Movies and Marriage

One of the sacrifices (amongst a seemingly unending series of them) that both husbandhood and fatherhood demand is a sharp reduction in the number of movies I get to see. And worse, the type of movies I get to see. Until Cian finally heads off to dreamland around 9:00pm the television is kept off, save for the Mickey Mouse Club House and the local news and weather. Once the boy goes to sleep if we are not too knackered ourselves, we sit down to watch something. That 'something' is usually, too stretch the term, a 'romantic comedy'. She insists we watch a movie together but equally insists that we don't watch any of my choices as they are either too dark, too violent, too obscure, or, in the case of Winter's Bone, all three (and more about this tomorrow when I will write about my movies of 2010. Still your clamoring hearts) .

So, we revert to the 'romantic comedy' genre, and whereas my darling wife has never seen, nor has any intention of ever watching say, Apocalypse Now or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or even The Squid and the Whale, I have seen Bridget Jones' Diary, one and, God forgive me, two; every film Hugh Grant has ever made; the Joe Wright directed, Keira Knightley starring remake of Pride & Prejudice, six times (which is still only approximately a fifth of the number of times Sanae has seen it); and a series of Sandra Bullock movies that subsequently left me cognitively impaired for close on a fortnight and in need of incontinence nappies.

The cumulative effect is disquieting. Watch enough of these movies and your oestrogen levels begin to rise and you find yourself saying things like "Jaysus, what does she see in yer man", "That scarf does not go with those shoes" and making a mental note to google the film to see if you can find out where you could buy those chocolate beige duvet covers.

There have been the occasional lucky breaks - Definitely Maybe, 500 Days of Summer (but Lord, was Zooey Deschanel so miscast), and Music and Lyrics, but the majority of these exercises in do-they-don't-they glib, cuteness have been among some of the loneliest times I have spent with my wife.

And so I have learned that, yes, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Sandra Bullock is from a galaxy, far, far away.

Snow Today

We had our first relatively big fall of snow last night. Over 25cm (or a foot for my metrically challenged American readership). I don't blog about anything under 20cm whereas back home 10cm is enough to lead the main evening news. And now you don't have enough sand and salt to grit the roads.

Jaysus, people. Ye wouldn't survive a March weekend in Hokkaido.

Mind you, the recent 'bad' weather back home has played havoc with the usual self introductory spiel I give to my classes at the start of each school year. After asking students to guess where I come from (answers usually range from the obvious - the US, Canada, Australia - to the geographically and linguistically challenged - Mexico, Brazil and once, rather memorably, Sudan), I tell them Ireland, teach them how to differentiate its pronunciation from Iceland, stress we are no longer part of the UK (and will pound to a pulp with my hurley anybody who says we are), and then wax long and lyrical about the mild and benign climate with which the Emerald Isle is blessed. A lush, green country where snow doesn't fall, merely 'sprinkles', a place where winter sports are unknown, and the paisti go leor run around barefooted, clad only in O'Neills' shorts and a hand-knit wool vest because, really, we have no such thing as 'winter' back home.

Not anymore. Now my introductions are grim accounts of unrelenting cold, akin to Scott of the Antarctic but without the levity and more whining about the feckin county council and its 'Let 'em freeze!' approach to road clearing.

We are currently packing our bags for our impending trip home and after watching the weather forecast for the coming week, it seems the shorts and t-shirts will have to be replaced with our finest fleeces and 900 fill down jackets, not to mention presents of 'Tried-and-Tested-in-Hokkaido' snow shovels for one and all.

Birthday Boy!

Four today! And what a day. First Cian tried to sell off daddy's entire winter's stock of cereal at SuperCian, "Where Cash is King!"

After a bowl of hideously overpriced cereal, it was outside for some snow shoveling. Which he'd better get used to as he will be doing it until next April. And you all whine about your ten day long 'Big Freeze' back in Ireland. Please.

Next presents. This year it is a 'Super Ozara' Express Train. Introduced in December 2002, it debuted on the Hakodate - Aomori run. Reaching a top speed of 140km/h, it 'shoots' through the Seiken Tunnel linking Honshu and Hokkaido. Equipped with convenient, wheelchair friendly doors, a plush, unprecedented, three-rows wide 'Green Car', it is the ultimate in rail comfort. Or so it says on the side of the box.

Exhausted from both the snow shoveling and the extended train play / total destruction of same, the birthday boy sat down to eat his body weight in oven-baked potatoes and fried chicken, as is the tradition here in Japan.

He then realized that he had to eat his birthday cake too.

Start with the strawberries...

Yearra, it'll do.

Meanwhile, Mammy tries to get in a sneaky play with the Super Ozara.

Cian, incensed by the liberties his mother has taken with his birthday present, takes his anger out on Daddy.

And finally, we end the day on a contemplative note, wondering whether to accept that modelling offer from Levi jeans.

A Qualification

It was pointed out to me by my ever vigilant wife (after she'd finished giving me a whuppin ) that my previous post could constitute a form of moral blackmail, particularly as I will be back home in Ireland to celebrate my birthday for the first time in the 21st century.

To which I replied, gleefully rubbing my hands together and cackling with manic laughter, "But of course, my dear. Of course. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

She then gave me another whuppin.

In truth, my wishlist will have to remain just that, a wishlist (with the exception of The Promise. Which I have already ordered from Amazon. Because, damn man, that Houston gig, ya know. It's gotta be seen. Now).

