Hemingway had it right
'I am drunk,' Pablo said with dignity. 'To drink is nothing. It is to be drunk that is important. Estoy muy borracho.'
Sunday, 4 July 2004
Sunday, 27 June 2004
Wednesday, 23 June 2004
So apologies for the delay, but when there's magic on tv, well, you've got to watch really haven't you. No? OK, I have to watch, which seems eminently fair to me.
Global Warming
Time was, so I'm reliably informed, when typhoons were an Autumn phenomenom. Certainly when I came to Japan first they seemed to congregate in September and October as a sort of 'Summer-heat-is-over' signal that meant body odour was no longer going to be such a problem for every westerner in Japan.
But it is a measure of how buggered up the weather patterns have become by global warming as last weekend we had typhoon number 6 pass by, and my what a biggy it was too! Usually typhoons seem to hug the coastline, moving up from Taiwan and Okinawa and, once they get to the bottom of Kyushu, either head left towards Korea or veer right along the coast of Honshu, occasionally wandering up past Tokyo but more often that not moving back out to sea. Maybe there is a meterological reason for this, maybe not, but this bugger moved slightly to the right of Kyushu and then just kept going, passing right over Shikoku and Honshu and, in the process, doing its worst.
If you've never been in a typhoon, they are pretty wicked things (or a hurricane, for that matter. By the by, know the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon? Guesses/answers in the comments section please). They start with a stiffening of the breeze about a day before they are going to hit. This can be quite pleasant as they sometimes push cooler air in front, so you get a nice cool breeze, hence everyone quite likes them in Autumn. Then the wind starts to really pick up, and clouds start to form and the air gets wetter. First a few spots of rain, then a steady fall, but not too heavy. Then, an hour or two before it hits, things begin to pick up. The rain gets heavier and the wind really starts to howl over the balcony and through the telegraph wires. When it hits proper it really is time to batten down the hatches. The rain is coming down at 30-40 cms per hour and wind is whistling past at 160kms, heady stuff and hot and sticky too boot. No walking in that, and no surfing, though some always try and a chap died on Sunday off Shikoku trying that very thing (surfing, not walking). All the trains stop running, all the streets are empty, ghost town stuff and the wind howls.
And then it stops.
Absolutely and completely.
Calm in the eye of the storm? You betcha, and it is that which is the strangest thing. No wind, no rain, just stillness and silence after all that noise and fury. And you know it is only for a short time and so its the waiting for the restart that gets you. Because it all starts again with no warning at all, suddenly the wind is howling again and the rain driving horizontally into the buildings and you have to sit it out for another hour or two to wait for things to die down.
When this happens in the Autumn the air after is often beautifully cool, clear and soft, like it has been freshly washed and laundered, which it kind of has, and so the world looks a little brighter and cleaner, everything seems a little sharper and in focus. But with number 6 being at the start of summer it brought with it loads of moist warm air from the south pacific, meaning that on Tuesday the temperatures in Tokyo hit 33 degrees and 37 in Saitama - these are the temperatures we usually see in the dog days of August and are far from pleasant. Last year, in a cooler than usual summer the temp in Tokyo never got above 32, so to hit 33 in June doesn't bode well for a pleasant summer (though aircon manufacturers and brewers have big smiles right now).
As with anything to do with nature in Japan, this is of course dangerous (think earthquakes, volcanoes and mud slides - dangerous country...). 4 people, I think, died because of this typhoon, and all of our new teachers who arrived on Monday were delayed as flights were held, shinkansens cancelled and roads made impassable, all from a bit of rain. Powerful stuff, I guess.
Luckily I got all the plants inside and so all were protected from the ravages of nature, just in case you were worried. Oh, and I'm not sure I've mentioned it but we have some new additions, now we have mint, growing as if its life depended on it, little chilli plants which seem hale and hearty (though no chillis yet) and shiso, or Japanese basil, which I am rapidly discovering doesn't like too much water - god knows how it survives June in this country...
Global Warming
Time was, so I'm reliably informed, when typhoons were an Autumn phenomenom. Certainly when I came to Japan first they seemed to congregate in September and October as a sort of 'Summer-heat-is-over' signal that meant body odour was no longer going to be such a problem for every westerner in Japan.
But it is a measure of how buggered up the weather patterns have become by global warming as last weekend we had typhoon number 6 pass by, and my what a biggy it was too! Usually typhoons seem to hug the coastline, moving up from Taiwan and Okinawa and, once they get to the bottom of Kyushu, either head left towards Korea or veer right along the coast of Honshu, occasionally wandering up past Tokyo but more often that not moving back out to sea. Maybe there is a meterological reason for this, maybe not, but this bugger moved slightly to the right of Kyushu and then just kept going, passing right over Shikoku and Honshu and, in the process, doing its worst.
If you've never been in a typhoon, they are pretty wicked things (or a hurricane, for that matter. By the by, know the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon? Guesses/answers in the comments section please). They start with a stiffening of the breeze about a day before they are going to hit. This can be quite pleasant as they sometimes push cooler air in front, so you get a nice cool breeze, hence everyone quite likes them in Autumn. Then the wind starts to really pick up, and clouds start to form and the air gets wetter. First a few spots of rain, then a steady fall, but not too heavy. Then, an hour or two before it hits, things begin to pick up. The rain gets heavier and the wind really starts to howl over the balcony and through the telegraph wires. When it hits proper it really is time to batten down the hatches. The rain is coming down at 30-40 cms per hour and wind is whistling past at 160kms, heady stuff and hot and sticky too boot. No walking in that, and no surfing, though some always try and a chap died on Sunday off Shikoku trying that very thing (surfing, not walking). All the trains stop running, all the streets are empty, ghost town stuff and the wind howls.
