er... stream of consciousness time
All a bit quiet this week and have not had the kind of 'ah, that will be good to write about in the blog this week' type thoughts that often fill my long commute to and from work. This could be because by brain is gearing down for Golden Week, which starts on Thursday and lasts, luckily for the name else it would be entirely inapt, for a week. Am sure the brain is powering down as I tried to study yesterday for the first time in about three weeks, thought I'd better start some reading for the new module (not that I can remember what the new module is), but it made my brain hurt, then made it shut down as I fell asleep at the kitchen table surrounded by text books. This does not bode well for the rest of the course. Anyway in GW the good Guru and I are off to Kamikochi for a couple of days. I do not know why we are going there, or what we will do once there, but I have been informed that I must be present and correct at 7am on friday morning in order to get a long distance coach from Shinjuku station. Shinjuku station is a funny old place. It is one of the busiest stations in the world, with over a million people passing through it on a busy day, most of them with cricked necks from trying to look at signs behind them whilst being forced along in a direction they definitely don't want to be going in. I don't think anyone really knows where they are going in Shinjuku as there are so many bullet train lines, regular JR lines, subways, private railway lines, local and long distance lines that no-one can possibly know where they need to be. But the Guru, who has the directional sense of a compass on acid, can navigate through with precision and speed, a juxtaposition that is somehow right and proper. My father, on one of visits here, likened Shinjuku station at 5pm on a frday afternoon as one of the missing levels of Dante's inferno, which I think is about right. But I was a little naughty on that one as the Guru and I had left the parentals in Matsumoto (so they wanted to explore, it wasn't out of spite!) and when I arranged their travel back to Tokyo, made sure they arrived at rush hour on a friday afternoon - not nice, I know, but gave them a real taste of Tokyo life. And talking of hell, the 3 Japanese who were abducted in Iraq were finally let out this week (or maybe last week). But the weird thing is that far from symapthy and warmth and 'oh you poor things', the general public has actually been quite negative towards them, following, I think, the lead of this blog (see 12 April entry) in thinking they are really just a bunch of silly buggers. And the best thing about it is that the govt is going to bill them for the rescue! I think this is fab and they should do it more often. The govt is basically saying 'we had a fly a lot of people out to Iraq to negotiate your release, and then fly them, and you, back to Japan again. This cost a lot of taxpayers' money so we are going to get abit of it back - let's just call it a fine for being really, really stupid and not doing what we tell you'. The Japanese are well into this kind of compensation money. If you were to knock someone off their bicycle whilst driving your car, you would be expected to hand over a lot of cash as a 'sorry I bent your wheel' payment. Stranger still, if you top yourself on the Tokyo subway or a railway, the company running the trains will send an invoice to your estate for the inconvenience caused to the other passengers. So your family, wracked with grief, remorse and 'I should have seen it coming...' are then hit with a bloody great bill, especially if your spouse did the really inconsiderate thing by jumping in front of a train at 5 pm on a friday afternoon in Shinjuku. And of course now there are plenty of scams to get this compensation money. I once wrote...somewhere.. about these phone scams, well one recently happened where a chap called a late middle aged woman and said something like 'this is the police, your husband has caused a car crash and done some pretty serious damage to someone, if you don't want this to go to court, please pay 12 million yen [that's 60,000 quid] into this bank account right now'. And she did, not thinking this to be strange in anyway. And only then did think to call her husband to check. And course he was at work, perfectly fine, no car accidents in sight. So I think the Japanese have a very strange attitude to money - they will save and save, looking after the little one yens, but then if someone tells them to, or they feel in the slightest bit obligated to someone, they will give it all away with barely a murmur. Probably also goes to show why the Japanese never, ever hold doors open for anyone (er... the bit about not wanting to be obligated to anyone, not the bit about giving away their cash). I remember the main character from 'As I Lay Dying' by William Faulkner was dead against being 'beholden' to anyone. Central tenet of his being, and the book I shouldn't wonder. Hated that book, absolute load of old nonsense. But then again, I seem to remember I felt that way about most of the books I read for English Lit at A-level. Nothing like a bit of literary criticism to ruin a good book for you - thank god I didn't do English at university, which was once a plan. I might think I got slightly off the point there, but I'm not sure there was a point to begin with. But talking, as we weren't, of plants, the ones here are now a mixed bag. The success story is definitely the rosemary, which is healthy and hale. The basil is just tall and gangly now, with few leaves but lots of flowers. It hasn't died, as I'm sure some nay-sayers neighed before, but it is not happy. The lavender is fighting a rearguard action against death, a couple of the sprigs look as if they are well up for the battle, but the majority is thinking of suing for peace. The olive tree continues to sprout new leaves in prodigous amounts, but has had an alarming attack of 'leaves going yellow and brown at the tips'. This may be a lack of zinc so plant food has been purchased and dispensed to all pots and troughs. The tulips almost got to flowering but then seemed to give up the ghost, go pale and slowly fall over. I thought they might be drunk, as it sounds a little like I get, I don't really think so but am marking my bottles to make sure. Lastly the thyme and sage that was planted recently seems to have taken hold, but I am not counting chickens until the fat lady has made an omlette.
Monday, 26 April 2004
Saturday, 24 April 2004
and in this week's (archived as they are on holiday and/or too busy) Friday five
1. Laying on your back and facing the ceiling, which side of the bed do you sleep on? on the right hand side, nothing special I think, but it is the side furthest from the door, which apparently means I am not doing enough to protect my wife.
2. Do you have to have covers (blankets and/or sheets) at all costs, no matter the weather? no, far, far too hot in summer in Japan for that kind of nonsense. If I were in the UK, probably
3. Sleep nekkid or no? Why? oh yes, far better that way (and I'm always too hot in bed whilst the Guru is always too cold, so the duvet is arctic strength for her benefit)
4. What's under your bed? nothing, we sleep on a futon so it's on the floor
5. If you have pets, do you let them sleep with you? Why or why not? no pets, but wouldn't anyway as not enough space on the bed
1. Laying on your back and facing the ceiling, which side of the bed do you sleep on? on the right hand side, nothing special I think, but it is the side furthest from the door, which apparently means I am not doing enough to protect my wife.
2. Do you have to have covers (blankets and/or sheets) at all costs, no matter the weather? no, far, far too hot in summer in Japan for that kind of nonsense. If I were in the UK, probably
3. Sleep nekkid or no? Why? oh yes, far better that way (and I'm always too hot in bed whilst the Guru is always too cold, so the duvet is arctic strength for her benefit)
4. What's under your bed? nothing, we sleep on a futon so it's on the floor
5. If you have pets, do you let them sleep with you? Why or why not? no pets, but wouldn't anyway as not enough space on the bed
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
it's not only me
saw this on ureshiidesu and thought I'd share as it kind of ties in with the stuff below. Must be a popular topic right now - finger on the pulse me...
saw this on ureshiidesu and thought I'd share as it kind of ties in with the stuff below. Must be a popular topic right now - finger on the pulse me...
Monday, 19 April 2004
Japan, Gaijin and the Constitution
This week's ramblings have all been in and around the news recently so will be well known to those of you here, but might be new to those of you who are not, so we'll go with them anyway.
As I may have mentioned in the past, the constitution of Japan is a pretty ropey old thing. It was, according to good authority, knocked up by MacArthur and a few others in 1945 during the victory party: written on the back of a beer mat and was only saved by a Corporal going through the bins the following morning, so most of the big things are there - equality, be nice to other people, make sure the trains run on time, that sort of thing. But some of the little things, that can become big things later, were a bit over looked - such as the separation of church and state and the role of the Prime Minister vs the Emperor as the head of state (well, not really that small then...)
Importantly, one thing that MacArthur did was keep the Emperor as the head of state which, in the eyes of your average Japanese (as one theory goes, I hasten add, this is not the definitive word) absolved old Showa of having any responsibility for the conduct of Japan from the pre-war days right through to the end. This has led to the assertion (accusation?) that the Japanese therefore kind of shrugged their shoulders after the war and thought "well, it wasn't the Emperor's fault as he is still there, so I guess we can't have done too much wrong" and so Japan, unlike say Germany, never went through a period of national hand wringing and self criticism before entering the second half of the 20th century.
"So what?" some may query. Well, it means for a start that Japan has never apologised for its conduct in WW2, or for the war itself, which as you can imagine angers most of the other nations in Asia, especially the Chinese and Koreans. Indeed, some of the more unsavoury areas of Japanese military history, the Rape of Nanking for example, are airbrushed Stalin-like out of the history books in Japanese schools. Not a good way to teach history, denying your past.
"Where is this going?" I hear you cry. Well, as MacArthur absolved the Emperor of his guilt/complicity in the war, it also got a lot of the generals off the hook as well. Now earlier in the blog there was a small mention that Koizumi, like most of the post-war Prime Ministers before him, every year troops off to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to pay his respects to the war dead, bit like the Queen at the Cenotaph. But Yasukuni, whilst being home to now long-dead war heroes, is also home to many of the generals who ran WW2 and who were, or are viewed as, war criminals. And as you can imagine this pisses off a lot of people, all of whom are non-Japanese (especially when just over the road from Yasukuni is another shrine that honours the war dead, has no 'war criminals' and contains the Japanese tomb of the unknown soldier but is the path much less travelled).
Now the bit about the constitution is this. Recently there have been some lawsuits crawling through the Japanese courts, non-Japanese suing the govt for Koizumi's action of attending Yasukuni Shrine in his official capacity as PM. They say it is against the constitution as the church and the state are separate and therefore he's not allowed to do it officially. He says, "ok, I'm doing it a private citizen". But last week a court ruled that no, he wasn't doing it as a private citizen but in his official capacity and therefore what he was doing was unconstitutional. The real giveaway, said the court, wasn't that he used an official car but was that he signed the guest book 'Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister'. A pretty dumb thing to do really.
So the court upheld this suit by some Koreans living in Kyushu, but refused to pay them a million yen each for the emotional distress caused. But even better than this was Koizumi's reaction, which was, essentially, "I don't agree with your ruling so I am going to keep doing exactly what I want to do. Yah boo sucks to you too!" (some of that might just have been made up)
So that's right folks, the PM of the 2nd biggest economy and 3rd or 4th biggest armaments buyer is told by his own national court that he can't do something but he doesn't agree so he tells them to bugger off. Bit odd that. But because this is Japan a lot of the newspaper editorials agree with Koizumi and then refuse to print any dissenting voices from, say China or Korea.
Hmm, this one could run and run...
Gaijin
We're a funny old breed, us gaijin. We're happy to call each other gaijin, you know, "wassup my gaijin?" that sort of thing. But catch a Japanese calling you a gaijin and a lot of us start to take umbrage (not me, I hasten to add - what's in a name?), and it's all down to translation. Like most words in most languages, it can be translated in a number of ways. It can be, for example, 'foreigner' or 'outsider'. Now the people who take umbrage are the ones most likely to take offence at this translation of the word.