Region code incompatibility rules out the Thin Red Line and the sure-to-have-accompanied-it Blu Ray player; the New Yorker subscription would just result in another pile of unread magazines to go with my already mildewing back issues of The New York Review of Books, Backstreets and Hello magazine. Reading, by professional necessity, is now dominated by books and journal articles with titles like "Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach", or "Acoustic analysis of the production of unstressed English vowels by early and late Korean and Japanese bilinguals".

Oh, I know, the unrelenting glamour of academia. Still your beating hearts.

And, well, Castlebar on New Year's Eve would probably just result in another whuppin.

The Galaxy caramel bars, though...

21 Shopping Days until Christmas

It's a Friday evening after a tiring and imminently forgettable week and I'm feeling a little bit self indulgent. So, what better way to raise the spirits than with some rampant materialism as befits the festive season. Below is a list of what I want for Christmas. There is no place here for world peace, or charitable donations of a bewildered donkey to some fly specked mud hamlet in east Africa. This is a list based on unabashed, unashamed, self satisfying greed - consider it a consumerist slap in the face of a terrible recession.

So, in no particular order we have:

(1) Bruce Springsteen "The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story"

A 6, yes, count 'em, 6 disc set that runs to "8 hours and 33 minutes of audio and video". Sustained Bruce for anything over three minutes tends to drive Sanae up the wall, so eight and half hours of His Bossness may well end up destroying our marriage, but, c'mon, a full three hour 'bootleg' video of the legendary Houston gig from the Darkness tour back in '78. Man, you can't pass that up.

(2) The Thin Red Line (the Criterion Collection) Blu-Ray Disc

Back in the late Autumn of 1998, myself, Ben Graves and Ben Wilson, emerged blinking from a small cinema in downtown Sapporo after spending close on three hours watching this, Terence Malick's first film since Days of Heaven some twenty years previous. The two Ben wanted nothing more than to go for a couple of beers and maybe dance on a table or two at Rad Bros (while scoring some 'hot Japanese chicks' as was their wont back then. They are both happily married now, but Lord, what their wives don't know..). I wanted to immediately go back inside the cinema and watch it again. Actually, 'watch' is too prosaic a word; I wanted to immerse myself in this film again. For me The Thin Red Line epitomizes the pure potential of cinema as a combination of sense, sight and sound, that exceedingly rare film that elevates the medium to an art form worthy of both aesthetic and intellectual admiration. To others, its pretentious shite and no amount of my wide-eyed gosh golly gee rhapsodizing is going to forgive lines like "Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining".

As an aside, as the film ostensibly concerns it self with the fighting between Japanese and American forces on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, three hours of this may also wreck our marriage. Is there an unconscious pattern developing here?

(3) A Blu Ray disc player to play the above. Hell, now that my marriage is on the rocks, I'll even consider Korean brands.

(4) A subscription to the New Yorker. Yes, yes, I know I should be doing my bit for d'auld sod and taking out multiple subscriptions to the Farmers Journal, The Kerryman and Gaelsceal, but God, the sheer parochialism of it all would both rend the heart and shrivel the mind. Better to loose yourself in wistful fantasies about the alternative life you could have lived had you been born Jay McInerney on the Upper East Side.

(5) My body weight in Galaxy chocolate caramel bars. No, wait, that should be my mother's home made bread. No wait, damnit, Sanae's not going to like that either, Christ, there goes my marriage again.

(6) A pair of tickets to the Sawdoctors' New Year's Eve gig in Castlebar and a baby sitter for Cian so me and Sanae can make a night of it and try and salvage our marriage.

Conferences

The weekend before last found me down in Nagoya attending the annual conference of the Japanese Association of Language Teachers (JALT). This is probably the most important, or at least, well attended, conference for Japan based language teachers, though given the rather middle-aged fraternity feel of many of the participants, this tends to undermine the academic respectability it strives for. By this I mean the overpowering sense of American-led clubbiness that pervades the proceedings (Yanks make up by far the largest majority of members in JALT). Presentations are seen as a forum to interrupt the speakers with supposed 'witty' comments; the speakers often pander to their pals (or 'dudes') with in-jokes; there are constant interjections, often shouted, and questions invariably begin with "Well, in my case..." and end up as vanity proclamations on the inherent superiority of their way of doing things.
Now before this descends any further into an overly cynical exercise in Uncle Sam bashing, I should explain that such 'dudes' are in a minority, albeit, unfortunately, a painfully vocal minority. By assiduously choosing which presentations to attend, the worst excesses of this insidious back-slapping bonhomie can be easily avoided.
In fact, I attended a number of very good presentations, particularly in the area of bilingualism/biliteracy. For me the highlight of the conference was meeting Mary O'Sullivan from Ballinskelligs in Kerry, who turned out to be (a) a remarkably nice woman; and (b) Jack O'Connor's first cousin. So, no more ticket worries come All-Ireland Sunday.
Amongst some other observations of the conference were:
* The baffling popularity of black-white check fleck wool trousers. I know, I know, what the hell was I doing looking at the people's trousers, but the sheer, ubiquitous, monochrome awfulness of these trousers couldn't be avoided.
* The sweeping generalizations beloved of the plenary speakers, who take the same speech on a multi-country tour, in a one-size-fits-all approach to second language acquisition. Context is blithely ignored and pronouncements, carved from stone, are uttered with with an authority worthy of Moses. Any dissent is summarily dismissed with a condescending "The research clearly states..". Not in Japanese it doesn't. And yes, I'm talking about you, Marianne 'Moses' Nikolov.
* Nagoya is an unremarkably bland city. Bombed to bits back in World War II, it was subsequently entombed in concrete so that it now possesses all the distinctive charm of a large, FedEx distribution warehouse. At least Muroran has surf. Plus, it's the home of Toyota and as I drive a Mazda, I was never going to cut it much slack anyway.
* The Miso Katsu though, is sublime.
* Japanese presenters, or rather the four I saw, tend to like their statistical analyzes. A lot. So no presentation is complete without a baffling digression into their methods of analysis which invariably include correlation coefficients, r points, anova's, scatter regression and lots of numbers.
The results people, show me the results. I don't care how you got them, just tell me what they are and if they are in any way important.
* The breath taking brilliance of Japanese public transport. From our house here in Muroran to the conference venue in Nagoya city centre, I took public transport all the way. Bus, plane, train, no delays, everything smooth and efficient, arrivals and departures on time, to the minute, people, to the minute.

