Words of wisdom, those, posted on Facebook at about 2.49pm yesterday, Friday 11th March, after the first big shake of the earthquake.
I was working in the office in Shibuya, over the road from the school (where, incidentally, the little fella attends). I was just sending a last few emails before heading over to our other campus down in Sangenjaya when the shaking started. As earthquakes go it started off fairly innocuously, a bit of shaking, yes, perhaps a bit more than 'normal', but nothing to get too excited about. Then after about 5 or 6 seconds it got a bit stronger.
"This is quite a big one..." said one of my colleagues
"Ha, this? If you think this is big then you've never been in a big earth..." started our boss but was cut short by the increase in violent shaking that then began.
Earthquakes are a fact of life here. I won't say you get used to them, they are too intense for that, but you do get, well, accustomed to the fact that there will, about once a month, be a bit of a shake. It will keep you on your toes so you don't get too complacent, but they don't tend to scare the bejayzus out of you. This one started as a regular, keep-you-on-your-toes kind of one,but this one kept going and kept getting stronger. Having read a few things about the Kobe/Hanshin quake my basic philosophy was 'if you have time to think you're in an earthquake then the chances are it's not going to kill you', as Kobe, apparently, went from nothing to unimaginable violence in a split second, meaning many people didn't have time to wake up before they died.And I suppose, on reflection, that is still true as yesterday I had the time to think, "I'm in an earthquake" and I'm still alive, but this time was more of a close run thing.
As this one got stronger reflex took over, to an extent. I had been waiting by my desk, as others were in the office. As the shaking got stronger I grabbed my hard hat from the cupboard behind me and put it on. Now it was strong but at a level i'd experienced before. Then, it got worse and for the first time in my life in Japan I got down under my desk (well, almost under my desk) as one is meant to do.
Hindsight is a weird thing. The brain, I am sure, is very good at blocking out unpleasant memories, as now, barely 24 hours later, it is hard to remember exactly what was going on. The things I can recall are:
Grabbing my mobile phones and disconnecting one of them from its cable
Thinking 'this might well be it...'
My computer monitors moving across my desk
Hoping that it would stop soon
That's about it. I'm glad I thought about the phones as if the building were to collapse around me better to have something like a phone available to contact the outside world. But I'm a bit disappointed that my life didn't flash before me or that I didn't think of the Guru or the little fella. Then again at that moment, when you can't move and the world is almost crashing around your ears, perhaps all you can do is hope you aren't about to die.
But die I did not, obviously. Then, first priority, post the above words on facebook - don't know why, but it was. Actually I tried to post 'Holly fuck...' due to shaking fingers and adrenaline OD, but managed to correct myself. The second thing I did was fire off a quick email to family to say I was alive as I knew they'd be worried. Then, hat on head, I'm glad to say I headed straight over to the school whilst most to the other staff stood around saying 'my wasn't that a strong quake!'. I quickly looked over the outside of the building and saw that no windows were broken so went inside and upstairs to the 2nd floor. Two teachers were waiting by their classroom doors, ready to evacuate, the kids were silent as church mice, waiting under their desks (good 'duck and cover' awareness). I told the teachers that I didn't think we'd need to evacuate but to be ready just in case. Then I walked towards the 'bridge' that joins our 2 buildings and, on the other side of the emergency door, met a senior staff member picking up posters that had fallen to the floor. Afterwards I remember thinking that it was perhaps not the most pressing need at that time, but at that moment I was just glad to see her as I knew she needed to make an announcement about staying or evacuating.
She also realised this so I figured it was better to check the lower parts of the building to see if there was any significant damage. I did and there was none that I saw, so I went back and told her so we stayed put, or rather, as it was that time of the day, we proceeded with the kids dismissal as normal. As She made the announcement I went back over the road to the office, part of me thinking 'well that's all right then' - I went back to my computer to see if there was any info, that's when the first reports started coming in about the size and location - off the Miyagi coast and a 7 on the Japanese scale (that goes up to 7). Whoa!
(Just thought about those last 2 paragraphs and if they make it sound like I had a plan then it shouldn't, I think i was on instinct and trying not to panic (as panicking is a very bad thing, as I always tell the youngster)).
Then it was back into the school as I realised I should probably make a more thorough check of the buildings. At this time parents were turning up to collect their kids and I'm happy to say the guru arrived to pick up the little fella. She was fine, had been in a train that had automatically stopped at Harajuku, the stop before Shibuya, and she has run from there to the school. The buildings seemed fine, a cracked pane of glass here or a crack in the plasterboard join there, but nothing looking too severe. Then it was back to the office for more info.
We were very lucky in that though the phone network went into meltdown, email and the internet were still working. This was great so we could see what was happening, the 7 in Miyagi was a 5+ in Tokyo (on the j-scale) which later transpired to be at magnitude 8.9, possibly the biggest quake to hit Japan. Facebook became the school communication saviour as it was one of the few things that was updating constantly, so our Communications Manager was able to get the message out to parents that they needed to be here, or to teachers that parents were on their way. The manager in question did an amazing job, hats very much off to her.
At this point, though the trains were stopped we were hopeful that they might start again. So we went into pretend-work but really what's-going-on mode. Then the first images of Miyagi and the tsunami started to come through. This really was a 'holy fuck...' moment...it was devastation, no other word for it, like Hiroshima after they dropped the bomb. Some of the images were unbelievable, they still are.
Anyway, enough for now, more tomorrow abut that night and how we got home
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Christmas
OK, it's a bit late, but there you go. So the first part of our story is 'us as tourists' - by us I mean, me, the Guru and the youngster and by tourists I mean just that, tourists, as the first week of our christmas holiday was spent in London doing all the touristy things one would expect.
The trip almost got off to a disastrous start for two reasons, work and the weather, but both bothersome banes were skillfully avoided by, well, being avoided. We were to fly on the last Friday of term but I, as HR personage, had a particularly difficult situation to deal with concerning a departing member of staff who had not, it must be said, personally chosen to leave. Our plan was that as soon as I got home we were to go to the in-laws in Chiba who live close to the airport, this was to make the Friday less stressful and to repack as we were borrowing a suitcase. But the surly staffer was proving annoyingly reticent to meet me on Thursday afternoon - I had to see her to explain stuff and collect paperwork from her - and as the clock ticked closer to my leaving time I still hadn't met her. So in the end, finally getting her on the phone, gave her the cunning option of popping into the office on Friday to meet one of my staff. Being lazy and useless (also the main reasons for her departure) she took this and I was off the hook. Right, home we go.
So, home, final preparations, set the alarm (the Guru had been trying to work it out for weeks) and we're off - "oh, by the way, you did the online check-in at work today, like you said you would, right...?" Er, shit, wait - 15 mins of fully justified stern looks later... "yes dear, of course I have, how could you ever doubt me?"
Station, trains, taxi, parents-in-law. Hello, quick beer, repack and it's now 10pm. Right, arrange taxi to station for tomorrow morning and then bed. Next morning, breakfast, taxi, train and Narita. I love Narita airport - lots of people hate it because, they say, it's so far out of town, but with a train that takes 36minutes to get to the centre of Tokyo, I say they're talking crap. It's big, wide, open, uncrowded, clean, cheap, well designed, helpful, friendly, works when it's snowing and, essentially, everything that Heathrow isn't.
Everything navigated nice and easily and onto the plane - this was the youngster's first real flight, he'd been to the UK before but only when he was 8 months old so obviously he couldn't remember. We were worried that he would get bored and/or hyperactive, but actually it was all one big adventure. He watched a couple of movies, read some books, did some sticking of stickers and then slept. He even ate all the food. For us more seasoned travellers it was much the same, I am glad to report, though without the stickers.
Whilst we had been flying, however, mother nature had been dropping a prodigious (for the UK) amount of snow on the south, so much so that traffic was at a standstill and the arrival committee were in serious danger of not getting to the airport on time to carry out their duties. Luckily good old Heathrow came to their aid as, even thought we landed on time, the baggage reclaim was in meltdown (or rather freeze-up) so that all but first-class luggage was delayed coming off the plane by an hour (amazing how they could only open the doors to the rich person's compartments...) Anyway this bought enough time for the family to arrive so as we wandered through the exit the welcomers walked into the arrivals hall. Cue much back-slappage and 'welcome home's. The snow flurry almost but didn't quite derail the air transport system, however the following day the snow shut everything down for about 5 days, so our leave-on-Friday plan was perfect, not only cheaper but we actually arrived on time :)
So for the next week, from Saturday to Friday (Christmas eve) we stayed in a London apartment hotel (Castletown House in West Kensington - thoroughly recommended) and went to see stuff...