A letter in the paper recently said that a chap got jolly angy when he heard Japanese using it in this sense, especially when they were outside Japan. He overheard a Japanese lady saying (in Japanese) "my what a lot of gaijin there are here" whilst on holiday in Hawaii. Now personally, knowing how many Japanese there are on holiday in Hawaii, one western face could seem like a lot, but no, she meant there were lost of big nosed white people around. So he went up to her and said (again in Japanese) "no, you are the gaijin here", to which he received a shocked and horrified look from the lady and to which he felt suitably happy and vindicated.
But my point here is that gaijin can also easily be translated as 'non-Japanese person', so the shocked and horrifed look he received may well have been along the lines of "what do you mean I'm not Japanese, foolish American person? Of course I'm Japanese and these people are not."
Maybe it is just one of those things that I can't seem to get too worked up about, but a lot of people do as they attach all this impoprtance to labels that the Japanese really just don't get as, I think, there isn't really anything to get. I mean really, the Japanese people using a Japanese word to describe something that isn't Japanese. How dare they?
And the vote
This is the last one today about gaijin and their whinging. Again in the paper recently there has been a run of letters bemoaning the fact that gaijin with permanent residency status aren't allowed a vote in this country and isn' that jolly unfair. Now I am all for a revision of the laws so that someone born in this country is entitled to a vote, such as all the Koreans dragged here during WW2 who never left but are still counted, as are their children and grandchildren, as foreigners - that's wrong and needs to be addressed.
But for some foreigner from the UK or US to demand the right to vote because they have chosen to live here but not renounce their citizenship of their own country seems utterly crazy in my view. One chap from the US even went so far as to say something like "no taxation without representation is as true today as it ever was". Idiot. Doesn't seem to have crossed his mind that he chose to live here, or that he has a vote back in the US should he choose to exercise it, or that the tax paid in the 1770s all went to foreign coffers. Oh no, he's taxed by the Japanese govt because he works here and that is bad.
If these people want the vote here in Japan they should become Japanese. Seems to me that if you want a say in how the country is run, you should be a citizen of the that country. Now there could be an argument for having a say in local elections as one is a member of the local community and, paying local taxes, one might be granted a say in how things are done, especially if you have children in local schools, for example. But votes for foreigners in national elections? Don't think that would be right somehow, even with Japan's dodgy old constitution.
This week's ramblings have all been in and around the news recently so will be well known to those of you here, but might be new to those of you who are not, so we'll go with them anyway.
As I may have mentioned in the past, the constitution of Japan is a pretty ropey old thing. It was, according to good authority, knocked up by MacArthur and a few others in 1945 during the victory party: written on the back of a beer mat and was only saved by a Corporal going through the bins the following morning, so most of the big things are there - equality, be nice to other people, make sure the trains run on time, that sort of thing. But some of the little things, that can become big things later, were a bit over looked - such as the separation of church and state and the role of the Prime Minister vs the Emperor as the head of state (well, not really that small then...)
Importantly, one thing that MacArthur did was keep the Emperor as the head of state which, in the eyes of your average Japanese (as one theory goes, I hasten add, this is not the definitive word) absolved old Showa of having any responsibility for the conduct of Japan from the pre-war days right through to the end. This has led to the assertion (accusation?) that the Japanese therefore kind of shrugged their shoulders after the war and thought "well, it wasn't the Emperor's fault as he is still there, so I guess we can't have done too much wrong" and so Japan, unlike say Germany, never went through a period of national hand wringing and self criticism before entering the second half of the 20th century.
"So what?" some may query. Well, it means for a start that Japan has never apologised for its conduct in WW2, or for the war itself, which as you can imagine angers most of the other nations in Asia, especially the Chinese and Koreans. Indeed, some of the more unsavoury areas of Japanese military history, the Rape of Nanking for example, are airbrushed Stalin-like out of the history books in Japanese schools. Not a good way to teach history, denying your past.
"Where is this going?" I hear you cry. Well, as MacArthur absolved the Emperor of his guilt/complicity in the war, it also got a lot of the generals off the hook as well. Now earlier in the blog there was a small mention that Koizumi, like most of the post-war Prime Ministers before him, every year troops off to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to pay his respects to the war dead, bit like the Queen at the Cenotaph. But Yasukuni, whilst being home to now long-dead war heroes, is also home to many of the generals who ran WW2 and who were, or are viewed as, war criminals. And as you can imagine this pisses off a lot of people, all of whom are non-Japanese (especially when just over the road from Yasukuni is another shrine that honours the war dead, has no 'war criminals' and contains the Japanese tomb of the unknown soldier but is the path much less travelled).
Now the bit about the constitution is this. Recently there have been some lawsuits crawling through the Japanese courts, non-Japanese suing the govt for Koizumi's action of attending Yasukuni Shrine in his official capacity as PM. They say it is against the constitution as the church and the state are separate and therefore he's not allowed to do it officially. He says, "ok, I'm doing it a private citizen". But last week a court ruled that no, he wasn't doing it as a private citizen but in his official capacity and therefore what he was doing was unconstitutional. The real giveaway, said the court, wasn't that he used an official car but was that he signed the guest book 'Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister'. A pretty dumb thing to do really.
So the court upheld this suit by some Koreans living in Kyushu, but refused to pay them a million yen each for the emotional distress caused. But even better than this was Koizumi's reaction, which was, essentially, "I don't agree with your ruling so I am going to keep doing exactly what I want to do. Yah boo sucks to you too!" (some of that might just have been made up)
So that's right folks, the PM of the 2nd biggest economy and 3rd or 4th biggest armaments buyer is told by his own national court that he can't do something but he doesn't agree so he tells them to bugger off. Bit odd that. But because this is Japan a lot of the newspaper editorials agree with Koizumi and then refuse to print any dissenting voices from, say China or Korea.
Hmm, this one could run and run...
Gaijin
We're a funny old breed, us gaijin. We're happy to call each other gaijin, you know, "wassup my gaijin?" that sort of thing. But catch a Japanese calling you a gaijin and a lot of us start to take umbrage (not me, I hasten to add - what's in a name?), and it's all down to translation. Like most words in most languages, it can be translated in a number of ways. It can be, for example, 'foreigner' or 'outsider'. Now the people who take umbrage are the ones most likely to take offence at this translation of the word.
A letter in the paper recently said that a chap got jolly angy when he heard Japanese using it in this sense, especially when they were outside Japan. He overheard a Japanese lady saying (in Japanese) "my what a lot of gaijin there are here" whilst on holiday in Hawaii. Now personally, knowing how many Japanese there are on holiday in Hawaii, one western face could seem like a lot, but no, she meant there were lost of big nosed white people around. So he went up to her and said (again in Japanese) "no, you are the gaijin here", to which he received a shocked and horrified look from the lady and to which he felt suitably happy and vindicated.
But my point here is that gaijin can also easily be translated as 'non-Japanese person', so the shocked and horrifed look he received may well have been along the lines of "what do you mean I'm not Japanese, foolish American person? Of course I'm Japanese and these people are not."
Maybe it is just one of those things that I can't seem to get too worked up about, but a lot of people do as they attach all this impoprtance to labels that the Japanese really just don't get as, I think, there isn't really anything to get. I mean really, the Japanese people using a Japanese word to describe something that isn't Japanese. How dare they?
And the vote
This is the last one today about gaijin and their whinging. Again in the paper recently there has been a run of letters bemoaning the fact that gaijin with permanent residency status aren't allowed a vote in this country and isn' that jolly unfair. Now I am all for a revision of the laws so that someone born in this country is entitled to a vote, such as all the Koreans dragged here during WW2 who never left but are still counted, as are their children and grandchildren, as foreigners - that's wrong and needs to be addressed.
But for some foreigner from the UK or US to demand the right to vote because they have chosen to live here but not renounce their citizenship of their own country seems utterly crazy in my view. One chap from the US even went so far as to say something like "no taxation without representation is as true today as it ever was". Idiot. Doesn't seem to have crossed his mind that he chose to live here, or that he has a vote back in the US should he choose to exercise it, or that the tax paid in the 1770s all went to foreign coffers. Oh no, he's taxed by the Japanese govt because he works here and that is bad.
If these people want the vote here in Japan they should become Japanese. Seems to me that if you want a say in how the country is run, you should be a citizen of the that country. Now there could be an argument for having a say in local elections as one is a member of the local community and, paying local taxes, one might be granted a say in how things are done, especially if you have children in local schools, for example. But votes for foreigners in national elections? Don't think that would be right somehow, even with Japan's dodgy old constitution.
Wednesday, 14 April 2004
Murakami
Am reading some Haruki Murakami right now. If you haven't already, give him a try. He is one of my favourite Japanese authors...no, he is one of my favourite authors full stop. Very odd, some of his books, but well worth it. This one I'm reading now is a good one, but also try 'A Wild Sheep Chase' and 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicle'.
Am reading some Haruki Murakami right now. If you haven't already, give him a try. He is one of my favourite Japanese authors...no, he is one of my favourite authors full stop. Very odd, some of his books, but well worth it. This one I'm reading now is a good one, but also try 'A Wild Sheep Chase' and 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicle'.
Monday, 12 April 2004
The beautiful Game
Am feeling a bit tired and shagged out today as, in response to a cry of need, I played football yesterday. The cry of need came as it was a 9am kickoff in Yokohama and, as such, not the sort of hour on a Sunday that most are up and about, unless it is returning from a night on the sauce in Roppongi and therefore not in a state to kick a ball around.
So we played the bottom of the league team (we are comfortably mid table) and, even though we only started with seven players, gained a 3-3 draw. We could have won. Perhaps we should have won, I don't know. But I didn't embarrass myself, as I am more than capable of doing on a football pitch, so I was happy in the end. Also, we played at a rather swish place called the Yokohama Athletic and Country Club, which was nice in a 'they-wouldn't-let-us-in-here-if-we-hadn't-just-played-football' kind of way, especially after we sat around afterwards drinking beer and enjoying ourselves and, I suspect, being quite loud into the bargain. Home team didn't stick about though.
Panic
You may have read about the 3 Japanese who managed to get themselves kidnapped last week. Well, silly buggers, if you ask me, the whole lot of them. Silly kidnappers who wanted to make a stand against the imperialist powers but only managed to get some random Japanese, whose soldiers in Iraq do actually seem to be trying to do something positive. Silly Japanese for being there - noone seems to know who they are or what they are really doing there, except they claim it was humanitarian aid (one of them was 18, for goodness sakes) even though the Japanese govt had obviously told people not to go. And silly parents who demanded that the govt accede to the kidnappers demands and pull all of the GSDF troops out of Iraq in 36 hours and then get really angry when Koizumi refuses to speak to them and refuses to follow the demands.
And then the sill kidnappers say 'hang on, these guys are Japanese! Sorry, thought they were Americans. Bugger, ok, you can have them back' and then not actually let anybody know where they are.
All a bit of a shower really.
Am feeling a bit tired and shagged out today as, in response to a cry of need, I played football yesterday. The cry of need came as it was a 9am kickoff in Yokohama and, as such, not the sort of hour on a Sunday that most are up and about, unless it is returning from a night on the sauce in Roppongi and therefore not in a state to kick a ball around.