Stats

One of the nifty little features provided by those fine folk at blogger.com, home to this and countless other (equally unread) blogs, is the 'stats' function. This, as the name suggests, gives you statistical information on how many times your blog has been viewed (1209), what are the most popular entries (Festivals part 2), and, most entertainingly, who your audience are, or rather, what country they come from.

It makes for interesting and somewhat head-scratching reading.

From the statistics provided for the six month period from May to November of this year, Japan ranks first in audience numbers, as determined by the number of pageviews emanating from here, 464 in total. However, as most if not all of these can be accounted for by me either writing posts, editing posts, or satisfying my rampant ego by constantly checking to see if anybody has left any comments about my posts, it doesn't really count.

Next up is the United States with 213. Hello Ben, and perhaps Una too. There may be others, but like so many of their fellow country men and women, they are obviously the shy and retiring types.

In a somewhat embarrassing third place is Ireland, with 141 pageviews. Ostensibly home to my family and greatest number of friends, this relative indifference wounds. Or then again maybe I have hitherto not been aware of just how illiterate most of my Irish family and friends are. I'll try using less big words and maybe more pictures. Or get Cian to write the blog.

In fourth place is Germany with 54 views. I like Germany, the country, its people; I used to be able to speak the language passably and visited the country regularly during my formative years. But I am completely stumped as to who could possibly be reading this blog. I used to have some very good friends there, but I haven't, shamefully, been in touch with them for a long, long time, so I doubt it's them. Still, whoever you are, 'Wilkommen'.

In fifth place with 39 views is the UK. Obviously this is the Provost of Oxford University who is head hunting me for a Chair in Literature at All-Souls, albeit in a very leisurely and somewhat distracted manner, as befits an Oxford don.

Next up is, eh, Russia, with 30 pageviews. No doubt a considered geopolitical response to my insightful views on the 'Northern Territories Problem', an entry that has quickly become required reading for all post-graduate students as the prestigious Moscow Institute for Strategic Affairs.

Tied on 18 pageviews are, I kid you not, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. It would seem I am a bit of a blogging powerhouse in the Middle East.

Finally, again tied on 11 pageviews apiece, are Brazil and the Netherlands. Whilst I admire their legendary soccer teams of the 1970's, I have no idea why anybody from their should be reading this. Maybe it is the dream of some boy growing up in the cobblestoned streets of Amsterdam or the favelas of Rio de Jainero to play for Muroran Otani soccer team.

Or maybe, as with so many others, they just typed in the wrong address.

The Hokkaido Shimbun

You know things are getting extremely bad for Ireland when the Hokkaido Shimbun, or "De Paper", as it is known round these parts, starts running stories on just how awful our economy is. This morning I was told on page 8 that the country would soon have to be bailed out by the EU as fears grow that we are about to suffer the financial equivalent of base jumping sans parachute.

According to the hacks at 'De Paper', we will soon be going cloth cap in hand to the EU looking for close on 95 billion euro or resorting to putting the country up for sale on Yahoo auctions. The newspaper gamely attempted to translate that bail out figure into yen but ended up having to provide an advanced math tutorial just to convey the amount of zeros involved.

Reactions from people on the Hokkaido street canvassed by reporters from 'De Paper' showed equal dismay at how far, as a certain Aki 'Jumbo' Onigiri put it, "we'd fallen into the shite, like". For Mrs. Watanabe, it was the worst in a succession of cruel misfortunes to befall the country. "First that volcano, how you say, blew up in the country, and now this". When it was pointed her that was Iceland, she said "Good Buddha, not there too! And such a nice, whale-eating country as well".

When Mr. Teriyaki 'Call me Terry' Tsunamaiyo was asked about Ireland's misfortunes, he identified their problems as originating in the scrum, with their props not even being able to "push a fart out after an Indian curry". And, he added, "the lineout wasn't up to much either. Bunch of green clad faeries".

The Moment

In his book 'The Snow Leopard', Peter Matthiessen experiences a moment of Zen-like inspiration whilst high in the dusty plateau beyond the Himalayas in the Dolpo region of north-western Nepal.

He attempts to put this experience into words.

"My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce my heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret of true being. In this very breath that we now take lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as "the precision and openess and intelligence of the present". The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life."

Now, there's more than a faint whiff of cannabis spiced hippiness floating around this statement, and others like it in the book - elsewhere he has a number of digressions about his experiences with LSD. But such cynicism is deflated by Matthiessen's compelling honesty about both his search for this wisdom to constantly live in the 'now', and his equally constant weaknesses that prevent him from doing so.

But that's not my point.

It took Matthiessen more day thirty days of hard trekking beyond the Himalayas into the Tibetan plateau with only a fellow misanthrope and biologist, George Schaller, to attain this momentary insight. And this was back in 1973, when such insights, I reckon, were far easier to come by.

Try it today. In your office. Amidst your desk clutter and your email inbox or at home with nappies to be changed and the electrician coming around at 11 to fix the wiring on the toaster. The continual, irritating pressures of modern life don't allow for much communing with wolves and lammergeiers (a type of eagle, incidentally) and resplendent moments of piercing insight.