And then it stops.
Absolutely and completely.
Calm in the eye of the storm? You betcha, and it is that which is the strangest thing. No wind, no rain, just stillness and silence after all that noise and fury. And you know it is only for a short time and so its the waiting for the restart that gets you. Because it all starts again with no warning at all, suddenly the wind is howling again and the rain driving horizontally into the buildings and you have to sit it out for another hour or two to wait for things to die down.
When this happens in the Autumn the air after is often beautifully cool, clear and soft, like it has been freshly washed and laundered, which it kind of has, and so the world looks a little brighter and cleaner, everything seems a little sharper and in focus. But with number 6 being at the start of summer it brought with it loads of moist warm air from the south pacific, meaning that on Tuesday the temperatures in Tokyo hit 33 degrees and 37 in Saitama - these are the temperatures we usually see in the dog days of August and are far from pleasant. Last year, in a cooler than usual summer the temp in Tokyo never got above 32, so to hit 33 in June doesn't bode well for a pleasant summer (though aircon manufacturers and brewers have big smiles right now).
As with anything to do with nature in Japan, this is of course dangerous (think earthquakes, volcanoes and mud slides - dangerous country...). 4 people, I think, died because of this typhoon, and all of our new teachers who arrived on Monday were delayed as flights were held, shinkansens cancelled and roads made impassable, all from a bit of rain. Powerful stuff, I guess.
Luckily I got all the plants inside and so all were protected from the ravages of nature, just in case you were worried. Oh, and I'm not sure I've mentioned it but we have some new additions, now we have mint, growing as if its life depended on it, little chilli plants which seem hale and hearty (though no chillis yet) and shiso, or Japanese basil, which I am rapidly discovering doesn't like too much water - god knows how it survives June in this country...
Monday, 21 June 2004
Monday, 14 June 2004
Well thankfully a lot more happened this week, which night make this blog intetesting for a change (don't believe the hype). First up was...
Gareth and Kumiko's Wedding
Gareth is a chum from work, jazz afficionado, wine lover and general all round good sort. On Saturday he and the lovely Kumiko were married. I don't know Kumiko so well, she did use to work with us, in the bit of the company that fleeces students by convincing them that studying in the UK for an inordinate amount of wad is going seriously improve their English ability. Seriously lighten their wallets, more like, but plenty sign up so either the dept is very persuasive, of there are a lot of Japanese students out there who want to splash their cash, have a nice holiday and assuage their guilt by pretending to study...
Seem to have wandered off the point somewhat, apologies.
Anyway now Kumiko has an infinitely more pleasurable job in the wine import business, which means she gets to go on lots of tastings and, in the best business perk I can think of, filch lots of half empty bottles of very passable plonk. Normally her and Gareth knock these back of an evening, but occasionally some of us others do as well, and I have spent a very pleasant evening or two with them in a small wine bar with take-in that the owner doesn't mind as she a good supplier. It also means that they know how to pick a good place for a wedding reception as they start at the wine list and go from there.
But that's getting too far ahead, first up was the ceremony. This was held at Kando Myojin Shrine in the very heart of Tokyo (going to the link, by the way, gives you a lovely picture of the shrine and some excellently bad English written by a Japanese person, enjoy).
Now I, who has been here for quite some time in total, had never been to the actual cremony part of a Japanese wedding before Saturday, so this was an interesting experience. Part one involved G&K sitting in, as it were, state. A reception room was set aside, they sat at the end, all dolled up in Japanese finery, with the families down each side. Mere mortals and friends then tentatively creep in, say "ooh, don't you look nice" and then ushered outside again, quick as possible. Sort of like paying one's respects, I suppose.
At this point I should mention that G had all his family over from the UK, that included parents, brothers, sisters and hangers on, all of whom looked utterly bemused from start to finish. But kept up with everything and certainly seemed to enjoy the day, especially after the wine started flowing.
Anyway, then it was onto the parade. Here we walked from the first room to the shrine proper. This was cool as G&K and the rest of us followed and kind of marching band, consisting of 6 monks playing flutes, shakuhachi (another kind of flute (and interestingly, the crude Japanese word for a blow job, no really)), and other instruments to make for a very traditional atmosphere. Also in the line up was a tsukisoi-nin (or perhaps a kaizoe-nin, the Guru isn't quite sure). This person's very important job is to make sure the K's kimono looked picture perfect - quick note about kimono, usually they are a bugger to wear, but bridal ones are very heavy, have 12 layers, a huge head dress/hat affair, are very restricting and are, basically, a real bugger to wear. So the tsukisoi-nin is there to help, though how much help you are when, with 50 metres to go you stop the procession to adjust the kimono, then the bride starts again and, with 48 metres to go the procession is stopped and kimono adjusted again and then the proces.... It's a moot point, anyway. Anyway the pair did look smashing and the tsukisoi-nin did prove amusing for the gaijin there.
Once in the shrine we had the ceremony, which was very traditional and Japanese. We had some chanting, where the chief priest chap tried his best to do each, admittedly long, stanza in one breath but really struggled on some of them. We had shaking of tree branches to drive out evil spirits. We had the shaking of rattles, to scare away any rattle snakes that had escaped from the zoo, presumably. And G&K got sake. In a Japanese wedding there is no exchange of rings, rather the betrothed swap alcoholic beverages early in the morning, which seems a much simpler, less expensive and, I think, apt, way to celebrate marriage. Start as you mean to go on, kind of thing.