So we played the bottom of the league team (we are comfortably mid table) and, even though we only started with seven players, gained a 3-3 draw. We could have won. Perhaps we should have won, I don't know. But I didn't embarrass myself, as I am more than capable of doing on a football pitch, so I was happy in the end. Also, we played at a rather swish place called the Yokohama Athletic and Country Club, which was nice in a 'they-wouldn't-let-us-in-here-if-we-hadn't-just-played-football' kind of way, especially after we sat around afterwards drinking beer and enjoying ourselves and, I suspect, being quite loud into the bargain. Home team didn't stick about though.
Panic
You may have read about the 3 Japanese who managed to get themselves kidnapped last week. Well, silly buggers, if you ask me, the whole lot of them. Silly kidnappers who wanted to make a stand against the imperialist powers but only managed to get some random Japanese, whose soldiers in Iraq do actually seem to be trying to do something positive. Silly Japanese for being there - noone seems to know who they are or what they are really doing there, except they claim it was humanitarian aid (one of them was 18, for goodness sakes) even though the Japanese govt had obviously told people not to go. And silly parents who demanded that the govt accede to the kidnappers demands and pull all of the GSDF troops out of Iraq in 36 hours and then get really angry when Koizumi refuses to speak to them and refuses to follow the demands.
And then the sill kidnappers say 'hang on, these guys are Japanese! Sorry, thought they were Americans. Bugger, ok, you can have them back' and then not actually let anybody know where they are.
All a bit of a shower really.
Monday, 5 April 2004
Bits and Pieces
No big theme this week, more a collection of randomness that crossed my path in the last seven days or so...
The Music Man
This was a strange experience, to say the least. Occasionally, of an evening, I am prone to fits of activity which generally result in my strapping on the running shoes and going down to the riverbank for a jog. Nothing wrong with that, very sensible really. But I am not, of course, the only one. The riverbank, as I may have described before, has a lot of space between the river and the actual embankment. This is taken up with a small golf course, baseball and football pitches, a barbeque area, that sort of thing, unlike Japanese houses, which are jam packed into as small a space as possible. This means that anyone with a potentially annoying-to-the-neighbours hobby must go elsewhere to practice it, so you get musicians down there.
Prior to last week, the oddest experience was to find a bagpiper practicing his wheezy way through a selection of Scottish classics. As you can imagine, that was strange enough in the middle of Tokyo, I mean the Scots only play the pipes to annoy the English I'm sure, so why a Japanese would want to play, who knows. I digress, so on Tuesday I was rumbling along and passed a middle aged trumpeter giving it all he was worth. He was ok, I suppose, and as I passed on way he was trying something suitably jazzy and upbeat. On my way back, however, when all was dark and the bats were starting to flit, the trumpeter had finished the Miles Davis and moved onto infinitely more depressing...the Last Post. I have no idea if he knew the significance of it, but it sent shivers up my spine and I had the distinctly uncomfortable impression that he was playing it for me and, one completion, was going to whip out a rifle and do away with me. Well, I was running, lack of oxygen to the brain i suspect, but it was a spooky one all the same.
The doors
This week's unnecessary scandal is all about doors and is a very sad story indeed. If you remember a few weeks ago I wrote about Roppongi Hills and the delights therein. Well, the weekend before last a young kid, 6 I think, was racing to catch up with his parents and tried to dive through a gap in one of the big revolving doors that are the main entrance. As you can probably guess the kid didn't make it and unluckily got his head caught between the door and the frame. These doors are huge metal things and through 2 design flaws had an infrared sensor blind spot from about 15 to 70cms from the floor (about the size of a small kid) and also the pressure sensors don't stop the door from moving until it has travelled another 20cms round. As you can imagine, this was not too good for the boy, whose neck was broken and the poor kid died.
The scandal is the fact that this was not the first time this had happened. Indeed at that very door there had been a couple of dozen cases since Roppongi Hills opened, but the door company and/or Mori had done nothing about it. Even worse was that all the cases involved little kids and worse still, three of the accidents were serious and involved the kids being trapped in exactly the same way as the kid that died. But worst of all, these doors have been in operation at the Landmark Tower in Yokohama for a good few years now and the same things have been happening there as well and the door company has done nothing to change its designs. Seems a pretty poor show to me, but it has led to safer...
Playgrounds
In the usual knee jerk over-reaction that comes after these sorts of things, some kids were playing down on some playground equipment in Osaka when a bolt came away from a bit on a roundabout. This created a small hole that children, as is their wont, could stick their fingers in and, if the roundabout was turning, get a painful nip on the end of their finger (or maybe taken a small piece out of). So the local police, swinging into action as they do, closed every single playground in the prefecture whilst the Prefectural Task Force (Playgrounds Division) inspected every piece of hardware available to ensure the children's finger safety. This took up a good 20 minutes of the national news on (I think) Friday evening. But this led to Saturday's...
Hanami
Or Cherry Blossoms. More words than there are cherry blossoms have been written and more pictures taken than there are fish in aquariums regarding the sakura season in Japan. So ok, it's pretty, it is a good opportunity to get drunk in a park and...and...that is about it. But the Japanese go head over heels at this time of year. It is meant to evoke the samurai spirit of a short but beautiful life apparently, but it seems to me that someone being cut in half with a four-foot katana would be a better symbol of the samurai, but maybe it is just me. Anyway the Guru and I went to Yoyogi Koen on Saturday, along with two thirds of the population of Tokyo. It was very pleasant in the quieter bits, but the busy bits were really busy and I can't really see how people could enjoy themselves - except, of course, Japanese are used to living cheek by jowl with everyone else so I guess it makes more sense.
It was nice, anyway, and we explored the park, something we haven't really done before. Yoyogi Koen also houses Meiji-Jingi shrine, you see, so everyone really goes there as it is a magnificent structure. Then we walked through the backstreets from Harajuku to Shibuya, poking through the alleys and byways, which was excellent. So all the business I wrote last week about Tokyo not being a city to walk in, ignore it, I was talking crap. To get home we used the new, improved...
Subway
We're all stupid, us foreigners, and can't use the subways properly, so the powers that be have put a new plan into action. No longer do we have a subway, now it is the Metro. And no longer do the staff wear boring olive green jackets, now they have natty blue ones. Not much here, I grant you, to make life easy for foreigners, so in a brainwave of fantastic proportions, the Metro decided that all stations would now have not just a name, but an identifcation letter-number combo. So now Nishi Kasai, were I work, is T6 - T for Tozai (line) and 6 as it is 6 from one end. Where I change, Iidabashi, is T16, so I can tell it is 10 stops from T6. Great. The problem, it seems to me, is where you get interchanges, as Iidabashi is T16 and also N6. Otemachi, which has about 8 lines running into it, is a veritable alphabet that you need an enigma machine to decode. Anyway it all seems to make the whole scene a lot more confusing to me. Uh oh, I've been here too long...
and lastly
I've been getting bored with plants I have so yesterday I increased the herb yield potential by planting sage, thyme and a cutting of mint. Updates to follow as event warrant.
No big theme this week, more a collection of randomness that crossed my path in the last seven days or so...
The Music Man
This was a strange experience, to say the least. Occasionally, of an evening, I am prone to fits of activity which generally result in my strapping on the running shoes and going down to the riverbank for a jog. Nothing wrong with that, very sensible really. But I am not, of course, the only one. The riverbank, as I may have described before, has a lot of space between the river and the actual embankment. This is taken up with a small golf course, baseball and football pitches, a barbeque area, that sort of thing, unlike Japanese houses, which are jam packed into as small a space as possible. This means that anyone with a potentially annoying-to-the-neighbours hobby must go elsewhere to practice it, so you get musicians down there.
Prior to last week, the oddest experience was to find a bagpiper practicing his wheezy way through a selection of Scottish classics. As you can imagine, that was strange enough in the middle of Tokyo, I mean the Scots only play the pipes to annoy the English I'm sure, so why a Japanese would want to play, who knows. I digress, so on Tuesday I was rumbling along and passed a middle aged trumpeter giving it all he was worth. He was ok, I suppose, and as I passed on way he was trying something suitably jazzy and upbeat. On my way back, however, when all was dark and the bats were starting to flit, the trumpeter had finished the Miles Davis and moved onto infinitely more depressing...the Last Post. I have no idea if he knew the significance of it, but it sent shivers up my spine and I had the distinctly uncomfortable impression that he was playing it for me and, one completion, was going to whip out a rifle and do away with me. Well, I was running, lack of oxygen to the brain i suspect, but it was a spooky one all the same.
The doors
This week's unnecessary scandal is all about doors and is a very sad story indeed. If you remember a few weeks ago I wrote about Roppongi Hills and the delights therein. Well, the weekend before last a young kid, 6 I think, was racing to catch up with his parents and tried to dive through a gap in one of the big revolving doors that are the main entrance. As you can probably guess the kid didn't make it and unluckily got his head caught between the door and the frame. These doors are huge metal things and through 2 design flaws had an infrared sensor blind spot from about 15 to 70cms from the floor (about the size of a small kid) and also the pressure sensors don't stop the door from moving until it has travelled another 20cms round. As you can imagine, this was not too good for the boy, whose neck was broken and the poor kid died.
The scandal is the fact that this was not the first time this had happened. Indeed at that very door there had been a couple of dozen cases since Roppongi Hills opened, but the door company and/or Mori had done nothing about it. Even worse was that all the cases involved little kids and worse still, three of the accidents were serious and involved the kids being trapped in exactly the same way as the kid that died. But worst of all, these doors have been in operation at the Landmark Tower in Yokohama for a good few years now and the same things have been happening there as well and the door company has done nothing to change its designs. Seems a pretty poor show to me, but it has led to safer...
Playgrounds
In the usual knee jerk over-reaction that comes after these sorts of things, some kids were playing down on some playground equipment in Osaka when a bolt came away from a bit on a roundabout. This created a small hole that children, as is their wont, could stick their fingers in and, if the roundabout was turning, get a painful nip on the end of their finger (or maybe taken a small piece out of). So the local police, swinging into action as they do, closed every single playground in the prefecture whilst the Prefectural Task Force (Playgrounds Division) inspected every piece of hardware available to ensure the children's finger safety. This took up a good 20 minutes of the national news on (I think) Friday evening. But this led to Saturday's...
Hanami
Or Cherry Blossoms. More words than there are cherry blossoms have been written and more pictures taken than there are fish in aquariums regarding the sakura season in Japan. So ok, it's pretty, it is a good opportunity to get drunk in a park and...and...that is about it. But the Japanese go head over heels at this time of year. It is meant to evoke the samurai spirit of a short but beautiful life apparently, but it seems to me that someone being cut in half with a four-foot katana would be a better symbol of the samurai, but maybe it is just me. Anyway the Guru and I went to Yoyogi Koen on Saturday, along with two thirds of the population of Tokyo. It was very pleasant in the quieter bits, but the busy bits were really busy and I can't really see how people could enjoy themselves - except, of course, Japanese are used to living cheek by jowl with everyone else so I guess it makes more sense.