But you knew that already. And it's not my point either.

Farthest Dolpo in 1973 was, as Matthiessen puts it, 'like travelling back in time, a hundred years or more'. As their sojourn continued they were reduced to eating tsampas morning, noon and night, they couldn't get kerosene for love nor money, and had to cook using dried yak shite as fuel. They also used up all their candles which meant that when darkness fell, they had no light to read by, which, I suspect, for Matthiessen was probably the greatest hardship of all. The result is that he ended up thinking. And thinking a lot. About a lot of things. As there was feck all else to do. And, as I said, he had to trek thirty days in far flung Nepal in 1973, to achieve this.

So, at the end of this remarkable book, I came away, not enlightened, nor despairing of this life, but rather envious, envious of all that he experienced, and the knowledge that I never will.

And that is my point.

Imperial ambitions

Kunashir as seen from near Shibetsu. Before a month long fog came and obscured the view.

On Monday last, on his way home from some regional shindig in Hanoi, Dimitry Medvedev, President of Russia, decided to stop off at a small, isolated windswept island some 7000 kilometres from Moscow. He only spent a few hours on Kunashir, visiting a fish processing factory, a small housing development, and taking some photos of a tank. (There's not that many things to do on the island, and even less tourists come and do them). It rained the entire time he was there. Before night fell, he boarded the presidential jet and flew across six time zones back to Moscow. And by the time he settled down to his dinner that evening all diplomatic hell had broken loose.

Dimitry goes sightseeing.

Japan regards Kunashir and three other islands in the southern Kurils as their sovereign territory. They refer to the islands as the 'Northern Territories' and are included in all official geographical and political designations of Japan. Up until 1945 they were under Japanese control but then during the final dog days of World War II, the Soviets landed and, well, to the victors go the spoils.

The islands themselves aren't all that valuable, but the surrounding waters are home to some of the richest fisheries in the world.

(Click on the above image to enlarge it and stop straining your eyesight)

Anyway, when Dimitry dropped in to Kunashir he was stepping on all sorts of Japanese toes. Prior to his visit, no Soviet nor Russian leader had ever set foot on the islands (and probably for good reason too. Wikipedia describes their climate as "generally severe, with long, cold, stormy winters and notoriously foggy summers"); hitherto there had been ad hoc discussions on 'resolving' the islands' disputed status, and on going goodwill exchanges between the islands' Russian inhabitants and the city of Nemuro on the eastern tip of Hokkaido.

So Dimitry's jaunt was the diplomatic equivalent of two fingers to the Japanese, an unmistakable message of "feck off! these are our islands". This set off howls of protest here in Japan from all quarters. On the Monday of the visit, bus loads of somewhat startled city employees, fishermen, local activist groups and anybody else they could find, were driven from Nemuro out to Cape Nosappu, the closest point to the islands. There they gamely chanted their opposition to the visit, though their words were lost in the driving rain and howling wind that unmercifully lashed them, quickly rendering the protest into a battle against hypothermia (the pictures on that evening's news, the camera rain streaked and shuddering from the power of the wind, showed a number of sodden protestors dressed only in suits. Out there fervor gets beaten every time by the weather).

Down south in considerably warmer Tokyo, there was anxious nosies from the prime minister's office, the foreign minister expressed his displeasure and people on the streets around Shinjuku were canvassed for their opinions (though I am guessing a fair few needed reminding of just where Japan's Northern territories are). On Tuesday, the Japanese government recalled their ambassador from Moscow, which probably had Dimitry choking with laughter on his salmon roe (one of the several gifts he received from the fish processing factory).

What the whole episode has highlighted is:

(a) how lightweight Japan has become, diplomatically speaking. Prior to this Russian 'incident', there had been a similar flare up with China (and it's still smouldering) over the Senkaku islands, at the opposite, southern extreme of the Japanese archipelago, towards which the Chinese also adopted a noticeably bellicose approach, akin to "Ye startin, wha? Are ye? Ye lookin at me, are ye. Ye startin, yeah, ye startin. I'll feckin do you pal".

(b) how consistently, feckin shite the weather is in east Hokkaido. I lived (endured?) for three years in Shibetsu-cho, some 26km from Kunashir where Dimitry went walkabout, and I can personally testify to the 'long, cold, stormy winters and notoriously foggy summers' in the area. Indeed, so bad was the weather there, that my body rapidly evolved to adapt to the harsh climate, which is why I now have such a thick, lush growth of matted hair insulating my chest and weaving its way over my shoulders and down my back (and yes, I can write these graphic descriptions of out-of-control body hair because I am already married and thus don't have to worry about the consequences anymore).

Shibetsu, in August. At noon.

A walk amidst autumn's splendour 2

As Sanae said, "You'd never think we lived in Muroran".

A walk amidst autumn's splendour 1

God decided to make it up to us for the snow he threw down last Tuesday and blessed with one of those glorious autumn days that leave you murmuring words like 'sublime' and 'transcendent'.

Men of the soil

God shook some of his frozen dandruff over us yesterday. He didn't even have the good grace to wait until the start of November, but instead flung winter at us before we had even finished with Autumn.