One thing that did make me smile was the collection box. At Shinto shrines the average punter walks up to the barrier, throws some coins into the collection box, has a pray and then moves on (which is perhaps why it is still so popular, none of that droning on for hours on a Sunday morning nonsense). Whilst the ceremony was going on, this could still happen as the punters stand outside as normal and lob in their coins. What made me smile was that the sound of the coins falling sounded exactly like an electricity meter. So when the coin dropping coincided with the end of a chant, it was remarkably like paying to get the old chap started again. This put a smile on my face, though no-one noticed as most of the assembled were, by this stage, dabbing at tears.
Then it was outside for the group photo. At this time we had the attention of not only the tsukisoi-nin, but also the photographer and the photographer's mate. This meant an awful lot of fucking about to get everything 'just' so. It came to something when one of them moved Gareth's brother, who is in a wheelchair, from one point to exactly the same point but, as he was in the chair, this included no small amount of too-ing and, wait for it....fro-ing into the bargain as well.
After all that you may think I am citical of the whole shebang. Not so. It was an excellent thing to be asked and, as it was my first, it was an interesting experience. The ceremony itself was nice and quick, about 30 minutes, long enough to enjoy the differences but not too long to get bored. So, a very pleasant time was had by all.
Then we went off to get drunk.
This was much more in the 'western' style. G&K changed out of their kimono clobber, much to their relief I'm sure, and we all decamped to a Californian restaurant not 15 minutes away. I got to sit next to Mark, Gareth's older brother who seemed pretty remarkable to me as he is disabled but has his own house, lives alone and works in IT for Prudenial and was a nice bloke too boot.
So we all chatted, we drank some extremely agreeable Californian red wine (Californian, never really tried it as has always suspected it, don't know why as usually new world wines are where I go. Anyway, I will certainly be going back to California when I get the chance) and we ate some rather pleasant tucker - though not G&K, who were too busy talking to everyone and so weren't able to eat, so ended up eating in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to the nijikai (second party) venue.
And we got speeches, we got gifts (in Japan you give money to the newlyweds and they give you a present in return - strange custom that)and then we got to go to the nijikai. And from here the rest of the evening gets hazy. There is lots of moving, you see, in a Japanese wedding. Ceremony, then reception, then second party, then third party, then fourth party, then gutter, all in different places with a gradually diminishing list of attendees. I made it to the end of the third party before I ungracefully bowed out - at least it wasn't disgracefully... well, I haven't heard anything yet, but then I took a day off today... I did manage to persuade the bar in question to let me keep the 3/4's of a bottle of red that I had just started, and so I wended my way home, luckily with enough presence of mind not to swig from the bottle as I stumbled around on the wrong trains. And I manged to get home with dignity intact and with all my valuables in place. Yes, I was surprised as well.
So, congrats to Gareth and Kumiko, thanks for a great party wedding day combo. Good luck and all that.
What else...?
Well, this weekend was also Le Mans...
...which I was able to listen to at length via the internet and even on TV. Now I don't want to blow the Arakawa trumpet too loudly, but after last year's diatribe on these very pages about the shocking quality of Le Mans coverage on TV, this year we got really good coverage. OK, it was on ESPNi, which I luckily have and heve never watched, but who's to complain? We got about 6 hours of live feed, of which I got to see about 3 hours of, and jolly exciting it was too. About 1 hour to go, that's 15 laps, with Johnny Herbert about 45 seconds down in second but lapping 3 seconds a lap quicker that the first placed car. Can he do it? No, in the end, but boy did he try. Cracking stuff. Even got to talk to various mebers of the b-team, who were there this year - they did mange to do their usual trick of waking me up at 6am, mainly as I was dead to the world with the wedding party hangover. And there was...
Rugby
Best not talk about that. And the...
Football
can be put into the same bracket.
But, strange thing. I came home from the wedding party, much the worse for wear but was able to program the video to record the rugby on sky, a difficult process that involves moving wires, which was being repeated at 5am as I had missed it earlier. But when I was sober I set the video to record the football, being shown live at 4am, and completely mucked it up and recorded the wrong channel. This then proves that video timing recorder things are only successfully operable by young children and adults who have gained mental acuity on a par with young children through the judicious application of alcohol. They should put that in the manual.
Gareth and Kumiko's Wedding
Gareth is a chum from work, jazz afficionado, wine lover and general all round good sort. On Saturday he and the lovely Kumiko were married. I don't know Kumiko so well, she did use to work with us, in the bit of the company that fleeces students by convincing them that studying in the UK for an inordinate amount of wad is going seriously improve their English ability. Seriously lighten their wallets, more like, but plenty sign up so either the dept is very persuasive, of there are a lot of Japanese students out there who want to splash their cash, have a nice holiday and assuage their guilt by pretending to study...
Seem to have wandered off the point somewhat, apologies.
Anyway now Kumiko has an infinitely more pleasurable job in the wine import business, which means she gets to go on lots of tastings and, in the best business perk I can think of, filch lots of half empty bottles of very passable plonk. Normally her and Gareth knock these back of an evening, but occasionally some of us others do as well, and I have spent a very pleasant evening or two with them in a small wine bar with take-in that the owner doesn't mind as she a good supplier. It also means that they know how to pick a good place for a wedding reception as they start at the wine list and go from there.
But that's getting too far ahead, first up was the ceremony. This was held at Kando Myojin Shrine in the very heart of Tokyo (going to the link, by the way, gives you a lovely picture of the shrine and some excellently bad English written by a Japanese person, enjoy).
Now I, who has been here for quite some time in total, had never been to the actual cremony part of a Japanese wedding before Saturday, so this was an interesting experience. Part one involved G&K sitting in, as it were, state. A reception room was set aside, they sat at the end, all dolled up in Japanese finery, with the families down each side. Mere mortals and friends then tentatively creep in, say "ooh, don't you look nice" and then ushered outside again, quick as possible. Sort of like paying one's respects, I suppose.
