Wednesday was a national holiday last week, Constitution Day or something, so all had the day off. I decided to take thursday and friday off as well to give me a bit of holiday and to do some serious study. In the end I did a bit of study for the mba, a lot of study of the grape and went out for a couple of day trips with the Guru, something we haven't done for a while. First up was...

Yokohama

Which is a jolly nice place and to be honest I would prefer to live there rather than Tokyo, or Kawaguchi, but have never had the opportunity. Anyway we visited a place called Daska (lit. 'big world' (?)). This is the kind of recreation thing that the Japanese love. It is based on a Chinese trading enclave and features period Chinese costumes, artifacts and, most importantly I guess, lots of restaurants selling small, over priced portions of Chinese food. The best thing about this recreation is that the powers that be decided that the best place for an artificial chinatown would be slap bang in the middle of the real Chinatown.

No really, and here is this week's point (I have them sometimes), the Japanese, in my humble opinion, don't like things they can't control and so, at the first opportunity, try to remake an idea they like but in a way they can control. Thus they love the idea of Chinatown, especially the food and the cheap goods (2 level bamboo steamer plus metal boiling pot for 3000yen - bargain) but they don't like the fact that it isn't Japanese and therefore aren't in control of it, so they make their own version right next to the original.

Another example to consider is the Seagaia resort in Miyazaki, Kyushu. A huge indoor, artificial beach was built, complete with wave pools, real sand and one of largest retractable roofs (at the time) so if the weather was nice, which is most of the time, the visitors could sunbathe on the artificial beach but with real sun. Seagaia was built, as you have probably guessed, right on a perfectly nice and respectable beach (in the picure in the link, it is the stadium looking thing above the tall hotel building). The problem with it was that it was miles from anywhere so no-one went there and it is slowly going out of business. Ah-ha, you may say, proves that they aren't really interested in these things then are they? But if that is true, where did the billions in planning, funding and contruction come from? Someone with an awful lot of influence thought it was a good idea.

So why have a dodgy, uncontrollable real beach, prone to weather and bad things like that when you can have a purpose built beach that a little man with a computer has complete control over? Same with Chinatown. Why go to the real thing, where people speak funny, you may get ripped off and the back streets are dirty, smelly and full of bustle when you can go to Daska where everything is clean and tidy and safe? A no-brainer, I think, to your average Japanese.

I think this is also manifest in things like bonsai and Japanese gardens, where control of form and nature is more important to aesthetic beauty than the wild lines of real nature.

So anyway we went to this Daska place and were quite disappointed, so went out to the real Chinatown and wandered around for a while, bought the steamer and a few other things and then wandered back to the bay area. The walk along the bayside is most pleasant indeed, through a park and then into the old warehouse district, which has now been renovated into a shopping and eating centre. (To get to Chinatown in the first place we used the new subway. Chinatown is a really inconvenient 15 minute walk from the bay, so what better way to connect it than spend billions on a six minute subway extension? On its opening day the new subway drew in half a million punters! Roppongi hills (more of which later) only had 330,000 visitors on its opening day, and it is a huge purpose built shopping an eating heaven in the middle of Tokyo. Japanese must love their trains.)

The warehouse area is a really well done, lots of little shops and restaurants to wander through, and original iron girders with 'Middlesbrough' stamped on them, which pleased me no end. The only downside to the place is that there are large open spaces between the old warehouses which the planners have filled with nothing, so we have wide expanses of pattened concrete. On a sunny February afternoon this was no problem, but come August it will be like an oven. A few trees would not go amiss, to break up the expanses and provide a bit of cover, but trees feature rarely in Japanese architecture, which is a shame as when they do appear, they always look exceptionally fine.

That was Thursday, on Saturday we went to...

Ikebukuro

But the only reason we went here was that Saturday was the opening day of 'The Return of the King' which we just had to go and watch - good valentines movie, you see. We queued for 2 hours and still weren't at the front, but we did get good seats and personally I thought it was a cracking 3 hour flick with a really bad last 30 minutes or so. Completely butchered the ending, the Shire was even lightly scrubbed, let alone scoured, which seemed to betray one of Tolkien's most important themes. Having said that the film was long enough so I'm not sure an extra 20 minutes would have been acceptable. Anyway, battle of the pelennor was awesome, the Frodo/Sam bit reasonably well done (except when Frodo tells Sam to bugger off, where was that from?) and Gollum stole every scene he was in. So I think a 7 out of 10 for this film and a 9 out of 10 for the series as a whole.

