Season's Greetings

The above photograph is of a Christmas tree in what was once the centre of Minamisanriku town, in Miyagi, northern Japan. It has been a pretty traumatic year in this part of the world and for many the merriness of the season will be impossible to come by.

All the more reason then to be grateful for what you have rather, as so many here in Japan must do, grieving for what you have lost.

So this Christmas, if I can make one request of you all, it is to spread some of that gratitude around - lots of hugs and kisses and smiles and laughter; uncork and uncask not just the wine and spirits, but the finer feelings and glad fellowship of our better selves.

Let the grace shine through.

Merry Christmas

メリークリスマス

Nollaig shona daoibhse

Fröhliche Weihnachten

S Rozhdestvom Kristovym

Selamat Hari Natal

Sugeng Riyạyạ Natal lan Warsạ Énggal

University Rankings

There is a rather engaging article in the current edition of The New Yorker on the compilation of university ranking scales (which you can read here). Such scales are the curse of the academic classes as, the article deftly explains, what they purportedly measure - university ‘quality’ - isn’t what they measure at all. Although the piece is specifically about American universities, the wider concerns and criticisms it raises are pretty much valid for wider global ranking scales too.
Here in Japan such rankings are becoming more insidious and all defining in assessing what goes on in a university. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when this year’s Times Educational Supplement world university rankings were announced and only two Japanese institutions featured in the top 100. Even here in my little academic backwater such rankings are making their effect felt. At a recent faculty meeting we were implored to do more research, or rather, publish more research.
Now, this raises the rather contentious point of what a university is actually for: teaching and/or research. Traditionally the two have sat side by side, but in this new, quantitative world we work in, research, being measurable (number of papers published, grants received, funds received, etc.) takes priority over teaching.
But does this make for a better university? Not, I would contend, if you are a student. Research (yes, I am aware of the irony) has consistently shown that the two most important variables on students’ academic performance are class size and the quality of the teacher. And note that’s quality rather than qualifications.
Class size tends to be an administrative rather than a pedagogical decision with the result that I end up teaching writing to a class of 60 students. Or rather trying to teach as in those circumstances all you can do is hope that the lowest common denominator, linguistically speaking, doesn’t end up that low (“Me like pley basketboll”, etc.).
The relationship between teaching quality and teaching qualifications is even more tenuous (if it exists at all). I am, Lord save me, in the midst of a drag-down, bare-knuckle brawl with a ragged beast of a PhD, and I can safely say with hand over stressed heart that it will in no way make me a better teacher. Given the extraordinary amount of time it consumes I suspect it will end up making me a worse one.
But, as a doctorate program, it is not supposed to make me a better teacher. Rather, it is intended to make me a professional academic researcher; somebody who, on successful completion of the program (should that blessed day ever come), has contributed a very incremental increase in the sum of our knowledge of my particular field of study. (It’s language policy, by the way. Still your thrilling hearts).
Yet, should you, in your desire to flee Ireland and all things Euro, end up perusing the academic job listings for English teaching positions in Japanese universities, you will quickly notice that most applicants are required to have a “PhD in Applied Linguistics or a related field”. Read on further though, and you find in the job description that you will be expected to teach something along the lines of English conversation, English writing, TOEIC test English, and the ever nebulous General English I. No mention of research despite the fact that in specifying a PhD holder the university is, de facto, intent on hiring a professional researcher rather than a professional teacher.
(Note: I am not saying that the two are mutually exclusive; there may well be some correlation but there sure as statistical heck won’t be any causation.)
Nor, chances are, will the successful applicant find any particular need for her specific area of academic specialization. No classes of wide-eyed, eager undergraduates impatiently waiting to be inducted into the mysteries of Bauldauf’s seven point language-in-planning model. Instead she will be asking students to make pairs and, rather unrealistically, tell each other in a foreign language what they did over the winter holidays.
So why this demand for PhDs? Because they are a quantifiable, easy to measure and thus used in ranking universities. Simple as that.
Ahhh, tis the season to be cynical. Coming up tomorrow: why Santa should be downsized and the elves outsourced to Vietnam.

Cold Shutdown

In a remarkable display of political hubris, the Japanese government announced on Friday that they had successfully achieved a cold shutdown of the three stricken reactors at Fukushima. In a narrow, technical sense that was correct: the temperature inside what remains of the reactor cores is now consistently below 100 degrees celsius. And that is about it.