At this point I should mention that G had all his family over from the UK, that included parents, brothers, sisters and hangers on, all of whom looked utterly bemused from start to finish. But kept up with everything and certainly seemed to enjoy the day, especially after the wine started flowing.
Anyway, then it was onto the parade. Here we walked from the first room to the shrine proper. This was cool as G&K and the rest of us followed and kind of marching band, consisting of 6 monks playing flutes, shakuhachi (another kind of flute (and interestingly, the crude Japanese word for a blow job, no really)), and other instruments to make for a very traditional atmosphere. Also in the line up was a tsukisoi-nin (or perhaps a kaizoe-nin, the Guru isn't quite sure). This person's very important job is to make sure the K's kimono looked picture perfect - quick note about kimono, usually they are a bugger to wear, but bridal ones are very heavy, have 12 layers, a huge head dress/hat affair, are very restricting and are, basically, a real bugger to wear. So the tsukisoi-nin is there to help, though how much help you are when, with 50 metres to go you stop the procession to adjust the kimono, then the bride starts again and, with 48 metres to go the procession is stopped and kimono adjusted again and then the proces.... It's a moot point, anyway. Anyway the pair did look smashing and the tsukisoi-nin did prove amusing for the gaijin there.
Once in the shrine we had the ceremony, which was very traditional and Japanese. We had some chanting, where the chief priest chap tried his best to do each, admittedly long, stanza in one breath but really struggled on some of them. We had shaking of tree branches to drive out evil spirits. We had the shaking of rattles, to scare away any rattle snakes that had escaped from the zoo, presumably. And G&K got sake. In a Japanese wedding there is no exchange of rings, rather the betrothed swap alcoholic beverages early in the morning, which seems a much simpler, less expensive and, I think, apt, way to celebrate marriage. Start as you mean to go on, kind of thing.
One thing that did make me smile was the collection box. At Shinto shrines the average punter walks up to the barrier, throws some coins into the collection box, has a pray and then moves on (which is perhaps why it is still so popular, none of that droning on for hours on a Sunday morning nonsense). Whilst the ceremony was going on, this could still happen as the punters stand outside as normal and lob in their coins. What made me smile was that the sound of the coins falling sounded exactly like an electricity meter. So when the coin dropping coincided with the end of a chant, it was remarkably like paying to get the old chap started again. This put a smile on my face, though no-one noticed as most of the assembled were, by this stage, dabbing at tears.
Then it was outside for the group photo. At this time we had the attention of not only the tsukisoi-nin, but also the photographer and the photographer's mate. This meant an awful lot of fucking about to get everything 'just' so. It came to something when one of them moved Gareth's brother, who is in a wheelchair, from one point to exactly the same point but, as he was in the chair, this included no small amount of too-ing and, wait for it....fro-ing into the bargain as well.
After all that you may think I am citical of the whole shebang. Not so. It was an excellent thing to be asked and, as it was my first, it was an interesting experience. The ceremony itself was nice and quick, about 30 minutes, long enough to enjoy the differences but not too long to get bored. So, a very pleasant time was had by all.
Then we went off to get drunk.
This was much more in the 'western' style. G&K changed out of their kimono clobber, much to their relief I'm sure, and we all decamped to a Californian restaurant not 15 minutes away. I got to sit next to Mark, Gareth's older brother who seemed pretty remarkable to me as he is disabled but has his own house, lives alone and works in IT for Prudenial and was a nice bloke too boot.
So we all chatted, we drank some extremely agreeable Californian red wine (Californian, never really tried it as has always suspected it, don't know why as usually new world wines are where I go. Anyway, I will certainly be going back to California when I get the chance) and we ate some rather pleasant tucker - though not G&K, who were too busy talking to everyone and so weren't able to eat, so ended up eating in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to the nijikai (second party) venue.
And we got speeches, we got gifts (in Japan you give money to the newlyweds and they give you a present in return - strange custom that)and then we got to go to the nijikai. And from here the rest of the evening gets hazy. There is lots of moving, you see, in a Japanese wedding. Ceremony, then reception, then second party, then third party, then fourth party, then gutter, all in different places with a gradually diminishing list of attendees. I made it to the end of the third party before I ungracefully bowed out - at least it wasn't disgracefully... well, I haven't heard anything yet, but then I took a day off today... I did manage to persuade the bar in question to let me keep the 3/4's of a bottle of red that I had just started, and so I wended my way home, luckily with enough presence of mind not to swig from the bottle as I stumbled around on the wrong trains. And I manged to get home with dignity intact and with all my valuables in place. Yes, I was surprised as well.
So, congrats to Gareth and Kumiko, thanks for a great party wedding day combo. Good luck and all that.
What else...?
Well, this weekend was also Le Mans...
...which I was able to listen to at length via the internet and even on TV. Now I don't want to blow the Arakawa trumpet too loudly, but after last year's diatribe on these very pages about the shocking quality of Le Mans coverage on TV, this year we got really good coverage. OK, it was on ESPNi, which I luckily have and heve never watched, but who's to complain? We got about 6 hours of live feed, of which I got to see about 3 hours of, and jolly exciting it was too. About 1 hour to go, that's 15 laps, with Johnny Herbert about 45 seconds down in second but lapping 3 seconds a lap quicker that the first placed car. Can he do it? No, in the end, but boy did he try. Cracking stuff. Even got to talk to various mebers of the b-team, who were there this year - they did mange to do their usual trick of waking me up at 6am, mainly as I was dead to the world with the wedding party hangover. And there was...
Rugby
Best not talk about that. And the...
Football
can be put into the same bracket.