Which only leaves Sunday, which was...

Roppongi and Roppongi Hills

Today was our third wedding anniversary so we wandered into Roppongi for a pleasant lunch and chance to have a nose around Roppongi Hills, the new shopping place mentioned earlier. We found a nice little French restaurant in an out of the way back street that was most pleasant and even looked a little authentic - really old rather than pretend old, and served up a decent bit of scran with a pleasant drop of plonk too boot. Afterwards we had a short walk around the streets of Nishi Azabu, which is dripping in cash and full of lovely looking little bars and eateries, a place I could live if I won the lottery, twice.

Onto Roppongi Hills. This is a huge place, full of offices, hotels, residences, shops and food places. It was built by a chap named Mori who has a vision to encourage real people to live and work in the centre of town. A noble venture as Tokyo has a dearth of people actually living in its middle. So he has created this place with 4 enormous tower block right in the beating heart of the metropolis. Shame that rents start from about 1.5 million yen per month, but it is a nice idea (and therein is the reason no-one lives in the centre of Tokyo, too damn expensive. Anyone with a bit of sense can see this, so forward thinking boroughs try real experiements, like giving free municipal health care to kids so as to encourage families. Mr Mori obviously doesn't live in the real world of real salaries, silly bugger).

The other problem is that the whole place just feels artificial. Walking around with the Guru we saw plenty of places to buy a new handbag, pair of shoes, horrible item of clothing that only the filthy rich would wear, but nowhere to buy a book, or a chair, or a lettuce. It is a place you can visit, but as a place to live, I don't think so - and nor did the Guru. So, great date place, bit of window shopping, go to the Virgin cinema to watch the latest flick and then visit one of the many nice restaurants, but I think Mr Mori's vision is not going to be fulfilled here.

Again it sort of ties in with this week's point - Roppongi Hills is an artificial town, rather than going to Ginza or Shinjuku, where you have to walk to so many different places to shop, eat, watch, consume, come to RH where you can do it all under one roof. Much easier, much more convenient and much more under control.

Meaty topics

If you thought the BSE scare in the US was a domestic issue, you'd be right, except that it is a serious domestic issue for the Japanese.

Japan is the biggest export market for US beef in the world. Lots of millions of tons of the stuff comes here every year, a lot of it to top off a bowl of gyudon from Yoshinoiya (not one bowl, obviously, as that wuld have to be a very big bowl. Lots of small ones seems much more likely). Gyudon is a mixture of very thinly sliced beef, fried with onions and a special sauce served on top of rice (the suffix ~don means 'over rice, such as Tempura-don, Katsu-don and Maguro-don, but not Udon, strangely, which are noodles - different kanji I expect). Anyway, the point is that as soon as BSE was found in an american cow, all imports were stopped immediately, with little chance of a swift return.

So why not use Japanese beef? Oh no, far too good to be wasted on gyudon, which is the equivalent of student food. And to be fair, it would seem a bit of a waste to use Kobe beef in such a way, seeing as it can cost 50 quid per 100g. But this is also another example of the Japanese government basically screwing their own people, as the govt. here is really into protectionism for agriculture, so the price of Japanese beef (and rice, and veg, and everything else) is kept artificially high, ostensibly to keep up the quality, but, as everyone knows, to keep the votes for the LDP rolling in from the countryside - can't have votes being los...sorry, farmers going out of business now can we...?

So what about Aussie beef, also very popular in Japan (and dirt cheap and shit (i.e. non Japanese) quality like US beef)? Well now squire, you see, your Aussie beef, right, well, it doesn't really taste the same, does it...? Not like the crap we usually mix with an overpowering sauce and so can't tell the difference and eat with our rice. Or words to that effect. So poor old Yoshinoiya, the biggest chain of gyudon restaurants in the land, has had to change all its menus and come up with some alternatives to its biggest seller. Poor them I say.

Last Friday's Angst

Strange thing angst. As reported last week, I had issues on the way home. This week, even though I got drunk, I didn't. Strange thing was that the night of angst came after a good week at work and a pleasant evening out, drinking and laughing. Friday just gone, I had a shitty week at work, went out in the evening, watched a bit of a boring game of cricket which Australia won and then carried on drinking and discussing the unpleasant things about the company before heading home (though to be fair we did chat about pleasant things as well and the evening was enjoyable). This time I wandered along the riverbank - being careful not to sit down - but everything was right with the world and I was in a much happier frame of mind. Must be the modern novel.