The term 'shutdown', purposefully chosen, implies something that has essentially being ended or switched off, but Fukushima is a couple of decades, if not generations, from that. The list of problems that still have to be overcome is equally long and daunting: removing the nuclear fuel from the bottom of the containment vessels it melted through; the small lake sized worth of radioactive fuel that has accumulated in and under the plant (and which continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean); the safe removal of the fuel rods from the top of reactor number 4 (and which have been consistently leaking radioactivity into the atmosphere for the past nine months - the roof got blown off in a hydrogen explosion and they have been exposed to the elements ever since).

Then there are what Donald Rumsfeld so memorably described as the "unknown unknowns". The nature and severity of the crisis at Fukushima is unprecedented; reference has been made to both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but that is only because they are, or rather were, all nuclear power stations. There the comparisons end as what occurred at Fukushima - three reactors suffering simultaneous meltdowns, the complete failure of all back-up systems, a series of explosions, and the vast (and still not yet fully quantified) dispersal of radioactive air and water over a wide area; is the sort of cumulative accident nobody imagined, or rather, wanted to imagine. And we still don't know how bad the situation is within the actual containment units - they are too dangerous yet for any form of human observation.

Basically everyone from the Government down through the TEPCO officials to the day laborers working on site, are contending with various levels of ignorance as to what needs to be done and more pertinently, how it will be done. They are, essentially, making it up as they go along.

So, the term 'cold shutdown' is more PR than science. Nor are the Japanese public buying it. The evening NHK news on Friday carried interviews with a number of evacuees from around the nuclear plant and all of them expressed a mixture of cynicism at the government's announcement and anger at the continued uncertainty surrounding their future.

Despite repeated pronouncements that it will take upwards of 40 years to fully shutdown the plant, no politician has come forward and stated the glaring obvious - that it will be a similar length of time before many of the displaced people from the area can return to their homes. Or rather, their descendants can return to their parents/grandparents homes. And who, in their right, cesium-free mind, would want to do that?

Birthday Boy

Cian celebrated his 5th birthday last Monday, though I am not too sure if you really can ‘celebrate’ a birthday on a Monday (as the photo above suggests). Nor was he all too happy about only being 5. So after a couple of minutes of five-dom he added another balloon and unilaterally declared himself 6. This is a much better age to be. In Hokkaido when you are 6 you can vote, drive a car, get served alcohol in a bar, gamble at a casino, carry a concealed weapon and attend elementary school. You can also do all of these at the elementary school too.
Or so Sanae tells me.
Anyway, Cian was 5, sorry, 6 on Monday and we got him a big creamy sponge cake with lots of strawberries with a side dish of strawberries and some strawberry juice to wash it all down. He ate a slice then shot the rest of it up with his hitherto concealed 9mm Glock automatic. No he didn’t but yes, just one slice. Mammy has had to eat the rest of the cake, though Cian was kind enough to eat all the strawberries first. Mammy and her waistline are not happy about this, not happy at all.
That’s the problem with Monday birthdays.

The Promised Land

A sort of tangential addendum to the previous post: In his song 'The Promised Land', Bruce Springsteen sings of a 'rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert'. It's a wonderful line, pithily capturing the epic essence of the American West. That said, I would argue that even Bruce's brilliance as a lyricist would be hard pressed to bestow some sort of similar epic quality on the N7 through Offaly.
Anyway, all this is a very roundabout way of showcasing a rather good remix of the Boss's "I'm on Fire" which I recently heard on RnaG's 'An Taobh Tuathail' program. So for you, lucky readers, some sublime sounds. You can listen to it here.

Journeys

Way back in the day before I was the man (though in the process of becoming 'An Fear'), every so often we would all be packed in to my father's beige Ford Cortina and set off on the epic, 6-feckin-hours-across-bogger-country trip to our grandparents house in north Kerry. This journey through the rolling badlands of Laois and Offaly was only made made tolerable by lunch. We'd stop at the Tower restaurant at the Esso station on the outskirts of Roscrea and there eat our body weight in chips and chicken. Then we'd force feed ourselves jelly and ice cream. Stunned in to silence by all the carbohydrates, we'd spend the remainder of the journey slack-jawed and stupified in the back seat. Though beyond Limerick as the roads deteriorated, we'd come close to reintroducing some of that chicken back into the world as the Cortina bucked and bounced its way towards Foynes. I was put in mind of this on my recent trip back to Ireland with Cian. For him potholes have given way to air turbulence, Laois and Offaly have become Russia (though I'd swear you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart), and the longed for stopover is at the Starbucks in Amsterdam airport; or rather, the Starbucks at Amsterdam airport overlooking the main runway!!!!! No chicken and chips though. All muffins and chapatis and other foreign shite.