But, strange thing. I came home from the wedding party, much the worse for wear but was able to program the video to record the rugby on sky, a difficult process that involves moving wires, which was being repeated at 5am as I had missed it earlier. But when I was sober I set the video to record the football, being shown live at 4am, and completely mucked it up and recorded the wrong channel. This then proves that video timing recorder things are only successfully operable by young children and adults who have gained mental acuity on a par with young children through the judicious application of alcohol. They should put that in the manual.
Monday, 7 June 2004
This week in Japan...
Has been quite quiet, to be honest with you all. The pension scandal has rumbled on. As you may remember I wrote sometime ago about how lots of dodgy old politicians had been caught not paying their pension premiums whilst at the same time telling everyone else that they should. Well, now some resolution has been passed about it. But here's the thing, I have been reading the paper trying to find out what this resolution says, mainly so I could write about it here, but, in all the column inches, I couldn't actually get to the bottom of what it was all about. Some of the dodgy old politicians didn't like it, I think from Minshuto the main opposition party, so they performed an 'ox walk' which is where they walk very slowly up to the voting place in an attempt to delay, and then stop, I guess, the vote.
It didn't work, of course. But it did mean that a lot of old politicians, who should know better, got to act in a very silly manner, ham it up in front of the camera and generally pretend to be 4 yr olds. And in this sense, I suppose, they are no different from any other politicians around the world.
But anyway I still don't know what the bill passed was all about, which is probably bad news for me as I have a sneaking suspicion it was something important...
Tsuyo
Japanese are very proud of their seasons. There are four of them, you see. Now everyone not Japanese who is reading his will be very surprised at this because much unbeknownst to you, you don't have four seasons in your country, only Japan has four seasons and the Japanese are very proud of it. (They seem to forget that Vivaldi, the distinctly non Japanese Italian composer wrote a piece of music called the Four Season, but that is by the by of course). Anyway, the Japanese four seasons are called spring, summer, autumn and winter. It doesn't matter what seasons in your country are called and it doesn't matter how many of them there are. Japan is unique in that it has these four seasons, each of which has its own distinct weather patterns.
They're a weird lot, these Japanese.
Anyway, you can easily confuse them by asking what season it is now. They will say 'tsuyo', which translates into English as 'rainy season' and lasts from mid-June to early July. It's like trying to teach Baldrick to count:
'So that's spring, tsuyo, summer, autumn and winters - 1,2,3,4,5'
'Oh no, Japan has 4 seasons'
'What'
'And that one'
'And if I add tsuyo to these 4, what does that make?
'A very crowded calender, my lord'
Has been quite quiet, to be honest with you all. The pension scandal has rumbled on. As you may remember I wrote sometime ago about how lots of dodgy old politicians had been caught not paying their pension premiums whilst at the same time telling everyone else that they should. Well, now some resolution has been passed about it. But here's the thing, I have been reading the paper trying to find out what this resolution says, mainly so I could write about it here, but, in all the column inches, I couldn't actually get to the bottom of what it was all about. Some of the dodgy old politicians didn't like it, I think from Minshuto the main opposition party, so they performed an 'ox walk' which is where they walk very slowly up to the voting place in an attempt to delay, and then stop, I guess, the vote.
It didn't work, of course. But it did mean that a lot of old politicians, who should know better, got to act in a very silly manner, ham it up in front of the camera and generally pretend to be 4 yr olds. And in this sense, I suppose, they are no different from any other politicians around the world.
But anyway I still don't know what the bill passed was all about, which is probably bad news for me as I have a sneaking suspicion it was something important...
Tsuyo
Japanese are very proud of their seasons. There are four of them, you see. Now everyone not Japanese who is reading his will be very surprised at this because much unbeknownst to you, you don't have four seasons in your country, only Japan has four seasons and the Japanese are very proud of it. (They seem to forget that Vivaldi, the distinctly non Japanese Italian composer wrote a piece of music called the Four Season, but that is by the by of course). Anyway, the Japanese four seasons are called spring, summer, autumn and winter. It doesn't matter what seasons in your country are called and it doesn't matter how many of them there are. Japan is unique in that it has these four seasons, each of which has its own distinct weather patterns.
They're a weird lot, these Japanese.
Anyway, you can easily confuse them by asking what season it is now. They will say 'tsuyo', which translates into English as 'rainy season' and lasts from mid-June to early July. It's like trying to teach Baldrick to count:
'So that's spring, tsuyo, summer, autumn and winters - 1,2,3,4,5'
'Oh no, Japan has 4 seasons'
'What'
'And that one'
'And if I add tsuyo to these 4, what does that make?
'A very crowded calender, my lord'
Monday, 31 May 2004
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Arakawa Riverviiieeew
Happy birthday to you!
Gosh how time flies. Yes, that's right, on 31st May 2003 Arakawa Riverview was born and my how it has grown into the strapping blog you see before you.
But that's all old history. Who cares about the last year we'd better look forward to the next 12 months, starting here...
The war on Terror...
Has come to Kawaguchi! No really.
Now Japan isn't really much good at wars anymore. As has been discussed before, the ropey old Japanese constitution is a bit vague on the whole war stance and as such, Japan has strenuously avoided all of that kind of nonsense for nigh on 50 years. And as you can also hopefully remember, the SDF is in Iraq right now in a foreign country deployment for the first time since ww2. Luckily they haven't been attacked by anyone yet and so haven't had to run away (sorry, strategically re-deploy to a rearward location)
But now the war on Terror has come to Japan, perhaps because of this very deployment. And it hasn't just to to Japan, it is here, right under the very nose of Arakawa Riverview - again no really.
On Wednesday this week a sweep by the for once effective police force, 5 suspected Al-Qaida terrorists were arrested, two here in Kawaguchi and one in Toda, which is right next door.
