Warning

You get a lot of odd noises at night in the countryside, this was brought home to me last week, when I was roused from my slumber by a ear-splitting noise at 3.30am. It sounded like an old WW2 air raid siren and, I can honestly say, scared the shit out of me at the time. 

Following the siren there was a muffled voice came over the tannoy that was difficult to make out but didn't seem to be explaining exactly what was going on. As my phone didn't go off, and I couldn't feel any shaking, I pretty quickly guessed that it wasn't an earthquake. The next thought to go through my mind was that it was indeed an air raid warning and maybe Krazy Kim was lobbing another missile over northern Japan. Then I thought it might be a bear sighting, then perhaps a bear attack. Then I realised it was winter and they are all hibernating at the moment (but were probably just woken by the same alarm so likely to be pissed off too). Of course another part of my mind was having a conversation along the lines of:

"you should get up!"

"why, nothing is happening"

"something is about to happen, that's what alarms are for"

"but it's really cold"

"you'll be colder when Krazy Kim drops a nuke on your head and you're dead"

"if he drops a nuke on me cold won't be a problem"

etc

But nothing did indeed happen and so once the wildly beating heart was stilled somewhat and the overactive imagination silenced I dropped off to a doze...

Only to be woken about an hour later but another loud voice giving us more information but in decidedly less strident tones, it could have been an all clear, but from what they didn't exactly say and thankfully this was not accompanied by the air raid siren. The conversation around the breakfast table with my houseguest, whose Japanese is far better than mine, was along the WTF lines as he hadn't been able to discern the nature of the alarm either but had, I'm glad to say, had the same internal conversation re cold vs imminent death so had stayed in bed too.

Later that morning we had to drop into the resort office to pick up some papers so thought we'd ask about the siren, in case we were meant to have done something (proceed to marshalling area #1 in full battle gear) but hadn't. Helpfully the first person we asked said 'what alarm?' Clearly not a resident of these parts.

But the second person finally explained, 'oh yes, that was a fire alarm'

'Wait what!? My house was about to burn down!? Where were the fire engines and flashing lights?'

'Oh, no, if there is a fire anywhere in Hachimantai city then all the alarms go off...'

Now Hachimantai covers quite a large area but it appears to be true, if there is a fire next door or 10 miles away, the fire alarm next to my house will go off and wake me up. Misery loves company, as the saying goes, so the authorities here have deemed it a good idea to make sure everyone knows when something has gone wrong somewhere. I guess in one sense might foster a feeling of community, of everyone in it together, to borrow a hollow Tory platitude, but really, waking everyone up at 3.30am to let them know but, crucially, not saying where the fire actually is...?  

Since then no more alarms but it's only a matter of time.

Tattoo You

Strap in, it’s rant-o’clock…

Japan has a bit of a neurotic attitude to tattoos. The history of tattooing goes back a long way, possibly 10,000 years to the Jomon period, but certainly to the Yayoi period (c.300BC to 300AD) where Chinese visitors to these shores remarked on them upon their return to the middle kingdom.

According to Wikipedia the Japanese art of tattooing (irezumi 入れ墨 (there are quite a few ways to write in kanji so I’ve plumped for this one) became popular after with the arrival of woodblock printing and it was the wood block artists who apparently became the tattooists. In the Edo period (1600-1860) it’s unclear who made irezumi popular, some say it was low class ruffian types, others say it was wealthy merchants who could not flaunt their wealth through clothes so got themselves painted instead. Anyway, the popularity took off until…

The Meiji Restoration (1860 onwards) – in a useless sop to the West (another chapter in Japan’s on-going attitude by the sound of it) the government made tattoos illegal and it was then that tattoos took on their connotations of criminality and the association with the yakuza was, well, not born as they had always had tattoos done, but from here on tatts = gangsters, end of story. Tattooing was legalized by the Americans in 1946 but the stigma has remained, so much so that onsens, swimming pools, gyms and other places where you may have to strip off will now not allow anyone with tattoos on the premises, even dorky gaijin with the kanji for carburetor stamped on their neck who could never, in a month of blue moons, be associated with Japanese yakuza gangs.

“So what” I hear you cry. Well it wouldn’t be very much at all really, just another example of Japan unable to think or acknowledge the changing of times. However a few months back in May Toru Hashimoto, the Mayor of Osaka, suddenly decided he didn’t have enough to do, so he sent a “voluntary” survey to all employees of the city government “asking” them to disclose if they had any tattoos and, if so one assumes, what and where.

For some reason most city’s 32,000 employees responded to this gross invasion of their privacy and provided details of the tattoos they had (98 workers had visible tattoos, 12 had concealed tatts and a further 16 had both). However around 500 teachers and other school staff with their heads screwed on refused to answer as they saw, rightly, it was an invasion of their privacy.

Delighted by the overall response Hashimoto basically said that any of the 120 or staff with tattoos should either get them removed (at, one assumes, their own expense) or look for another job as he didn’t want their sort around. So, having been given a job under one set of criteria, those staff are now being shafted by a complete dickhead with a serious chip on his shoulder (the nasty media accused his parents of being yakuza when he was running for office, so instead of getting narked with the media he’s taking it out on his employees, nice…)

However he was mightily irked by the refusals so he ordered these 500 miscreants to reply to the voluntary survey or else – which I guess means that at that stage it stopped even trying to be voluntary.  Most of them did eventually comply but 15 Osaka city employees continued to refuse to respond, again citing the violation of privacy issue that it so clearly was. So the city government decided that these 15 employees would be subject to disciplinary measures, including reprimands and possible salary cuts as the refusal to complete the survey was tantamount to disregarding a direct order (they were teachers and caretakers, remember, and not soldiers).

Since then the scent on this issue has gone cold, as it were. What I find most depressing about the whole issue is not the survey itself or the action being taken against the Osaka 15, though it’s bad enough. No, what gets me more is that fact that there has not been a general outcry in the media, organisations devoted to freedom and/or liberty, from the unions or from anyone else. Indeed the main reaction seems to have been “well, they do have tattoos…” even though we don’t actually know if they have tattoos or not. What we do know is they have the balls to stand up to the authority figure and say ‘no way am I going to tell you that, it’s personal, it’s nothing to do with you, it makes no difference to my ability to do my job so go fuck yourself”. It almost makes me want to get a tattoo in sympathy – though I won’t because they’re ridiculous, but I will stand up for the right of Osaka city employees to not have to answer pointless and demeaning questions about the possibility of having one.

Driving in Tokyo

In England drivers tend to follow the mantra ‘mirror-signal-manoeuvre’

In Japan drivers tend to follow the mantra ‘manoeuvre’

It makes driving fun, really…

That said I will maintain that Japanese drivers do tend to be better behaved towards cyclists that (my limited) experience of UK drivers. OK, I know I used to cycle quite a lot when I was a kid 25 years ago, before Bradley Wiggins had won the Tour de France or Chris Hoy had torn up the Beijing velodrome, but it cycling on a A-road was taking your life in your hands. Here in Tokyo I cycle to work in the summer and take roads that are the equivalent of the London north circular (namely routes 317 (nakasendo) and 17 (yamate-dori)) and drivers are pretty well behaved, even taxis and truck drivers.

My theory on this is that in Japan you are allowed to undertake on motorways, so when changing lanes you have to use your passenger-side mirror a lot more – this means Japanese drivers are a bit more adept about using them and spotting cyclists flying up their inside. They still don’t signal very well, but at least you think they might have spotted you (unlike the idiot who stepped into the road on a long flat corner last week who I missed by the width of a swear word…)

Oh, er, oops...

Sorry, keep doing this, not exactly a blog you can set your watch by, now are we?

So I can't really remember everything, nay, anything, really, that has gone on since the last time I posted back in April, though I am absolutely sure that some things have, indeed, gone on. Anyway, let's try the ol' stream of consciousness approach and see where we get to...

(The Man Who) Kan ('t do a f*cking thing)

OK, the guy has been dealt a fairly shitty hand, all told. No PM really wants a catastrophic earthquake on his or her watch, but in Japan it's one of the hazards of the job, as it were. Now as we discussed last post, the govt didn't really know what to do in the immediate aftermath, though things did swing into action. Of course once the initial shock has been sort the job of rebuilding begins – the idea of not bothering to rebuild Tohoku was, I admit, a bit of a non-starter, not just because ok, it had been devastated, but actually only a relatively small bit, up to about 10km inland, so that left an awful lot of Tohoku not devastated, so it would have been a mighty kick in the knackers (and a potential vote-loser) if the govt had said ‘ah, sorry, don’t have the cash to rebuild, best you move down to Kyushu and hope there isn’t a lethally big jolt down there in the next 20-30 years’.

Now, the quake has been a big opportunity for the people of Tohoku, and everywhere else as a show of support, to pull together, cooperate, work in harmony to get things done. Everywhere except, of course, Kasumigaseki, where the politicians all live. For them this has been an unparalleled opportunity to stab each other in the back, criticise, divide and generally act like, well, a bunch of politicians. In the beginning the tone was unduly harsh on The Man Who, as I said he had been dealt a shitty hand by nature and TEPCO but seemed to be doing the best he could. There were plenty of ‘we don’t think he’s handled it very well’ calls from other politicos who were safe in the knowledge that they would never be in that position so could snipe all they liked.