It was nice, anyway, and we explored the park, something we haven't really done before. Yoyogi Koen also houses Meiji-Jingi shrine, you see, so everyone really goes there as it is a magnificent structure. Then we walked through the backstreets from Harajuku to Shibuya, poking through the alleys and byways, which was excellent. So all the business I wrote last week about Tokyo not being a city to walk in, ignore it, I was talking crap. To get home we used the new, improved...
Subway
We're all stupid, us foreigners, and can't use the subways properly, so the powers that be have put a new plan into action. No longer do we have a subway, now it is the Metro. And no longer do the staff wear boring olive green jackets, now they have natty blue ones. Not much here, I grant you, to make life easy for foreigners, so in a brainwave of fantastic proportions, the Metro decided that all stations would now have not just a name, but an identifcation letter-number combo. So now Nishi Kasai, were I work, is T6 - T for Tozai (line) and 6 as it is 6 from one end. Where I change, Iidabashi, is T16, so I can tell it is 10 stops from T6. Great. The problem, it seems to me, is where you get interchanges, as Iidabashi is T16 and also N6. Otemachi, which has about 8 lines running into it, is a veritable alphabet that you need an enigma machine to decode. Anyway it all seems to make the whole scene a lot more confusing to me. Uh oh, I've been here too long...
and lastly
I've been getting bored with plants I have so yesterday I increased the herb yield potential by planting sage, thyme and a cutting of mint. Updates to follow as event warrant.
Tuesday, 30 March 2004
Internationalisation
Hey, get this. Arakawa is now a truly international organ. Check out the comments on the 19th March post and you will meet Heine, a Norwegian living in Denmark. He (...I think he is a he, but I realise that this is just an assumption, of you are a she, apologies, please let me know) is a remarkable person on three counts:
1. He has read this blog from start to almost finish in almost one go. This is dedication above and beyond the call of duty.
2. In a comment he referred to Danes as 'daft punters' which is fantastic use of language, especially for a non-native English speaker (and he also describes the blog as 'expert description', and as we all know, flattery will get you everywhere).
3. He seems to find my ramblings interesting.
All this has earned Heine first prize in the Arakawa Riverview Challenged Cup. This entitles the winner to a free beer or three, please come to meet me in Japan and I will happily provide the necessaries.
Anyway welcome Heine, good to have some Scandanavian input.
Hey, get this. Arakawa is now a truly international organ. Check out the comments on the 19th March post and you will meet Heine, a Norwegian living in Denmark. He (...I think he is a he, but I realise that this is just an assumption, of you are a she, apologies, please let me know) is a remarkable person on three counts:
1. He has read this blog from start to almost finish in almost one go. This is dedication above and beyond the call of duty.
2. In a comment he referred to Danes as 'daft punters' which is fantastic use of language, especially for a non-native English speaker (and he also describes the blog as 'expert description', and as we all know, flattery will get you everywhere).
3. He seems to find my ramblings interesting.
All this has earned Heine first prize in the Arakawa Riverview Challenged Cup. This entitles the winner to a free beer or three, please come to meet me in Japan and I will happily provide the necessaries.
Anyway welcome Heine, good to have some Scandanavian input.
Monday, 29 March 2004
The other side of Japan
So as mentioned in the last post, I was off on a business trip this week, down to Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu. The Guru and I have been down to this neck of the woods before, in 1999 I think, when we flew to Fukuoka and went on a bus tour around the whole island (never again, by the way, for a Japanese bus tour - it was an experience that everyone should try once, but never again). Anyway that time I never went into Fukuoka, so it was virgin territory.
Getting to Haneda airport I was able to take the Tokyo Monorail. I thought this would be crap, but it was one of the best things about the whole trip! It runs from Hammamatsucho on Tokyo Bay and sort of follows the bay round to Haneda, which sticks into the Bay around the bottom of Tokyo where it joins Kawasaki. The route is great as it goes through Shimbashi and Tennozu waterfront areas, past OKeibajo, which is bloody great horse racing stadium in the middle of the city, and then down past the industrial/petrochemical bits that make Middlesbrough look like an advertisement for clean air. The best thing is the monorail runs about 20m off the ground so you get this great view of the whole area. It doesn't sound like much, but if you live in Tokyo and you see is grey concrete everywhere you go, it was a real eye-opener to see colours and contours and, well, life. Hmm, waxing lyrical there, better get to a rant.
Planes
During one of my visits to BA recently, we discussed the fact that the skies over Japan aren't deregulated like they are over Europe. So where in the UK, fo example, it can work out cheaper to fly from London to Liverpool via Frankfurt than to use the trains, here the same isn't true. No EasyJet or RyanAir to bring the prices down so my return flight to from Tokyo Haneda to Fukuoka cost over 60,000yen - that is 300 quid! This was with ANA with whom, last month, a colleague flew return to the UK for 62,000yen! OK, I wasn't paying so Iwasn't too bothered to be honest, but then this really got me - 300 pound flight and if I wanted a beer on the plane, I had to pay for it! I found this totally shocking. And even worse, when ANA tried to set up a budget style airline called Skymark, no-one used it. Weird, these Japanese. Anyway, I showed my absolute displeasure over the paying-for-a-beer issue by maliciously not buying one. That, I think you'll agree, showed them!
Fukuoka
Is a most pleasant and compact little city. So much so that I was rather taken with the place and had a short but nevertheless strong desire to move down there. The nicest thing about it was, I suppose, that it is walkable. Actually thinking about it, this is more a shortcoming of Tokyo, though shortcoming seems the wrong word as, if you are going to walk anywhere, it is more of a longcoming. Anyway it was nice to be in a place where you could walk around the city, where the interesting little side streets held interesting little shops and restaurants and bars and where they still have trees on the pavements which must make the summers a little more bearable. They also have two small emporia that made my stay much more enjoyable. First, on the way back to the hotel was a cracking little yakitori shop that was perfectly placed for me to stop and have a beer with yakitori whilst writing up my notes from the day. There is nothing quite like a really cold beer with some barbequed chicken at the end of a long day. Anyone who bangs on about sushi and sashimi as the height of Japanese cuisine is talking rot, give me beer and yakitori any day. They also served, free of charge, a dish of raw cabbage with the beer. Now this sounds odd, and if you had told me before I would have politely declined. But no, it is a really good little combination, and much healthier than crisps or peanuts. Sounds strange but no, beer, yakitori and raw cabbage - winning combination.
The other place was a little bar just round the corner from the hotel. Normally you take you wallet in your hands when you enter an unknown Japanese pub as it can easily turn out to be a hostess bar, which will charge you anything from a small fortune to a very large one just to sit down, let alone have a beer or, even worse, a bowl of peanuts. Anyway this one looked ok as it had a sign for Abbot's Ale outside. No really, first time I have seen anything like it in Japan (Guiness, Kilkenny and Bass are about the best you can usually get). In the end I only got one opportunity to go in to this place, and the night I was in there was absolutely dead, no-one else at all. But this was great as I got to chat to the bar owner chap. He was really into all things English and was in love with Abbot's Ale, hence being the only place in Japan to regularly stock it. But even thought this chap was into Englishness, he couldn't speak a word and has never been there, so our long chat was conducted all in Japanese, which made me happy, if confused at times. But the best thing was he kept giving me free samples of beer to try! What a nice chap, but I think he was lonely. Anyway I got to try a whole load of beers made by local micro breweries on Kyushu, which was great as it really difficult to find a beer in Japan that isn't made by one of the big 5 breweries. The best one was made by a brewery called Suginoya and recently won first prize at some international beer competition thing. The worst was a strawberry beer that was very similar to cough mixture. So we chatted away and he kept *forcing* me to try all these different beers and we were getting on famously. Then three middle-aged Japanese men came into the bar and, with all these glorious beers on offer, ordered asahi superdry. Oh well, the spell was broken and I wandered back tothe hotel, gently bumping into things as I went. But I really hope this guy and his bar succeed, mainly so I can go back and ask his name.
But that was about it. The work was worky, the people very nice and a good bunch of trainees to boot. The hotel room was small and to say the most, functional. Anyone who has lived or stayed in Japan will know all about breakfasts in hotels here and, rest assured, this one was up to the usual high standards. I don't know what it is about breakfast here, but the Japanese really can't do a 'western' style one and a Japanese style one just seems to be the leftovers from last night. Economical? Yes. Tempting at 7:30 with a hangover...?
So as mentioned in the last post, I was off on a business trip this week, down to Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu. The Guru and I have been down to this neck of the woods before, in 1999 I think, when we flew to Fukuoka and went on a bus tour around the whole island (never again, by the way, for a Japanese bus tour - it was an experience that everyone should try once, but never again). Anyway that time I never went into Fukuoka, so it was virgin territory.
Getting to Haneda airport I was able to take the Tokyo Monorail. I thought this would be crap, but it was one of the best things about the whole trip! It runs from Hammamatsucho on Tokyo Bay and sort of follows the bay round to Haneda, which sticks into the Bay around the bottom of Tokyo where it joins Kawasaki. The route is great as it goes through Shimbashi and Tennozu waterfront areas, past OKeibajo, which is bloody great horse racing stadium in the middle of the city, and then down past the industrial/petrochemical bits that make Middlesbrough look like an advertisement for clean air. The best thing is the monorail runs about 20m off the ground so you get this great view of the whole area. It doesn't sound like much, but if you live in Tokyo and you see is grey concrete everywhere you go, it was a real eye-opener to see colours and contours and, well, life. Hmm, waxing lyrical there, better get to a rant.
Planes
During one of my visits to BA recently, we discussed the fact that the skies over Japan aren't deregulated like they are over Europe. So where in the UK, fo example, it can work out cheaper to fly from London to Liverpool via Frankfurt than to use the trains, here the same isn't true. No EasyJet or RyanAir to bring the prices down so my return flight to from Tokyo Haneda to Fukuoka cost over 60,000yen - that is 300 quid! This was with ANA with whom, last month, a colleague flew return to the UK for 62,000yen! OK, I wasn't paying so Iwasn't too bothered to be honest, but then this really got me - 300 pound flight and if I wanted a beer on the plane, I had to pay for it! I found this totally shocking. And even worse, when ANA tried to set up a budget style airline called Skymark, no-one used it. Weird, these Japanese. Anyway, I showed my absolute displeasure over the paying-for-a-beer issue by maliciously not buying one. That, I think you'll agree, showed them!
Fukuoka
Is a most pleasant and compact little city. So much so that I was rather taken with the place and had a short but nevertheless strong desire to move down there. The nicest thing about it was, I suppose, that it is walkable. Actually thinking about it, this is more a shortcoming of Tokyo, though shortcoming seems the wrong word as, if you are going to walk anywhere, it is more of a longcoming. Anyway it was nice to be in a place where you could walk around the city, where the interesting little side streets held interesting little shops and restaurants and bars and where they still have trees on the pavements which must make the summers a little more bearable. They also have two small emporia that made my stay much more enjoyable. First, on the way back to the hotel was a cracking little yakitori shop that was perfectly placed for me to stop and have a beer with yakitori whilst writing up my notes from the day. There is nothing quite like a really cold beer with some barbequed chicken at the end of a long day. Anyone who bangs on about sushi and sashimi as the height of Japanese cuisine is talking rot, give me beer and yakitori any day. They also served, free of charge, a dish of raw cabbage with the beer. Now this sounds odd, and if you had told me before I would have politely declined. But no, it is a really good little combination, and much healthier than crisps or peanuts. Sounds strange but no, beer, yakitori and raw cabbage - winning combination.