So, what were they arrested for? Was a bomb making factory found? Perhaps trace elements of uranium or plutonium for a 'dirty' nuclear device? Evidence of a plot to hijack taxis and leave them in 'no parking zones' with malice of forethought?
Nothing so exciting, I'm afraid. As usual it was the old standby in Japan, immigration violations (though to be fair, if the US authorities had been looking, a lot of people might not have died). Apparently the 3 arrested round here were all from Bangladesh and had been identified from phone records taken from a Lionel Dumont, a chap arrested in Germany after living in Japan for a year and who, alledgedly, was trying to build up an AlQaida cell here in sunnt Saitama next to the river. However the charges one of them seems to have been arrested on is 'forging official documents in relation to a mobile phone dealership' whilst the rest are the ubiquitous and extremely vague 'suspicion of violating immigration laws'.
Now this information comes from the newspaper and various TV news reports, but it seems to me that there is just a hint of flimsiness about it all. Not that this will bother the authorities, naturally. As a senior Interior Ministry official (might well have) said after the arrests "Suspected but unproven terrorist links? We-ell, if they're foreign it must be true, best arrest them, keep them locked up for as long as we can get away with and then deport them. Just to be safe".
Anyway it is now Monday after the arrests and, as far as I can tell, not a peep have we heard about this since last week. No huge in-depth follow up. No investigative 'how could they have got here' type journalism. Not even a 'yes they were guilty' or a 'no, sorry they weren't'. But what really strikes me as odd is that no one seems to be asking either...
You thought it could only happen in America
But no, here in Japan we are now seeing utterly ridiculous law suits. Again related to the whole SDF in Iraq thing, a citizens' group in Shizuoka prefecture has files a suit against the govt seeking 10,000 yen (that's about 50 quid)compensation on the grounds that the deployment of troops infringes on their rights to a peaceful life. Now even I can see that it is a symbolic thing to bring the govt to task, but surely they could have thought of a better charge than infringing on their right to a peaceful life? Against the ropey old constitution, perhaps, or against an illegal invasion and occupation of a soverign state, but infringing on a peaceful life? Oh please.
And finally, sorry to report...
No new games or stories about strange Tokyo wildlife to report this week, I'm afraid. Must try harder.
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Arakawa Riverviiieeew
Happy birthday to you!
Gosh how time flies. Yes, that's right, on 31st May 2003 Arakawa Riverview was born and my how it has grown into the strapping blog you see before you.
But that's all old history. Who cares about the last year we'd better look forward to the next 12 months, starting here...
The war on Terror...
Has come to Kawaguchi! No really.
Now Japan isn't really much good at wars anymore. As has been discussed before, the ropey old Japanese constitution is a bit vague on the whole war stance and as such, Japan has strenuously avoided all of that kind of nonsense for nigh on 50 years. And as you can also hopefully remember, the SDF is in Iraq right now in a foreign country deployment for the first time since ww2. Luckily they haven't been attacked by anyone yet and so haven't had to run away (sorry, strategically re-deploy to a rearward location)
But now the war on Terror has come to Japan, perhaps because of this very deployment. And it hasn't just to to Japan, it is here, right under the very nose of Arakawa Riverview - again no really.
On Wednesday this week a sweep by the for once effective police force, 5 suspected Al-Qaida terrorists were arrested, two here in Kawaguchi and one in Toda, which is right next door.
So, what were they arrested for? Was a bomb making factory found? Perhaps trace elements of uranium or plutonium for a 'dirty' nuclear device? Evidence of a plot to hijack taxis and leave them in 'no parking zones' with malice of forethought?
Nothing so exciting, I'm afraid. As usual it was the old standby in Japan, immigration violations (though to be fair, if the US authorities had been looking, a lot of people might not have died). Apparently the 3 arrested round here were all from Bangladesh and had been identified from phone records taken from a Lionel Dumont, a chap arrested in Germany after living in Japan for a year and who, alledgedly, was trying to build up an AlQaida cell here in sunnt Saitama next to the river. However the charges one of them seems to have been arrested on is 'forging official documents in relation to a mobile phone dealership' whilst the rest are the ubiquitous and extremely vague 'suspicion of violating immigration laws'.
Now this information comes from the newspaper and various TV news reports, but it seems to me that there is just a hint of flimsiness about it all. Not that this will bother the authorities, naturally. As a senior Interior Ministry official (might well have) said after the arrests "Suspected but unproven terrorist links? We-ell, if they're foreign it must be true, best arrest them, keep them locked up for as long as we can get away with and then deport them. Just to be safe".
Anyway it is now Monday after the arrests and, as far as I can tell, not a peep have we heard about this since last week. No huge in-depth follow up. No investigative 'how could they have got here' type journalism. Not even a 'yes they were guilty' or a 'no, sorry they weren't'. But what really strikes me as odd is that no one seems to be asking either...
You thought it could only happen in America
But no, here in Japan we are now seeing utterly ridiculous law suits. Again related to the whole SDF in Iraq thing, a citizens' group in Shizuoka prefecture has files a suit against the govt seeking 10,000 yen (that's about 50 quid)compensation on the grounds that the deployment of troops infringes on their rights to a peaceful life. Now even I can see that it is a symbolic thing to bring the govt to task, but surely they could have thought of a better charge than infringing on their right to a peaceful life? Against the ropey old constitution, perhaps, or against an illegal invasion and occupation of a soverign state, but infringing on a peaceful life? Oh please.
And finally, sorry to report...
No new games or stories about strange Tokyo wildlife to report this week, I'm afraid. Must try harder.
Wednesday, 26 May 2004
??