Now, this mightn't be such a big deal to all of you basking in the warm benevolence of the North Atlantic Drift, buy we live in a part of the world where the time frame for 'winter' extends to the beginning of May. Think I exaggerate? Well then let me remind you, dear readers, of this:

http://gaynor-takahashi.blogspot.com/2010/04/oh-lord-hokkaido.html

The weekend before last Cian and myself took ourselves off to the mountains above Lake Toya to plant some trees, because that is the kind of caring-sharing we-all-live-on-one-planet-with-mother-nature kind of family we are. So, hippies for a day, but rugged, manly, LL Bean attired hippies. (Mammy was busy with her 'school festival', but from how she subsequently described it - "feckin busy" - I don' think it was all that festive.

The event, in a sort of outdoorsy, try not to think of the environmental damage house building actually entails, way was organised by my good friends at Sudo Home, who obviously had forgotten about the events of last spring.

http://gaynor-takahashi.blogspot.com/2010/03/home-loans.html

Or perhaps they presumed (prayed?) I wouldn't come. But the invitation (yes, on recycled paper) had said trees, and importantly, free barbecue afterwards, so Cian and myself jumped in the car, stuck some Neil Young in the cd player, and sang about searching for a heart of gold, cos I'm getting old, man.

In actual fact, it turned out to be a great day, the occasional rain shower notwithstanding. Cian was in his element, wielding shovel, digging soil, planting trees, while I felt all Daddy like as I instructed my son in the ancient Kerry art of digging a good, round hole.

And on the way home, we had ice cream. Perfect.

Tis the Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

Autumn in Hokkaido brings with it some fine, cool sunny weather and more importantly, fruit. Lots of it. Orchards full of burgeoning ripe apples, prune trees weighed down with full, voluptuous berries, and vineyards resplendent with the many hues of succulent grapes.

It is all a bit vaguely erotic, in a 'fecund Mother Nature and her abundant fertility' sort of way, but thankfully we don't stand for any of that auld hippy shite around here. Nope, pick 'em, eat 'em, and poo 'em out. That's our motto. Well, Cian's anyway.

A couple of weekends ago, on what turned out to be a gloriously sunny Saturday, we jumped in the car and headed off to Sobetsu, home to some of Hokkaido's finest fruit growing farms. We had been there back in June to devour our body weight in strawberries, and after our long, hot summer, we were expecting a bumper harvest. We weren't disappointed.

First we had grapes. Or to be scientific about it, red grapes.

Then prunes. Voluptuous ones only mind you. No sagging berries for us.

Then more grapes, green ones this time.

Next, apples.

By this stage Cian's sugar levels were somewhere up in the stratosphere. But the boy is a professional juice junkie; even now he was only having a mild 'buzz'. So, time then, for some more grapes. Black ones, if you please.

To calm him down we took ourselves off for a walk to look at a waterfall. And then we threw Cian into it.

No we didn't (though the thought did cross our minds). Instead we went off to Lake Toya, where Sanae and Cian went and threw stones at the small lake-side shrine.

Before Daddy and Cian sat down and contemplated the serene beauty of Mother Nature (when she's not being overly fecund), and how fleeting and thus so precious, are days like today.

Well, Daddy did. Cian sat there wondering how he could score some more grapes.

No Surrender.

Last Sunday, I went for a run up the mountains in nearby Noboribetsu, along with 26 fellow fleet-footed souls of questionable sanity. The occasion was the annual 'Forest Kozan Trail Run' though this was my first year to compete. And compete I did. There was honor at stake, national pride, as Ireland's representative at what is now the 'International Forest Kozan Trail Run', I had the expectations of a nation resting on my slim, albeit still toned, shoulders. Plus, I didn't want Cian calling his Daddy 'a wuss'.

So 'Bang!' goes the starter's gun and, as you will see from the following clip, in a turn of speed and a sudden burst of acceleration, within 10 metres of the start I had already opened up a commanding lead on the donkey in 25th and made 24th place my own.

Now, keep an eye on the old guy in the yellow top, number 402.

In every race I have entered in Japan their has always been a 'Death before Dishonor' older Japanese competitor, who takes it personally if the tall, hairy foreigner passes him by. In the Kozan race, he was the man, the Nihonjin who embodied the samurai spirit of old, who would rather run himself into the ground, smear himself in honey and get torn to pieces by ravenous bears rather than let a lanky gaijin beat him. Also, they all run like the Duracell Bunny, constant, clockwork-like steps, pat--pat--pat--pat--pat--pat, that only ever changes when they realize they have been overtaken by yours truly, when they suddenly shift from low to high and go pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat as they scurry past me.

Anyway, we come to the 2km marker, and there we are, me and Swifty Suzuki, little and large, dueling it out for the highly coveted 20th spot.

Back up into the mountains, this time for a good, lung-burning 7km constant climb. At the top I'm still behind him, but as we descend, I stretch those gazelle like limbs of mine and lope past him. But not for long, Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat and he, I swear, 'whirrs' past me, damned if the spirit of the absent Emperor isn't willing him along. "Ah-hah sweaty foreigner, eat my dust!"

7km though, is a long down hill and well, my legs relish the stretch. Go by him again. More frenetic pat-pat-pat-pat-pating but it's a warm Autumn day, I've got at least 20 years and 30 centimetres on him and I'll be damned if I'm going to lose to a bald hobbit.

After this we headed back up into the mountains again, for what turned out to be a 'Sweet-Mother-of-Jesus-what-was-I-thinking" final 6km of an absolute bastard of a climb. Embroiled in my own private world of excruciating hamstring pain, I don't know what happened to Mr. 402 but I thought I saw some empty honey jars on the trail as I finally plodded home.

To a surprising 10th finish, which I was quite pleased with. Until Cian called me "a wuss".