The American journalist Mignon McLaughlin wrote, "Spring, summer and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition". Wise words, though with a name like 'Mignon' you would expect her to have such thoughts.

(As an aside, what right thinking parent names their daughter 'Mignon', and reckon it works quite well with 'McLaughlin'? Presumably steak was quite popular at the dinner table).

Winter descended on Muroran last night, in all it cold, imperial, Siberian haute glory. Cold morning, cold day, colder night as I write this. We are due to have snow on and off for the rest of this week and early into the next.

And it's only November 16th. Going to make for a long winter this year...

Japanese Demographics Part II

As a sort of postscript to my previous entry, I will point you in the direction of this article in a recent edition of the Economist (Cian kindly lent me his copy). It is a fairly damning indictment of the inherent, one might say entrenched sexism in Japan's labour market. The article in full is at the following link:

http://www.economist.com/node/21536543

Nor is it just confined to white-collar, corporate Japan. In the university I work in there are approximately 260 teaching faculty. Three, yes, three of them are women. And they all work in the languages department. We are a science and engineering university, 10% of our undergraduates are female, yet there are no female faculty to be found teaching them (or male graduates either). It is not exactly sending out a very positive message about either their choice of study or their potential job opportunities.

Demographics

Japan held its quinquennial census last year (that's every five years, Ciara. No need to look it up), and the initial results were released last month.

(One of the incidental pleasures of same was when I got to tick both the 'head of household' and 'home-owner' boxes. Ahh, the sense of proprietary).

According to the survey there are now 128, 057, 352 people living in Japan. Surprising as this may seem, this actually a (very) slight increase of nearly 30,000 people from the previous census in 2005. However, this increase is attributed directly to a rise in the foreign population resident in Japan. Yes, us gaijin are all that is stopping Japan from slipping down the demographic sinkhole. Since the previous survey, the number of big hairy foreigners has increased by 5.8% to 1,648,037 people, which is less than 2% of the total population, but still dizzyingly cosmopolitan for Japan.
The actual number of rice-munching Japanese declined by 0.3%, the first time this has happened since the census began. Although is only a slight decline, it masks marked differences in regional demographics. Whereas Tokyo has seen an increase of over 580,000 people, Hokkaido by contrast has seen the greatest decline in population among Japan's 47 prefectures, with the disappearance of nearly 122,000 people.
Although some of this is due to a natural decline, a significant proportion can be attributed to people leaving Hokkaido to live elsewhere in Japan. The vast majority of the students here in the university, for instance, come from Hokkaido, but upon graduation more than 90% of them will leave the island to look for work elsewhere in Japan. Not many of them, I suspect, will return in the future.
Indeed, one of the most distinctive features about Japan's declining demographics is the ongoing internal migration that is taking place, which is resulting in the accelerated depopulation of many rural areas, and indeed, urban areas too. Again, to take some examples from Hokkaido: the village of Shimukappu, in the mountainous centre of the island, saw its population plummet by 23.4% in five years. Should that level of decline continue, the place will be empty by 2025.
For the urban example I will use Muroran. Back in 1969 during the steel town's heyday, the population peaked at 183,000. Then one of the large steel mills closed down in '73 and after that we became a Bruce Springsteen song. According to the 2010 census, the town's population has almost halved to 94,000 and continues to decline on by more than a thousand people a year. And of those 94,000, nearly a third of them are over the age of 65 which means that an increasing amount of the city's budget goes on pension and social welfare and health support for this group while other areas are severely reduced or cut outright. To give a personal example, the hoikusho (nursery) Cian attends, is due to close next year and be merged with another one some 3km's away as the town can't afford to keep both open.
Feckers.
Nor is there any end in sight; in fact it may well just be 'the end' for many towns and villages across Japan. Short of the government erecting a Statue of Liberty in Tokyo Bay and asking the world to send us 'your poor, huddled masses', then those quinquennial censuses are going to be filled in by less and less people.