Had a most singular experience this morning that was odd enough to share. I was walking to work at about 8:30 along the backstreets of Kawaguchi, minding my own business and compiling letters to various people in my mind, as I went, when what should cross my path but a real life chicken... (or perhaps cockerel, though I saw no marauding French rugby players)
The bird, a rather thin and weedy looking brown specimen was a-strutting along the road near the big building site looking distictly bemused about its predicament, though not nearly as bemused as the crowd it had attracted.
but anyway
For those of you not here, the Telegraph have a 'Go to Tokyo' thing in their online paper here. Joy that we are finally becomming a tourist destination must be tempered by the fact that this feature, at the end of May, contains the sage advice 'avoid from June to September due to heat and humidity'.
Had a most singular experience this morning that was odd enough to share. I was walking to work at about 8:30 along the backstreets of Kawaguchi, minding my own business and compiling letters to various people in my mind, as I went, when what should cross my path but a real life chicken... (or perhaps cockerel, though I saw no marauding French rugby players)
The bird, a rather thin and weedy looking brown specimen was a-strutting along the road near the big building site looking distictly bemused about its predicament, though not nearly as bemused as the crowd it had attracted.
but anyway
For those of you not here, the Telegraph have a 'Go to Tokyo' thing in their online paper here. Joy that we are finally becomming a tourist destination must be tempered by the fact that this feature, at the end of May, contains the sage advice 'avoid from June to September due to heat and humidity'.
Monday, 24 May 2004
Krazy Kim's People Mart
So the big news this week in Japan has been Kim Jong-Il, North Korean and the Japanese abductee thing that, in truth, has been going on for ages.
But first I should point out that being a foreigner here, I can't get nearly as worked up as the Japanese about it. I find this understandable, for the Japanese it is an affront to their nationhood and all a jolly nasty thing indeed so they are getting very, very het up about it all. And rightly so, I suppose, but I can't sustain the levels of vitriol that they can.
Anyway, if you didn't already know, in the 1970s and 1980s, nefarious north korean types came to Japan in mini-subs, abducted perfectly normal Japanese people off lonely and windswept beaches in Niigata and Hokkaido and then whisked them off to the homeland. Some people say they knicked 400 people, others say only 10 to 15, so who knows? Why did they do it? Well apparently it was so the abducted Japanese could teach the North Koreans about Japan and in Japanese ways, like wash before having a bath, don't wear the toilet slippers around the house, that sort of thing, so the NK's could be spies. All very James Bond. Then they kidnapped some Japanese women so they could marry the Japanese men and so not be lonely, I think.
But of course the NK's denied all this for years and years and no one believed the Japanese. At big UN meetings the rest of the world kind of shook their heads and smiled indulgently and said 'yes of course the NK's are kidnapping your citizens, now come along and take the little blue pill, there's a good little paranoid schizophrenic nation'.
Until the NK's fessed up about 18 months ago.
And about 18 months ago a bunch of the original abductees came home to Japan. And there was much rejoicing and the Japanese govt said 'look we f**king told you so' and everyone lived happily ever after.
Except that there weren't enough people. 'Where are the rest and where are the kids?' said the Japanese.
'Er...well...you see...its like this' said Krazy Kim 'well everyone else that we kidnapped is dead, mostly through suicide, sorry about that. And the kids, well, you can't have them back. Bibble bibble my old man's a dustmen like my new hair goes with shoes. Frog!' Which was the most coherent thing he'd said in decades. So all the Japanese were a)mightily relieved to have some of their chaps back but b) mightily pissed off that the kids were still there and others were dead.
Until now.
So in a bout of diplomatic tooing and, I would not be in the least bit surprised, a bit of frooing as well, the Japanese PM Koizumi, he of the leonine Micheal Hestletine-stylee hair, trooped off to NK this weekend for a pow-wow with Krazy Kim to see if he couldn't get the kids back and everyone else etc.
We have to stop here and feel just a little bit sorry for Koizumi as he is in an absolute no-win situation. Just about everyone in Japan really wants him to go over there, get out everyone with a trace of Japanese blood in them and then, really, nuke the place. Most off the rest of the world couldn't really give a toss but would have to be really angry if Japan nuked another country and would therefore have to give Koizumi a jolly good telling off. Also, Krazy Kim holds all the aces, as it were. He has the kids, he has the others, he has the information and he doesn't have to give them back if he doesn't want to. Koizumi has some money and some economic aid. As Krazy Kim isn't really too bothered if everyone in his little fiefdom starves to death, what kind of bargaining chip is that?
So off he goes. He is hideously snubbed at the airport, only being met by the Asia Foreign Minister, rather than Krazy Kim, so now the Japanese media want to string up every NK by their ankles before nuking them all. Krazy Kim and Koizumi meet, they chat, they watch dancing girls and get really smashed on cheap Chinese red wine. Later in the evening Krazy Kim says 'look, yur my besht mate and I luv you. No really beeeep! You jusht don' undershandt. I'm off to hartlepool to buy some exploding trousers. Have the kidsht, I never really wanted them anyway.' And so Koizumi says 'nah nah, I do luv you, its jusht, well, its the hair and glasshes. but thanks for the kidsht, have shum econmm... gecominc...money n' stuff'. [the above is the real conversation and you shouldn't believe the nonsense written in the newspapers. Honest. No really.] And they part the best of friends.
Until koizumi gets home and everyone starts calling for his head. 'This is the worst possible outcome' says Yokota (whose daughter was abducted and who it is alledged died in hospital). Now this is patently not true as the worst outcome would have been Koizumi to come back empty handed. But he played his hand too soon, they say, didn't discuss the others, didn't talk about nuclear weapons, gave the aid away and generally got screwed by the opposition.
