Into Thin Air...

When mountaineers gather to tell tall tales about high places, about the mountains and the mountaineers that defined them, they speak in reverent tones of Mallory, Kurz, Harrier, Hillary, Meissner and Visteurs. To that pantheon may now be added the name of Cian Takahashi Gaynor.

Muroran-dake.

Its very name provokes a shudder of fearful recognition. K2 may be higher, the Eiger more famous, but among that exclusive fraternity of elite alpinists, no other mountain evokes such an equal mixture of desire and terror: the desire to be one of the few, the very few, to climb it; the terror of what that entails. For Muroran-dake is a mountain like no other. 911 metres of unrelenting, heart-stopping danger, a vertical dance with death that takes away more than it ever gives (Sorry, not too sure where that metaphor was supposed to be going).

Today, Cian climbed it.

Yes.

You read that correctly.

Today, Cian climbed it.

Well,

'climbed' may be linguistically incorrect, but hell, we aren't linguists, we're climbers, men and women enraptured with those places, those high places, that so many look up to but few, oh so few, look down from.

反抗期

I learned a new word in Japanese recently, 反抗期 (hankouki, pronounced hankouki), which means 'contrary'. Or rather, in Cian's case, incredibly mule-headed contrary. The boy is at that precious time in his life where everything is a willful battle between him and his apparently overbearing parents. And common sense has nothing to do with it.

"Cian, stay away from the stove! It's hot, you'll burn yourself!"

"No, Cian wants to burn me".

Or,

"Cian, eat your dinner. Or you'll starve to death!"

"Starve, okay".

We try contra-suggestions such as "Okay Cian, don't go for a pee-pee in your potty, you can go ahead and wet your pants", and unfortunately he then takes us up on our suggestion.

So matters quickly descend into threats and punishments, "If you don't get into your pyjamas, you'll sleep outside. Again." (That one, incidentally, is Sanae). My fear is that this stage is just the beginning, and we are in for another, Oh God, seventeen or so more years of this.

Can you 'check' this please?

One of the less appealing aspects of my job (yes, there are some), is the the regular request to 'check' various documents in English. These have been written initially in Japanese, then translated into English. I use the term 'translated' very loosely, for I am not to sure how the process works. I suspect they use translation software - not very good software either - as the results are invariably a meaningless patchwork of words, bizarre phrasings, random punctuation and the apparent ramblings of a deranged mind. The same effect could probably be achieved by giving some of my first year students the original Japanese documents, some pens and paper, and vast amounts of Uncle Smokey's Gold Leaf Home Grown Barley Bud. As an example, this is (part of) what I am currently 'checking':

"In order to construct more healthy and cultural society, it is necessary to establish an idea (plan) and a method (technology) which synthetically realize social environment in harmony with nature. The object of this division is to conduct the education and researches concerned about the plan and the technology on social foundations and living environments linking to total systems of society. The plan is the design for utility spaces and facilities according with nature and social environment. The technology involves phenomena for environmental preservation, disaster prevention and underground development".

The repeated references to the 'plan' unnerve me. As do words like 'phenomena', 'disaster' and 'underground development'. If the document didn't clearly state that it originated from the the university's 'Division of Architecture' (sic), I would consider it the work of some sort of illiterate anarchist's group.

Anyway, to 'check' this means that I have to go back to the original Japanese document and try and figure what the hell these crazy-whack-shit-architects are on about. So 'check' pretty quickly morphs into 'translate', and what really should take me only an hour takes a full days work.

And then, after I have submitted it, the architects have the nerve to come back to me wanting to know why I got rid of 'synthetically realize social environment in harmony with nature ' and how are people going to learn about their 'plan' for 'underground development' if I have omitted it. Usually by that stage I then just toss them, their opinions and their documents out the window of my fifth floor office, providing them with the opportunity to 'synthetically realize' with the car park below.

(Belated) Books of the Noughties

My dear, darling (if slightly mad) sister Sue, is currently in Antarctica, where she has been ever since Shackleton had enough of her cooking and rowed off to South Georgia. Although her links to sanity are at times tenuous (I have photographs to prove this), she hasn't completely lost touch with reality as is evident from the various , thoughtful presents that appear in the post on all our birthdays. One of those was a book entitled 'Antarctica - Secrets of the Southern Continent' and my initial reaction was "Christ, not more feckin penguins". There are penguins, but there is also a lot more besides. A lot, lot more as this is a big, big book. The sort of hefty book you could easily use to clobber a cute baby seal to death with and then check to see whether the fresh, raw seal meat you are feasting on comes from the Lobodon carcinophagus or, as you suspect, the leptonwychotes weddelli.