"Who are you nature..."

"What's keeping us from reaching out and touching the glory?"

Ahh, yes. In anticipation of the imminent arrival of the dvd of 'Tree of Life', I have been rewatching, nay experiencing the films, nay the slow unspooling philosophy of Terence Malick in all its wind-washed, wheat waving glory.

And then going for long walks, both physically and mentally, in this vast, unreeling cosmos we try to render home.

Hushed voiceovers, that's what this blog really needs.

Halloween

On Sunday last we danced with madness, entertained chaos, flirted with disaster; we held a Halloween party for Cian and some of his friends in our house.

Yes, that same feeling.

I'm not too sure what we were thinking. Actually there was no 'we' as such. Matters were taken out of my hands, decisions taken behind my back, invites issued and accepted without my knowledge. Basically I was Greece and Sanae and Cian were a well sugared mix of the EU-IMF-and the munchkins.

In total we had 14 people here - four mothers, 9 kids ranging from 5 to 12, and one bewildered Irishman whose hitherto belief in the peacefulness and decorum of Japanese kids was rudely and loudly shattered.

There were games - hide-n-seek, screaming hide-n-seek, just, basic screaming, etc. - and an unfortunate amount of sweets and chocolate which send the kids off rocketing around the house like they were in an M&M fueled version of a particle collider.

I left. Or rather, I fled for my life, and hid in my office at the university until Sanae rang to say that both the children and the riot police had left.

Autumn

Sorry, I know, October is turning out to be a particularly sparse month for blogs from this part of the world. In my previous post I alluded to some of the reasons for that, but I don't think I quite emphasized how sweet-holy-mother-of-divine-Jesus-they'll-be-lowering-me-into-the-ground-before-I-finish-this, time consuming Ph feckin D.

Not that ya'll care, as it should be.

So less of the self pity and more of the adrenaline soaked photos you have to come to expect. Yes!!

So here, in all its Sam Peckinpah-like visceral, bloody splendor, is autumn in Muroran...

Drying carrots in the sun .... after they had they had been gunned down...in slow motion...

And the leaves, yes the leaves...massacred ... in slow, slow motion...

Taking cover while all this is going on...

And the wind blew ... omniously....omonoulsy...omnoso, feck it...weirdly

Yeah, well leaves, c'mon, you want to take on this, big, bad, milk-drinking foreign motherf****?!

Catching up

Good Lord, the middle of October already and I am only getting around to my first post of the month. There are two good (?) reasons for this. The first is my PhD research, or, to be more exact, my lack of PhD research. Part of the process involves submitting a qualifying report to prove that you are basically not making the whole thing up as you go along. Said report was due in by Sept. 22^nd, yet it still remains a work in progress.

Albeit, a shiny beautiful work in progress.

My supervisor has started to get all Mexican on me, demanding it now or various family members will get to celebrate Dia de los Muertos. So my advice to all you aspiring academics out there (and let’s face it, who else reads this blog), write early and write often, kids.

The second reason is my annual application to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for ‘Grant-in-Aid Research’. And yes, it is as enticingly sexy as it sounds.

The application is a job requirement rather than a first step towards the Nobel Prize. If I don’t submit an application, then I don’t receive any research funding from my university in the next academic year. Said funding enables me to travel to interesting places like Beijing and Hong Kong, sorry, disseminate my valuable research findings at major international conferences that just happen to be hosted in exotic, foreign locales.

I should point out that my funding from the university is separate from that awarded by the JSPS and is not actually dependent on me getting a ‘Grant-in-Aid’. Which is a good thing as (a) there is no way I would ever be awarded a grant given the quality of my submissions (“Seanchoi and the oral tradition in Japan: a connection?”); and (b) I don’t want the funding as it an administrative nightmare to process.

No, all I have to do is go through the process of submitting an application and I will receive research funds from the university. There are a range of grants you can apply for, but as becomes the man, I always go for the ‘Challenging and Novel Research’ category. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Applications to this category should demonstrate “In what way does the current research have novel ideas and a challenging nature?”.

Let me just count the ways...

Thus my application emphasizes that my proposal is ‘ground breaking’, that is, when it’s not ‘breaking new ground’. Indeed, the main aim of my research is to ‘ramp up my ground breaking’ in order to ‘break new ground’, and thus ‘push out the envelope on the frontier of new ground breaking research’.