But then it really did begin to look like didn’t know what to do, what to start or even how to look like he was doing something even if it was just buying time (surely a pre-requisite for a politician?). It ended a few months back with a no confidence vote in the guy, which he survived reasonably comfortably. This should have been the green light for Kan to say ‘right, fuck off you lot, I’m The Man (Who), I got the vote, people have confidence, cut the crap and let me get on with sorting out this shit’.

But what he actually said was (something along the lines of) ‘er, what, I survived? Er, well, I guess that means that some people still don’t like me, so tell you what, I’ll resign when we have reached some point of stabilisation in the current recovery situation’.

So, the worst of all worlds; he didn’t flip the bird (like he should have done), he didn’t resign, he didn’t give a timetable for a possible resignation and didn’t clarify what that ‘point of stabilisation’ might be. It would have been better if he had just stood up and said ‘I do not have the first effing clue what I am doing, end of.’

So now Japan, from a leadership viewpoint, which should be steaming full-ahead on the recovery is still sitting in the ferry terminal arguing who is going to board first. I had some sympathy for Kan when the rest of the politicos wouldn’t let him do his job, but now I realise that he was not up to doing the job in the first place. What Japan needed, no needs, is someone to drain the poison out of the political system, remind politicians that they are there to serve the people and then, well, I don’t care if that person a) kicks as many butts as necessary, scruff of the neck, bull by the horns and other ‘strong-man’ clichés or b) builds a genuine consensus, one of mutual aid and common sense, either/or but which finally starts governing this country… I was going to write ‘governing this country properly’, but the way it is now no-one is running the show, so there isn’t even a ‘properly’ to live up to.

Nuclear Armageddon update

Apparently, according the newspaper this morning, we’re over the worst of it now, as you can see from this lovely graphic:

Now I’m not entirely how much of this I believe, especially now as beef contaminated by caesium has recently been sold in Tokyo, but still, it’s a start. One thing that (The Man Who) Kan has decided, or been told to decide, is that Japan, like Germany, is going to phase out nuclear power even though he, nor anyone else it would seem, has any really clear idea of what to replace it with. This is also after he stated, quite publicly, that Japan would not do anything to derail Japan’s long standing nuclear power policy – so clear and decisive leadership, then.

Update from yesterday [writing a few days after I started the rant] – apparently Kan’s u-turn on nuclear power, (the phase-out phase) is not government policy after all, merely the audible ramblings of a confused mind. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up…

Oh Ambassador, you’re spoiling us…

Not one but two invitations to be wined and dined at the Ambassador’s residence at the Embassy, that’s how important a member of the British expat community I am these days, that or a absolutely reliable (as in, will turn up if asked), probably won’t embarrass us, almost certainly British (no matter what Ichikawa ward office thought) person to make the room look full.

The reason it was 2 invites was because of Jeremy Browne MP. He is the Minister of State, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, which I think means he’s like a deputy foreign minister, and he was meant to come in May but, in true British fashion, he was waiting for his flight in the US and his plane broke down. As this was at the last minute, as it were, the Ambassador, Dave, decided to go ahead with his soiree anyway and the caterers had been booked and he would have given less than 72 hours’ notice for a cancellation. So off we scooted to Hanzoumon, where we Brits have our embassy, and food and drink was laid on. Now free food and drink is always, in my book, worth getting out of bed for (hence the absolutely reliable above), but even more so when the British taxpayer is paying for it. I can tell you, all those of you who pay taxes on your hard earned cash in the UK, the Ambassador keeps a pretty good table and cellar – I’ll admit that we were not treated to his 1999 Chateau Lafite but a decent bit of plonk was provided, along with canapés and some other, more substantial foodstuffs. This time we were also treated to a few glasses of Pimms by way of greeting, which in Japan is a little hard to come by so that was nice.

But on neither occasion were we, I am very sad to report, offered any Ferrero Roche chocolates! When I grew up it was touted as the height of sophistication to offer them around, indeed the subtitle to this very piece was the tagline of the commercials, shot at some dodgy studio dressed up to look like some ‘swish embassy in a former communist republic but now very cosmopolitan place’ like Prague (think the embassy scene from mission impossible 1).

Anyway, dashed expectations are generally the forerunner to national insurrection so I am now fermenting revolution here in Tokyo at the hopeless decline of Her Britannic Majesty’s Foreign Service provision of chocolates at free nosh-ups. I mean, not even an After-Eight or a tray of Matchmakers! Pitiful! What will johnny-foreigner think? We’ll be a laughing stock. I believe the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands was predicated on a bowl of Quality Street being proffered at a cocktail reception at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1981; “If zis is ze only chocolate zey can afford…” General Galtieri is alleged to have said, ‘…zen we are in viz a chance, boys!”. At least they were offered…

So come on, buck your ideas up, Tokyo!

Finally in sports news…

 Well done to the Japanese ladies footy team, who won the World Cup

And the gents rugby team who won the Pacific Nations Cup

Well played all

What's going on...? (as a famous man once sang)

So it's been an interesting month or so, to say the least.

First the earthquake, then a lot more earthquakes, then (not really) nuclear armageddon in Fukushima, then a gaijin-only broohaha (about flyjins or denyjins or cryjins or whatever the label de jour-jins was), then (not really) social and infrastructural breakdown in a large city an awfully long way from the earthquake and (not really) nuclear armageddon zones and a whole load more stuff as well. Phew, it's been a ride!

But for us good folk of Arakawa Riverview (in the large city an awfully long way from the earthquake and (not really) nuclear armageddon zones), life has been reasonably normal, to tell the truth. In the week after the quake there were indeed shortages of foods like milk, bread and dried and canned stuff, but since then things are back on the shelves. There was a subsequent yoghurt scarcity, but that's pretty much OK now, and then a very real scare as breweries suddenly realised that beer producing and shipping capacity was way down and Tokyo running dry suddenly became a very real possibility. So far so good on that one, but we are monitoring the situation carefully (and stocking up on red wine and gin (I will re-label myself a gin-jin)).

Also in the week after the quake the British Embassy (to whom I will doff my cap to a job reasonably well done in the face of enormous stress) changed their travel advice from 'everything is pretty much OK' to 'British nationals should consider leaving Tokyo'. This freaked me, along with the Guru, out and we made plans to move south to a branch of the family down in Kyushu. But after a little reflection and a realisation that the travel advice was more to stop people coming to Tokyo, thereby giving the embassy more responsibilities if things did go bad, rather than a cry to run to the hills (and not Roppongi Hills), we decided to stay put. Others didn't, some went to Osaka or Kyushu, some went to Singapore or Hong Kong, others further afield to Australia or the UK. Fine, I have no problem with that, people make the decisions best suited for themselves and their families. What I find most poisonous is the subsequent name-calling and label-making mentioned above - people that left became flyjins, branded cowards by some who stayed; people who left called the stayers naïve, delusional and crazy to put themselves in harm's way. Basically everyone trying to justify their actions, as if a) it matters or b) it has anything to do with anyone else. So, anyway, get over it people as we’re all people and we don’t have to justify our decisions to others.

Now because of the goings on in Fukushima TEPCO (that’s Tokyo Electric Power Company, for those who have been living in the north pole for the last month) and the Japanese Government have come in for some pretty stinging (by Japanese standards) criticism in the last month. The main foci have been:

1) Tepco don’t know what they are doing

2) The govt don’t know what they are doing

3) The govt don’t know what Tepco is doing

4) Everyone is covering up the scale of the nuclear related problems

The first 2 are undoubtedly true as neither Tepco nor the govt have a clue what to do about the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant or, if they did know what to do, they have no idea how to do it. The 3rd point is probably true – Tepco are definitely the bad guys here (except the valiant Fukushima 50 (and probably more) who are trying to cool the reactors and sort out the problems – these heroes are distinct from the homogenous Tepco mass as I think they do have a clue what they are doing and probably a clue how to do it (and are trying to do it the face of seemingly insurmountable incompetence by their “superiors”)). Er, yes, Tepco, definitely the bad guys, or more likely lethally negligent guys…lost my train of thought. Ah yes, so, not only does it look like Tepco have been pulling the wool over the eyes of their staff and the people of Fukushima, it seems that they haven’t really told the whole story to the govt, or the IAEA, or anyone else. This does not, as you may well imagine, fill one with confidence about what is happening there right now, but it will, hopefully, mean that those (ir)responsible will be brought to book when the (radioactive) dust finally settles. One thought – some argue that Tepco should be nationalised, as should all nuclear power production, but I wonder. Private firms will cut corners to save costs, thereby endangering lives like now; however state industries can be woefully inefficient and ‘jobs for life on the state sector’ can very easily lead to similar sloppy work procedures. So what to do…?