Recovery

Cian, it turns out, had a touch of pneumonia which has kept him, and me, out of the nursey and university for the past two weeks. While I'm pretty sure the Nursery has missed their little bit of Irish charm, I figure the university has been a model of indifference. We have been in and out of the hospital over the past 10 days or so, and are now pretty much on first name terms with all the nurses in the pediatrics department. And we'll be back again on Monday when the boy goes for another x-ray and I sit in the doctor's office pretending to understand what he is mumbling on a about. And God, does he mumble. When he speaks it sounds like an extended clearing of the throat, a low, incomprehensible bass-line of barely formed words that has me itching to give me a clip across the ear and yell, "For chrissakes, would you speak clearly, man!" I mean, its bad enough that all this is being explained to me in Japanese, but it is made irredeemably worse coming from a man who learned about elocution from watching Marlon Brando in the Godfather.

Still, I shouldn't complain. The cost of all our visits, consultations, tests, and medicines have yet to break the 10 euro barrier. Let's hear it for socialized medicine, folks! God bless Marx.

In fact, the hardest part of the past two weeks have been not so much the illness per se, but keeping the boy's waking hours occupied and entertaining. He's an active three-soon-to-be-four year old, and the doctor's strictures about limiting physical activity and getting plenty of rest are easier said than done. Particularly when we are enjoying our annual extended spell of fine weather that turns Hokkaido, for the month of September, into a Japanese version of southern California. So thank God for the internet. Initially it was just cartoons and train videos on Youtube, but then we discovered the unlimited joys of online poker and, well, as long as "don't tell Mammy", then its no-hold-'em happiness for Cian 'Texas' Takahashi and his financial backer, 'Studs' Gaynor.

Today, because Mammy was around, we had to fold and leave the online felt table, so we went for a train ride. Cian likes his train rides. I think chugging along the rails, sitting in the open boxcar, eeking out a tune on his harmonica reminds him of the Lone Star State, his spiritual home.

Health

Unfortunately, the little man has been laid low for the past week with a bit of nasty chest cough. I suspect bronchitis but then again I'm just a lowly English teacher (and getting lower), so what do I know. Nor does he seem to be able to shake it. I took him to see the doctor last Monday where he received a week's worth of medication, but to date to little avail. Mind you, I can't really fault the Japanese medical system as my experience, or rather my proxy experience via Sanae and Cian*, has been one of unfailing excellence. And cheap too. Cian's visit to the doctor cost is subsidized by 90%, yes, you read that correctly, 90%, so for the consultation I shelled out the princely sum of 180 yen (which is about 1.60 euros). Similarly, for his medicine - a week's worth of cough suppressent and foul tasting fever powder - I spent another 340 yen, just a few cents over 3 euro.
Then on Friday last I had my annual health check here in the university. Said health check is compulsory and thorough too: bloods, urine, x-ray, eye, ear, electro-cardiagram, and a doctor's once over. I was pronounced 'alive' and fit to continue teaching low-level students low-level English. I am, however, going blind. 'Age' said the ophthalmologist and at close on 41, who am I to disagree. Glasses beckon, as do dentures, a wig, incontinence nappies and great, furious tufts of wild ear-hair.
Anyway, said health check was also free and despite being told you are fast becoming McGoo-san, it was good to get it done.

*Outside of required health checks, the only time I have ever been officially admitted into hospital in my 12 years herein Japan, happened shortly before Cian was born. I was biking to the university one morning, free wheeling down a hitherto fun and fast hill when a Nissan X-Trail suddenly pulled out in front me. I hit the front side of the jeep, catapulted myself into the windscreen, bounced off the bonnet and skidded down the road a few metres. Luckily there was no oncoming traffic so I kind of staggered over to the side of the road and sat down. My ankle hurt and that, as far as I could figure out, was the extent of my injuries. The driver, I think, was more stunned by the fact that he had hit a foreigner, a big one at that too, that by the actual accident. Anyway, he makes the requisite emergency phone call and in a couple of minutes, there's a police car, an ambulance, and two, yes, two fire engines, one of them with specialist cutting equipment. Not wanting to have wasted their trip, I offer to go lie under my bike on the road and they could practice cutting me out from under it. The ambulance men want me to lie down on the stretcher. No, no, it's fine, I tell them, I'm not that bad, I can sit on the seat here. No, they insist, you have been in a car accident, you must lie down on the stretcher, it's the rule. To keep them happy (the fireman were already beginning to look pissed off at the lack of anything to do), I lie down on the stretcher. More than a bit embarrassed, we set off, sirens a-wailing, through the streets of Muroran, and two minutes later end up at the local hospital. Into the ER. There's another patient in there before me, an old man, a very old man, unconscious, wheezing a deeply troubled breath, hooked up to a series of beeping monitors with the intervals between beeps growing longer all the time, surrounded by a team of doctors.
And then they see me.
"Woah, what's this, a foreigner, yes! We get to practice medicine on a foreigner; we get this right and there will be an article in Lancet - "Cross Cultural Car Crashes" or some such. Quick, before he gets off the stretcher. No, don't mind the old guy, he's on his way out, wheel him downstairs and leave him parked in front of the motuary. He's headed that way anyway. But don't forget to bring back the monitors. We'll need them to impress the foreigner".
So I get an X-Ray and a CT-scan but unfortunately, despite their dearest wishes, the doctors can find no bones broken, no internal or external bleeding, and nothing wore than a badly bruised ankle and some scrapes and scratches. And so after two hours or so, they reluctantly let me go, but not before they make me promise them that I'll come to this hospital should I ever get in a 'proper' accident.
And that has been my only time in the consummate care of the Japanese medical profession.

Let the Games continue...

Sorry about that folks. Our very own Little Lar Corbet came down with a phlegmy cough after Saturday's heroics and had to go to the hospital this morning where he rather shamefacedly admitted to the doctor that lately he had been taking too many anabolic steroids.