Then I have a break for a cup of hot cocoa and try and grab some more mixed metaphors floating by.

Bits and Pieces

I meant to include these in my posts about Beijing but never got around to them at the time. First up is my plenary address to the AILA Conference where my spirited rendition of the 'ABC' song proved to be a huge hit, though I did have the odd tone-deaf heckler to contend with.

"Yes you, you at the back. Yeah, you with the brown eyes and the chopsticks. What did you just say? What?! Oh yeah, right, listen pal, like you can sing better. Yeah? No, not with my western leathered foot so far up your communist ass you'll be choking on my shoelaces...Oh yeah? You and who's army, Mr. Ming?....Oh, the People's Army you say, well, bring 'em on, bring 'em on..."

On our way back to Sapporo from Beijing our flight was delayed by nearly two hours as the pilot had to "negotiate" (read, 'haggle') with air traffic control for clearance to take off. This meant that by the time we arrived at Incheon airport in South Korea for our connecting flight to Sapporo, we had all of twenty minutes to make our connection.

But this is East Asia folks, where the concept of 'service' is as integral to society as rice consumption is. We were met at the gate by a representative of Korean Air holding a 'Sapporo: Flight KL 379' sign. There were three of us who needed to make that flight and once we were all assembled we began to move while Mr. Lee got on his walkie-talkie and arranged to have us 10-4ed through all the transfer passenger security checks. After that he layed on some more of his rubber-ducky magic and had them keep the gate open for us as we jogged through a crowded Incheon airport on a busy Sunday evening.

Made the flight. Get to Sapporo where we are met at the gate this time by a female JAL representative with a sign saying 'Gaynor Brian'.

"Honey, like countless women before you, I gotta tell you, much as you'd like it to, it's not going to happen. I'm married".

Which was met with a very Japanese "eh?". Turns out she was there to regretfully inform me that my suitcase had not made the connecting flight and would I accept their deepest apologies. And all this accompanied by deep bows and much wringing of hands and wailing of teeth. Or however it goes.

So as we made our wringing and wailing way to customs I filled in the necessary paperwork while Ms. JAL promised me they would courier my suitcase down to Muroran the very next day.

Which they did. Effortlessly.

Whereas last December when we went back to Ireland and our suitcases decided to take the long, slow scenic root from Amsterdam to Dublin, we had to go out to the airport, queue for two and a half hours and then search for our own luggage in the arrivals area.

September in the Forest Kozan

Occasionally you have to take the time out to smell the daisies, even in the rain. So it was with this month's trip to Forest Kozan where a wet day and unseasonably cool temperatures meant there were only 12 of us this time; a far cry from the 70 or so who turned out on our first visit back in May.
Warm weather wusses.
So us 12 foolish, sorry, hardy souls donned jackets, hats and rubber boots and slowly wandered around in the gentle rain, taking our mellow time to marvel at Mother Nature's miniature marvels. (Yes, my friends, thrill to the alliteration. Thrill, I say. Thrill!).
There were spider webs spun in a frieze of raindrops; glistening green clover: stalks of inudate splayed to the sky adding speckled stripes of vermilion to the verdant green; pale birch bark furrowed and fissured, splotched with peeling, faded lichen.
But wait, what's this .... a water slide!!
Yesssss!!!
To hell with speckled, verdant, etc. Mother Nature; we want to go splash - splash (though in as much an alliterative way as possible).



And once we were finished there was a nice barrel of steaming hot water for us to sit in and soak ourselves warm.

The Niseko Trail Run

Or rather, to give it its full title: "The Complete and Utter Wretched Bastard of a Niseko Feckin Trail Run".

I had always wanted to climb to the top of Mt. Annupuri. From its 1309 metre summit you look west and you can see the dark hulk of the Shakotan Peninsula shouldering its way out into the Sea of Japan; to the south and east you can see the great sweep of southern Hokkaido encircling Funka Bay; whilst to the north the serrated ridges of the mountains give way to the broad expanse of the Ishikari plain.

Well, last Sunday, I finally got to fulfill my ambition.

Twice.

The occasion was the annual trail run race in Niseko organized by NAC with whom we went rafting earlier in the summer. I used to take part in their runs and adventure races quite regularly back in the day when I was the bear-chasing, deer-skinning, squirrel-eating man, but lately.... ahh lately I have been to much of the surf brah and lost touch with my inner Grizzly Adams.