Point 4 above, that everyone is covering up, does, I think, have some merit as an argument. The reason, I think, is that the govt need a diversion to take everyone’s mind, and view, off what has happened to Iwate and Miyagi prefectures in the aftermath of the quake and tsunami. The devastation up there, the sheer scale of the rebuild that will need to take place is, I think, on a level that people cannot comprehend, and when they do start to think about it the excrement will hit the slowly rotating cooling device. So, better to keep the focus of the people and the world on Fukushima, which so far has killed 2 people (I think) rather than on the destruction wrought upon Tohoku area on 11th March, after which some 30,000 are dead or missing. So when, again, the radioactive dust finally settles, (the man who) Kan can quickly whip a satin sheet off Tohoku, say ‘ta-daa’ and show everyone that the clean-up is underway, reconstruction has already started and things aren’t as bad as you thought they were, so keep calm and carry on. Mark my words, you read it here first.

But here’s a seditious thought – why bother rebuilding Tohoku? It was full of old people, most of whom were unfortunately swept away by the tsunami. Rural depopulation is such that the areas affected were dying anyway, there was little inward investment above the govt building useless roads to nowhere and empty concert halls in vainglorious but futile pork barrel projects. Schools were closing and classes amalgamating in towns all over the area as fewer and fewer children were born because the kids that were born moved to Tokyo as soon as they were old enough, never to return. So why bother? Rebuild the ports and the fishing fleets as they were useful; and then put all the rice fields together in one big lump and either nationalise rice growing in that area or sell the land as one or two blocks to a major agricultural business and let them grow rice on an industrial basis as opposed to the millions of mom & pop farms that again are slowly dying as the kids realise rice farming is hard work. With the hundreds of thousands of displaced people, ship them to Tokyo or other areas of rural depopulation (which is most of Japan outside the major cities) and start filling up the gaps in those communities – Tohoku is lost, don’t bother trying to find it again. Japan needs a radical rethink towards the countryside, maybe this is the time to do it…

Of course the counter argument to that (apart from the humanitarian one), is that Japan should be trying to de-centralise, especially Tokyo, as there is too much important stuff here so if/when the big one hits us (as it surely will) too much infrastructure will be destroyed. What Japan should be doing is rebuilding Tohoku and encouraging (forcing?) govt departments, businesses and the like to move to these areas to disperse the potential damage when another quake hits (I don’t mean when another quake hits that area – Tohoku could be the place to go as it has now been ‘disastered’ so the chances of another catastrophic event are, compared to Tokyo which hasn’t had a major quake since 1923, hopefully reduced). I don’t know, I don’t think there is a right answer, just options that all seem a tad bleak.

Let’s leave those happy thoughts for a while and talk about fashion.

I don’t, and won’t, claim to know a lot about fashion, especially where young ladies are concerned, but a recent trend has got me confused. As a rule I don’t criticise what people wear – if they want to look foolish then that’s their lookout, also I don’t want to sound like an old fart, which is getting harder as the years go by.

Anyway the recent trend is for women to wear glasses. Nothing strange there, I know, but the fashion is to wear what look like oversized, plastic framed glasses but only the frames, no lenses. Now wearing glasses is a pain in the, well, often the nose and behind the ears, but generally it’s more just annoying having something stuck to your face, so why go to that trouble if you don’t need to?

A pictorial reference to the fashion would look something like this

OK, yes, she’s fit, but she would be without the frames.

The Guru says these women are wearing the big glasses to make their faces look smaller and therefore more cute. If this is true it seems odd, as to me it looks like they have big glasses on, not a smaller face. Another explanation is that they actually need the glasses and lenses, but can’t wear them with the lenses in as they get in the way of the artificially long eyelashes – this, I think, holds more water as a theory.

So I don’t know, but it seems to me that this fashion cocks a snook at people who really do have to wear glasses. ‘Ha haa’ they seem to be saying, ‘I can take my glasses-frames off and suffer no degrading of my sight, whereas you, have-to-wear-glasses-person, you will stumble around bumping into things if you tried to do the same’. This seems a little rude to me, but there you go. If I fine out the real reason I’ll let you know.

One of our centenarians is missing!

Actually that’s not true, at last count it was about 60 of the sly buggers – what is going on in the post-100 not out age classification stakes?

You may have seen a week or two ago that that in Tokyo a local ward office official from Adachi-ku, accompanied by a policeman, popped around to see Sogen Kato, a 111year old man, to check the usual things one checks on with 111year old people and to give him a commemorative gift for attaining such a ripe old age intact. Kato’s kids (81 yr old daughter and 53 year old granddaughter) refused to let the official see their pa, saying that he was a ‘human vegetable’ and therefore wasn’t in any condition to meet anyone.

But then the following day the granddaughter reportedly went to visit the stonemason who made the gravestone for Kato’s wife when she died, at the age of 101, and told the stonemason all about the visit, apparently adding:

"My grandfather shut himself in a room on the first floor of our home 30 years ago, and we couldn't open the door from the outside. My mother said, 'Leave him in there,' and he was left as he was. I think he's dead."

No shit! At the time, I read somewhere else, the old fella said something along the lines of “I’m going to become a living Buddha so close the door and don’t come in again, no need to worry about the food and water (but beer and yakitori on a Friday night would be most welcome) !” he probably didn’t add.

Of course with every dodgy event in Japan there is some money involved, this time being pension payments, which appear to be about 9 million to him but only from 2005 to now, and seeing as they reckon he’s been dead for possibly 30 years it could be a great deal more – but in the family bank vault is only about 3 million, so the kids have some explaining to do I expect…

So then a couple of days later a similar thing happened with Tokyo’s ostensibly oldest person, the 113 year old Fusa Furuya of Suginami-ku, who has not lived at her address in Suginami for decades and therefore no one knows where she is. Also missing is Furuya’s oldest son and when the police went to check his address, in the hope of finding him and mom, all they found was a vacant piece of land. They did eventually track down the errant offspring but all they got from him was an ‘I don’t know’ on the whereabouts of ma. At least in this one there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of pension fraud as the kids haven’t been collecting it, but there does seem to have been a lot of parental neglect by the kids, there are 3 in total, who don’t appear to have spoken to each other since about 1990 and when they were all asked ‘where’s your mum?’ all pointed to the person on their left and said ‘living with him!’

Of course since all this kicked off all the wards in Tokyo, and I daresay other prefectures as well, have suddenly realised they better be checking up on this sort of thing, and when they have it appears that at least 63 of the longest livers (I don’t mean that their livers are particularly long, or any other internal organs for that matter, just they have lived a long time) might not be that long lived after all. In Osaka prefecture at 21 are missing, including 18 in Higashi-Osaka alone. It’s not clear if this is just carelessness on the part of the local governments and/or relatives of these oldsters, or a more sinister plot being concocted by North Korea to bankrupt Japan by over claiming pension rights (no one has made the North Korean connection yet, so remember, you read it here first).

Half the problem, though, seems to be the kids (kids in the broadest possible sense, of course). For example in my own ward of Itabashi a welfare worker who visited the home of a woman recognized as the ward's oldest in September last year and again this spring was not allowed to meet the woman, as her family said she "had difficulty going out." Quite why ‘difficulty going out’ means the ward official ‘can’t go in’ wasn’t immediately made clear, but there you go.

A lot of the time the ward offices are trying to contact the old folks to give them presents or other handouts, whereupon their progeny basically say “yeah, he lives here; no you can’t see him but I’d be happy to pass on the cash”, but ‘pass on’ soon turns to ‘pocket’, which is, of course, fraud. Why the ward offices can’t make a simple rule along the lines of ‘you want the cash? Show us the person’, I’m not really sure, though the Guru said it was against their human rights to demand to see someone (but then again she was happy all the pension money was going back in the pot).

Anyway with 40,399 centenarians as of September last year this could well be a slightly more widespread problem, just watch out for those North Koreans!

So then we went to Summerland

Summerland is a big water park out past Hachioji, so still in Tokyo but not in the city.

Summerland is a big place run by Japanese people for, mainly, Japanese people, but there was a surprising amount of English around so obviously there get a lot of foreign visitors there. We went on 13/14th July and I know what you’re thinking, ‘why did we go so close to, or rather in, the rainy season?’ well, it was one of those work-holiday-price-overcrowdedness questions, with the potential overcrowdedness issues of going leter in the month outweighing all other considerations. Don’t believe me, this is the large pool at ‘peak’ time:

There is a pool there, it’s just you can’t see it as it’s covered in people!

The “pool” above is their big, indoor wave pool; they also have a couple of kids’ play pools and a couple of waterslides inside; whilst outside they have more pools, more slides and an amusement park. So we got there after a journey involving not only trains but also a bus too. As I mentioned we went on the 13th and whilst this did overcome the overcrowdedness issue it failed on the nice weather criteria, being grey and wet and, as we were a little way out of Tokyo, quite cold as well – surprising, I know, for rainy season, but once you get away from the heat island effect of Tokyo’s 23 wards the temperature drops dramatically, there is tundra in Tochigi, you know… (not really).

