Snow

It has only snowed properly a couple of times so far since I've been here but even so I have noticed an interesting peculiarity of Appikogen snow; it doesn't fall, as the word would imply, top-to-bottom, rather it arrives in very much horizontal fashion, arriving across the landscape in a howling fury.

This makes certain things like being outside something of a challenge, amongst the many challenges of living here. Driving to and from the office in this weather has been an interesting experience, with visibility down to a metre or two at times. But it does make for pretty patterns as the snow dances across ground in eddies and swirls.

There is also a lot of it, and I say this knowing that we ain't seen nothing yet, as the peak season for snowfall is towards the end of January. That said it is not, apparently, like prefectures such as Niigata where houses have a second front door on the 2nd floor so you can exit onto the snowdrifts rather then into, I assume that is because they are on the Japan Sea coast and get the full force of the snow clouds, I wonder if Akita, to the left of Iwate, gets the same...?

I must say I have great admiration for the boffins who invented snow tyres. Here they don't grit the roads so once the ploughs have been past about an inch of compacted snow is left on the road which quickly turns to solid ice. Walking to your car is a hazardous experience, fraught with arse-over-tit opportunities, but the cars are as sure footed as mountain goats, as long as you are careful, obviously. I mentioned after the skidpan experience that I was impressed with ABS, and this is so, and coupled with snow tyres it shows how far car safety has come in the last 30 years. Impressive stuff I must say.

Oh, and well done England. It is important to keep traditions alive in this ever changing world and losing heavily at the Gabba in December will always be a cherished part of our heritage, like incompetent Prime Ministers or selling weapons to third world despots.

Skid row

 So on Tuesday last week I got to leave the middle of nowhere to travel to the thriving metropolis that is Morioka, the reason being was that I had a date with a skid pan...

Iwate and Tohoku get a lot of snow and I, being a person who has not driven a car in snow before (or actually owned a car at any point in my life) figured I should probably try and get prepared for this - or rather the Guru rightly thought I should. So Tuesday night down to Morioka on one of the infrequent Hanawa line trains (the reason you need a car) for a night on the tiles in a city that doesn't have a roofing emporia. I got to the city, found the hotel and realised I was surprised to see groups of people again, which was weird as I'd only been living up here for about 10 days, but walking through the station mall trying to find somewhere for dinner was quite odd for some reason.

The reason for staying the night was that the driving lesson started at 9. 30 and was some way out of the city, so up early, a few work emails then a taxi to the driving school - that the taxi cost nore thhan the lesson was something we'll not dwell, then again the alternative travel arrangements were not, as we shall see, particularly plentiful. Oh, and a note to say that Tuesday night was the first snow of the season...

I was shown to a portacabin that nicely warm and waited, slowly the room filled and in total there were 8 of us, though only 7 to begin with as one bloke went to the wrong driving school site - oops, glad it wasn't me. So two groups of 4, our group gets to watch the obligatory videos first while the other group gets to have fun in the cars. The videos are pretty much what you'd expect - it's slippery, drive carefully, take it slow and smooth, don't give it plenty of welly on a curve if you don't want to come a cropper - that sort of thing. Of course while we were watching there were all sorts of interesting noises coming from the skid pan and a quick look out the window confirmed the drivers were having fun. 

The other 3 guys in my group (#3 finally arrived late) were all employees of Kirin beverage, in fact all the participants except me had been sent by their companies, and all had been transferred up to Iwate recently - cue lots of knowing smiles, the company, huh... They seemed like nice guys and were pleasantly chatty so I was thinking that if I asked one of them they might give me a lift back into Morioka (everyone but me had driven to the pan), so keeping that in mind we headed out once the first group were done.

As is typical with driving lessons in Japan you share a car with 2-3 trainees and one instructor, which for me is another oddity but there you go, I graciously allowed the other guy to go first, how nice of me, as this was all being done in Japanese and while I was doing pretty well at following everything, watching someone else do the drills first seemed like a smart move on my part. Added to this was the fact that this, it suddenly dawned on me, was the first time I was going to have driven a car in over a year. Oops.

The actual driving bit was quite short in all honesty, you got to make 4 passes through the pan with varying degrees of 'try to brake/turn, see what happens', the first runs without the ABS switched on and then with. Goodness me ABS makes a difference! How did people drive safely before? Then the last bit was a handbrake turn to make you skid properly and then attempt to steer your way out of the slide - let's just say if this happens to me the roads better be pretty wide...

It was useful though as I have never been in an out of control car before so being in one in a controlled environment was really helpful and a bit of an eye opener. But then I had to get home. So as I mentioned I had been thinking to ask one of the nice Kirin guys for a lift but, as I was the only non-company person there they all got to leave while I had to go and pay, and as I was doing this everyone else buggered off. As I didn't want to call a taxi (it would have been doubly expensive) I asked the instructor chap if the bus stop was 'over there?', gesticulating vaguely. He looked at me as if I was mad and asked how I got there in the first place and another instructor piped up with "taxi" and a smirk, Smiling amused smiles to themselves the main instructor then, kindly I must say, offered to drive me to the bus stop, which was good of him as the weather was changeable to say the least.

So we hopped in the car for the short drive to what turned out to be the bus depot, though that's stretching it a little. Out side I asked a lady what time the bus for Morika left, she looked at me as if I had asked  to bed her daughter and scurried inside to ask (turns out she was a cleaner so fair enough), she returned with 1155, so a 20 minute wait, ok. As it was chilly I went inside the depot as they had a waiting bench, cue stunned silence from the 2 people working in there, reminiscent of the pub in American Werewolf in London. I smiled, they stared. To break the tension I asked how long roughly it took to Morioka, about an hour maybe? This led to much shuffling of paper and frantic searching as if no one had ever wondered such a thing, what was really odd was that the driver was sitting there and you'd ave thought he'd be able to knock that one out of the park straight away but apparently the appearance of anyone, let along a Japanese speaking gaijn, at the depot had struck everyone temporarily dumb. But it was confirmed, about an hour - I thought prudent at that point not to try and engage them in any more small talk.

The journey back itself was rural and quite interesting, but only in a once-is-enough kind of way. However because it took so long I did miss the 12.47 Hanawa line train back to Appikogen and as is often the case in this part of the world the next train was at 16:40. What to do with 4 hours to kill in Morioka? Sit in the library and work seemed to be the best option, at least the wifi was free.

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…)