"But what's kid to do, Doc? It's the undokai, Doc, I mean, c'mon, I've been training for it all year. You think I'm going to blow my and Red team's chance of glory? Especially when everyone knows White team are coked up to their eyeballs and so strung out on amphetamines that they haven't slept since June."

Anyway, after Cian's rather uninspired stretching routine they were straight into battle in the 20 yard dash.

And Cian came third. Out of four runners. As was beaten by a girl. A small girl too. For shame. Cian, echoing his father's excuse for his often ropey displays at full forward on the St. Finian's Junior B team, put it down to "a bad pint he had the night before".

Next to the tricky eye-hand coordination team contest of throwing balls into nets. Oh yeah, sounds easy, you reckon. Well, just go ahead and try it some time.

I think the team tactic here was "to spread chaos and carnage in all directions", which, admittedly, isn't the most appropriate tactic to take when the aim is to put balls in a ridiculously high net.

On to the 'Fame!' moment, which I suspect, was the highlight of Cian's day. This comes in two parts, to allow you to catch your breath after the first one minute fifteen seconds of Nureyev-like poetry in motion.

And part two, if you can stand to take the emotional intensity of it all.

Alright, that's enough for one day. I reckon you'll all should go and lie down in a dark place now until your fevered minds learn to cope with what you've just been privileged to witness.

Let the Games begin...

Today, Cian has his undoukai, or 'sports day'. 'Sports' is a term I use quite loosely. As you will see from the attached clips, there is a lot of frantic movement involved to loud music, but I'm not sure you could really call it competitive. Then again, you could say the same about ice skating.

Cian was on the Red team or akagumi, and despite the best efforts of those meany weasels on the cursed White team, or shiroigumi, fairness and justice prevailed, good triumphed over evil, and the Red team won. How they actually won is beyond me, involving as it did a ridiculously complicated scoring system and, I suspect, liberal doses of EPO and Norandrosterone.

Anyway, like all true athletes, before the games can properly begin, these toned, muscled bodies have to go through an elaborate warm-up routine in case they detone and unmuscle any of those said bodies crucial minutes before the off.

Cian as you will see, has a sort of Dara O'Se - Jack O'Connor type of relationship with Red team's Bainisteoir and isn't all that impressed with d'auld stretching thing.

Empty Blog

I am trying to think of something to write about but the incessant, stifling heat we are suffering through, but nothing comes to my basted mind. We are enduring a rice strewn version of Dante's 'Inferno'. Last week, despite the calendar telling us that Autumn had arrived, we had three days in a row of plus 30 degree temperatures (for my American readership - Hello, Ben - that corresponds to 450 Kelvin). If the mercury dips below 25 degrees (398 Kelvin), we regard it as a 'cool' day, and dress accordingly - fleeces, down jackets and electric blankets.

For the three months of summer just gone by, 2010 has broken all sorts of records-since-records-began: hottest summer, highest average nighttime temperature, hottest day, number of days above 30 degrees, hours of sunshine, sustained humidity levels, largest number of whiny, woe-is-me blogs about the subject.

Now all this is taking place in Hokkaido, more famous for its harsh winters, than its sub tropical summers. Everything up here is designed for the cold, our house included - radiators everywhere, lashings of insulation, triple glazing on the window, thick, coarse, heat retaining chest hair (that is now, much to my horror, spreading over my shoulders and down my back - photos to follow) and a distinct lack of air conditioning.

So we sweat, molder, drink gallons of mint juleps and consider chopping down all the fir trees and growing cotton instead.

Ho hum

This hasn't been a good week for the Japanese economy. Last Wednesday saw China officially overtake Japan as the second largest economy in the world as measured by GDP. Today saw the Nikkei Index fall below the 9000 yen level, its lowest in 14 months. To put this is perspective, at the height of the economic boom here back in the late 1980's, the Nikkei reached a high of 38,957 in 1989. Then everything went remarkably pear shaped, $16 trillion worth of paper wealth evaporated (almost three times the country's gross domestic product), and two decades later, the economy hasn't even clawed back a quarter of that yet.

All this provides an object lesson for those back home who think that in another 12 months or so Ireland will snap back out of recession, find its feet, and start lurching back to recovery. If it hasn't happen for the world's second, sorry, third largest economy after nearly 20 years of trying everything bar selling itself to the Chinese*, then what hope for a small island economy on the periphery of Europe.

The Economist has two good articles on Japan's ongoing woes, one here on the decline of Japanese firms

http://www.economist.com/node/16847828

And one here - actually a book review - on the societal changes all this has resulted in.

http://www.economist.com/node/16843681

*(though they're probably waiting a little longer for a Japanese-Government-staves-off-imminent-collapse-everything-must-go-bargain-basement-sale).

Hafu

There is a rather vigorous debate (and a lot of name calling) going on at the 'Japan Today' site about the use of the term 'hafu' (half) in Japan. The debate can be accessed at this rather ridiculously long link:

http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/the-hafu-project-exploring-the-question-of-what-it-means-to-be-japanese

'Hafu' is used to describe those Japanese (?) children, one of whose parents is a foreigner. Cian is a 'hafu' and is regularly referred to by people as such. I'll have to say as a father it is a bit disconcerting to have your child labelled as something besides 'boy', 'son' or 'that noisy fecker', based solely on his mixed parentage. Some of the contributors to the above debate would go way beyond 'disconcerting' and label it racist, akin to the use of 'nigger' in American society. I'm not too sure, in Cian's case, I have ever discerned that level of opprobrium directed towards him, and to be honest, hope I never do. However, Cian is the son of a Japanese-Caucasian marriage, and one of the things I have discovered in my time here in Japan is that there seems to be a socially covert ranking of international partnerships.