Anyway, as we’re staying for the night we are allowed to drop our bags at the ‘lodge’ and head to the attractions. As it wasn’t really raining at this point we thought we’d try a few of the rides. Knowing that the little fella isn’t really into being scared that much we head for the gentle looking Spin Dinghy, a ride based on, if you can guess, a spinning dinghy. Apprehensive though he was we board and the ride gradually builds up spinning speed. Approximately 0.25 seconds into the ride Marcus starts to scream, a scream that lasts the rest of the ride and causes concern in parenting circles that the fella might pass out through lack of oxygen. He didn’t, I’m glad to say. With that and the prospect of the ‘Air Catapult’ looming we felt discretion was the better part of valour and headed for the pools instead.

The pools – what can I say, they were big and full of water. The first one the little fella tried was the Tropical Fruits Island, which was a bunch of little waterslides designed for the smaller members of public (e.g. children and members of the ‘under 5-foot club’). So Marcus slid, jumped, wallowed and generally had a very nice time. There was also another pool next to this that had a climbing frame and a big bucket that filled and then dumped water over everyone. Then there was the big wave pool in the picture above.

Because it was a Tuesday still in rainy season the place was pretty much empty, comparatively speaking. There was a big kindergarten group that Marcus attached himself to and played with for a while, until they disappeared somewhere else. But hordes of fun seeking holiday makers there were few, which was good as it meant we didn’t have to wait for anything. At lunchtime we did the decent thing and went for lunch. After my much documented travails with TDL I was most happy to discover that this place, as it is run by Japanese, realised that doting though fathers may be, they still like a beer with their chicken and chips, and a reasonably priced beer at that.

The evening was spent at the aforementioned ‘lodge’ – this was a bit of an odd place. To start with there were only 2 occupied rooms in the place, leaving 22 gaps, as it were. As is natural the place had a big ‘ofuro’ (lit. bath) but as there were only 2 sets of guests the lodge people decided that we, as a family could have one bath to ourselves and the other guests could have the other. OK, so even knowing this it felt weird using the ‘women’s’ bathroom because I knew, deep down, that even though I had been told I could use it, I knew I shouldn’t, not really – it was the women’s bathroom. A relaxing bath it did not make.

Dinner was taken in a dining hall with space for about 40 scoffers but with only actually 5. Vast, echo-ey spaces and all that, but at least they served beer (pet hate here (might have mentioned it before, but this one annoyed me) – went to the serving lady, who was also the front desk lady with whom I had conversed earlier, and asked in flawless Japanese, as we stood next to a poster of a bottle of Suntory Premium Malts beer, if I could have a beer, please. She looked at me, then turned to the Guru who was getting some water, and told her that they only served bottled beer, was that OK? Er, hello, I’m standing next to, asking you a simple question in Japanese that we have previously established I can speak to a reasonable degree, the least you could do is address me first and wait to see if I do the confused guppy-fish expression before asking my wife. For fuck’s sakes).

Anyway, dinner was a mostly Japanese affair, with lots of small dishes of mostly edible stuff. Nice, but not awe-inspiring. Breakfast, on the other hand was a sight to behold – it was a full on Japanese morning dining experience, that meant a bowl of grey slimy stuff, a bowl of pink slimy stuff, black slimy stuff that might have been seaweed, rice with raw egg, natto and other not so easily identifiable or digestible delicacies. Mmm. Envious glances at Marcus’ kid’s breakfast, which included toast, hash browns, a sausage, scrambled eggs and a small, pleasant looking salad. Oh well…

The rest of the day was spent in the pools, of course, but this time the weather was fine so we could use the outdoor pools as well. This was good, of course, as we could use the slides. Bit of a gripe that there were three different water slides open but 2 of them were ‘pair rides’ so 2 people had to go at the same time, but with a small child and a wife who wasn’t into water slides I had no one to go with – boo hoo etc.

And that was about it, all in all a good couple of days away, but like TDL I wouldn’t want to go there on a bank holiday Monday in August – actually to be honest there aren’t that many places that I would like to go to on a bank holiday Monday in August…

A tale of two amusement parks

Part 1 – in which our intrepid heroes visit Tokyo Disneyland

We don’t get to go away on holiday much in our house, mainly as it’s too expensive and we don’t have enough of the folding stuff. This means we have staycations, which is great as so does everyone else these days so we are being hip and trendy like other people, as opposed to being poor.

This does mean, though, that we go on a few day trips and/or ‘short breaks’ and it is to this we turn now. So, back in May Marcus had a half term holiday of 2 days and on one of those days the Guru decided she and Marcus were going to go to Tokyo Disneyland – only the two of them, you’ll note, as I had long maintained that visiting anything to do with that old racist Walt Disney was right up there with golf and Alzheimer’s – i.e. when I do it, shoot me there and then as I will have lost my marbles and I need to be retired, permanently.

Anyway that’s what I thought but, low and behold, when we told the little fella that a trip to TDL was in the offing he was mightily excited as only a 5 yr old can be but, importantly, only if both parental entities could take him along. And so, after much wheedling, I bowed to the inevitable pressure and found myself going along as well.

So we aim to get there early, around 930am for a 10am start, not too early as this is a Tuesday in May, not a national holiday and not a school or university holiday period either, so kids older than about 4 yrs should be thin on the ground as they’ll all be studying. As we approach the gates there aren’t any queues so we smile a bit say various thanks – then we get to the turnstiles and realise that today the opening time was 930, probably a bit before, and so there are people already inside. Oh, ok, then we go through and realise that it is not a few people but a shitload of people, the place is heaving!

Nowadays at TDL they have a smart queing system, so you can buy pre-booked tickets to rides so you don’t have to wait for hours in lines; this works to an extent, except you have to wait in line for hours to get the pre-booked ticket, thereby shifting the queue to a different queue. So we really wanted to go on the new Monsters Inc ride, so we rushed there along with 1/3rd of the population of Japan and waited for about 45minutes until we got our ticket for, if memory serves, about 230pm, so for 5 hours later! We went to another popular ride to see if we could pre-book that but by the time we got there the ride time was about 7pm! Er, no thanks, not staying here that late…

So after that we decided to get on some of the less popular rides, like the Star Wars one, which was really cool whizzing through the universe and had zero queue (and amusingly scared the shit out of Marcus), and Buzz Lightyear one (which had a longish queue but wasn’t too bad). Then in need to refuelling we went to some pizza place and got a couple of somewhat stiff slices of pizza and small drinks for the GDP of Vietnam.

“And can I have a beer with that?” I asked…

“A beer! Here? In Tokyo Disneyland!? What are you, some kind of demented alcoholic wife-beating child-molester?” the serving lady shouted at me (with her eyes) before calling the Pentagon and having me transported via extraordinary rendition to Fort Bragg via Rangoon, Kabul, Algiers and Panama city, where I was kept for 72 hours in a dazzlingly white room and had classic Disney songs played constantly at ear-splitting volume before being dropped naked in a lay-by near the M3. Or something like that, but the important thing was that I didn’t get a beer. A sneer, yes, but no beer – this did not make me happy. I thought about asking if they had any crack instead, but I don’t think they would have got the joke.

After that we went to see the parade – as a show this was actually pretty good, as parades go. The song and dance routines were very song-y and dance-y, though the irony of course is that all the performers looked they had taken speedballs moments before they were unleashed on the suspecting public because no-one can look that perky for that long unaided.

So what else? We went on a number of rides or attractions that, after a while, seemed to blend into one. A lot of them, like the pirates of the Caribbean and one with small furry critters were of the ‘sit in a boat and go slowly with the flow whilst looking at the vignettes’ variety, so good in that a lot of work has gone into the production, but not really that original an idea and a bit, well, dull towards the end. We also went on an Amazon ‘river’ cruise which was in a proper boat looking at not-real animals. Lunch was actually very nice with decent sized portions but cost the other arm and leg and I still couldn’t get a beer, even in a ‘proper’ restaurant.

Oh, splash mountain was good but as we didn’t have fast-track tickets we had to wait for this one and it took nearly an hour of queuing, but at least that one had a bit of oomph about it, and proper ride rather than a sit and watch stuff ‘experience’ – also it amusingly scared the shit out of Marcus again (not literally I am glad to say), but he was most proud of himself afterwards that he survived.

And that was about it – oh, except for the long awaited Monsters Inc ride, the new pride and joy of TDL. Well, remember I mentioned the Buzz Lightyear ride? In that one you were in a trolley/car thing and you had to shoot aliens that popped up and the Zarg thing as you went around – all good fun, that one. In Monsters Inc you were in a trolley/car thing and you had to shine a torch on monsters that popped up [and then something big at the end] as you went around – all pretty much the same as the Buzz ride, just with a different backdrop.