30 kilometres. Yes, dear reader, 30 shagging kilo-feckin-meters. That was what I signed up for. Middle-aged madness I hear you cry. Too bloody right is how I reply.

Somewhere about the oh, I don't know, the 3km mark maybe, I was already thinking "What the good f*** was I thinking?!!"

We started at 8.00am at the 400 wooded hilly metres above sea-level mark, then panted our way up to 1200 metres, headed back downhill to 350 metres and then back up to top out at Annupuri's 1309 metre summit. And that, as the NAC man waiting there gleefully told us, was only the half way point.

Above vultures wheeled and screeched in the featureless braised blue sky. They looked hungry.

My watch said 11:03 - already three hours gone. And then my watch fell off.

Down, I thought, at least it's all downhill from here on in.

And, as it turned out, uphill, across hill, down stream, through stream, up-down-up-down muddy trails, for what seemed a forested eternity.

By the end of it (me?), my thigh muscles were cramped so tightly you could have put a bow to them and played Barber's Adagio for Strings.

I staggered, teetered and moaned my way across the finish line like a blinded bear off his head on methylated spirits some five and half hours after I had first set off. To put that in perspective, the fleet footed freak first past the post, sorry, the winner, came home in three hours fifteen minutes.

Freak.

Mind you the last person back took eight hours so I didn't feel too bad. Actually, I did. I felt like shit. And, as you can see from the following photos and videos, I looked it too.

Before and ....

.... After

Yes, I ran up that.

Not content with the immediate dangers of falling, dehydration, exhaustion, bear attack, rabid squirrels, etc., the organizers also routed the course close to Hokkaido's only nuclear power station. Ahhh, deep breath and inhale those cesium isotopes...

Some videos - those of you who suffer from motion sickness may be better off not watching.

Yesssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ireland 15 Australia 6 (Holy Shit!!!!)

Beijing Part II

The Great Wall. Lives up to its name. We visited a section a two hour drive north of Beijing. In a fast Hi-ace van. It supposedly gets less visitors than those sections closer to the city, but it still had a chair-lift to cater for the crowds (something the wall's builders no doubt planned for all those centuries ago).

What struck me most about the wall is how it was constructed atop the mountain ridge lines regardless of incline or accessibility. I have no idea how they managed it. Probably with monkey magic. Apparently until late last year you could hike along sections of the wall that had 60 degree or more inclines, but decadent, lumbering westerners kept falling down/off the wall so they closed this section. Which was a pity as I was really looking forward to tackling the Spiders Steps* and the Dragons Broken Wing**.

And 'hike' is a bit of a misnomer to. The section we did could have been done in a comfortable pair of runners, a hat and a bottle of water. But no, Outdoor Gear Brand Man here went in full REI.com summer hiking special and looked like a rich, decadent, overdressed westerner who deserved to be pushed off the wall.

Perhaps that is why it proved so hard for me to fathom what it must have been like to patrol this wall all those hundreds of years ago. In a tea-shop we stopped in after our walk, sorry, 'hike', there is a photograph of the wall in the midst of a thunderstorm. Like I said, the wall sticks to the ridge lines making its guard towers the highest objects around. And they, if this picture was anything to go by, attract lightening strikes the way I attract mosquitoes.

What must it have been like half a millennium or so ago when the sky crackled and the clouds roared and the unlit tower you sheltered in shook to the thunder and exploded in the light of lightning? What could you do but tremble before the wrath of the gods and fervently pray you would be spared their tumultuous anger?

That or grab your Patagonia Torrentshell Jacket and make a run for the chair-lift.

(* These are approximate translations of the original Mandarin terms).

(**Actually, they're not. I just made them up).

Beijing Part 1

I spent last week in Beijing, fearlessly striking a blow for democracy and freedom against the oppressive communist authorities that have blighted a billion peoples' lives for nigh on 60 years.

And eating some rather tasty dim sum too.

I was ostensibly there to attend and present at the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (and yes, it was just as impressive as its title), but as everyone who's everyone knew (Hilary Clinton, The Dala Lamai, Richard Gere, my wife, Kung Fu Panda, etc.), I was really there to ride a horse through Tiananmen Square with my arms out-stretched yelling "Freeeeeedommmm!!!" as the first crucial step towards the country's political emancipation.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a horse, so I had to confine myself to muttering "Go on, ya good thing" to my sweaty pedicab driver as he dodged crazed taxi drivers and we-don't-stop-for-anything-bar-a-direct-airstrike truck drivers.