And now people are screaming at Koizumi along with all the NK's and, of course, Krazy Kim's. And that's the bit that gets me. I can understand the anger of people like Yokota and the other abductees and their families, but Koizumi seems to be trying his best and I wonder when dealing with someone like Krazy Kim, what more one can do short of nuking the place.
and just to let you know
The disintegration of Japanese culture continues apace as Asashoryu won the Summer Sumo tournament with a 13-2 record. Although there was something for the Japanese to shout about as he was pushed all the way by a chap by the name of Hokutoriki, who could quite possibly be a local.
So the big news this week in Japan has been Kim Jong-Il, North Korean and the Japanese abductee thing that, in truth, has been going on for ages.
But first I should point out that being a foreigner here, I can't get nearly as worked up as the Japanese about it. I find this understandable, for the Japanese it is an affront to their nationhood and all a jolly nasty thing indeed so they are getting very, very het up about it all. And rightly so, I suppose, but I can't sustain the levels of vitriol that they can.
Anyway, if you didn't already know, in the 1970s and 1980s, nefarious north korean types came to Japan in mini-subs, abducted perfectly normal Japanese people off lonely and windswept beaches in Niigata and Hokkaido and then whisked them off to the homeland. Some people say they knicked 400 people, others say only 10 to 15, so who knows? Why did they do it? Well apparently it was so the abducted Japanese could teach the North Koreans about Japan and in Japanese ways, like wash before having a bath, don't wear the toilet slippers around the house, that sort of thing, so the NK's could be spies. All very James Bond. Then they kidnapped some Japanese women so they could marry the Japanese men and so not be lonely, I think.
But of course the NK's denied all this for years and years and no one believed the Japanese. At big UN meetings the rest of the world kind of shook their heads and smiled indulgently and said 'yes of course the NK's are kidnapping your citizens, now come along and take the little blue pill, there's a good little paranoid schizophrenic nation'.
Until the NK's fessed up about 18 months ago.
And about 18 months ago a bunch of the original abductees came home to Japan. And there was much rejoicing and the Japanese govt said 'look we f**king told you so' and everyone lived happily ever after.
Except that there weren't enough people. 'Where are the rest and where are the kids?' said the Japanese.
'Er...well...you see...its like this' said Krazy Kim 'well everyone else that we kidnapped is dead, mostly through suicide, sorry about that. And the kids, well, you can't have them back. Bibble bibble my old man's a dustmen like my new hair goes with shoes. Frog!' Which was the most coherent thing he'd said in decades. So all the Japanese were a)mightily relieved to have some of their chaps back but b) mightily pissed off that the kids were still there and others were dead.
Until now.
So in a bout of diplomatic tooing and, I would not be in the least bit surprised, a bit of frooing as well, the Japanese PM Koizumi, he of the leonine Micheal Hestletine-stylee hair, trooped off to NK this weekend for a pow-wow with Krazy Kim to see if he couldn't get the kids back and everyone else etc.
We have to stop here and feel just a little bit sorry for Koizumi as he is in an absolute no-win situation. Just about everyone in Japan really wants him to go over there, get out everyone with a trace of Japanese blood in them and then, really, nuke the place. Most off the rest of the world couldn't really give a toss but would have to be really angry if Japan nuked another country and would therefore have to give Koizumi a jolly good telling off. Also, Krazy Kim holds all the aces, as it were. He has the kids, he has the others, he has the information and he doesn't have to give them back if he doesn't want to. Koizumi has some money and some economic aid. As Krazy Kim isn't really too bothered if everyone in his little fiefdom starves to death, what kind of bargaining chip is that?
So off he goes. He is hideously snubbed at the airport, only being met by the Asia Foreign Minister, rather than Krazy Kim, so now the Japanese media want to string up every NK by their ankles before nuking them all. Krazy Kim and Koizumi meet, they chat, they watch dancing girls and get really smashed on cheap Chinese red wine. Later in the evening Krazy Kim says 'look, yur my besht mate and I luv you. No really beeeep! You jusht don' undershandt. I'm off to hartlepool to buy some exploding trousers. Have the kidsht, I never really wanted them anyway.' And so Koizumi says 'nah nah, I do luv you, its jusht, well, its the hair and glasshes. but thanks for the kidsht, have shum econmm... gecominc...money n' stuff'. [the above is the real conversation and you shouldn't believe the nonsense written in the newspapers. Honest. No really.] And they part the best of friends.
Until koizumi gets home and everyone starts calling for his head. 'This is the worst possible outcome' says Yokota (whose daughter was abducted and who it is alledged died in hospital). Now this is patently not true as the worst outcome would have been Koizumi to come back empty handed. But he played his hand too soon, they say, didn't discuss the others, didn't talk about nuclear weapons, gave the aid away and generally got screwed by the opposition.
And now people are screaming at Koizumi along with all the NK's and, of course, Krazy Kim's. And that's the bit that gets me. I can understand the anger of people like Yokota and the other abductees and their families, but Koizumi seems to be trying his best and I wonder when dealing with someone like Krazy Kim, what more one can do short of nuking the place.
and just to let you know
The disintegration of Japanese culture continues apace as Asashoryu won the Summer Sumo tournament with a 13-2 record. Although there was something for the Japanese to shout about as he was pushed all the way by a chap by the name of Hokutoriki, who could quite possibly be a local.
Tuesday, 18 May 2004
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
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
Monday, 10 May 2004
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...
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...
Tuesday, 4 May 2004
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.
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.
Monday, 26 April 2004
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.
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.
Saturday, 24 April 2004
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
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
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
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...
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...
Monday, 19 April 2004
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.
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.
Wednesday, 14 April 2004
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'.
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'.
Monday, 12 April 2004
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.
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.
Monday, 5 April 2004
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.
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.
Tuesday, 30 March 2004
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.
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.
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