And that was the problem with TDL, it’s basically about 3 rides which are repeated with different themes, so after you’ve done them once that’s it, you’re bored. Now on a busy weekend, when you’re only going to get to do about 3 rides, this may work well (though a rip-off), but if you can squeeze in 8 or 9 things in one day (as I said, it was busy there, but obviously not that busy as we did a lot – I would hate to be there on a bank holiday Monday during Obon…) then it gets a trifle boring.
And Mickey-fucking-Mouse is everywhere.
And you can’t get a beer anywhere.
(They could make a world of difference for the better by swapping those last two around…)

So shoot me now as I have lost my marbles and I need to be retired, permanently.

And coming soon…

Part 2 – in which the courageous team head to Tokyo Summerland

You gotta have form

Ready for a good old fashioned rant? OK, strap in and let's go...

How many world class Japanese athletes can you name? I'm talking about genuinely world class, ones that would walk into any team (if it's a team sport) or at the top of the tree individually. I can think of two, Kosuke Kitajima the swimmer who won double golds at the last 2 Olympics and Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners baseball team. For a country of 120 million people that doesn't seem a good return to me, so why is that?

Personally I think it all starts in school. I've written before about sadistic baseball coaches who train their teams literally to death every summer, I think that's a big part of it, but I think there are a few other factors as well. One is too much specialisation, this might seem counter-intuitive but bear with me. When I was a kid at school I got to play just about every sport the school could give me, so winter was rugby, football, hockey and cross country; summer was athletics (having a bash at all events) and cricket whilst all through the year we played indoor sports like badminton, squash, basketball, volleyball, gymnastics and I'm sure a whole bunch of other stuff as well. It helped that my school was next to a sports centre, but even if it wasn't we'd have still done a lot of this stuff. After school I could have joined a load of teams had I wanted to, I chose rugby but I could have represented the school at football as well if I had wanted - the more the better.

At a Japanese school, once you have decided you are a footballer, for example, that's it, you will play football all the time and it will be the only game you play. You will play it in the winter and the summer. You will not be allowed to play baseball even if you are quite good at it. You are a footballer and football you will play. Why is that? Doesn't it seem a bit rubbish? Rob Andrew, amongst others, was a blue at rugby and cricket for Cambridge - wouldn't happen at Waseda.

The argument, I'm sure, is that this makes you better at the sport you've chosen to specialise in, but that's hokum. The skills you learn in one sport will usually have a beneficial effect in other sports - think of the balance you gain from gymnastics, how useful would that be for our footballer? So I think they're missing a trick here, the more sports you play the better generally at sports you'll become, but that's not how it's done here.

But the real problem, I think, is all the fault of martial arts. Remember the film Karate Kid? Old Mr Miyagi gets Daniel-san to do menial jobs around the place - wax on, wax off etc. At the end Daniel says "you haven't taught me anything!" but then they spar and, lo and behold, cunning Mr Miyagi has been teaching Daniel the 'form' of the moves he needs to know. And that's the problem, in Japan it's all about form, or put it another way, it's about style over substance and especially being able to look correct, follow the form book and not being able to think for yourself. This might be a good approach for karate but it's a disaster area for everything else.

Walk past a school tennis club session and for 20 minutes you will hear the swishing of racquets but if you look at the session you will see a long line of (probably) girls swinging their arms practicing backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand, backhand. Stop, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk from the coach. Forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand etc but, and this is the important thing, the only thing they will be hitting is thin air. Isn't the point of tennis to hit a ball? It's the same with baseball, swinging bats or throwing & catching; same for football, swinging your leg; I watched a rugby coaching session a while back for 14-16 year-olds and they weren't allowed to touch a ball for 30 minutes of the one hour session while they were running through back's moves! The point from the coaches is that you have to practice the move, but how can you practice hitting a ball if you don't, actually, hit a ball?

The problem is this creates generations of kids who can swing a bat but can't hit a ball properly - how can you learn the hand-eye coordination needed to hit a ball if you can spend half the time swinging the bat with your eyes closed? Also a generation of kids who are told what to do all the time so can't think for themselves and play what's in front of them. It also walks hand-in-hand with the Japanese trait of squashing individualism and being a member of a team - in the team you don't have to think as the coach tells you what to do, but it means that Japan will never create a 'genius' sportsman or sportswoman, a Chris Hoy, a Michael Jordan, a Kelly Holmes, a Dan Carter, a Lionel Messi, because these players used their brains and natural talent to excel at their sports. If any of these kids grew up in Japan they would have had talent coached out of them by the time they were 14.

It's such a shame as Japan has the wealth and resources to create athletes that should compete with the best on a regular basis. Their football team should, by any measure, be right up there, but they are functional and utilitarian at best - the best player they produced, Hidetoshi Nakata, was generally regarded as a maverick, difficult to mange and didn't get on with other players on the team. At least the managers had the good sense to pick him - just before the recent winter olympics in Vancouver a Japanese snowboarder and gold medal prospect Kazuhiro Kokubo arrived at Narita Airport in his official olympic blazer but with his shirt hanging out and his tie undone. The shock, the horror - he's a snow boarder, what do you expect? But officials from the Japan Olympic Committee (quite possibly the biggest bunch of old farts in the sporting universe, and as you can imagine, that's up against some pretty stiff opposition) wanted to ban the guy from the games - a gold medal prospect banned for not tucking his shirt in! You couldn't make it up. It took a quick bit of negotiation from some agent or other with the guy and a bit of top level mollification toward the JOC and finally the kid was allowed to go (once he tucked in his shirt, one trusts). Eventually he came 5th in his event and I wouldn't be surprised if his mental equilibrium was shot by the crap he had to go through before getting on the plane.

Last there is this. Do you know that characteristic is most prized by Japanese parents in their children? Courage? No. Intelligence? A distant second. Apparently the most prized characteristic parents want in their kids is, according to a recent poll, shyness. Apparently it is considered cute. Oh for fuck's sakes, cute! It might be OK for a 4 year old (though I would have serious reservations about even this) but you want to cripple your child for the rest of his or her life by making them socially inept, scared and unable to think clearly when conversing with another person? This of course has a far more wide ranging impact than just making decent sportsmen and women in Japan (for example the abnormally high suicide rate in Japan), but that was how this rant started so that's how we'll end. Can you think of a shy elite athlete? I can think of plenty who value their privacy but shyness? Elite athletes tend to have big personalities to go with their enormous egos which drive them on to win. Ichiro, who we mentioned above, has a pretty sorted ego, as did Nakata, that's what made them better then the rest of the baseballers and footballers of their generations, it's why their Japanese teammates didn't like them and why they ended up playing overseas. Let's hope a few more of them and their ilk come along and manage to slip through the fingers of their junior high school coaches and they find someone decent to nurture and develop their talent, not beat it out of them...

Skiing

So last weekend I went skiing.

"I?" I hear you ask, not "we" as in with the family?

No, this was an 'I', along with 3 teachers from the school and 19 kids in the 'school ski club'. This may sound like a recipe for disaster, but it was not, in fact it was a jolly good weekend jaunt, there are several reasons for this.

Firstly it was the ski club, which means it wasn't an unruly mob of kids but a bunch who had done this twice before this year so were used to the whole caper, this meant that they were not quite into the silly bugger mode as might be expected. Secondly I didn't have to pay for anything as it was a school trip and I was 'staff' so shinkansen tickets, accommodation, lift passes (and the odd enormous gin and tonic after the kids had gone to bed) were all covered by the school and parents of kids on the trip. Also the kids knew how to ski very well, so we didn't have to worry too much about them hurting themselves by accidentally falling off something inappropriate, like a mountain (however it did mean we had to worry about them attempting to break the sound barrier whilst racing their mates). And last but not least we stayed in a great place called Canyons, which is essentially a cheap & cheerful outward bound centre, the sort of place that for some reason generally does not exist in Japan so is run by a bunch of crazy New Zealanders.

It's weird but ski places in Japan are extremely po-faced and serious, a place to go to ski, have a bath and sleep, missing out that important 'get shitfaced in the evening' bit after the bath. I don't know why this is, but trying to find an open izakaya, let alone a bar or karaoke place, after about 7pm at a Japanese ski resort is next to impossible. Well it was until Aussies realised this and started opening bars especially in Hokkaido, but not in Gunma, where we were, but luckily the Canyons place we stayed at had a most convivial bar that required propping up on a Saturday night.

However before we got there we had a day of skiing to get through. As I said this was the ski club so no beginners here, but they were there to improve so had lessons. The kids were split into groups and taken off with an instructor and as a responsible adult I went with one of them. Now it has been a while since I last ski-ed, I think it was with Steve on his last trip with the high school he worked at, maybe 4 or 5 years ago, so I knew it would take me a while to get back into the swing of it. So we went up the first lift and then a second, then the instructor stopped, had a quick explain of what he wanted us to do. 