And talking of novels...

Actually not talking about novels at all, that was just a clunking segue into talking about navels (or belly buttons, if you prefer). This is a bit of research into belly buttons and their fluff (or lint, as some may call it). Now I get belly button fluff, and it is of a certain colour, no matter what colour clothes I wear. Minako, bless her heart, thinks this to be odd and doesn't believe me when I saw that not only do most males get it, but it is usually the same colour as mine. Heaven only knows how she could doubt me, but she does.

So, dear readers, I would be most grateful if, as a male, you could use the comments section to state whether firstly you do, or don't, collect fluff in your navel and, if you do, what hue it may be. Anonymity may well be respected

What does it all mean?

Had a real moment of existential angst on Friday night. Well, I had to, I was drunk.

Being drunk I questioned the meaning of existence, analysed the motivation of desires, addressed the refutation of the immortal soul and composed a letter to my unborn children concerning free will and logical positivism.

To be honest I came up with some pretty startling conclusions that shook the very bedrock of accepted philosophical thought and fused western rationalism with eastern mysticism to create a whole and radically new way of thinking and viewing the world.

I also sat in a puddle on the riverbank, which I grant you isn't quite in the same league and led to a frozen arse, but you can't have everything in moments of blinding insight.

Blinding insight also falls down in the face of rigour and looking back on what I can remember of my thoughts, I think I may have left something out. Or lots of things, who knows. Come to think of it, I don't actually know what logical positivism is, but it sounded like a very good thing to write to one's unborn children at the time and I came up with a very convincing argument for it (or perhaps against it).

But I did get to watch the moonset over the river, which was a first, and most beautiful it was to. Indeed it was better than a lot of the sunsets we get (and we get them almost everyday) so it was worth it for that at any rate. I think the moment of angst was rooted in reading Atomised by David Hollebecq, which is resolutely depressing. I don't know why I bother to read 'modern' novels as everytime I do they seem to depress me. Maybe it is just me. Maybe I'm reading the wrong books. But maybe I'm right and for a modern author to write about the state of the human pysche they have to look on it in the most negative way their storyline will allow them (i.e. Atomised - one bloke had a bad childhood, shags lots of women but can't love them, finds one he can love and she commits suicide; his half brother doesn't shag women at all, can't find anyone to love until he meets his childhood sweetheart, they are just about to try and be happy when she dies of cancer. First guy ends up in an asylum, half brother creates genetically engineered sexless 'humans' with no passions who inherit the earth. Laugh a minute, I think not.) Maybe I should get out more...

As you can guess, I'm scratching around a bit here for things to write. But at least we can talk about the...

Plants

Seem to be in reasonable fettle. A couple of weeks ago I blitzed the basil with some kind of chemical bug killer thing as the little white buggers were doing much damage and causing much angst. It seemed to work for a while, but I think little white buugers may be back with a vengeance so more Agent Orange may be called for.

But, the basil is flowering! I was most surprised by this at first as it didn't occur to me at all that basil should flower (but of course it should, it is a plant, I know that now). There seems to be quite a spread of little blossoms all over the basil patch so I am quite hopeful that things may continue to improve.

Today I hacked back the Olive tree a bit, just to see what happens. I have tried a little half-heartedly in the past and, to be honest, I haven't noticed a lot of change, so this time all the budding shoots were hacked back to the base to see what happens. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Lastly, back in Novembr I think, the Guru said she wanted flowers in spring, so tulips were duly bought. Just goes to show how much the Dutch know (or maybe the Japanese, depends where they're from I guess) as the tulips were sold under the name of 'Union Jack' but the picture was of a mainly white flower but with 4 red stripes going up the petals! Do these people know nothing?

Anyway the rosemary is still growing, as is the lavender. Soon I shall be sowing thyme and sage to add to the collection.

Hutton

Or not really Hutton, but the idea. I think that it is impossible for an inquiry such as the Hutton one to happen in Japan. I suspect that the mechanisms for calling the national braodcaster and the government to account do not exist in this country. So whilst a great many people seem to bemoaning the fact that the inquiry went too far criticising the BBC, or not far enough with the government, perhaps those people should reflect on the fact that it can happen at all.