The other place was a little bar just round the corner from the hotel. Normally you take you wallet in your hands when you enter an unknown Japanese pub as it can easily turn out to be a hostess bar, which will charge you anything from a small fortune to a very large one just to sit down, let alone have a beer or, even worse, a bowl of peanuts. Anyway this one looked ok as it had a sign for Abbot's Ale outside. No really, first time I have seen anything like it in Japan (Guiness, Kilkenny and Bass are about the best you can usually get). In the end I only got one opportunity to go in to this place, and the night I was in there was absolutely dead, no-one else at all. But this was great as I got to chat to the bar owner chap. He was really into all things English and was in love with Abbot's Ale, hence being the only place in Japan to regularly stock it. But even thought this chap was into Englishness, he couldn't speak a word and has never been there, so our long chat was conducted all in Japanese, which made me happy, if confused at times. But the best thing was he kept giving me free samples of beer to try! What a nice chap, but I think he was lonely. Anyway I got to try a whole load of beers made by local micro breweries on Kyushu, which was great as it really difficult to find a beer in Japan that isn't made by one of the big 5 breweries. The best one was made by a brewery called Suginoya and recently won first prize at some international beer competition thing. The worst was a strawberry beer that was very similar to cough mixture. So we chatted away and he kept *forcing* me to try all these different beers and we were getting on famously. Then three middle-aged Japanese men came into the bar and, with all these glorious beers on offer, ordered asahi superdry. Oh well, the spell was broken and I wandered back tothe hotel, gently bumping into things as I went. But I really hope this guy and his bar succeed, mainly so I can go back and ask his name.
But that was about it. The work was worky, the people very nice and a good bunch of trainees to boot. The hotel room was small and to say the most, functional. Anyone who has lived or stayed in Japan will know all about breakfasts in hotels here and, rest assured, this one was up to the usual high standards. I don't know what it is about breakfast here, but the Japanese really can't do a 'western' style one and a Japanese style one just seems to be the leftovers from last night. Economical? Yes. Tempting at 7:30 with a hangover...?
Monday, 22 March 2004
Innovations
The Guru and I had a lively discussion this week and it all started with sellotape.
Or Scotch tape, for those of you who know it by that nomenclature. The Guru subscibes to a weekly email newsletter from a Japanese woman who lives in England. She has been living there for years and so offers sage and timely advice for those Japanese women who, or who want to, live in the UK. One of her many valuable contributions to the sum of Japanese housewife knowledge of the world is to point out, in no uncetain terms, that English people do not all have a full afternoon cream tea at 4pm everyday, and for this she has earned my undying admiration (as well, I suspect, the vitriol of Japanese tourist agencies trying to flog over priced cream tea holidays to the Cotswolds).
Anyway, in her last missive she started having a go at British sellotape. It is crap quality, you see, always breaking in the wrong place, twisting, difficult to handle and generally a bane in her life. The Guru nodded along with wholehearted agreement. "Useless" she laughed, casting amused looks in my direction (as I had anything to do with it! (But at 1 pound for 5 rolls in Brixton market, what did she expect?)). But the crowning turd, as it were, was the fact that the rolls of tape don't come with a built in cutter. In Japan, apparently, rolls of sellotape come with a small metal clip type thing that is actually a cutter and means you save valuable nanoseconds when wrapping your presents (not that Japanese ever wrap presents, the department does it for you!).
Now I have tried to use these little cutters and cannot get the hang of them, and nor has a friend in Japan Steve, so we prefer the 'biting with your teeth' method favoured by, I think, most English. So the argu.. discussion started on the relative merits of Japanese vs English sellotape and then progressed, through a series of logical bounds, to the Guru stating the opinion that the English never innovate. When they have invented something that is useful, apparently, they never try to improve it whilst the Japanese are always doing this, hence the little metal clip/cutter on sellotape here. My point was that firstly, it isn't an improvement and, if it was, it would catch on in England as well, and that, secondly, the Japanese are respnsible for a whole lot of unnecessary crap in the world mainly because they try and improve on things that don't need improving. And here we reached impasse as neither was willing to concede to the other. Then we went out on Saturday evening and met up with Steve and Yasuko, had the same discussion and came to the same conclusions, only double the numbers.
This is one that could run and run, I fear, as now anything useless or unnecessary that I see in this country I point out, whilst the Guru, when she remembers things that used to drive her crazy in London, doesn't shirk from reminding me. I am willing to concede her views on occasional, small things, like the London Underground, but she will not budge from her view. This made me happy the other night, though. She was washing rice in it's cooking pot when I mentioned that it was easier to wash rice in a seive under running water. "This is the way it's been done for thousands of years" said she.
I don't like to keep score, but that one went on the fridge door.
(The Japanese woman who started all this off, by the by, lives in Margate. Enough said.)
Fukuoka, Kyushu.
I'm off on a business trip!
That's right. Tomorrow I have to troop off to Haneda airport and fly down to Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu. We have a new franchise set up there so I have to go down to do some interviews/orientation for a bunch of new teachers who have been 'selected' by the franchisee, and then do a couple of days of training with them as well. Get to stay in a hotel that I don't have to pay for and get extra money for doing my job. Marvellous.
I am looking forward to this as it is a chance to see a new city, meet some new people and generally not be in the office for four days. Sounds like a great deal and should all be smooth as silk as luckily the franchise department isn't one of those where all the staff received, and used, DIY lobotomy kits for christmas last year. Oh hang on...
Full report next week.
The Guru and I had a lively discussion this week and it all started with sellotape.
Or Scotch tape, for those of you who know it by that nomenclature. The Guru subscibes to a weekly email newsletter from a Japanese woman who lives in England. She has been living there for years and so offers sage and timely advice for those Japanese women who, or who want to, live in the UK. One of her many valuable contributions to the sum of Japanese housewife knowledge of the world is to point out, in no uncetain terms, that English people do not all have a full afternoon cream tea at 4pm everyday, and for this she has earned my undying admiration (as well, I suspect, the vitriol of Japanese tourist agencies trying to flog over priced cream tea holidays to the Cotswolds).
Anyway, in her last missive she started having a go at British sellotape. It is crap quality, you see, always breaking in the wrong place, twisting, difficult to handle and generally a bane in her life. The Guru nodded along with wholehearted agreement. "Useless" she laughed, casting amused looks in my direction (as I had anything to do with it! (But at 1 pound for 5 rolls in Brixton market, what did she expect?)). But the crowning turd, as it were, was the fact that the rolls of tape don't come with a built in cutter. In Japan, apparently, rolls of sellotape come with a small metal clip type thing that is actually a cutter and means you save valuable nanoseconds when wrapping your presents (not that Japanese ever wrap presents, the department does it for you!).
Now I have tried to use these little cutters and cannot get the hang of them, and nor has a friend in Japan Steve, so we prefer the 'biting with your teeth' method favoured by, I think, most English. So the argu.. discussion started on the relative merits of Japanese vs English sellotape and then progressed, through a series of logical bounds, to the Guru stating the opinion that the English never innovate. When they have invented something that is useful, apparently, they never try to improve it whilst the Japanese are always doing this, hence the little metal clip/cutter on sellotape here. My point was that firstly, it isn't an improvement and, if it was, it would catch on in England as well, and that, secondly, the Japanese are respnsible for a whole lot of unnecessary crap in the world mainly because they try and improve on things that don't need improving. And here we reached impasse as neither was willing to concede to the other. Then we went out on Saturday evening and met up with Steve and Yasuko, had the same discussion and came to the same conclusions, only double the numbers.
This is one that could run and run, I fear, as now anything useless or unnecessary that I see in this country I point out, whilst the Guru, when she remembers things that used to drive her crazy in London, doesn't shirk from reminding me. I am willing to concede her views on occasional, small things, like the London Underground, but she will not budge from her view. This made me happy the other night, though. She was washing rice in it's cooking pot when I mentioned that it was easier to wash rice in a seive under running water. "This is the way it's been done for thousands of years" said she.
I don't like to keep score, but that one went on the fridge door.
(The Japanese woman who started all this off, by the by, lives in Margate. Enough said.)
Fukuoka, Kyushu.
I'm off on a business trip!
That's right. Tomorrow I have to troop off to Haneda airport and fly down to Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu. We have a new franchise set up there so I have to go down to do some interviews/orientation for a bunch of new teachers who have been 'selected' by the franchisee, and then do a couple of days of training with them as well. Get to stay in a hotel that I don't have to pay for and get extra money for doing my job. Marvellous.
I am looking forward to this as it is a chance to see a new city, meet some new people and generally not be in the office for four days. Sounds like a great deal and should all be smooth as silk as luckily the franchise department isn't one of those where all the staff received, and used, DIY lobotomy kits for christmas last year. Oh hang on...
Full report next week.
Friday, 19 March 2004
and in this week's friday five
If you...
1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve? often thought about this, but never really settled on a definitive style, so probably a bit of everything that I like, so a bit of Japanese, some Thai, a touch of Mexican and your usual Euro/French/Italian stuff. I hate the word 'fusion' in cooking, so better to be pick n' mix.
2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell? often thought about this as well. Definitely a combination deli/coffee/book shop. (This one, one day, will happen).
3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be? i'd like to think a series of wry, occasionally humourous articles on the oddities and strangeness of living in Japan. But probably a fantasy novel.
4. ...ran a school, what would you teach? I work for a school, we teach English. So anything but that.
5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it? have never thought about this as I am so totally unmusical, a bit like Steve Martin's character in 'the jerk'.Although having said that, I love music. But the choice would change depending on the day, week, month, hour etc. Listening to lots of led zep/stones/ black crowes right now, so if i recorded an album this weekend, it would probably sound like them.
If you...
1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve? often thought about this, but never really settled on a definitive style, so probably a bit of everything that I like, so a bit of Japanese, some Thai, a touch of Mexican and your usual Euro/French/Italian stuff. I hate the word 'fusion' in cooking, so better to be pick n' mix.
2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell? often thought about this as well. Definitely a combination deli/coffee/book shop. (This one, one day, will happen).
3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be? i'd like to think a series of wry, occasionally humourous articles on the oddities and strangeness of living in Japan. But probably a fantasy novel.
4. ...ran a school, what would you teach? I work for a school, we teach English. So anything but that.
5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it? have never thought about this as I am so totally unmusical, a bit like Steve Martin's character in 'the jerk'.Although having said that, I love music. But the choice would change depending on the day, week, month, hour etc. Listening to lots of led zep/stones/ black crowes right now, so if i recorded an album this weekend, it would probably sound like them.