Quite straight forward so off we went - the first slope was quite shallow and we all cruised along. Next bit, stop, explain again, off down a steeper bit and zoom, off they all went and quite an alarming pace. Of course I was last to go as I had to make sure I was following up if anyone fell over or got lost, and as the rest were quicker than me by the time I caught up with the group the instructor was saying "everyone got that? Right, let's go...". And off they went. This carried on for about 45 minutes until, coming down on a reasonably long run into the main starting area, the last of the kids who I was following disappeared over the lip of a hill and by the time I'd got there had completely disappeared...uh oh. To be fair there were a lot of people down there milling about waiting for lifts, but I lost them totally. Ah, slightly embarrassing, outrun by a bunch of kids.

Oh well, luckily I found another of our groups and tagged along with them, figuring we'd probably meet again at some point and the kids were with an instructor so probably weren't in too much danger. And meet up again we did about 30 minutes later - cue much bullshitting on my part about how I had to find Mr L to discuss something... no, I don't think any of them believed me either...

After that I had to speed up, but of course the more confident I became so did the kids, so they were always far out in front of me, but I consoled myself in the knowledge that it wasn't a race. No, that came in the afternoon and on Sunday. We set up a slalom course and Saturday afternoon was practice for the big race on Sunday. Naturally the steepest bit of slope was found to set up the course and whilst skiing a steep slalom course is tricky (believe me), setting one up is even harder as you have to stop, drill into the snow and screw in poles with a big corkscrew type thing. Anyway that done the kids all set about the course, some better,some worse, but none quite so bad as yours truly. I figured I had to have a go, but soon realised that a slalom course is extremely down. This may sound obvious, but when you ski you tend to go across slopes more than down, until you get better and are confident about more downness than acrossness. I only fell over twice, but one was a real headfirst-into-the-snow wipeout - must have looked good from above, judging by the mirth.

So then on Sunday (after a Saturday night ski and aforementioned g&t) the kids spent all day racing down an even longer slalom course to see who could record the overall best three times of the day. More wipeouts from the kids this time, but then again they were really going for it and it was very icy in the morning. In the end we had various champions but the biggest winners were that we didn't have any injuries and managed to get all the kids back to Tokyo in one piece and with all their gear. 

I was knackered by the end of it, but will definitely be back next season.

Haloscan...

OK, so the comments haven't disappeared, don't blame me, I was just passing on what they told me, or what I thought they told me. Whatever, the comments are all still there and new ones can be added so I don't know wtf is going on (hah! like that's any change...), but as long as I don't have to change anything with the template I'm good with that.

Signs

They're everywhere, man, just everywhere. And I'm just, like, OMG! It's sooo kinda out there!!! Ooops, sorry, a bit of the princess dippy blog there spilling back into the Arakawa universe (see the comments section of the last post if your really want to).

No, signs, they really are everywhere, telling you what to do or passing on information that you really don't need. Then again, every now and again you see a sign or two that makes you think 'yeah, see what they mean' or 'hmm, useful info, thanks' or even 'wtf?'

This is a long way of getting around to talking about a couple of signs the Guru and I saw the other day. Last Sunday we were in Kudanshita (I know, on a Sunday! Believe me not a lot goes on in Kudanshita on a Sunday but there we were, actually, not a lot goes on in Kudanshita most of the time, I reckon) as we were taking the little fella to a birthday party. "What, in Kudanshita? On a Sunday!?" Yes, believe it or not. Kudanshita is the bit of Tokyo just to the north of the imperial palace compound, with a bit of moat, a lot of cherry trees for spring, Budokan (if a concert is on - I saw Oasis there many a moon ago, maybe 1998), Yasukuni Shrine (enshrined class A war criminals (read the archives for more)) and not much else. But one of Marcus' school chums' fathers works for OUP and probably has strong embassy (which is close by but round the corner in Hanzoumon) connections and so for some reason chose a restaurant, no, a Bar & Grill, in Kudanshita for his daughter's 5th birthday party. Maybe it's because his wife is Russian, I don't know.

Anyway, we dropped the fella off (does this make us bad parents? A birthday party - here, you look after 20 kids with too much sugar intake for 2 hours whilst the wife and I have a Starbucks, just the two of us, for the first time in 3 months... No, sensible parenting, if you ask me) and then went to find the aforementioned Starbucks. The cafe in question was on the ground floor of an office building, which had the following sign affixed:


Now, doing business is the purpose of an office block, if you ask me, so what is it that people have against pets in Kudanshita? Worried that a bunch of market-savvy corgis are about to move in and clean up, or maybe a syndicate of Siamese are about to move in - that's probably a good idea as the area looks like it needs a high class pussy or two around to liven things up (ba-dum-tsh, I thank you!)

Anyway also spotted on our wanderings was the next sign:

It's the 1st floor that is of interest here. Now, think about James Bond (bear with me), when he is under cover and trying to get that all important first meeting with Blofeld he doesn't call up and say "This is James Bond from MI6" does he? No, he says "James Bond, Universal Exports" - it's called a 'cover', from what I am to believe reading John Le Carre novels. In Japan they don't bother with this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff when it comes to espionage, they just play it straight and tell you how it is.

So I couldn't believe it either when I saw the sign above which says (roughly translated)

1F Office Japan Secret Service

Of course it could all be a front, I mean there was me, a shaven-headed foreigner taking pictures of the Secret Service building and so far no SWAT team has jumped through our living room window spraying bullets and tear gas...

Orthopaedic chap

So went along to the ortho-chap today. We were going to go to our local hospital but then the Guru found what looked to more like a physio/sports-injury doctor so there we went. Interestingly we were the youngest patients there by about 50 years, and it was packed, so goodness knows what the hospital's ortho section would have been like...

Due to numbers of extremely decrepit old personages there we figured that we were in for a long wait, but I think that their interest was piqued by the prospect of treating someone under the age of 90, so a young doctor-ish person came out straight away and started asking questions about what, were, when etc.

First decision was to make sure it was anything to do with problem bones, so it was x-ray time. I thought it would be one, maybe another from the side, but I really must get out of this mindset and remember I'm in Japan. So, something like 15 x-rays later we were done - about half way through I did feel slightly worried that they were taking snapshots of my groin; not that I'm planning on any more kids, but 15 doses of radiation on the old meat & two veg can't be good, can it?

Then a meeting with the Doc - the good news was that there is no bone damage, so it's not like I have a stress fracture in my femur or anything like that (I was worried). And the bad news... well, wasn't really like bad news, except he said, essentially;

"Your thigh hurts and it's muscular - not much you can do except 1 rest; 2 stretch, especially after a hot bath; 3 buy some cold patch things from the chemist down stairs, here's a prescription."

Can I run again?

"Your leg hurts you idiot, no you can't, not for at least 2 weeks, then come back and see me if it still hurts".

So there we go. No real help or advice on what I did wrong or what I can do to prevent it happening again in the future. But then again he isn't a sports physiotherapist so maybe he doesn't know the why's or how not to again's, just what's wrong and how to make it better.

At least another 2 weeks of not running will mean I have been off training for the best part of 5 weeks and it will only be about 5-6 weeks until the marathon; so not enough time to get back to where I was fitness-wise and improve enough/get enough miles under my belt to make the race a realistic proposition (and avoid serious and permanent damage to myself in the process).

So the marathon is off the agenda for 2010, more's the pity. However I will be applying for 2011 and fingers crossed I'll get in for that one.

In the meantime I will recover from this setback, be wiser for it, start running again and launch the 2011 training programme from a much stronger running base. Also I'll try and get a couple of half marathons in there so I know what racing feels like.

Back with a vengeance

OK, apologies, been busy etc, but we’re back now.

As I haven’t put finger to keyboard pretty much this year a lot has gone on, however as it is now August I can’t remember most of it. What I can remember is that 1) we moved and 2) the folks came to visit, so that is what I shall write about (so if you don’t want to know about either of these things, stop reading now).

The moving

Yes, as I type this at the office (it’s summer so it’s quiet…) I know that when I finish I will return home not to the bustling metropolis of Kawaguchi but to the sleepy-except-for-the-trains Ukimafunado. ‘Where on earth is that?’ I’m sure you’re all wondering, well, if you google it you can find it, but it is in Itabashi ward of Tokyo, so I can finally say that I really do live in Tokyo rather than in a bit of Japan right next to Tokyo (not that it ever stopped me). Anyway the new gaff is actually pretty close to the old gaff, over the river and along a bit, so we are still nice and close to the riverbank (good for jogging) and also very close to a jolly nice big park with a pond (but also close to a train line and a fairly big road) and also we’re on a direct line into Shibuya, making the morning commute slightly less stressful for me and the little ‘un (who has now attained the ripe old age of four – about the right age and size for chimney sweeping, which is where I would send him over the summer holiday if only a) the guru would let me and b) anyone in Japan had a chimney… I digress)