Saturday - Natural History Museum - mainly for the dinosaurs but also for everything else. Excellent basement area where staff were on hand to amaze small children with experiments, microscopes and stuff like that. Well done to Marcus for stumping one of the assistants; 'what animal do you like that you want to know more about?' 'Er, maybe the Pronghorn'. 'Hmm, what's that...?' Of course it's a type of African antelope sort of thing, as everyone knows, but not, sadly the assistant that Marcus spoke to. Anyway the NHM is great, interesting and really quite cold.
Sunday - not really touristy but went to have lunch with friends south of the river. Again crappy weather but a warm welcome from very hungover hosts.
Monday - was meant to be a family get together for some photo portraitage, but the weather stumped us all so getting down to Hampshire would have been akin to a polar expedition (so we were told). So instead we went to the Tower of London. This was great but get this, the price, in big letters on the ticket office wall, was something like 17.50 per adult. This, I felt, was quite a lot, but then, in very small print underneath it said 'This includes a voluntary donation of 2 quid.' Well excuse me, but I do feel a voluntary donation is, in essence, me offering, not the ToL automatically deducting! So naturally I refused to pay, I mean really. I was happy, though, as even though the youngster was 5 and the price list said '5 and over: 12 quid' (a blummen rip off as well), the nice lady let him in for free. The Tower was great, lots to see, hardly anyone there due to christmas and bad weather, Henry VIII's suit of armour with enormous cod-piece, crown jewels and loads of stuff. Great but very expensive.
After that we walked across Tower Bridge and went to HMS Belfast. Marcus was really excited about this but, whilst going around, he became unnerved by the mannequins set up to show what life was like on-board ship. So much so that he had to be carried out in something of a state.
Tuesday - British Museum and the National Gallery with Uncle Julian and Cousin Charlie. So, you send someone a message saying, 'we're in Covent Garden, in a coffee shop near the Crusting Pipe, come and meet us here'. Now a normal person, on arriving at Covent Garden, would then look inside the various coffee shops near the Crusting Pipe until he had located said person to meet. Not my brother, oh no, he walks close to the Crusting Pipe and then, not seeing anyone, sits down and has a doughnut. Only when I go out to look for them as they should have arrived by now, do I find him sitting behind a coffee stall not 10m from where we were. And for some reason I get the blame for this!
Anyway the British Museum is ace, lots to do, especially the trails for the kids to follow. Marcus and Charlie had a great time together finding stuff out, though Charlie had done the trails before so helped Marcus instead. Lunch at Wagamama's (they say it's Japanese...) and then a wander to the National Gallery to look at pictures. Great day and big thanks to Uncle Julian for showing us all around.
Wednesday - Westminster Abbey (and the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben). Never been to Westminster Abbey and I must say that it was fascinating. Again expensive, about 15 quid a head to get in, but Marcus got a trail to follow and we got the audio-guide things and it was, well, really interesting. I know it's obvious but blimey it's old, there is an awful lot of history in those stones - I don't know why but it felt much, much older than the Tower of London, though they are contemporaries. Again loads to see, lots of tombs and graves and again not too full of the tourist hordes. After that a fine pub lunch we took a double-decker to Oxford Street, mainly so we could ride on the top deck and also to see the christmas lights. OK, the bus ride was fun but boy did we find where all the tourists had been hiding. Oxford St was heaving, more than heaving and basically not very nice. Night was falling so we headed home.
Thursday - Science Museum. For our last full day we headed to the Science Museum, just up the road near the NHM. Again it was excellent, interesting and informative and, most importantly, free. Also they had on workshops for kids, one about space and another about bubbles, both of which the youngster very much enjoyed. I think museums have come a long way since I was a kid and the people that run them realise now that kids are important so they have to do something to make it a worthwhile experience for them. Jolly good, I say.
Friday - we were heading to Gosport for Christmas and, after various rearrangements, we were travelling down by National Express coach from Victoria to Portsmouth. This necessitated going to Victoria, of course, and as the coach wasn't until 2pm and we had to be out at 10am, we had a bit of time to kill. Marcus was quite happy, he said, to sit in Victoria Coach Station for 4 hours, but we weren't and, as Buckingham Palace was only a shortish walk away, off we went (much to the unhappiness of small child). The guidebook said that the changing of the guard would not happen on that day as it was an odd-numbered day in December and was cold, but lo-and-behold, when we arrived they were just starting up. Now I think it's probably quite interesting to watch, certainly plenty of the Oxford St tourists had turned up, but with a whiny kid and a cold, biting wind, spirits soon sank。So we watched a bit and then departed back to the safety and warmth of a shopping centre. A spot of lunch (our one and only trip to a UK McDonald's) and then the usual scramble and confusion trying to find the right coach going to the right place, made more confusing by the fact that so many people wanted to go to Portsmouth that they laid on an extra coach which said Southampton on it. Also Guru most surprised that, though we had tickets, seats were a free-for-all as there was not seat numbering allocation ('very third world' I'm sure she muttered - I know I did).
So the journey down was slow but uneventful - the coach's purported wifi cut out about 50m from the station so our slow progress and delay could not be forwarded to family members waiting in the freezing evening at Portsmouth Hard. But arrive we eventually did, and then it was Christmas...
The trip almost got off to a disastrous start for two reasons, work and the weather, but both bothersome banes were skillfully avoided by, well, being avoided. We were to fly on the last Friday of term but I, as HR personage, had a particularly difficult situation to deal with concerning a departing member of staff who had not, it must be said, personally chosen to leave. Our plan was that as soon as I got home we were to go to the in-laws in Chiba who live close to the airport, this was to make the Friday less stressful and to repack as we were borrowing a suitcase. But the surly staffer was proving annoyingly reticent to meet me on Thursday afternoon - I had to see her to explain stuff and collect paperwork from her - and as the clock ticked closer to my leaving time I still hadn't met her. So in the end, finally getting her on the phone, gave her the cunning option of popping into the office on Friday to meet one of my staff. Being lazy and useless (also the main reasons for her departure) she took this and I was off the hook. Right, home we go.
So, home, final preparations, set the alarm (the Guru had been trying to work it out for weeks) and we're off - "oh, by the way, you did the online check-in at work today, like you said you would, right...?" Er, shit, wait - 15 mins of fully justified stern looks later... "yes dear, of course I have, how could you ever doubt me?"
Station, trains, taxi, parents-in-law. Hello, quick beer, repack and it's now 10pm. Right, arrange taxi to station for tomorrow morning and then bed. Next morning, breakfast, taxi, train and Narita. I love Narita airport - lots of people hate it because, they say, it's so far out of town, but with a train that takes 36minutes to get to the centre of Tokyo, I say they're talking crap. It's big, wide, open, uncrowded, clean, cheap, well designed, helpful, friendly, works when it's snowing and, essentially, everything that Heathrow isn't.
Everything navigated nice and easily and onto the plane - this was the youngster's first real flight, he'd been to the UK before but only when he was 8 months old so obviously he couldn't remember. We were worried that he would get bored and/or hyperactive, but actually it was all one big adventure. He watched a couple of movies, read some books, did some sticking of stickers and then slept. He even ate all the food. For us more seasoned travellers it was much the same, I am glad to report, though without the stickers.
Whilst we had been flying, however, mother nature had been dropping a prodigious (for the UK) amount of snow on the south, so much so that traffic was at a standstill and the arrival committee were in serious danger of not getting to the airport on time to carry out their duties. Luckily good old Heathrow came to their aid as, even thought we landed on time, the baggage reclaim was in meltdown (or rather freeze-up) so that all but first-class luggage was delayed coming off the plane by an hour (amazing how they could only open the doors to the rich person's compartments...) Anyway this bought enough time for the family to arrive so as we wandered through the exit the welcomers walked into the arrivals hall. Cue much back-slappage and 'welcome home's. The snow flurry almost but didn't quite derail the air transport system, however the following day the snow shut everything down for about 5 days, so our leave-on-Friday plan was perfect, not only cheaper but we actually arrived on time :)
So for the next week, from Saturday to Friday (Christmas eve) we stayed in a London apartment hotel (Castletown House in West Kensington - thoroughly recommended) and went to see stuff...