Wednesday, 17 March 2004
Musical differences
Here's a strange thing. The Guru and I were having a spot of dinner the other night and a piece of music started up on the old cd player. It was a classical piece and as it started the Guru slowly got a wistful, faraway look in her eye and murmured natsukashi. At the same time my thoughts wandered off, stimulated by the music and slowly an amused smirk spread across my face. The music, I'm sure you're dying to know, was the bit from the old Hamlet cigar ads (the name escapes me just now, and the cd has been replaced on the shelf). I was thinking of the ads, specifically the one in the restaurant where I think the waiter knocks the chap's toupee off, much to the amusement of his younger date, whence the waiter gives him the cigar and strikes a match on the back of his head. So like most English people my connection with the song is wryly amusing.
Natsukashi, for those who don't know, doesn't really translate well into English but is a sort of wistful nostalgia, "that takes me back" sort of idea. The reason being, you see, is that the same piece of music is the one played at all Japanese graduation ceremonies, so as soon as a Japanese adult hears it, they are suddenly transported back to school/college/university and those halcyon days. I just smirked. This could, of course, prove embarrassing in the future when, at my childrens' very solemn kindergarten graduation ceremony, when I should be crying with pride or something, I will be happily smirking to myself thinking of Hamlet cigar adverts. Must learn self control.
But of course there are many more examples of this sort of wholly different cultural reaction to music. For example whilst we in the west are somewhat pissed and spluttering "I love you, yur my besht mate, no really" at new year to the tune of Auld Lang Syne (or whatever the spelling is), here in Japan it is known as the 'Firefly' and is played to tell you that the supermarket or department store you are in is about to close. Curiously, the image I have for Vaugh-Williams' new world symphony is the Hovis kid walking with his bike up a steep hill on his way home in Yorkshire or the Cotswolds, which is spooky as it is the music they play over tannoys at around 5pm in towns all over Japan (well in Kawaguchi at any rate) telling kids it is time to go home. Maybe it has a deep psychological resonance about returning to the bosom of ones family. Or something.
Here's a strange thing. The Guru and I were having a spot of dinner the other night and a piece of music started up on the old cd player. It was a classical piece and as it started the Guru slowly got a wistful, faraway look in her eye and murmured natsukashi. At the same time my thoughts wandered off, stimulated by the music and slowly an amused smirk spread across my face. The music, I'm sure you're dying to know, was the bit from the old Hamlet cigar ads (the name escapes me just now, and the cd has been replaced on the shelf). I was thinking of the ads, specifically the one in the restaurant where I think the waiter knocks the chap's toupee off, much to the amusement of his younger date, whence the waiter gives him the cigar and strikes a match on the back of his head. So like most English people my connection with the song is wryly amusing.
Natsukashi, for those who don't know, doesn't really translate well into English but is a sort of wistful nostalgia, "that takes me back" sort of idea. The reason being, you see, is that the same piece of music is the one played at all Japanese graduation ceremonies, so as soon as a Japanese adult hears it, they are suddenly transported back to school/college/university and those halcyon days. I just smirked. This could, of course, prove embarrassing in the future when, at my childrens' very solemn kindergarten graduation ceremony, when I should be crying with pride or something, I will be happily smirking to myself thinking of Hamlet cigar adverts. Must learn self control.
But of course there are many more examples of this sort of wholly different cultural reaction to music. For example whilst we in the west are somewhat pissed and spluttering "I love you, yur my besht mate, no really" at new year to the tune of Auld Lang Syne (or whatever the spelling is), here in Japan it is known as the 'Firefly' and is played to tell you that the supermarket or department store you are in is about to close. Curiously, the image I have for Vaugh-Williams' new world symphony is the Hovis kid walking with his bike up a steep hill on his way home in Yorkshire or the Cotswolds, which is spooky as it is the music they play over tannoys at around 5pm in towns all over Japan (well in Kawaguchi at any rate) telling kids it is time to go home. Maybe it has a deep psychological resonance about returning to the bosom of ones family. Or something.
Sunday, 14 March 2004
Saturday, 13 March 2004
and on this week's friday five
1. What was the last song you heard? haven't been listening to a lot of music this week, the md player has remained at home, but I think it would be 'when the levee breaks' by Led Zeppelin
2. What were the last two movies you saw? that would be Love, Actually and Lord of the Rings pt 3. (and surprisingly love, actually wasn't as awful as I thought it would be)
3. What were the last three things you purchased? apart from lunches, a load of Harvey Nicholls toffee (going cheap at Sogo dept store which was given to the ladies in the office for White Day), 4 books at Bondibooks over in Kichijouji (thanks Josh) and a lot of beer last night.
4. What four things do you need to do this weekend? haircut, study, recover from hangover and study.
5. Who are the last five people you talked to? The good Guru (in a drunken state last night and a hungover state this morning) and then 4 others from the office - Dave, Helen, Sally and Simon - with whom I drank too much beer and probably put the world to rights (lucky old world!).
1. What was the last song you heard? haven't been listening to a lot of music this week, the md player has remained at home, but I think it would be 'when the levee breaks' by Led Zeppelin
2. What were the last two movies you saw? that would be Love, Actually and Lord of the Rings pt 3. (and surprisingly love, actually wasn't as awful as I thought it would be)
3. What were the last three things you purchased? apart from lunches, a load of Harvey Nicholls toffee (going cheap at Sogo dept store which was given to the ladies in the office for White Day), 4 books at Bondibooks over in Kichijouji (thanks Josh) and a lot of beer last night.
4. What four things do you need to do this weekend? haircut, study, recover from hangover and study.
5. Who are the last five people you talked to? The good Guru (in a drunken state last night and a hungover state this morning) and then 4 others from the office - Dave, Helen, Sally and Simon - with whom I drank too much beer and probably put the world to rights (lucky old world!).
Tuesday, 9 March 2004
It 's the new War
Dave, once of Tokyo and now of Bangkok has a new blog, The Hundred Day's War, detailing his new offensive against complacency. Please pop over here to see it and support him in his endeavours.
Dave, once of Tokyo and now of Bangkok has a new blog, The Hundred Day's War, detailing his new offensive against complacency. Please pop over here to see it and support him in his endeavours.
Sunday, 7 March 2004
What's in a name?
Quite a lot really, if you are Japanese....actually quite a lot for anyone really, but as this blog is all about Japan we're going to go with this theme.
I saw an article in a magazine this week that was all about naming children and the fun you have to go through in Japanese. I had never really thought about it before, but as this is something I will be doing for real (hopefully) soon, I read the article with gusto, and it turns out that it is not simply about choosing a name you like for your offspring. Oh no, that would be far too easy. There is a lot more to it than that. A lot. But before we begin this I think I should give you all a brief guide to the complexities of the Japanese language (for those of you in Japan and who know all this, you may want to wander further ahead. Or you may not, up to you really).
Kanji and all that
So Japanese, in a nutshell, is this - why use one alphabet when you can use four? That's what someone over here said a few centuries ago and everyone thought it to be a jolly wizard idea. So for starters there is kanji which a lot of can be seen at the Kanji Site link on the right. Kanji is the writing that came over from China a few millenia ago and is the one with the pictographs (or maybe pictograms) and pretty much everything old or major has a kanji. Some of these are quite literal and you can see how they developed - for example Kawaguchi, where we live, is made up from a square (meaning guchi, or mouth as it is in the shape of an open mouth) and three vertical parallel lines (meaning kawa or river, from the banks of the river with water in between). Put them together and you have Rivermouth, and there is a river mouth here, so it all makes sense. Unfortunately this is an isolated case and most kanji bear no resemblance to the thing they are meant to repesent. Kanji are not phoenetic, so you can't really try to work out what they mean, especially as you can put two together and the sum of the parts bear no relation to the original bits.
Because Kanji came from China so long ago, they have also become Japanized, so each kanji will have at least two different ways of being read - two if you're lucky. So if you see a kanji you can never be sure how it is read and therefore what it means, which creates a lot of scope for confusion. This is especially true with names - if you find a random business card you won't know who it belongs to as you won't be able to read their name until they tell you. And place names, like nishi kasai, where I work, is made from 2 kanji, the first, 'nishi' and the last, '-sai' are the same kanji, but pronounced differently. Sound a bit silly? You bet.
Even the Japanese realised this, so about 500 years ago hiragana was developed (actually it was developed by a noblewoman at the Emperor's court to send secret messages to someone, somewhere - I forget). So anyway hiragana is phoenetic, unlike kanji, so it was jolly useful for writing under kanji to show what they meant. Now it is used for particles and articles, defining tenses and the like. So that is two alphabets.
The third is katakana, which was developed more recently, in the last hundred years or so when lots of new foreign words started appearing in the Japanese language. This was a problem because, unlike English, there are no spaces in between the words in written Japanese, so if there suddenly appeared a foreign word spelt out in hiragana, the reader would not know where the word started or what it meant. So katakana is essentially the same as hiragana, except that where hiragana is soft and curvy, katakana is angular and sharp, so when reading a sentence you can see where the words change. This is quite a sensible idea really, but confusing for the average foreigner as katakana takes no account of where the foreign word comes from - so lots of English speakers have been very confused by their studebts saying 'I have arlbeit' - they mean, of course, they have a part-time job, from the German, but no-one told the Japanese that, they just think of Japanese and 'foreign'.
So that's three. The last alphabet the Japanese use is this one, the roman alphabet, called romaji in Japan and not really used very much, except in train stations which is very useful if you are going somewhere new.
So back to names
So first you have to choose the name you want for your kid. This is the easy part as there are lots to choose from. So far so good.
But then you have to decide how you want to write it. Now we can assume that the surname is going to be the same as the rest of the family, but what of the first name? Well, you could write it in hiragana, the curvy phoenetic script above, but where is the fun in that? Now in English, if you want your kid to be called John, you have little choice but to choose one 'o', one 'n', one 'j' and one 'h', out them in the right order and hey presto, you have John. But with a name like Akira, for example, reasonably popular especially after the post-apocalyptic dude, you will have at least 25 different ways of writing it in Kanji. 25!
So just pick a nice looking kanji that means something nice like 'strong-warrior-salary-man', yes? No. You've forgotten the strokes! and we're not talking noveau rock pop here. All kanji have a set number of strokes and an order in which to write them, and woe betide you if you get either wrong. This is important because you have to add up the number of strokes and see if you get good numbers or bad numbers - but not just the total number of strokes, that would be too easy, you have to look at:
Jinkaku - the number of strokes in the last character of the last name and the first character of the frst name. This will tell you the child's talent or character.
Tenkaku - all the strokes in the last name. This will tell you about destiny and the influence from your ancestors (surely the same for everyone in the family?)
Chikaku - all the strokes in the first name. This will tell you about the kids life up to middle age, including marriage and health, but not after middle age, that is from...
Sokaku - which is all the strokes in both names.
With it so far, well then
Get your number of strokes in the sokaku and deduct the jinkaku, this will give you the gaikaku, which will tell you how society will perceive your child, his or her sincerity and self-confidence. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.