Our flight arrived late in the evening so my first impression of Beijing was one of smell - it has that sweet, warm acrid mixture of gasoline, sewage and cigarette smoke that for me is one of the defining features of Asia. Japan, or certainly Hokkaido, doesn't have this, which is fine as I don't think the auld bronchioles could take too much of it; but the rain washed, fresh air reared Irishman in me does enjoy the unhealthy exoticism of it all.

That's me, parochial to the last breath.

What follows over the next couple of blogs are my impressionistic, eh, impressions of the city, along with some completely objective-grounded-in-the-vast-expertise-I-accrued-in-my-five-day-visit statements about the Chinese, all 1.3 billion of them.

The Forbidden City

They wouldn't let us in.

The Forbidden City II

Yeah, I thought that was funny too.

Listen, the place is impressive; anything constructed on that scale is bound to impress. It is close on a kilometre from north to south and 750 metres from east to west, giving an expansive but still cosy total living area of some 720,000 square metres (or to everyone in the US of A, the same size as Disneyland).

And that is about all I remember of our tour guide's explanation. There is a lot of history to the Forbidden City, or more specifically, a lot of Chinese history. Call me a bigoted monocultural, Western imperialist lackey from a fatally flawed late capitalist society drowning in its own degrading excesses, but I'm afraid the detailed explanations of all the various dynastic Xings, Qings, Mings, etc., merged into a gilded, incomprehensible whole so I turned off the headset and just wandered off on my own for a bit.

The unceasing grandeur, the indurate spectacle of 'this majestic, you puny' architecture gets to you after a while. It stops impressing and starts oppressing, as I am sure all those Xings-Qings-Mings no doubt intended all those years ago.

Plus, traipsing around (and after two hours, there's no other word for it) in the late afternoon heat of an August day in central Beijing, my less than divine thoughts increasingly tended towards more, mundane, peasant like matters such as beer, preferably ice-cold, and sometime soon.

See, that's me, not afraid to tell it like it is - travel writing as it should be.

Sooo, we went down to the river, and into the river we dove...

Back to Forest Kozan. Back to the river. Oh when, when oh when, will this watery madness ever end? Summer 2011 essentially means water, both sea and fresh. And usually Cian is in it. And if Cian is getting wet it means that Daddy has to get wet too, as Mammy only likes to eat fish - she doesn't particularly want to become one.

It was a grey, rainy day when we went to Forest Kozan in August but that didn't stop Cian, or rather 'Dances with Salmon' as he is now known, from plunging into the first stream he came to. And who had to plunge straight in after him as he began to helplessly float down stream?

'Dances with Salmon' needs to learn how to swim as 'Daddy of Dances with Salmon' isn't too keen on having his nether regions reduced to shriveled peanuts when he has to go wading into the "mother of sweet jesus but that's feckin freezin" river after his son.

Neither is his wife.

Goody

During the month of August, Japan 'celebrates' (if I can use that term) the festival of Obon. To show due respect to their deceased ancestors, people return to the family home for a round of grave visits, meeting and greeting relatives, and eating and drinking as much as they can in the sweltering summer heat.

We are no different, heading east to Memuro where Sanae's from. I though, tend to go further east again, to what I regard as my original 'home' in a small fishing village called Hiroo.

I spend three and half wonderful years there, made many friends and met my wife. So it is a place of happy memories for me.

I should make a special mention of 'Goody', home of the finest beef stew east of Dublin (or so my father swears). Toru, or rather 'Master', his wife and his wife's mother, have been my family since I first arrived in Hiroo, and continue to be so.

They are kindness personified and the warm welcome we receive on those unfortunately rare occasions we get back to Hiroo make me feel like I have come home.

Plus, they let Cian go up on the roof of their cafe and he thought that was the coolest thing ever.

And my father wasn't exaggerating about the stew - it's incredible, and you have choice of creamy mashed potatoes or chunky chips.

Summer Holidays Day 5: Army Base

Mammy's new car.

Cian's new car.
On patrol, Horobestsu, the western quarter.

As you were, Mammy.

And finally, some edgy footage from a front line patrol.