So anyway, the first part of the year was mainly taken up with getting this gargantuan move sorted out. As I’m sure you can imagine there were plenty of hassles along the way, mainly involving money and pieces of paper that had to be signed. Luckily the bank and the mortgage neatly involved both of these bothersome requirements and the Guru and I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time travelling to Mizonokuchi (where we nearly bought before and where the man with the money was) and sitting in the bank’s loan plaza (which was unlike a plaza in almost every way) listening to a man with bad breath talk to us about mortgages. Of course we went through the whole fixed or free floating conundrum and ended with a deal that, to be honest, I don’t really understand, but some of the loan is floating and some of it fixed for 10 years, but the rate on the floating bit has limits so it can’t suddenly go up by 5% overnight. Or something. I don’t know, I just filled in and signed lots of bits of paper. Interesting that whilst the bank savings interest rate is something like 0.000000001% at the moment, the rate on loans and mortgages is, of course, much higher at something like 3.5%. Hmm…

Note on filling in forms – over the last few months and, well I suppose a year now, I have had to fill in a shitload of bits of paper, usually with exactly the same bits of information like names, address, work, family details etc. Now as a non-native writer of Japanese I have had to practice a bit to get to a point where what I write is legible. The Guru, on the other hand, is Japanese so has had a lot of practice. The result of this is that, as a Japanese person, her handwriting is allowed to be nearly illegible and another Japanese person reading it will have no issues; however as a foreigner my writing has to be of almost typeface quality otherwise a Japanese person will refuse to believe it is Japanese. A case in point. There is a katakana character 'イ' which is the phonic equivalent of a short ‘i’, on one of the bank forms an officious banker decided that with my written イ the slanting top bar was too short and therefore illegible, so I had to go back to Mizonokuchi one evening by myself after work and redo all the forms because one or two of these characters didn’t look right. It didn’t matter that there isn’t really another katakana character it could be confused with (see here if you want http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana) or that, in context, it couldn’t really have been anything else, to him it didn’t look right so had to be changed. Can you imagine having to fill in the same forms all over again because the bloke at Barclays doesn’t like the way you write the letter ‘e’? What a tosser.

Anyway the important point here was that we got the cash, which made the construction company happy as it meant that we could actually buy the place.

Moving house is a big business in Japan, although I can guess that this may well also be the case in other parts of the world. Moving in April is even bigger business here in Japan as a lot of people do it, so moving companies can, and do, make it more expensive. Interestingly the reason April is so busy is that it is the start of the financial year; ‘so what?’ you may muse. Well, Japanese companies are extremely likely to, at the drop of a hat in March, decide that the company would be better served if Tanaka san from accounts in the Tokyo office would become, on 1st April, Tanaka san from marketing in the Nagoya office. And off Tanaka san will duly toddle, possibly but not necessarily taking family in tow with about 2 week’s notice. This may seem harsh, and it is. The reason, so I am reliably informed by my memory, is a hangover from the feudal samurai period where the samurai were distributed around the country and, importantly away from the wives and families who stayed in Edo (Tokyo), so as a) not to ferment rebellion/assassinate the emperor or shogun in Edo with their mates and b) so wives and family could be held hostage. Nowadays it is corporate salaryman that gets shunted about and usually families are encouraged to go (but if hubby is moved to, say, Utsunomiya would you go…?), but the moves are still there. It seems like a serious waste of time and money to me, but then I’m not Japanese so I couldn’t possibly understand.

Moving into a newly built apartment block can be tricky. If it is a really big block then you can imagine the problem if each and every of the 758 new apartment owners all tried to move in at 9am on Monday morning – so these things have to be organised.

As you can imagine this is a jobsworth’s wet dream.

Our new block is quite small, only 50 or so units, however we also had a partner removal firm appointed by the construction company. It was their job, let’s call them Kitazawa for that indeed was their name, to organise the moving of new owners and, as they are a removal company themselves, basically get as much business for themselves as possible (what, I wonder, was the kickback to the construction company to get the business…?). The equation was quite simple, if you used Kitazawa you could move at any time you wanted, spend as long as you want loading and unloading your gear, block everyone’s access to the building if you wanted and have the them kiss your butt everyday for a month; if you didn’t use Kitazawa then you could move only when Kitazawa said you could, everything had to be unloaded from your removal van in 30 seconds or less, your removal van could not, however, actually stop moving outside the building for more than 4 seconds and parking facilities were available but only in Osaka.

With this in mid we contacted Kitazawa and asked them to give us a quote. For moving all our stuff about 1½ miles and recycling about 13 pieces of old, crap furniture they wanted the princely sum of 500,000 yen that’s over 3 grand in real money. Next! The recycling bit was the bit that got me – in Japan the local council will do this for you, you just call them up, they give you a date and then you buy a recycling sticker from your local convenience store, total cost about 500 yen per piece and the hassle of buying the sticker and putting it outside your apartment on the designated day. So for Kitazawa to quote us 150,000 yen for the recycling was the clincher – well, that and the fact we couldn’t afford half a million yen on the removals.

Luckily the school I work for uses a local mover every summer to cart teachers stuff around, so I gave him a call and asked him to give us a quote and he came back with a removals only price of 100,000, much more like it, though he did blanch a bit when we gave him the ‘rules’ for delivery and unloading.

After that it was mostly plain sailing. We packed up all the stuff, sometimes with the little un’s help but more often with us packing and he unpacking at the same time, sometimes from the same box. The appointed day came quickly, as they always do, but just before it did my folks arrived from the UK for a month’s stay – more of that later.

The moving itself was fine, we stood back and let sweaty men do all of the hard work whilst worrying about the new place and the old place. Although Kitazawa had all these draconian rules and penalties about the unloading of stuff the truth was that the new block was quite small and the arrival of new owners was actually spread out over a number of weeks, if not months, so there was very little in the way of moving in clashes and certainly no removal rage which, apparently, is not uncommon. Also we moved in on a Monday morning so it was never going to be that busy, not like a weekend.

The bigger concern for us was how much, if any, of the deposit on the old place we would get back. The deposit was 100,000yen and we figured if we got 20,000 back we’d be happy. There are horror stories of bastard landlords not only not giving any deposit back but of making demands for huge extra payments for spurious cleaning or repair work. I didn’t think it would come to that, but you never know.

So on the Monday afternoon we went back to the old 7th floor, fine view Kawaguchi flat for the final time to witness the last rites (of our stay anyway). Surprisingly neither the letting agent nor the landlord turned up, just a bloke from a redecorating company who would give his professional opinion. OK, fair enough. So as we sat on the floor of the empty flat he nosed around. The reason we were a tad worried was that over 6 years of wear and tear, including 4 years of small boy, there were bits of the flat in a state of disrepair. The tatami mats in the living room were threadbare in places, the paper on some of the sliding doors was a tad holey (not wholly holey, but enough), there were plenty of nicks in the wallpaper and the kitchen floor had scratches and, worst of all in our opinion, the odd gouge. So we weren’t too hopeful.

So chap did his rounds, then showed me what he’d found, all of which I agreed with. So, how much to put right? He started to fill in his clipboard and take measurements with his tape measure. When he started on the walls and wall paper his comment was – [with sucking of teeth] “and this is where it can get really expensive…” Gulp. And the final tally…45,000yen to you squire.

“Gosh, well, hmm, that seems an interesting number, does that include the tatami?” “Yup, everything in there chief”. OK, hold on…

Of course we were pleasantly surprised and could have said yes right then, but I had an even more cunning plan. One of my team at work is a qualified estate agent (they have to take exams in this country!) and she had said it was ok to call her to discuss what landlords can actually charge for, so I did. I went onto the balcony and left redecorator and the Guru inside. This made redecorator nervous as the Guru told him I was taking legal advice (which was in a sense true), so even whilst I was talking outside the quote came down to about 39,000yen as redecorator had made a ‘mistake’. The advice was that as tenants of 6.5 years and more we were legally only obliged to contribute a maximum of 10% of the cost of a number of items, specifically the wallpaper. Nice work! We told chap this and he said he would pass on to the letting agents – he did and a couple of days later the final bill was agreed at about 25,000yen! Yaay, result! And he never even checked the kitchen floor.

After that it was just trying to work how all the new electronic gizmos in the new place worked (we still don’t know…)

Next, the folks visit…

Jesus Christ!

Apparently he was Japanese, you know, buried in a field in Aomori Prefecture when he died at the age of 106. It was his brother that was strung up by the Romans; tsk, imagine they must have been pretty narked when they found out. Anyway, read the whole story here.

The last few months

So I figure it’s about time I wrote something down. Er…

So a lot has changed over the past few months, not least the fact that I have changed jobs. If you may remember I was working for an English school, the fools having been foolish enough to make me Principal in 2006. this was fine while it lasted but I discovered that the higher up the tree you go, the more shite it gets – might only be true for that particular company but more likely it is a truism all over the world. Anyway I wrote in spring/summer last year that I was trying to make myself more marketable, I don’t know if I managed to do this or not, but I think it put me in the right mindset.

Over the summer I had a number of interviews for hr/recruitment related jobs for banks in Tokyo – this was something of an eye opener, as you might expect, not least for the fact that I had to spend about a week in the library trying to find out what it is exactly that banks do to make money. Actually that’s not true, I spent a week in the library trying to get to a point where I could sound like I knew a little bit about how banks make their money. Luckily I have now forgotten everything I read because these none of these banks were that interested in me (nor me them, really, except the wad I might have expected had I joined one of them, they do seem to pay well).