So what does it all mean. Well, if your sokaku (that's all the strokes in both names) adds up to 19, your kid will be artistic but rebellious and tempramental. In Japan this is not a good combination so it is to be avoided at all costs apparently. You can just see it...
Dad: what about Leonardo?
Mum: hmm, what does it say in the book?
Dad: Artistic but might get a bit angry.
Mum: Ooh I dont like that, how about Kevin?
Dad: happy go lucky, bit of a dreamer, steady.
Mum: that's nice, Kevin da Vinci, has a nice ring to it and none of that rebelliousness...
I digress. So you have to employ the services of a fortune teller to make sure that the name you have decided upon is going to be an auspicious one for your progeny. And you have to be careful as the number of strokes can change unexpectedly when you use a kanji for a name rather than its normal usage, for no good reason whatsoever, except, as with all of this, to confuse foreigners (although it is pretty good at confusing the Japanese as well. When the guru and I wed at the local ward office, the desk bound chappie admonished the Guru for spelling her name wrong, something she had been doing for thirty odd years as her father had chosen an alternative kanji that changed in name usage but then he had basically forgotten to tell her!).
And then, of course, there are the forbidden kanji. There are only 2230 kanji that can be used for naming your kids, out of a total of many tens of thousands that are out there, the 1945 Joyo kanji, which are the sort of everyday ones that everyone can read (yours truly excepted) plus 285 special kanji for names. That is it. Back in the nineties a rather deranged chap wanted to name his son Akuma, which means evil or devil (using the kanji he wanted to use). Now he was a silly chap, but his local authorities actually took him to court and won, meaning that he was legally not allowed to name his son what he wanted! Now although I think this chap was being a bit of a prat, I am shocked at the principle that you can't name you kids what you want to. And who chose the 2230 kanji? No one seems to know.
But there you have it. Seems to me that if you eant to do this sort of thing properly you need an advanced degree in calculus to work out the stroke permutations and then a direct line to Russel Grant to chack everything is sweet in the heavens.
Think I'll be giving my kids English names...
Quite a lot really, if you are Japanese....actually quite a lot for anyone really, but as this blog is all about Japan we're going to go with this theme.
I saw an article in a magazine this week that was all about naming children and the fun you have to go through in Japanese. I had never really thought about it before, but as this is something I will be doing for real (hopefully) soon, I read the article with gusto, and it turns out that it is not simply about choosing a name you like for your offspring. Oh no, that would be far too easy. There is a lot more to it than that. A lot. But before we begin this I think I should give you all a brief guide to the complexities of the Japanese language (for those of you in Japan and who know all this, you may want to wander further ahead. Or you may not, up to you really).
Kanji and all that
So Japanese, in a nutshell, is this - why use one alphabet when you can use four? That's what someone over here said a few centuries ago and everyone thought it to be a jolly wizard idea. So for starters there is kanji which a lot of can be seen at the Kanji Site link on the right. Kanji is the writing that came over from China a few millenia ago and is the one with the pictographs (or maybe pictograms) and pretty much everything old or major has a kanji. Some of these are quite literal and you can see how they developed - for example Kawaguchi, where we live, is made up from a square (meaning guchi, or mouth as it is in the shape of an open mouth) and three vertical parallel lines (meaning kawa or river, from the banks of the river with water in between). Put them together and you have Rivermouth, and there is a river mouth here, so it all makes sense. Unfortunately this is an isolated case and most kanji bear no resemblance to the thing they are meant to repesent. Kanji are not phoenetic, so you can't really try to work out what they mean, especially as you can put two together and the sum of the parts bear no relation to the original bits.
Because Kanji came from China so long ago, they have also become Japanized, so each kanji will have at least two different ways of being read - two if you're lucky. So if you see a kanji you can never be sure how it is read and therefore what it means, which creates a lot of scope for confusion. This is especially true with names - if you find a random business card you won't know who it belongs to as you won't be able to read their name until they tell you. And place names, like nishi kasai, where I work, is made from 2 kanji, the first, 'nishi' and the last, '-sai' are the same kanji, but pronounced differently. Sound a bit silly? You bet.
Even the Japanese realised this, so about 500 years ago hiragana was developed (actually it was developed by a noblewoman at the Emperor's court to send secret messages to someone, somewhere - I forget). So anyway hiragana is phoenetic, unlike kanji, so it was jolly useful for writing under kanji to show what they meant. Now it is used for particles and articles, defining tenses and the like. So that is two alphabets.
The third is katakana, which was developed more recently, in the last hundred years or so when lots of new foreign words started appearing in the Japanese language. This was a problem because, unlike English, there are no spaces in between the words in written Japanese, so if there suddenly appeared a foreign word spelt out in hiragana, the reader would not know where the word started or what it meant. So katakana is essentially the same as hiragana, except that where hiragana is soft and curvy, katakana is angular and sharp, so when reading a sentence you can see where the words change. This is quite a sensible idea really, but confusing for the average foreigner as katakana takes no account of where the foreign word comes from - so lots of English speakers have been very confused by their studebts saying 'I have arlbeit' - they mean, of course, they have a part-time job, from the German, but no-one told the Japanese that, they just think of Japanese and 'foreign'.
So that's three. The last alphabet the Japanese use is this one, the roman alphabet, called romaji in Japan and not really used very much, except in train stations which is very useful if you are going somewhere new.
So back to names
So first you have to choose the name you want for your kid. This is the easy part as there are lots to choose from. So far so good.
But then you have to decide how you want to write it. Now we can assume that the surname is going to be the same as the rest of the family, but what of the first name? Well, you could write it in hiragana, the curvy phoenetic script above, but where is the fun in that? Now in English, if you want your kid to be called John, you have little choice but to choose one 'o', one 'n', one 'j' and one 'h', out them in the right order and hey presto, you have John. But with a name like Akira, for example, reasonably popular especially after the post-apocalyptic dude, you will have at least 25 different ways of writing it in Kanji. 25!
So just pick a nice looking kanji that means something nice like 'strong-warrior-salary-man', yes? No. You've forgotten the strokes! and we're not talking noveau rock pop here. All kanji have a set number of strokes and an order in which to write them, and woe betide you if you get either wrong. This is important because you have to add up the number of strokes and see if you get good numbers or bad numbers - but not just the total number of strokes, that would be too easy, you have to look at:
Jinkaku - the number of strokes in the last character of the last name and the first character of the frst name. This will tell you the child's talent or character.
Tenkaku - all the strokes in the last name. This will tell you about destiny and the influence from your ancestors (surely the same for everyone in the family?)
Chikaku - all the strokes in the first name. This will tell you about the kids life up to middle age, including marriage and health, but not after middle age, that is from...
Sokaku - which is all the strokes in both names.
With it so far, well then
Get your number of strokes in the sokaku and deduct the jinkaku, this will give you the gaikaku, which will tell you how society will perceive your child, his or her sincerity and self-confidence. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.
So what does it all mean. Well, if your sokaku (that's all the strokes in both names) adds up to 19, your kid will be artistic but rebellious and tempramental. In Japan this is not a good combination so it is to be avoided at all costs apparently. You can just see it...
Dad: what about Leonardo?
Mum: hmm, what does it say in the book?
Dad: Artistic but might get a bit angry.
Mum: Ooh I dont like that, how about Kevin?
Dad: happy go lucky, bit of a dreamer, steady.
Mum: that's nice, Kevin da Vinci, has a nice ring to it and none of that rebelliousness...
I digress. So you have to employ the services of a fortune teller to make sure that the name you have decided upon is going to be an auspicious one for your progeny. And you have to be careful as the number of strokes can change unexpectedly when you use a kanji for a name rather than its normal usage, for no good reason whatsoever, except, as with all of this, to confuse foreigners (although it is pretty good at confusing the Japanese as well. When the guru and I wed at the local ward office, the desk bound chappie admonished the Guru for spelling her name wrong, something she had been doing for thirty odd years as her father had chosen an alternative kanji that changed in name usage but then he had basically forgotten to tell her!).
And then, of course, there are the forbidden kanji. There are only 2230 kanji that can be used for naming your kids, out of a total of many tens of thousands that are out there, the 1945 Joyo kanji, which are the sort of everyday ones that everyone can read (yours truly excepted) plus 285 special kanji for names. That is it. Back in the nineties a rather deranged chap wanted to name his son Akuma, which means evil or devil (using the kanji he wanted to use). Now he was a silly chap, but his local authorities actually took him to court and won, meaning that he was legally not allowed to name his son what he wanted! Now although I think this chap was being a bit of a prat, I am shocked at the principle that you can't name you kids what you want to. And who chose the 2230 kanji? No one seems to know.
But there you have it. Seems to me that if you eant to do this sort of thing properly you need an advanced degree in calculus to work out the stroke permutations and then a direct line to Russel Grant to chack everything is sweet in the heavens.
Think I'll be giving my kids English names...
Friday, 5 March 2004
and this week's friday five
What was...
1. ...your first grade teacher's name? Not sure about first grade as we don't have them in the UK, but the first teacher's name that I can remember is Mrs Kenyon - old, pinched face, bit of a harridan sometimes but basically ok.
2. ...your favorite Saturday morning cartoon? Battle of the Planets with G-Force, and their spaceship called the Phoenix that, cunningly, went all fiery in times of need, which was actually 'Gatchaman' here in Japan, for Japanese it was. (After asking the Guru what the Japanese name was, she has just sung me the theme song - bless her!)
3. ...the name of your very first best friend? James Milne - whatever happened to him...?
4. ...your favorite breakfast cereal? As a kid I have a very vague recollection of Golden Nuggets, which I suspect where lumps of sugar with yellow food colouring (which luckily covered all the major food groups for a four year old). If not, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.
5. ...your favorite thing to do after school? Too many to write down but 'bugger all' and 'not doing homework' come close to the top.
What was...
1. ...your first grade teacher's name? Not sure about first grade as we don't have them in the UK, but the first teacher's name that I can remember is Mrs Kenyon - old, pinched face, bit of a harridan sometimes but basically ok.
2. ...your favorite Saturday morning cartoon? Battle of the Planets with G-Force, and their spaceship called the Phoenix that, cunningly, went all fiery in times of need, which was actually 'Gatchaman' here in Japan, for Japanese it was. (After asking the Guru what the Japanese name was, she has just sung me the theme song - bless her!)
3. ...the name of your very first best friend? James Milne - whatever happened to him...?
4. ...your favorite breakfast cereal? As a kid I have a very vague recollection of Golden Nuggets, which I suspect where lumps of sugar with yellow food colouring (which luckily covered all the major food groups for a four year old). If not, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.
5. ...your favorite thing to do after school? Too many to write down but 'bugger all' and 'not doing homework' come close to the top.
Monday, 1 March 2004
The Police State
Interesting story in this week's news about the police, which I thought I would share. Now personally I have a lot of time for the police in the UK, they seem to be a hard working lot, over stressed, criticised from all quarters, that sort of thing. I haven't had to much to do with them, to be honest, and long may that continue, but they seem to be trying to be doing a good job. And before anyone gets too irate in the comments section, I am looking at them from 5,000 miles away with little in the way of domestic UK news, so I may be wrong about that. I am also looking at them in comparison with the Japanese police, who are, I think, pretty shite.