Saturday - Natural History Museum - mainly for the dinosaurs but also for everything else. Excellent basement area where staff were on hand to amaze small children with experiments, microscopes and stuff like that. Well done to Marcus for stumping one of the assistants; 'what animal do you like that you want to know more about?' 'Er, maybe the Pronghorn'. 'Hmm, what's that...?' Of course it's a type of African antelope sort of thing, as everyone knows, but not, sadly the assistant that Marcus spoke to. Anyway the NHM is great, interesting and really quite cold.
Sunday - not really touristy but went to have lunch with friends south of the river. Again crappy weather but a warm welcome from very hungover hosts.
Monday - was meant to be a family get together for some photo portraitage, but the weather stumped us all so getting down to Hampshire would have been akin to a polar expedition (so we were told). So instead we went to the Tower of London. This was great but get this, the price, in big letters on the ticket office wall, was something like 17.50 per adult. This, I felt, was quite a lot, but then, in very small print underneath it said 'This includes a voluntary donation of 2 quid.' Well excuse me, but I do feel a voluntary donation is, in essence, me offering, not the ToL automatically deducting! So naturally I refused to pay, I mean really. I was happy, though, as even though the youngster was 5 and the price list said '5 and over: 12 quid' (a blummen rip off as well), the nice lady let him in for free. The Tower was great, lots to see, hardly anyone there due to christmas and bad weather, Henry VIII's suit of armour with enormous cod-piece, crown jewels and loads of stuff. Great but very expensive.
After that we walked across Tower Bridge and went to HMS Belfast. Marcus was really excited about this but, whilst going around, he became unnerved by the mannequins set up to show what life was like on-board ship. So much so that he had to be carried out in something of a state.
Tuesday - British Museum and the National Gallery with Uncle Julian and Cousin Charlie. So, you send someone a message saying, 'we're in Covent Garden, in a coffee shop near the Crusting Pipe, come and meet us here'. Now a normal person, on arriving at Covent Garden, would then look inside the various coffee shops near the Crusting Pipe until he had located said person to meet. Not my brother, oh no, he walks close to the Crusting Pipe and then, not seeing anyone, sits down and has a doughnut. Only when I go out to look for them as they should have arrived by now, do I find him sitting behind a coffee stall not 10m from where we were. And for some reason I get the blame for this!
Anyway the British Museum is ace, lots to do, especially the trails for the kids to follow. Marcus and Charlie had a great time together finding stuff out, though Charlie had done the trails before so helped Marcus instead. Lunch at Wagamama's (they say it's Japanese...) and then a wander to the National Gallery to look at pictures. Great day and big thanks to Uncle Julian for showing us all around.
Wednesday - Westminster Abbey (and the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben). Never been to Westminster Abbey and I must say that it was fascinating. Again expensive, about 15 quid a head to get in, but Marcus got a trail to follow and we got the audio-guide things and it was, well, really interesting. I know it's obvious but blimey it's old, there is an awful lot of history in those stones - I don't know why but it felt much, much older than the Tower of London, though they are contemporaries. Again loads to see, lots of tombs and graves and again not too full of the tourist hordes. After that a fine pub lunch we took a double-decker to Oxford Street, mainly so we could ride on the top deck and also to see the christmas lights. OK, the bus ride was fun but boy did we find where all the tourists had been hiding. Oxford St was heaving, more than heaving and basically not very nice. Night was falling so we headed home.
Thursday - Science Museum. For our last full day we headed to the Science Museum, just up the road near the NHM. Again it was excellent, interesting and informative and, most importantly, free. Also they had on workshops for kids, one about space and another about bubbles, both of which the youngster very much enjoyed. I think museums have come a long way since I was a kid and the people that run them realise now that kids are important so they have to do something to make it a worthwhile experience for them. Jolly good, I say.
Friday - we were heading to Gosport for Christmas and, after various rearrangements, we were travelling down by National Express coach from Victoria to Portsmouth. This necessitated going to Victoria, of course, and as the coach wasn't until 2pm and we had to be out at 10am, we had a bit of time to kill. Marcus was quite happy, he said, to sit in Victoria Coach Station for 4 hours, but we weren't and, as Buckingham Palace was only a shortish walk away, off we went (much to the unhappiness of small child). The guidebook said that the changing of the guard would not happen on that day as it was an odd-numbered day in December and was cold, but lo-and-behold, when we arrived they were just starting up. Now I think it's probably quite interesting to watch, certainly plenty of the Oxford St tourists had turned up, but with a whiny kid and a cold, biting wind, spirits soon sank。So we watched a bit and then departed back to the safety and warmth of a shopping centre. A spot of lunch (our one and only trip to a UK McDonald's) and then the usual scramble and confusion trying to find the right coach going to the right place, made more confusing by the fact that so many people wanted to go to Portsmouth that they laid on an extra coach which said Southampton on it. Also Guru most surprised that, though we had tickets, seats were a free-for-all as there was not seat numbering allocation ('very third world' I'm sure she muttered - I know I did).
So the journey down was slow but uneventful - the coach's purported wifi cut out about 50m from the station so our slow progress and delay could not be forwarded to family members waiting in the freezing evening at Portsmouth Hard. But arrive we eventually did, and then it was Christmas...
Friday, 7 January 2011
Thursday, 9 December 2010
Oh, has it been that long already?
Goodness I think it has been.
Kan he? I'm not so sure...
So, what's been going on. Well, in Japan, not a lot that I can really remember, hence the fact that I haven't bothered posting anything. One snippet this morning, though, is that Primae Minister (The Man who) Kan is quickly becomming (The Man Who) Kan't (if, of course, he became (The Man Who) Kant and then went around quoting dear old Immanuel all day long, for example "Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination" or "All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.", or even "Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world", though a few might argue with that, especially over one's personal definition of 'safely'; anyway if he had done this sort of thing then I think he'd be onto a winner, or at least a position within a university's philosophy faculty, but he hasn't, he's tried to be a PM, and a Japanese one at that).
Where was I? Oh yes, our man who Kan is, apparently, on the way to becomming the most unpopular PM Japan has ever had, and as you can imagine, that's up against some pretty stiff opposition. The real problem is this:
It's not the bit at the end that is doing our man down, poor support though that may be. No, the problem is at the start. For some insane, perhaps Japanese-only reason, every new PM, no matter who it is, always starts off with an approval rating that is really high. I guess it is a hangover from the fall of the previous guy, who, no matter who it is, will have stunk by the time he left office (think Silent Shinjo or Fuckwit Fukuda, anyone after them would have seemed like a renaissance man), which basiclly means that anyone who comes in is set up for a fall. I mean look at Kan's approval rating when he started, nearly 70%, no one is going to sustain that so it's a long slippery slope downhill
That said it does look like he had a pretty good rally there in the middle, towards the end of September... ah, that was when he was fighting the odious Ozawa for control of the party and, indeed, the country, no wonder he looked good then...I'd have looked good standing next to that crook! But anyway, apart from that, which had nothing to do with actual governing, it's all downhill, and it's the same for every single politico that takes the job on. It could be that he's in charge of a lousy party in a deadlocked house (a bit like Obama) but he's just not really doing anythign about it - I was tryign to think of some things that have happened that would have upped, or downed, his popularity, but I'm struggling apart from the Ozawa thing. OK, I expect that was a foot-in-mouth gaffe from a senior minister and a cabinet member-in-bribe scandal, but these are run of the mill events that happen to all PM's. But maybe that's it, they're all rubbish and it just takes a few months for everyone to realise. So it makes me wonder why they bother as I am certain that when (TMW) Kan goes, a new guy or [reality bending delusion] woman [reality bending delusion/] takes over, it will all happen again. Oh well...
Cricket News now
Ennnnnglaaaaaand! Ennnnnnglaaaaaand! etc
Come on you rubbish Aussies! An innings and 71! In Adelaide! (the first time we've beaten you by an innings there for 118 years!) And you couldn't even roll us over in Brisbane after taking a 220 run lead in the first innings! 517-1! ha ha ha ha hoo hoo hooo wa-ha hah ha etc etc
But pride cometh before a fall and we're not at home to Mr Cock-up, so watch out boys as a wounded Aussie is a tricky beast.