The writing is insightful, the photography superlative, and for this cartographic nut, the book comes with 12 detailed regional maps and a further 80 thematic maps on subjects such as the polar environment, explorers' routes and the top ten places to go baby seal clubbing.

Skirmishes with bureaucracy

Friday was another (long) day in our ongoing skirmishes with various forms of Japanese bureaucracy. We are in the protracted processes of both getting a house loan and applying for permanent residency for yours truly. This, as is probably true of most countries, involves a lot of paperwork. Unlike most countries, it is entirely in Japanese, and is heavy going, even for my wife.

So Friday, we both took the day off - I had no classes anyway and Sanae has yet to start back after the winter vacation - sprung Cian from the creche, and headed for the bank. There we were told that getting a loan in both our names would raise all sorts of convoluted tax issues and would probably need us to sell Cian into slavery to pay them off. I said that was fine by me, but Sanae, typically, refused, so I in turn said, "fine. You take out the loan". Which she did. So Sanae is now both a property owner and in hoc to the bank for the next 10 years. As I will, legally, be only in the house on her sufferance, it means 10 years of nightly shoulder massages and a constant refrain of "Yes dear, whatever you say dear".

After that we headed for the City office as to acquire permanent residency here you need everything from marriage certificates to proof of tax payments. All of it on official, city annotated paper. This took an hour. Then we had to drive a further hour and a half to the immigration office in Tomokomai (a sort of grim Limerick, though with less stabbings and more tall smokestacks), where we assisted by an official who clearly didn't know his job. This no longer surprises me any more. In Japan's civil service, it is standard practice to rotate people from post to post after every three years or so. Ostensibly it is to give staff a degree of training in all aspects of public administration, but in my experience, it merely spreads ineptness, an over-reliance on strict procedure and an indecent love of paperwork. So, you will have officials who have spent three years working in the immigration department, transferred to, say, work in the water mains division, or put in charge of parks and playgrounds. And naturally enough, they are, initially, clueless. And then, three years later, when they have finally mastered the various aspects of the job, whoosh, they are transferred again, to some place like the agriculture and rural affairs department.

Anyway, I submitted my application, but it will be a while before I know the decision. I will keep you posted.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I have just finished reading the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, the sadly deceased Swedish writer. It is a crime novel, set in Sweden, and a rather good one at that too, garnering all sorts of plaudits and awards (the Frozen Dagger, the Silk Handcuff, the Readers Digest Best Brutal Crime Novel Award, etc). It has been a best seller, not only in Sweden, but all over Europe, the States, and now in Muroran too. The plot concerns a (male) journalist, his sullen, anti-social but terrifically talented (female) partner, and their investigation into the disappearance and murder of the heiress of a wealthy industrial family. (Is that correct - a 'wealthy industrial family', as in a family that accumulated its wealth from its involvement in industry, as opposed to a wealthy family made from steel and iron?) Anyway, the book rolls along at a fair old clip, and we get digressions about Nazism in Swedish society, the evils of capitalism, the debate on nurture versus nature, computer hacking, and the country's guardianship laws.

However, and this is probably just recently-turned-40-suddenly-become-an-arch-conservative old me, I found the murder, or rather murders, at the center of the novel to be wearily familiar in their gruesomeness. It seems that you can't have just a murder, and a murderer, but you have to have murders, plural, and a serial killer behind them all. And he can't be just a run of the mill serial killer, but a demented, schizophrenic, Nazi misanthrope, who seems to have some sort of personal quality criteria about dispatching people, usually women, in the most grisly fashion imaginable. And the author, because most sane people tend not to, will do the imagining for you and then give a detailed description of just how the various victims met their incredibly gruesome ends.

There seems to be a race to the bottom in just how sadistic and horrific you can render a murder. The crime in itself is not terrible enough. It must be accompanied by acts of monstrous savagery - and therein lies the problem. It takes a monster to commit such acts, and on relying on such a clearly inhuman perpetrator, it dehumanizes murder, that most immoral of crimes. Rather, the author's feverish imaginings renders it as a grotesque spectacle bordering on the fantastical. Empathy is lost, and with it guilt, and instead we are offered cheap visceral shocks instead. Most real-life murders, terrible as each every one of them are, are more mundane crimes, akin to the actions of the Bull McCabe in The Field, rather than Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.