I mean sh*te in a sort of useless way. Not bumbling incompetence, like the jolly laughing policeman, but a kind of arrogant, don't mess with me but if you do mess with me I won't really know what to do about it sort of way. If you take my meaning.
Anyway what got me thinking was a story in the paper. Apparently a week or so ago, a woman was out and about when suddenly she started screaming at the top of her lungs, someone had snatched her bag, you see. Now the police, far from their usual policy of waiting for two weeks before checking anything out, actually arrived at the scene as the woman was still a-screaming. (Perhaps she was near a koban or police box, which is not, as the name might suggest, a law enforcement protective, rather it is a little box-like shed found next to most railway staions where the police can relax after a long morning's doing nothing by drinking coffee). I digress, so the local coppers turn up, at which point the woman stops her screaming and, pointing, shouts 'it was him'. Keystone Cops-like our intrepid heroes turn and apprehend the larcenous individual. This proves to be a 68 year old gentleman laden with shopping bags in both hands - hardly the type to have just snatched a ladies handbag, seeing as he doesn't have a ladies handbag on his person and couldn't carry anything more anyway, let alone run, the favoured modus operandi of bag snatchers, or so I am led to believe.
Pleased with themselves, the coppers drag the bewildered shopper back to the screaming woman, only to find her gone, with out so much as a by your leave and leaving not a trace. 'Oh well', think they, 'but at least we got our man'. So they drag said man back to the koban, on, you remember, a hysterical accusation by a now disappeared woman. Unfortunately the chap, obviously not used to this sort of thing, is now bewildered and extremely stressed which, I'm afraid to say, pushes his dicky ticker into overdrive, giving him a massive coronary and leading, very shortly, to his untimely death.
All very sad, but what makes it worse is the fact that the police refuse to apologise for anything. Apparently they had a suspect who had been identified and accused by a victim and that, sadly, is good enough for them. Doesn't matter that the 'victim' has disappeared, or the chap was an elderly gent laden down with shopping, or most importantly, for the chap at least, that he died in police custody. Nope, he was obviously guilty, so they got him.
Hmm.
I think it is because the police, when faced with a potential crime against a person, aren't really sure what to do. Most of the crime in Japan is of the white collar kind, as reported in these pages in the past, somewhere, so most police really do sit around in their koban's all day, drinking coffee and giving directions to lost people. Now much of this is because Japan is a safe country, much safer than, say, the UK. Having lived in both I feel I can say this with some knowledge, although anywhere feels safe after living in Brixton. Japan is becomming less safe, mostly through socially maladjusted kids losing it and murdering their peers, or parents, and also Japan has always been a place where sexual harrassment goes uncommented upon - for example men groping women in trains, which has become such a problem that there are now Women Only carriages on trains in central Tokyo of an evening. But Japan is still, I feel, much safer physically than the UK.
So when the police come up against this sort of incident, they don't really know what to do, so they either go a little over the top, as with the chap above, or do nothing. In Nagasaki last year there were numerous assaults on kids around a kindergarten but the police didn't tell anyone, so the attacks continued for quite a while until the police finally thought they'd better do something about it - they did catch the guy, in the end, but a word of warning might have helped. An argument against this, I realise, is that they don't want to cause a panic. Fair enough. But how about this.
This week Shoko Asahara, the Aum Shinrikyu chap was sentenced this week. It was the death penalty for him for the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway (and a lot of other murders, going back about 6 years, some of them using Sarin gas - was he investigated? Have a guess...). Anyway because of this there have been lots of TV news features about ex-cult members and what they are doing now. Most of them are trying to live new lives, leave the past behind, but they can't as wherever they move they have to register with the local police who then tell all their neighbours, everyone in the town, who they are and where they live, so they and their kids are attacked, threats made and houses defaced. All nasty stuff that need not happen but is basically encouraged by the local boys in blue.
Seems to have turned into quite a polemic, this one. But they are pretty useless, in my opinion. Pick on the small guys whilst letting the big fish, the yakuza, swim freely about.
But on a happier note
Let's all cheer for Middlesbrough, who finally won something for the first time in 128 years by beating Bolton in the Tin Pot Cup. Yay!
And also
Saw a very strange thing on Friday. I was on the train - clean, cheap, on time (pogo take note) - and sitting a few yards down the aisle was a girl in suspenders. I had to stop and stare. I could hardly help myself, such was the scene. Now lest you think I am one of the dirty old men mentioned above, this young lady was wearing gentlemans' suspenders, the old fashioned type that go around one leg at about calf height and are attached to the sock by a single clip. Otherwise she was quite normally attired - coat, scarf, skirt, socks and shoes. Most very odd indeed, although it is indicative of the strangeness of the fashion of young women in this country. I mean for heaven's sake, leg warmers are back in fashion right now...
Interesting story in this week's news about the police, which I thought I would share. Now personally I have a lot of time for the police in the UK, they seem to be a hard working lot, over stressed, criticised from all quarters, that sort of thing. I haven't had to much to do with them, to be honest, and long may that continue, but they seem to be trying to be doing a good job. And before anyone gets too irate in the comments section, I am looking at them from 5,000 miles away with little in the way of domestic UK news, so I may be wrong about that. I am also looking at them in comparison with the Japanese police, who are, I think, pretty shite.
I mean sh*te in a sort of useless way. Not bumbling incompetence, like the jolly laughing policeman, but a kind of arrogant, don't mess with me but if you do mess with me I won't really know what to do about it sort of way. If you take my meaning.
Anyway what got me thinking was a story in the paper. Apparently a week or so ago, a woman was out and about when suddenly she started screaming at the top of her lungs, someone had snatched her bag, you see. Now the police, far from their usual policy of waiting for two weeks before checking anything out, actually arrived at the scene as the woman was still a-screaming. (Perhaps she was near a koban or police box, which is not, as the name might suggest, a law enforcement protective, rather it is a little box-like shed found next to most railway staions where the police can relax after a long morning's doing nothing by drinking coffee). I digress, so the local coppers turn up, at which point the woman stops her screaming and, pointing, shouts 'it was him'. Keystone Cops-like our intrepid heroes turn and apprehend the larcenous individual. This proves to be a 68 year old gentleman laden with shopping bags in both hands - hardly the type to have just snatched a ladies handbag, seeing as he doesn't have a ladies handbag on his person and couldn't carry anything more anyway, let alone run, the favoured modus operandi of bag snatchers, or so I am led to believe.
Pleased with themselves, the coppers drag the bewildered shopper back to the screaming woman, only to find her gone, with out so much as a by your leave and leaving not a trace. 'Oh well', think they, 'but at least we got our man'. So they drag said man back to the koban, on, you remember, a hysterical accusation by a now disappeared woman. Unfortunately the chap, obviously not used to this sort of thing, is now bewildered and extremely stressed which, I'm afraid to say, pushes his dicky ticker into overdrive, giving him a massive coronary and leading, very shortly, to his untimely death.
All very sad, but what makes it worse is the fact that the police refuse to apologise for anything. Apparently they had a suspect who had been identified and accused by a victim and that, sadly, is good enough for them. Doesn't matter that the 'victim' has disappeared, or the chap was an elderly gent laden down with shopping, or most importantly, for the chap at least, that he died in police custody. Nope, he was obviously guilty, so they got him.
Hmm.
I think it is because the police, when faced with a potential crime against a person, aren't really sure what to do. Most of the crime in Japan is of the white collar kind, as reported in these pages in the past, somewhere, so most police really do sit around in their koban's all day, drinking coffee and giving directions to lost people. Now much of this is because Japan is a safe country, much safer than, say, the UK. Having lived in both I feel I can say this with some knowledge, although anywhere feels safe after living in Brixton. Japan is becomming less safe, mostly through socially maladjusted kids losing it and murdering their peers, or parents, and also Japan has always been a place where sexual harrassment goes uncommented upon - for example men groping women in trains, which has become such a problem that there are now Women Only carriages on trains in central Tokyo of an evening. But Japan is still, I feel, much safer physically than the UK.
So when the police come up against this sort of incident, they don't really know what to do, so they either go a little over the top, as with the chap above, or do nothing. In Nagasaki last year there were numerous assaults on kids around a kindergarten but the police didn't tell anyone, so the attacks continued for quite a while until the police finally thought they'd better do something about it - they did catch the guy, in the end, but a word of warning might have helped. An argument against this, I realise, is that they don't want to cause a panic. Fair enough. But how about this.
This week Shoko Asahara, the Aum Shinrikyu chap was sentenced this week. It was the death penalty for him for the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway (and a lot of other murders, going back about 6 years, some of them using Sarin gas - was he investigated? Have a guess...). Anyway because of this there have been lots of TV news features about ex-cult members and what they are doing now. Most of them are trying to live new lives, leave the past behind, but they can't as wherever they move they have to register with the local police who then tell all their neighbours, everyone in the town, who they are and where they live, so they and their kids are attacked, threats made and houses defaced. All nasty stuff that need not happen but is basically encouraged by the local boys in blue.
Seems to have turned into quite a polemic, this one. But they are pretty useless, in my opinion. Pick on the small guys whilst letting the big fish, the yakuza, swim freely about.
But on a happier note
Let's all cheer for Middlesbrough, who finally won something for the first time in 128 years by beating Bolton in the Tin Pot Cup. Yay!
And also
Saw a very strange thing on Friday. I was on the train - clean, cheap, on time (pogo take note) - and sitting a few yards down the aisle was a girl in suspenders. I had to stop and stare. I could hardly help myself, such was the scene. Now lest you think I am one of the dirty old men mentioned above, this young lady was wearing gentlemans' suspenders, the old fashioned type that go around one leg at about calf height and are attached to the sock by a single clip. Otherwise she was quite normally attired - coat, scarf, skirt, socks and shoes. Most very odd indeed, although it is indicative of the strangeness of the fashion of young women in this country. I mean for heaven's sake, leg warmers are back in fashion right now...
Wednesday, 25 February 2004
+++ UPDATE +++ UPDATE +++ UPDATE +++
Poor old Yoshinoiya, when it rains...
As reported before, the whole American BSE thing has hit Yoshinoiya's gyudon empire by depriving them of their main source of beef. Now it appears that the Bird Flu in South East Asia has now hit Yoshinoiya's second most important money earner, which was some kind of chicken and onions on rice, as there is now an import ban on all poultry from infected countries.
That leaves, on Yoshinoiya's once extensive menu, pickled daikon and water...
Poor old Yoshinoiya, when it rains...
As reported before, the whole American BSE thing has hit Yoshinoiya's gyudon empire by depriving them of their main source of beef. Now it appears that the Bird Flu in South East Asia has now hit Yoshinoiya's second most important money earner, which was some kind of chicken and onions on rice, as there is now an import ban on all poultry from infected countries.
That leaves, on Yoshinoiya's once extensive menu, pickled daikon and water...
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