And other stuff
Er, well, we're still on course to head to Blighty for Christmas, leaving a week tomorrow as it happens - looking forward to that.
Also on the cricket front I, along with some other staff, took the primary cricket team down to near Mt Fuji for a cricket tournament a few weeks back. Great fun, I took charge of the B team (naturally) and we out-performed even our own sky-high expectations by winning two games and coming within a whisker of making the semi-finals (though a good job we didn't as the games we lost were by embarassing margins and a semi would have been a similar proposition) - but it was a cracking weekend and the kids all had a jolly time, which is what it's all about, and, in the end, cricket was the winner (as well as Gunma CC A team). Anyway here's a photo (our chap's batting):
And last but not least, it's chilly here, but not as cold as England! What's going on? I do not expect to spend a 2 week holiday on a bench in Heathrow as no traffic is moving anywhere in the UK - sort it out!
Kan he? I'm not so sure...
So, what's been going on. Well, in Japan, not a lot that I can really remember, hence the fact that I haven't bothered posting anything. One snippet this morning, though, is that Primae Minister (The Man who) Kan is quickly becomming (The Man Who) Kan't (if, of course, he became (The Man Who) Kant and then went around quoting dear old Immanuel all day long, for example "Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination" or "All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.", or even "Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world", though a few might argue with that, especially over one's personal definition of 'safely'; anyway if he had done this sort of thing then I think he'd be onto a winner, or at least a position within a university's philosophy faculty, but he hasn't, he's tried to be a PM, and a Japanese one at that).
Where was I? Oh yes, our man who Kan is, apparently, on the way to becomming the most unpopular PM Japan has ever had, and as you can imagine, that's up against some pretty stiff opposition. The real problem is this:
It's not the bit at the end that is doing our man down, poor support though that may be. No, the problem is at the start. For some insane, perhaps Japanese-only reason, every new PM, no matter who it is, always starts off with an approval rating that is really high. I guess it is a hangover from the fall of the previous guy, who, no matter who it is, will have stunk by the time he left office (think Silent Shinjo or Fuckwit Fukuda, anyone after them would have seemed like a renaissance man), which basiclly means that anyone who comes in is set up for a fall. I mean look at Kan's approval rating when he started, nearly 70%, no one is going to sustain that so it's a long slippery slope downhill
That said it does look like he had a pretty good rally there in the middle, towards the end of September... ah, that was when he was fighting the odious Ozawa for control of the party and, indeed, the country, no wonder he looked good then...I'd have looked good standing next to that crook! But anyway, apart from that, which had nothing to do with actual governing, it's all downhill, and it's the same for every single politico that takes the job on. It could be that he's in charge of a lousy party in a deadlocked house (a bit like Obama) but he's just not really doing anythign about it - I was tryign to think of some things that have happened that would have upped, or downed, his popularity, but I'm struggling apart from the Ozawa thing. OK, I expect that was a foot-in-mouth gaffe from a senior minister and a cabinet member-in-bribe scandal, but these are run of the mill events that happen to all PM's. But maybe that's it, they're all rubbish and it just takes a few months for everyone to realise. So it makes me wonder why they bother as I am certain that when (TMW) Kan goes, a new guy or [reality bending delusion] woman [reality bending delusion/] takes over, it will all happen again. Oh well...
Cricket News now
Ennnnnglaaaaaand! Ennnnnnglaaaaaand! etc
Come on you rubbish Aussies! An innings and 71! In Adelaide! (the first time we've beaten you by an innings there for 118 years!) And you couldn't even roll us over in Brisbane after taking a 220 run lead in the first innings! 517-1! ha ha ha ha hoo hoo hooo wa-ha hah ha etc etc
But pride cometh before a fall and we're not at home to Mr Cock-up, so watch out boys as a wounded Aussie is a tricky beast.
And other stuff
Er, well, we're still on course to head to Blighty for Christmas, leaving a week tomorrow as it happens - looking forward to that.
Also on the cricket front I, along with some other staff, took the primary cricket team down to near Mt Fuji for a cricket tournament a few weeks back. Great fun, I took charge of the B team (naturally) and we out-performed even our own sky-high expectations by winning two games and coming within a whisker of making the semi-finals (though a good job we didn't as the games we lost were by embarassing margins and a semi would have been a similar proposition) - but it was a cracking weekend and the kids all had a jolly time, which is what it's all about, and, in the end, cricket was the winner (as well as Gunma CC A team). Anyway here's a photo (our chap's batting):
And last but not least, it's chilly here, but not as cold as England! What's going on? I do not expect to spend a 2 week holiday on a bench in Heathrow as no traffic is moving anywhere in the UK - sort it out!
Monday, 18 October 2010
Politician is a bit of a prat shocker!
Goodness it was over 2 months ago since I posted about the centenarians – where does the time go…? Anyway,
Political news now
I have little time for most politicos, it’s all about self interest and not about running a country properly, or even trying to most of the time. But about Japanese politicos I am even more in despair – I just don’t know why they bother. If there wasn’t actually a prime minister I don’t actually think it would make the slightest bit of difference to the country as a whole. OK, there might have to be a top level game of ‘paper, scissors, stone’ (or the j-equivalent ‘junken’) to decide who goes to the [insert name of international conference here] this week to stand at the back, not say anything and then come home and be criticised, or there might be an unseemly tussle if Carla Bruni comes a-visiting and someone has to shake her hand (or other stately appendage), but otherwise Japan would probably quite happily carry on with no head of state, or rather with the faceless grey bureaucrats and the plain grey emperor. But anyway they do have a PM so I’d better write about him.
Actually it’s not about him, the Man Who Kan, I am going to write, it’s about his erstwhile Moriarty, Ichiro Ozawa. OK, this is all old news, but hey, I’ve been busy. So Ozawa is the oldest of old skool, he is only in politics for one reason – himself. Pockets to line, plebs to rule over, god given right to lord it over other people with the expectation that they will thank him for doing so. I don’t like him, if you can’t guess.
Anyway a few months ago a probe was started into some alleged falsification of his financial reports by him and his little minions. At this time Ozawa was a serious heavyweight in the Democratic Party of Japan, a contender for future PM if he could avoid scandal. Now, as we know the DPJ had been out of power for decades until the The Hat came along and won an election. He then ballsed it all up over Okinawa and fell on his sword, as reported here before, and then The Man Who took over. So, new government formed for the still fledgling DPJ ruling classes, what better thing to do than launch a hostile bid for the leadership, just for a laugh. So that’s what Ozawa did.
Now, the timing of this, as you can see, is a bit odd. OK, the DPJ, according its constitution I think (a constitution that needs some serious revision by the sound of it) have to have a leadership contest – but as a party, if you’ve just been through a messy divorce with the standing PM and your popularity is shaky to say the least, you do not want the party ripped apart from the inside by an extremely partisan leadership contest. So, someone needs have a word with the potential leadership contenders along the lines of ‘this is a really delicate time, a time for unity, so there won’t be any challengers, will there…?’
Unfortunately the possibly most-appropriate person to have this little chat is our friend Ozawa, controller of the largest faction in the DPJ, but his chat is more like ‘Come on! Where are all the fighters in this town!?’ So he throws his hat in the ring.
All the while this is going on the investigation into his ‘financial irregularities’ is in full swing and the evidence is pointing increasingly strongly to the fact that he is a lying, cheating bastard (he’s a politician, as if there is any doubt!). His response to this is a simple ‘fuck you!’ to the investigators, reporters and general population of Japan.
So now we have a spot of internecine warfare in the DPJ and not just a little bit but a full on battle front as Ozawa is an important figure in the party who then gets endorsed by ex-PM, and current waste of space The Hat, and the very real possibility that, if Ozawa wins, he will become the first PM to be indicted whilst running the country (as well as the small matter of being something like the 3rd PM in 12 months).
The saving grace is the election process – now I won’t claim to understand the whole shebang, but basically the election votes are divided between (I think) the equivalent of the power-blocs in the Parliamentary party and the rank and file members. In the parliamentary party the votes are reasonably even between Ozawa and Kan, but the rank-and-file, who have been watching as this idiot Ozawa tries to destroy their attempt at government, are horrified at the prospect of him being PM and so are in favour of Kan by about 8-2.