I enjoy my crime fiction (when I am not rereading Virgil's Aeneid in the original Latin), but I am growing weary of the incessant tendency to replace crime with carnage. This holds true for the movies as well. By far and away the best crime movie I saw in recent years was Brick, a truly original take on classic Fim Noir, and it involved one plain vanilla murder and the rippling repercussions from same.

As I said, maybe I am just getting old, and the accumulated experience of reading and watching all this crime is finally catching up with me.

No country for young men (or women)

As with most other countries, the period over the new year saw the Japanese newspapers publish a number of reviews of the previous year (and decade), along with previews for the coming year(s). Whilst not a comprehensive account of the state of the nation, they do offer an interesting snapshot of where Japan is and seems to be headed. So, in no particular order, we have:

Suicides (forgive me, a little grim I know, but a seemingly intractable part of society here in the same way drink-driving is back home): 2009 was the 12th consecutive year in which over 30,000 people took their own lives. In other words, from 1997 onwards, a cumulative total of more than 360,000 people committed suicide, a figure equal to the combined population of Cork city and county. What strikes one most though is this is not necessarily big news. There seems to be an air of resigned inevitably about the topic, as if suicides were a perennial feature of life, akin to the seasons, that cannot be countered, only reluctantly accepted.

An Ageing Population: Japan, unfortunately, leads the world in this one. Currently, almost 25% of the total population is aged 65 or over. By 2020 that is expected to rise to over 30%. What this means is anyone's guess, as Japan is boldly stepping (or should that be shuffling) into a type of society hitherto unknown in the modern era. Complicating matters is...

The declining birthrate. Not enough babies. At the moment the rate is 1.28. This is projected to decline to 1.22 by 2020. This is going to have all sorts of repercussions, economically, socially and politically. The last point in particular, I think, is often overlooked. Older people tend to vote more than the young, and this in turn has the effect of politicians, in an attempt to seek votes, pander to this constituency. This effect is going to be magnified in Japan, and the ever shrinking supply of public funds will, inevitably, be directed by politicians to those who elect them - pensioners - rather than those who arguably need them most - young people trying to find work, marry, start families, raise children, etc.

This can, in turn, be seen in the declining marriage rate. By 2020 it is estimated that 20% of men then aged 50 will be unmarried. The emphasis here is not so much on men, but on the women who don't want to marry them. They don't because these poor, dowdy bachelors are economically unviable as prospective spouses - they don't have the jobs to be husbands or fathers.

And so the demographic spiral steepens and deepens. There is a partial solution to all this, although one that Japan is very reluctant to examine, namely immigration. But that is a topic I shall have to return to at a later date.

shougatsu

And so 2010 has begun. As is traditional, we went down to Sanae's mother's house where we, Sanae and myself, enjoyed a blissfully 'hands free' couple of days. Sanae's mother and Cian get on like a house on fire (principally because she indulges his every whim and caters for his every need, particularly his strawberry needs), so we can wander off for hours on end and not be missed. Initially a rather bewildering experience as the ingrained assumption of planning our days off around what Cian will / will not accept or put up with is hard to ignore. But it didn't take us long to adjust, nor did it take us long to discover that there is not much to do in Memuro in the middle of winter besides shovel snow. And there was plenty of it to shovel. Close on half a metre fell on the night we arrived. I awoke the following morning to find Cian's 85 year old great-grandfather already outside clearing the snow. I think he did it to deliberately shame his foreign grandson-in-law. It worked. I bounded out of my beseeching bed ("Stay, stay a little longer, stay, its warm here, so warm, and cold, so cold outside"), fumbled into my clothes and stumbled out the door just in time to see him start clearing the snow off my car.

Arse.

Wrestled the snow shovel off him and started shoveling. Two hours later was still shoveling. The great-grandfather came out for a cigarette and a once over of my progress. "Not bad" and he went back inside. It took me to lunchtime to finish.

The next day, I had to re-shovel all the snow I had spent the previous day shoveling, in order to make room for the next winter storm and the snow it would bring. This is pretty much par for the course in this part of the world. I did the same when we returned to Muroran yesterday afternoon. First I cleared the snow from the driveway and then this morning, I shoveled the cleared snow around to the side of the house so there would be space for the next big fall of snow. Which we are due to get tomorrow.

My ever alert readers will of course notice how I use 'I' and not 'we' when it comes to shoveling snow. Cian comes out occasionally and displays his god-given gift for getting in the way. Sanae stays inside and claims to be 'cooking' or 'cleaning' or whatever, and is only by sheer coincidence taking a coffee break whenever I look in the window.

And that, apparently, is how marriage works.