Japanese-Caucasian unions are generally, (aside from the blood and soil extremists of the far right), viewed in a favourable light. Less so are unions involving Asians, particularly Chinese. This isn't a fact, just an observation on my part. In a way it reflects the esteem still granted the Anglophone world as witnessed by the primacy of the English language here in Japan despite the fact that (a) Koreans are by far the largest ethnic minority, followed by the Chinese; (b) China has replaced the US as Japan's largest trading partner; and (c) the majority of tourists to Japan hail from China.

A lot of this is to do with history, particularly the shooting, bombing and killing bits of history that tend to linger on from generation to generation (and don't we Irish just know that). More of it has to do with Japan's somewhat childish view of the world as a territorially defined 'us' and 'them' sort of place, even if increasing numbers of 'them' are living here in Japan amongst the 'us'.

In truth Japan is still a bewildered beginner at all this multiculturalism and ethnically diverse society stuff, thus, I think, the use of the term 'hafu', for they have yet to learn that there is no need for a term at all.

But a generation or two of more Cians and I reckon they might just get there.

Sanae's blog...

..has been updated!!
Yes, your disbelieving eyes read that correctly: updated!!
She's back, with more bilingual brilliance and, wait for it, video too!!!
Deep breaths people, calm yourselves, calm yourselves.
So quicker than a JR Hokkaido train, click on the link on the left and check out all that's been going on in the world of Hobbits.

Festivals (Part 2)

Japanese Anthropology 101
Okay people, pay attention. Time to enlarge your knowledge of Japan beyond Sony Bravia flatscreen LCD TVs and faulty Toyota accelerator pedals. Over the past weekend the country celebrated (commerated?) the Obon festival and we did the same. Or rather, Sanae and Cian did. I pleaded global agnosticism and spent the time instead catching up on my reading.
According to Wikipedia - (after Sanae's explanation of Tana Bata, I have had to look elsewhere for legitimate explanations of the country and its customs) - "Obon is a Japanese Buddhist custom to honor the spirits of one's ancestors. This has evolved into a family reunion holiday during which people return to ancestral family places and visit and clean their ancestors' graves, and when the spirits of ancestors are supposed to revisit the household altars. It has been celebrated in Japan for more than 500 years and traditionally includes a dance, known as Bon-Odori."
Unfortunately Obon also coincides with the hottest days of summer, and the mass migration of Japanese all over the archipelago. This results in packed trains, planes and buses, not to mention 40km+ tailbacks on the motorways and the sort of heat induced stress levels that can be observed from space. In our case its not so bad as we travel across the island to Obihiro Sanae's family home. Others though have considerably longer distances to travel and the various travel services are not averse from making money out of people diligently conforming to custom. During the Obon period, not only are full fares charged, but knowing there is guaranteed demand for all forms of transport and lodging, the airline companies, trains, buses and hotels all charge an 'Obon premium'.
Bastards.
And then you have your typhoons. On Thursday last I was due to take the train down to Obihiro late in the afternoon. Sanae and Cian had driven down on Tuesday as I had movies to watch, sorry, work to do. On Thursday morning, biblical downpours and the resulting landslides close the rail line at Muroran. So I jump in my car and drive up, nay heroically drive up through the same biblical downpours, to Minami Chitose to catch the train from there. Get on the train. Have to stand as the train is packed. An hour into the journey the train stops. And remains stopped for the next three hours due to, yes, heavy rainfall. When we did get moving again, we trundled along at less than 25 kph. And what should have been a three and half hour journey ended up taking ten hours. And JR Hokkaido charged a premium for this.
Bastards.
Anyway Obon also involves the Bon Odori dance, an example of which is held here on the streets of Muroran every year. I went along with Cian and his friend from the Nursey, Aika, to watch Aika's Mammy get in the 'real groove'. Aika's mother is a foreign student here at the university (she's from Indonesia), and all the foreign students have to take part in the town's Obon dance festival. As you can see from the photos, she's barely able to contain her happiness and being made to take part.

Festivals - Part 1

Apologies for the break in correspondence. End of term here in Japan (in August, I know. God love the poor students. Summer is almost over and they are only getting their summer holidays now. All 8 weeks of them. No going to California on J-1 visas and thrashing apartments for them). Summer here in Muroran is marked by matsuri's (festivals) of various sorts held hither and thither, which as far as I can make out, are essentially just an excuse for people to dress up, get drunk and let off fireworks. And that's just the children! (boom! boom!). Anyway, at the end of July Cian's nursery celebrated Tana Bata*, a festival that, according to Sanae, celebrates one of Japan's oldest and most enduring legends. Apparently, in a galaxy far, far away and a long, long time ago, the elves on the Death Star got together and made one true ring "to bind them all" and gave it to a young boy called Harry. Harry lived a special place where nobody ever aged until one day he ate a burned salmon and turned in to a swan and, eh, he dropped the ring which was eaten by, umm, a machine sent back in time to protect mankind and, eh, swans, from the future apocalypse that is due to take place in 2012. Or something. Sanae tended to gloss over the details and there are parts of the underlying history I'm not certain about, but that is generally the gist of it. And every year in July this remarkable story is celebrated by young children all over Japan who give thanks that they are not swans enslaved by machines growing up in the shadow of the Death Star.
*Remarkably, tana bata liertally translates as "bookshelf butter" and refers to the special bookshelf in the Japanese home where traditionally the butter is stored. And elvish rings of power.