In the end, of course, the election was won by the Man Who with the votes going almost exactly along the lines above. Was Ozawa repentant? Of course not, probably do it all again. The happy news is that he will be prosecuted by the police for the financial irregularities, but not before he threatened to sue the entire panel that came up with the indictment in the first place – his defence being ‘You can’t do that, don’t you know who I am?’ and other such choice defensive posturing. I’d like to think that’s the last we’ll ever hear of the inestimable Ichiro Ozawa, but I have the horrible impression that he will somehow avoid prosecution and bide his time whilst the Man Who inevitably cocks something up and then step into the leadership vacuum. Will be a sad day for Japan if it happens…
Holiday news now
Lock up your daughters, Mr Sexy Peasant is a-coming home for Christmas! Or something like that. Yes, we will be back to Blighty for festive celebrations from December 17th to, I think, 3rd January.
Already I have been instructed to present myself and family at a photo studio in Crowthorne (I know, who’d have thought it!) for family picture snappage – though worryingly father parental has mentioned something about having smart clothes with us for a ‘formal’ shot (golf-playing-brother is the organiser (I know, who’d have thought that adjective could be applied to that person!)). Anyway word to the wise, we will not have much in the way of formal clothes with us, not with normal clothes, Christmas presents and a small child with us.
And now, a brief mention of house guests
We have a house guest by the name of Adam – he is the nephew of a friend of the family and, unlike most 18 year olds (well, unlike most 18 year olds I knew when I was 18 (as I don’t really know very many now)) he doesn’t drink, take drugs or smoke – maybe he isn’t really 18… but he is jolly polite and somewhat diffident.
Anyway he’s here as he has a deep and abiding interest in Japan that needs knocking out of him so he’s staying with us for a couple of weeks. He arrived on Saturday evening looking slightly bewildered by it all, though he had been on a plane for 12 hours and had used, so he told me, one of paper bags that most people just make fun of.
Yesterday the Guru, youngster and I had to go to Meiji Jingu shrine near Harajuku for some serious feng shui praying (don’t ask me) so took Adam along with us. Then we wandered back through Harajuku to Shibuya and thence to Shinjuku and a ride to the top of the TMG building for a look over Tokyo’s sprawl. All very pleasant but at the time a little, niggling worry as whenever we asked ‘where you like to go and see now?’, he didn’t really know. Hmm, thought yours truly, so taking the bull by the horns when we got home I asked him outright, ‘what are your plans for the next 2 weeks?’ to which I got the reply;
‘Er, I don’t know really – maybe go to Kyoto and I’d like to climb Mt Fuji’
So you’ll have done a lot of research, then? Yes, you can climb Fuji in late-October but you tend to have to be an experienced climber with the full kit as snow has already dusted the top of the mountain. And Kyoto, good, that’s a couple of days, what about the rest?
OK, so maybe he is like any other 18 year old; lots of ideas but a bit lacking in the preparation department.
Political news now
I have little time for most politicos, it’s all about self interest and not about running a country properly, or even trying to most of the time. But about Japanese politicos I am even more in despair – I just don’t know why they bother. If there wasn’t actually a prime minister I don’t actually think it would make the slightest bit of difference to the country as a whole. OK, there might have to be a top level game of ‘paper, scissors, stone’ (or the j-equivalent ‘junken’) to decide who goes to the [insert name of international conference here] this week to stand at the back, not say anything and then come home and be criticised, or there might be an unseemly tussle if Carla Bruni comes a-visiting and someone has to shake her hand (or other stately appendage), but otherwise Japan would probably quite happily carry on with no head of state, or rather with the faceless grey bureaucrats and the plain grey emperor. But anyway they do have a PM so I’d better write about him.
Actually it’s not about him, the Man Who Kan, I am going to write, it’s about his erstwhile Moriarty, Ichiro Ozawa. OK, this is all old news, but hey, I’ve been busy. So Ozawa is the oldest of old skool, he is only in politics for one reason – himself. Pockets to line, plebs to rule over, god given right to lord it over other people with the expectation that they will thank him for doing so. I don’t like him, if you can’t guess.
Anyway a few months ago a probe was started into some alleged falsification of his financial reports by him and his little minions. At this time Ozawa was a serious heavyweight in the Democratic Party of Japan, a contender for future PM if he could avoid scandal. Now, as we know the DPJ had been out of power for decades until the The Hat came along and won an election. He then ballsed it all up over Okinawa and fell on his sword, as reported here before, and then The Man Who took over. So, new government formed for the still fledgling DPJ ruling classes, what better thing to do than launch a hostile bid for the leadership, just for a laugh. So that’s what Ozawa did.
Now, the timing of this, as you can see, is a bit odd. OK, the DPJ, according its constitution I think (a constitution that needs some serious revision by the sound of it) have to have a leadership contest – but as a party, if you’ve just been through a messy divorce with the standing PM and your popularity is shaky to say the least, you do not want the party ripped apart from the inside by an extremely partisan leadership contest. So, someone needs have a word with the potential leadership contenders along the lines of ‘this is a really delicate time, a time for unity, so there won’t be any challengers, will there…?’
Unfortunately the possibly most-appropriate person to have this little chat is our friend Ozawa, controller of the largest faction in the DPJ, but his chat is more like ‘Come on! Where are all the fighters in this town!?’ So he throws his hat in the ring.
All the while this is going on the investigation into his ‘financial irregularities’ is in full swing and the evidence is pointing increasingly strongly to the fact that he is a lying, cheating bastard (he’s a politician, as if there is any doubt!). His response to this is a simple ‘fuck you!’ to the investigators, reporters and general population of Japan.
So now we have a spot of internecine warfare in the DPJ and not just a little bit but a full on battle front as Ozawa is an important figure in the party who then gets endorsed by ex-PM, and current waste of space The Hat, and the very real possibility that, if Ozawa wins, he will become the first PM to be indicted whilst running the country (as well as the small matter of being something like the 3rd PM in 12 months).
The saving grace is the election process – now I won’t claim to understand the whole shebang, but basically the election votes are divided between (I think) the equivalent of the power-blocs in the Parliamentary party and the rank and file members. In the parliamentary party the votes are reasonably even between Ozawa and Kan, but the rank-and-file, who have been watching as this idiot Ozawa tries to destroy their attempt at government, are horrified at the prospect of him being PM and so are in favour of Kan by about 8-2.
In the end, of course, the election was won by the Man Who with the votes going almost exactly along the lines above. Was Ozawa repentant? Of course not, probably do it all again. The happy news is that he will be prosecuted by the police for the financial irregularities, but not before he threatened to sue the entire panel that came up with the indictment in the first place – his defence being ‘You can’t do that, don’t you know who I am?’ and other such choice defensive posturing. I’d like to think that’s the last we’ll ever hear of the inestimable Ichiro Ozawa, but I have the horrible impression that he will somehow avoid prosecution and bide his time whilst the Man Who inevitably cocks something up and then step into the leadership vacuum. Will be a sad day for Japan if it happens…
Holiday news now
Lock up your daughters, Mr Sexy Peasant is a-coming home for Christmas! Or something like that. Yes, we will be back to Blighty for festive celebrations from December 17th to, I think, 3rd January.
Already I have been instructed to present myself and family at a photo studio in Crowthorne (I know, who’d have thought it!) for family picture snappage – though worryingly father parental has mentioned something about having smart clothes with us for a ‘formal’ shot (golf-playing-brother is the organiser (I know, who’d have thought that adjective could be applied to that person!)). Anyway word to the wise, we will not have much in the way of formal clothes with us, not with normal clothes, Christmas presents and a small child with us.
And now, a brief mention of house guests
We have a house guest by the name of Adam – he is the nephew of a friend of the family and, unlike most 18 year olds (well, unlike most 18 year olds I knew when I was 18 (as I don’t really know very many now)) he doesn’t drink, take drugs or smoke – maybe he isn’t really 18… but he is jolly polite and somewhat diffident.
Anyway he’s here as he has a deep and abiding interest in Japan that needs knocking out of him so he’s staying with us for a couple of weeks. He arrived on Saturday evening looking slightly bewildered by it all, though he had been on a plane for 12 hours and had used, so he told me, one of paper bags that most people just make fun of.