But what I did see was a position as hr manager for another school in Tokyo, this time not an English school but an International School that happened to be quite British in its outlook, curriculum, teachers etc. So after some to-ing and, but of course, no little amount of fro-ing as well, I landed the gig. Even for these guys it took three interviews including one that lasted most of a day! I started here at the back end of November but as part of my lengthy and extended escape period from the last lot I had to return there 4 times in December to ‘finish things off’ – which meant I went to Nishi Kasai and sat there doing not very much at all, but it did mean that I got paid to the end of the December by those guys and the new guys – double salary action, nice…

Being the new guy meant that I got to work for most of Christmas as well, so whilst for the last 10 years or so I’ve had around 10 days off over crimbo and the new year this time around it was Christmas day and new year’s day only (though boxing day was the last day to return to last lot, so it was something of a bittersweet working day). Therefore exciting stories of Christmas adventure are somewhat thin on the ground this year as, basically, I worked. We did go to the brand spanking new train museum in Omiya (in fact the youngster has dragged me there twice), which was good in a lots-of-trains-can-only-keep-me-interested-so-far kind of way, which, I hardly need to add, isn’t nearly as far as they can keep a 2¾ year old boy interested.

Christmas day was full of the usual presents-and-food shenanigans, this year I even got some presents myself, which was most pleasant after last year’s rather dismal showing. The youngster got lots of car/train action, which, well, I was going to say kept him quiet for hours but in reality they kept him interested and loud for hours. The Guru also received presents aplenty, though I’ll be buggered if I can remember what she got, now that it is February after all.

On the Japan front things have been quiet as well. Quiet is the operative word for the new PM, Somethingsomething Fukuda (sorry, can’t remember his first name…might be Yasuro…). Anyway you might remember that I nothing but ambivalence for Silent Shinzo because, as far as I could see, he didn’t do or say anything of note, or anything at all. Well, Fukuda makes him look like Outrageous Abe (I wanted that to be alliterative, and it kind of is when you say it, but it doesn’t work when you read it, if anyone can suggest a synonym for loquacious that starts with ‘a’ then I’d be happy to edit). I digress, so, Fukuda, even more quiet and crap than the last extremely quiet and crap bloke. Goodness how we all hanker for the excitement of the Kid. Along with much of the rest of the world the people of Japan are worried about recession – no, the media are telling everyone that they are worried about recession, making it a truth even if it isn’t.

Lots of other things have happened, none of which I wrote down (though at the time saying ‘I must write that down and write about it in the blog’) and now, of course, can’t remember. As you might expect the usual white collar crimes have continued unabated, the usual frauds, embezzlements and backhanders that keep Japan Inc ticking over nicely, whilst erstwhile parents have continued to show their credentials by murdering their offspring (and vice versa to be fair).

One story I did like from a few months ago was about a bloke who got legless, literally. Chap was riding along a motorway in the countryside somewhere in Japan with some friends and strayed a little too close to the central reservation barrier. Apparently he felt the bike twitch a little so thought he had clipped a stone or something so he slowed down a little and moved in a little and then carried on regardless. It was only when he stopped at a junction a little later that he realised that his right leg below the knee was missing – that and his mate coming to stop beside him and then handing over his newly liberated limb. Apparently the bike twitch he felt was his leg catching on the barrier and then being ripped off – without him noticing a thing! You have to wonder, all mad these bikers (or extremely hard)

They'll get you, and there'll be no exceptions


Once before, a long time ago, I wrote on this very blog about the local traffic police in Nishi Kasai, or rather the parking police, who drove around putting chalk marks on your car tyres to prove you were illegally parked (having to clean your car tyres being the direst punishment in the Japanese Big Book of Punitive Actions). Anyway it was my contention then that this was 'a bit crap really' and wasn't much of a deterrent - if you can be bothered you can go and read the original post, but heaven knows where it is.

Anyway this general level of dissatisfaction with the parking busies, and the boys in blue overall, should not in any way tarnish the image of the Bicycle Parking Police, who are assiduous and dedicated in their approach to what is, in a country of 120 million people and 874 million bicycles, a hard job. So, on Boxing day I was walking through Nishi Kasai on my way to lunch when I stopped dead because I saw this:



So here we have a child's tricycle illegally parked outside a convenience store. The evil perpertrator of this crime is nowhere to to be seen (thankfully as I would not want to meet them!) but the plucky bicycle police (Child Tricycle Division) have reasoned that illegal parking is illegal parking and, dangerous though the situation may become, they have a job to do and that job is to tag illegally parked vehicles and take them away if no one reclaims them within one year and a day of tagging.

As you can see this tag has been firmly placed on the handlebars of the tricycle and now the Bicycle Police can only sit back and wait for the inevitable backlash. I am happy about this on two counts; firstly that the Bicycle police do their job without fear of favour, protecting and serving as is their remit. Secondly, as of Boxing day I no longer work in Nishi Kasai (that's another story) so will not get caught up in the spiral of violence that will inevitably follow this dramatic event.

Your friendly, neighbourhood bobbies on the beat

Apparently this is a flyer published by the friendly boys in blue from Ibaraki. Just a quiet note to the locals that states the best policy when dealing with the influx of foreigners, all of whom are criminals, is to "stop them at the shores!"

Yes, that is a total of 7 riot police subduing one helpless chap (well, 6 and their mate on his way in to help out)...



Just in case you're wondering, the first 3 kanji in yellow say "gaikokujin", or foreigner. And I thought Japan was a friendly place.

For more see the newspaper report here.

Hmm

Lots of odd stuff going off in Japan right now. None of it, I should point out now, concerns Silent Shinzo, but that is to be expected. In fact he's a bit like Silent Bob in those Jay and Silent Bob Do Mescaline type films, one of which I watched once (I think I might have been drunk at the time, that is only reason I can think of that I actually sat through it).

I digress. No, read in the paper this morning that a 17 year old boy, a high school student as you would expect, from a central bit of Japan walked into a police station yesterday morning with his mother's head in a platic bag, as you would probably not expect. Apparently this boy had killed his mother and hacked off her head the previous night because "he really wanted to kill someone" and I suppose his mother was the closest person to hand, as it were. I know Japan is full of weird, but how weird is that? What strike me are parallels with the chap who did all the killing at Virginia Tech in America a month or two ago. Both boys, both obviously very disturbed...er, that's about it on the parallels, but the main difference which I can see, but a lot of Americans can't, is that fact that American college chap got his hands on lots of guns and ammunition and managed to take a lot of his classmates with him, whilst Japanese boy, with only a knife, decided he didn't need his mother anymore and then turned himself in. At least he kept it in the family (I realise that is not a particularly nice thing to say, and certainly isn't too good for his mum, but it did keep the death toll down).

Other weird thing is the new hatch down in Kumamoto. This is a baby hatch, the first in Japan, where parents with new offspring who suddenly decide they don't want said offspring can leave the little one in a hatch in a hospital and the nursing staff will take the baby in and look after it etc. Why anyone would wait until giving birth before deciding they don't want to keep their baby is beyond me, but obviously people do (and before we get into a discussion about the prosand cons of abortion, the Japanese have a very different take on abortion than the typical western view and it is, because of this, a lot more common - I'm not saying that's good or bad, it just they have a different way of thinkning about it with much less of the stigma (but no less of the emotion, I feel sure)). Anyway the weirdness was that yesterday morning, I think, or amybe before, the nurses found a 3 year old boy had been abandoned in the hatch. Now relieving yourself of a newborn must be pretty hard, but a 3 year old! Apparently the little boy is 'helping police with their inquiries', to use the euphemism, but what sort of parents would do that? (answer, I suppose, is desperate ones).

Anyway that's all quite depressing. On a lighter note Steve and I ventured into town last week to watch the Classic All Blacks do a number on the Japan national team on the rugby paddock. At half time it was 6-10 to the Old New Zealanders (I think calling them the All Blacks adds to their aura, they're from New Zealand, so say that!) and so we thought that ew might have a game on our hands, but alas no as after 1/2 time the ONZ's scored 26 points with noreply to walk away with it. The Japan coach is ex-NZ star John Kirwan, he wanted his charges to play the ONZs to toughen them up a bit before the Pacific 6 Nations - that's all well and good but I shudder to thnk what score the Young New Zealanders would put on this Japan team...

And finally. Just a few words about the little fella, he now has more energy than that star that exploded recently and got all the NASA scientists in a tizzy. However he is putting this to good use by learning lots of new words, some of which we even teach him. His favourites right now are 'where are you?' which he says whilst hiding behind the curtains; daddy + noun, such as daddy belt, daddy work, daddy beer or daddy shoooes, just in case I had forgotten; whilst also beginning to realise that some words work better with daddy, like 'pick me up' (as I won't respond when he asks me in Japanese), but when mummy is cooking he'll point to the cooker and say 'abunai' rather than dangerous, both of which he knows. Clever that.