Yesterday the Guru, youngster and I had to go to Meiji Jingu shrine near Harajuku for some serious feng shui praying (don’t ask me) so took Adam along with us. Then we wandered back through Harajuku to Shibuya and thence to Shinjuku and a ride to the top of the TMG building for a look over Tokyo’s sprawl. All very pleasant but at the time a little, niggling worry as whenever we asked ‘where you like to go and see now?’, he didn’t really know. Hmm, thought yours truly, so taking the bull by the horns when we got home I asked him outright, ‘what are your plans for the next 2 weeks?’ to which I got the reply;
‘Er, I don’t know really – maybe go to Kyoto and I’d like to climb Mt Fuji’
So you’ll have done a lot of research, then? Yes, you can climb Fuji in late-October but you tend to have to be an experienced climber with the full kit as snow has already dusted the top of the mountain. And Kyoto, good, that’s a couple of days, what about the rest?
OK, so maybe he is like any other 18 year old; lots of ideas but a bit lacking in the preparation department.
Monday, 9 August 2010
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!
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!
Thursday, 5 August 2010
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:
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…
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…
Friday, 16 July 2010
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
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
Sunday, 6 June 2010
The man who Kan
Oh hang on, probably not, anyway here's the gen on the fella in case you missed the changeover...
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
The Hat Goes!
So the Hat has gone, done in by his ability to do nothing at all - normally for a Japanese politician this isn't a problem, in fact many a political career in J-land has built on the ability to prevaricate and procrastinate, but for the Hat this has not worked.
So, 4 PMs in 4 years and now another on the way, but the big question is, will anyone notice the change?
So, 4 PMs in 4 years and now another on the way, but the big question is, will anyone notice the change?
Monday, 24 May 2010
Towel Wars & other stuff
As if to prove that the recent plunge in stock markets, instability in the Euro and general demise of the world’s capitalist economy is just something that happens to other people, big manufacturing news in Japan! So, how’s this for a headline…
Osaka, Shikoku battle over No. 1 towel production title!
Now you may laugh, I know I did, but towels are important, and not just for drying yourself off (or wetting your brow on a hot day, wiping up spills or many other of the myriad of uses that a square or oblong piece of cloth can be put to) – I mean, where would Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent have been without their towels? So as you can imagine when I saw this headline on 17th May I immediately though I had better investigate further as it was prime Arakawa Riverview, ahem, material.
But, I’m sure you’re wondering, how can this be a battle, surely the association with the highest sales is the winner, no? Well, no. You see the Osaka Prefecture and Shikoku region (the smallest of the 4 main island of Japan, containing 4 prefectures, Kochi, Ehime, Kagawa and Tokushima – and yes, I did just have to look that up – and very close to Osaka) both claim they are the top producers of towels in the country, but base their claims on different calculation methods.
Ah, the murky world of towel production statistics.
Before WWII Osaka was, apparently, the place for towel production in Japan, however post-war the upstart island, through cunning use of cotton blanket production, overtook Japan’s second city. Recently the figures of 9,381 tons to Shikoku against 9,209 tons from Osaka have been bandied about, accounting for 99% of domestic towel production. But this of course, raises a number of questions – how were these figures compiled? What percentage of overall towel sales in Japan does this represent? Where does the other 1% of domestic towels produced come from? Who, outside of Osaka and Shikoku towel production associations and me, really gives a fuck about any of this? How on earth did this story get onto page-2 of a national newspaper?
Well, I can’t answer very many of those questions, except, luckily, the first one – the Osaka Towel Industry Association (102 member firms) uses as its basis the volume of towels brought to dye houses as the production figure – so if 1 ton of towels arrive to be dyed then the production figure is 1 ton.
The Shikoku Towel Industrial Association (132 members) calculates production by using the yield rate, which shows the percentage of cotton yarn that is actually turned into towels without being wasted. The association multiplies the amount of yarn by the yield rate to calculate towel production – the yield rate has gone up from 84% in 2007 to 95% in 2010, they argue, meaning the amount of towels actually made has increased.
Confused? I am. Why don’t they just count the number of finished towels shipped from their factories? Or the sales? Or at least agree on something? Why hasn’t the Japan Towel Industrial Association (or maybe the Japan textile Federation) got involved and sorted this out.
Uncertainty reigns as both Osaka and Shikoku associations are both now using ‘Japan’s largest towel production center’ on their advertising and websites – as you can image, in the cutthroat world of domestic towel production this has huge ramifications (and if I can think of any I’ll let you know).
So this is set to run and run, I’ll keep you posted if anyone ever writes anything about this ever again…
Yukio ‘the Hat’ Hatoyama news now
Jeez, talking about things set to run-and-run…
A few posts back I mentioned that the relocation of the US Airbase at Futenma, Okinawa, was a pressing issue for the Hat (I don’t think he is particularly known for his hats, by the way, it’s just an easy (read lazy) nickname for him). He was going round the houses desperately trying to find a solution that wouldn’t piss anybody off – fat chance of that as who would really want a US airbase next door? Not I.
So two updates, the first from a couple of weeks or so ago – so he’s the PM of a major, first world country, he knows he wants (or maybe needs) the US to be here, but he also knows that the ”people”, whilst knowing deep down that having the US here is a good thing, especially with Krazy Kim torpedoing S Korean ships, the “people” want the US to ‘here’ but not ‘here’ as in ‘close to my house’ but ‘here’ as in ‘over there – maybe in between Osaka and Shikoku so they can sort out this towel battle business’. So what does the Hat do? He goes to somewhere that isn’t where the base is now (I can’t remember where, the details of this story are so unbearably boring, which is ironic as the associated politicking is undeniably fascinating) and says to the local worthies;
“Ah, excuse me, terribly sorry to bother you, er, would you mind awfully if I put a US airbase in your prefecture…? No? Not the sort of thing you really want? Ah, I see, well, sorry for the trouble, do have a good day. Thank you.”
Oi, Yukio, grow a pair, will you! I mean, what did he expect, a tickertape parade and a welcome with open arms? This story has been going on so long that anyone, in any prefecture, is going to tell him to take a running jump. So instead of slapping down a few compulsory purchase orders and sending in the bulldozers he’s fart-arsing around and getting nowhere. OK, so maybe he’s trying to be less like the LDP which would have sent in the bulldozers (unless it was farmland) and ignored the locals, but this way everyone is looking at him saying ‘did we really vote for this guy…?’
So the weekend just gone he eventually went back the Futenma people and told them that, sorry, all been a big mistake and they would still have the base that they don’t want, but also the expanded version that they really, really don’t want. So 6 months of fucking about, a period which has seen his popularity plummet, to get back to the original plan which will still piss off the locals and will get the media even more on his back as he opposed this plan way back in 2006. Nice work there, Mr The Hat.
In other news
Goodness a lot has been going on since I last bother to write. Britain has 2 new leaders, well done there – I personally like the plan for the Clegg-Haig house share, with each getting to use it on alternate weekends, I’m sure they’ll get on like a house on fire…
Japan Cricket news, well, more like school cricket news in that now yours truly is coaching the primary cricket club kids on Monday mornings before school. This is jolly fun as these kids are some of the only humans on the planet who know less about playing cricket than I do, so I can generally sound knowledgeable when talking to them. Actually on Saturday just gone I took them up to Gunma Prefecture for a knockabout with a load of Japanese kids who are being coached by a chap named Richard, who is a loud, Aussie ex-pro cricketer who, I’m glad to say, told the kids basically the same things as I have been telling them when he gave them an impromptu batting session in between games.
Last but not least
Who are you all, part II.
I now have, it says on the sidebar, 38 followers of this blog – good on yer, as they say. Now, please could everyone who is a follower please leave a ‘hello’ type comment, just see how many we get – go on, you know you want to…
Osaka, Shikoku battle over No. 1 towel production title!
Now you may laugh, I know I did, but towels are important, and not just for drying yourself off (or wetting your brow on a hot day, wiping up spills or many other of the myriad of uses that a square or oblong piece of cloth can be put to) – I mean, where would Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent have been without their towels? So as you can imagine when I saw this headline on 17th May I immediately though I had better investigate further as it was prime Arakawa Riverview, ahem, material.
But, I’m sure you’re wondering, how can this be a battle, surely the association with the highest sales is the winner, no? Well, no. You see the Osaka Prefecture and Shikoku region (the smallest of the 4 main island of Japan, containing 4 prefectures, Kochi, Ehime, Kagawa and Tokushima – and yes, I did just have to look that up – and very close to Osaka) both claim they are the top producers of towels in the country, but base their claims on different calculation methods.
Ah, the murky world of towel production statistics.
Before WWII Osaka was, apparently, the place for towel production in Japan, however post-war the upstart island, through cunning use of cotton blanket production, overtook Japan’s second city. Recently the figures of 9,381 tons to Shikoku against 9,209 tons from Osaka have been bandied about, accounting for 99% of domestic towel production. But this of course, raises a number of questions – how were these figures compiled? What percentage of overall towel sales in Japan does this represent? Where does the other 1% of domestic towels produced come from? Who, outside of Osaka and Shikoku towel production associations and me, really gives a fuck about any of this? How on earth did this story get onto page-2 of a national newspaper?
Well, I can’t answer very many of those questions, except, luckily, the first one – the Osaka Towel Industry Association (102 member firms) uses as its basis the volume of towels brought to dye houses as the production figure – so if 1 ton of towels arrive to be dyed then the production figure is 1 ton.
The Shikoku Towel Industrial Association (132 members) calculates production by using the yield rate, which shows the percentage of cotton yarn that is actually turned into towels without being wasted. The association multiplies the amount of yarn by the yield rate to calculate towel production – the yield rate has gone up from 84% in 2007 to 95% in 2010, they argue, meaning the amount of towels actually made has increased.
Confused? I am. Why don’t they just count the number of finished towels shipped from their factories? Or the sales? Or at least agree on something? Why hasn’t the Japan Towel Industrial Association (or maybe the Japan textile Federation) got involved and sorted this out.
Uncertainty reigns as both Osaka and Shikoku associations are both now using ‘Japan’s largest towel production center’ on their advertising and websites – as you can image, in the cutthroat world of domestic towel production this has huge ramifications (and if I can think of any I’ll let you know).
So this is set to run and run, I’ll keep you posted if anyone ever writes anything about this ever again…
Yukio ‘the Hat’ Hatoyama news now
Jeez, talking about things set to run-and-run…
A few posts back I mentioned that the relocation of the US Airbase at Futenma, Okinawa, was a pressing issue for the Hat (I don’t think he is particularly known for his hats, by the way, it’s just an easy (read lazy) nickname for him). He was going round the houses desperately trying to find a solution that wouldn’t piss anybody off – fat chance of that as who would really want a US airbase next door? Not I.
So two updates, the first from a couple of weeks or so ago – so he’s the PM of a major, first world country, he knows he wants (or maybe needs) the US to be here, but he also knows that the ”people”, whilst knowing deep down that having the US here is a good thing, especially with Krazy Kim torpedoing S Korean ships, the “people” want the US to ‘here’ but not ‘here’ as in ‘close to my house’ but ‘here’ as in ‘over there – maybe in between Osaka and Shikoku so they can sort out this towel battle business’. So what does the Hat do? He goes to somewhere that isn’t where the base is now (I can’t remember where, the details of this story are so unbearably boring, which is ironic as the associated politicking is undeniably fascinating) and says to the local worthies;
“Ah, excuse me, terribly sorry to bother you, er, would you mind awfully if I put a US airbase in your prefecture…? No? Not the sort of thing you really want? Ah, I see, well, sorry for the trouble, do have a good day. Thank you.”
Oi, Yukio, grow a pair, will you! I mean, what did he expect, a tickertape parade and a welcome with open arms? This story has been going on so long that anyone, in any prefecture, is going to tell him to take a running jump. So instead of slapping down a few compulsory purchase orders and sending in the bulldozers he’s fart-arsing around and getting nowhere. OK, so maybe he’s trying to be less like the LDP which would have sent in the bulldozers (unless it was farmland) and ignored the locals, but this way everyone is looking at him saying ‘did we really vote for this guy…?’
So the weekend just gone he eventually went back the Futenma people and told them that, sorry, all been a big mistake and they would still have the base that they don’t want, but also the expanded version that they really, really don’t want. So 6 months of fucking about, a period which has seen his popularity plummet, to get back to the original plan which will still piss off the locals and will get the media even more on his back as he opposed this plan way back in 2006. Nice work there, Mr The Hat.
In other news
Goodness a lot has been going on since I last bother to write. Britain has 2 new leaders, well done there – I personally like the plan for the Clegg-Haig house share, with each getting to use it on alternate weekends, I’m sure they’ll get on like a house on fire…
Japan Cricket news, well, more like school cricket news in that now yours truly is coaching the primary cricket club kids on Monday mornings before school. This is jolly fun as these kids are some of the only humans on the planet who know less about playing cricket than I do, so I can generally sound knowledgeable when talking to them. Actually on Saturday just gone I took them up to Gunma Prefecture for a knockabout with a load of Japanese kids who are being coached by a chap named Richard, who is a loud, Aussie ex-pro cricketer who, I’m glad to say, told the kids basically the same things as I have been telling them when he gave them an impromptu batting session in between games.
Last but not least
Who are you all, part II.
I now have, it says on the sidebar, 38 followers of this blog – good on yer, as they say. Now, please could everyone who is a follower please leave a ‘hello’ type comment, just see how many we get – go on, you know you want to…
Saturday, 17 April 2010
I'm depressed
Once upon a time, in July 2003 to be exact, I wrote this:
Even more impressive a scam is the newly formed Resona bank, which was previously known as Asahi bank, and a couple of others. This is now in seriously deep trouble, so what do the government do? Let it go to the dogs for having such inept managers? Oh no. They decide to pump in 1.96trillion yen's worth of tax payers cash to bail them out. That is 1,960,000,000,000, or 98,000,000 quid...for a private bank. In any other country this bank would be allowed to become bankrupt, probably as soon as everyone found out they were in trouble and took out their savings.
In light of events over the last few years I can't believe how naive I was. As usual Japan was at least half-a-decade ahead of the curve, bailing out rubbish banks and even more rubbish managers with my cash.
I think Gordon, Obama, Alan, no hang on, it's not Alan anymore is it, it's Timothy and Ben, and all those other shysters that have fucked the world up, they all owe a nod and a wink to Japan and the Kool Kid to acknowledge that, once again, Japan was there first, at the forefront of propping up big business with our money.
Even more impressive a scam is the newly formed Resona bank, which was previously known as Asahi bank, and a couple of others. This is now in seriously deep trouble, so what do the government do? Let it go to the dogs for having such inept managers? Oh no. They decide to pump in 1.96trillion yen's worth of tax payers cash to bail them out. That is 1,960,000,000,000, or 98,000,000 quid...for a private bank. In any other country this bank would be allowed to become bankrupt, probably as soon as everyone found out they were in trouble and took out their savings.
In light of events over the last few years I can't believe how naive I was. As usual Japan was at least half-a-decade ahead of the curve, bailing out rubbish banks and even more rubbish managers with my cash.
I think Gordon, Obama, Alan, no hang on, it's not Alan anymore is it, it's Timothy and Ben, and all those other shysters that have fucked the world up, they all owe a nod and a wink to Japan and the Kool Kid to acknowledge that, once again, Japan was there first, at the forefront of propping up big business with our money.
A blog of note
In fact so noteworthy that I have been interviewed for a prestigious online blog voting thing, or something. Anyway have a gander here and vote for me (see the doohickey on the sidebar below) and I can win cash! How great is that!
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Alas, poor Yukio
A while back, here if you're interested, I wrote about the (then) new Japanese PM Yukio Hatoyama and is election victory. It was important, I seem to recall, as it meant an end to the almost uninterrupted post-war LDP monopoly of nice offices in Kasumigaseki (or whatever the Japanese equivalent to Whitehall is - I think it's there, I went there once and I think the Guru told me that's what went on in the office buildings...I digress). I might even have attempted a spurious resonance with the elecetion of Barak Obama as they both came from left field, upset long standing cartels (middle aged white men in Obama's case, now the whitehouse as a middle-aged nearly white man at the helm) and were meant to be all about change.
So, a year or so on Obama has done his healthcare thing, turned America in socialist/fascist/communist/progressive wasteland/utopia/same as it ever was, whilst also reducing nuclear weapons stocks, playing basketball in his back garden and doing some other stuff as well.
Well done there.
The big question, therefore, is what monumental changes to the very fabric of Japanese society has Yukio wrought in his term of office so far (which, to be fair, is just under a year as he was elected in May 2009)?
No, I can't think of any either. He's talked a lot about the relocation of the US Airforce base in Okinawa (but not actually done anything about it). He's talked a lot about the state of the Japanese economy (but not actually done anything about it). He's talked a lot about letting foreign permanent residents in Japan vote in local elections (but not actually done anything about it). He's talked a lot about members of his cabinet and party being found out for taking sizeable undisclosed donantions of a political nature (but not actually done anything to stop it). Made some firm commitments to carry on talking about the relocation of the US Airforce base in Okinawa (and been good to his word).
He has worn a couple of very nasty shirts that should have been banned by the Geneva Convention, like this one:
and another but I can't find a picture of it; it was even more alarming.
OK, I admit it, I thought that with Hatoyama it would be a bit of a change - I mean he was coming after Silent Shinzo Abe and that Fuckwit Fukuda so he couldn't have had an easier 'in' to the big chair - but things just haven't materialised. There were promises to end corruption that have spectacularly failed thanks to members of his own party; promises to curb the pork-barrel spending projects of the provinces, things like dams and concreting over rivers, but nothing much has stopped or changed. The amukudari are still floating down from heaven.
Oh, hang on, he did promise to increase child allowances and from June I think we do get an extra 8,000yen a month for the youngster, so we can add one tick to the credit column.
But it was not meant ot be like this, a return to the old ways with a PM from a party who didn't have any old ways. He shouldn't have known what the old ways were, let alone how to get to them. Maybe I, like a lot of other people, were getting a little bit too carried away with his 'fresh-faced new change' thing to actually listen to what he was saying at the time, which probably wasn't very much. Maybe more should have been made of the fact that he is very old-school politician (which inevitably means conserative, with or without the big 'c') as his grandfather was PM and founded the LDP and his father was foreign minister.
But he wasn't meant to be LDP, he was meant to be different. He told us he was. New broom. Fresh start. Not like those other old farts. But it's been; No broom. Fresh scandals. Same as it ever was. And bad shirts.
You have to wonder why. I'm sure that when he got the top job he did want to make a difference, but at this rate he will go down as one of the most rubbish/least effective PMs in postwar Japan (and as you can imagein, that's up against some pretty stiff opposition). His cabinet approval rating has gone from over 70% at election time to just 33% now - that despite not doing anything, or maybe because he hasn't done anything... now I'm getting deja vu - I wrote almost exactly the same as this after the Kool Kid had gone and we had whoever came after him...
Oh no! Maybe it's Japan that turns you into a caricature of yourself, rehashing the same-old same-old and never coming up with anything new. Oh my god! I'm becomming a Japanese politician!
So, a year or so on Obama has done his healthcare thing, turned America in socialist/fascist/communist/progressive wasteland/utopia/same as it ever was, whilst also reducing nuclear weapons stocks, playing basketball in his back garden and doing some other stuff as well.
Well done there.
The big question, therefore, is what monumental changes to the very fabric of Japanese society has Yukio wrought in his term of office so far (which, to be fair, is just under a year as he was elected in May 2009)?
No, I can't think of any either. He's talked a lot about the relocation of the US Airforce base in Okinawa (but not actually done anything about it). He's talked a lot about the state of the Japanese economy (but not actually done anything about it). He's talked a lot about letting foreign permanent residents in Japan vote in local elections (but not actually done anything about it). He's talked a lot about members of his cabinet and party being found out for taking sizeable undisclosed donantions of a political nature (but not actually done anything to stop it). Made some firm commitments to carry on talking about the relocation of the US Airforce base in Okinawa (and been good to his word).
He has worn a couple of very nasty shirts that should have been banned by the Geneva Convention, like this one:
and another but I can't find a picture of it; it was even more alarming.
OK, I admit it, I thought that with Hatoyama it would be a bit of a change - I mean he was coming after Silent Shinzo Abe and that Fuckwit Fukuda so he couldn't have had an easier 'in' to the big chair - but things just haven't materialised. There were promises to end corruption that have spectacularly failed thanks to members of his own party; promises to curb the pork-barrel spending projects of the provinces, things like dams and concreting over rivers, but nothing much has stopped or changed. The amukudari are still floating down from heaven.
Oh, hang on, he did promise to increase child allowances and from June I think we do get an extra 8,000yen a month for the youngster, so we can add one tick to the credit column.
But it was not meant ot be like this, a return to the old ways with a PM from a party who didn't have any old ways. He shouldn't have known what the old ways were, let alone how to get to them. Maybe I, like a lot of other people, were getting a little bit too carried away with his 'fresh-faced new change' thing to actually listen to what he was saying at the time, which probably wasn't very much. Maybe more should have been made of the fact that he is very old-school politician (which inevitably means conserative, with or without the big 'c') as his grandfather was PM and founded the LDP and his father was foreign minister.
But he wasn't meant to be LDP, he was meant to be different. He told us he was. New broom. Fresh start. Not like those other old farts. But it's been; No broom. Fresh scandals. Same as it ever was. And bad shirts.
You have to wonder why. I'm sure that when he got the top job he did want to make a difference, but at this rate he will go down as one of the most rubbish/least effective PMs in postwar Japan (and as you can imagein, that's up against some pretty stiff opposition). His cabinet approval rating has gone from over 70% at election time to just 33% now - that despite not doing anything, or maybe because he hasn't done anything... now I'm getting deja vu - I wrote almost exactly the same as this after the Kool Kid had gone and we had whoever came after him...
Oh no! Maybe it's Japan that turns you into a caricature of yourself, rehashing the same-old same-old and never coming up with anything new. Oh my god! I'm becomming a Japanese politician!
Saturday, 27 March 2010
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...
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...
Saturday, 20 March 2010
At last
So today, 3 months to the day after my ill-fated 10k, I was finally able to go for a run with enough confidence that my thigh/groin would be able to take it.
And I'm glad to say that the leg took it well and, this evening, I am able to move with no problems. Phew!
I must say I was a little worried, who wouldn't be, but I took it nice and easy and didn't go very far. I jogged at a gentle half-pace to the running track up the river (passing the preparations for tomorrow's Arakawa Marathon, which I will join next year rather than Tokyo as it starts about 500m from our apartment), did a lap of the running track at half-pace and then jogged back home, stopping to stretch at various points along the way.
Probably about 3k in total but I didn't time myself as that wasn't really the point. We'll see how it feels tomorrow, but if tonight is anything to go by I should be OK. Now I can get back into it again - I have really missed running - but it will be slow, steady and short for a while longer yet.
And I'm glad to say that the leg took it well and, this evening, I am able to move with no problems. Phew!
I must say I was a little worried, who wouldn't be, but I took it nice and easy and didn't go very far. I jogged at a gentle half-pace to the running track up the river (passing the preparations for tomorrow's Arakawa Marathon, which I will join next year rather than Tokyo as it starts about 500m from our apartment), did a lap of the running track at half-pace and then jogged back home, stopping to stretch at various points along the way.
Probably about 3k in total but I didn't time myself as that wasn't really the point. We'll see how it feels tomorrow, but if tonight is anything to go by I should be OK. Now I can get back into it again - I have really missed running - but it will be slow, steady and short for a while longer yet.
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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.
Sunday, 7 March 2010
I think we're getting there
Slowly but surely - at least I've got the photo in the header box centred, re-sizing is an issue so we may have to stick with what we've got. Even got proper titles for the posts now!
Saturday, 6 March 2010
A new beginning
So, the old comments really have gone this time, they have been obliterated by the new template, which for some reason doesn't like old things.
The new look is because I found out that new blogger templates have loads of stuff on that you can play around with really easily - the old template, from about 2003, was all html based so any changes you wanted to make you had to code yourself, or rather, I had to code myself. But this new stuff is all drag-and-drop and edit in real time - super I say! Shame about the photo in the title not really being the same size as the box, but I'll figure out how to resize it sometime.
Anyway; off with the horns, on with the show...
So, the old comments really have gone this time, they have been obliterated by the new template, which for some reason doesn't like old things.
The new look is because I found out that new blogger templates have loads of stuff on that you can play around with really easily - the old template, from about 2003, was all html based so any changes you wanted to make you had to code yourself, or rather, I had to code myself. But this new stuff is all drag-and-drop and edit in real time - super I say! Shame about the photo in the title not really being the same size as the box, but I'll figure out how to resize it sometime.
Anyway; off with the horns, on with the show...
Saturday, 27 February 2010
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...
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...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
