Yuki

On Friday I came home from work and spent the next hour or so shoveling snow. I didn't mind so much as my neighbor, Taiura-san was out doing the same and it gave us the opportunity to have an intermittent conversion on topics as diverse as nuclear power, the French language and the feckless inability of the municipal authorities to send any snowplows out our way.

As we were finishing for the night, it started snowing again.

And it snowed.

And it snowed some more.

And it didn't stop snowing.

We awoke on Saturday morning to this:

And this in turn entailed a full turn-out of the Gaynor-Takahashi Specialist Snow Clearing Squadron: Cian 'The Scoop-meister', Mammy 'The Grunter', and Daddy 'The Good Jaysus what possessed me to move here'.

Seven feckin hours it took us. Or rather, it took Cian and Mammy an hour before they decided they had better things to do inside, while Daddy ploughed a lonely white frozen furrow alone. Most of the time was spent shoveling the accumulated snow off the roof of our house.
Muroran, as with the rest of Japan, has had an unusually cold winter this year with the result that the show has hardly melted. Throughout Hokkaido there have been numerous houses collapsing under the weight of the snow, along with accidents and even fatalities from people slipping and falling to the icy ground below whilst trying to clear their roofs.
But, as you've already guessed, 'danger' is my middle name - I'll dance that icy roof-top tango with vertigo to a 5/6 beat.


Actually, I won't. And my middle name is not 'danger', it's, ahem, 'Christmas', but for explanations about same, you'll have to talk to my parents.
Anyway, I very gingerly got up on our roof, staying well back from the edge, and shoveled the snow onto the road below. Then, I got down from the roof and had to move the snow off the road and into the bushes. So, essentially I had the shift the snow twice.
Meanwhile two-thirds of the Gaynor-Takahashi Specialist Snow Clearing Squadron were inside drinking hot chocolate and watching Curious George.
I am moving to Singapore.
On my own.

Best and worst

I came across this interesting financial tidbit in the most recent edition of the Economist.

In early 2002 Apple shares were trading at $12.50 each. On February 13th, they rose above $500. So, if back then you had bought $100 worth of Apple shares, your investment would be worth almost $4,000 today.

God bless liberal, free market capitalism.

Or then again, perhaps not.

If you had bought $100 worth of shares in Allied Irish Banks back in 2002, your investment would now be worth ... $1.33.

Be with AIB indeed.

And then there were two...

Yesterday those nice people down at Kansai Electric Company turned off the Number 3 reactor at the Takahama Nuclear plant. This means that as of writing there are only two out of 54 nuclear reactors currently operating.
One of the reactors is in Niigata and the other is - hold your head up high Hokkaido! - in Tomari, some 60km or so from Sapporo.
Here in Hokkaido we'd rather feed our children to the Russians than turn off our reactors.
Yeah, how do you like them atoms!
In a wonderfully inane piece of PR, earlier this month the Hokkaido prefectural government organized an emergency evacuation drill from Tomari village. They evacuated the municipal workers at the town hall but the townspeople by and large refused to go as it was too feckin cold for such carry on.
Anyway the town employees were barked on to buses by self-important men with loudhailers and safety helmets, and driven to Kutchan some 20km away (which, by the by, has one of Hokkaido's best pizzerias).
Some 20km to the southeast away.
The prevailing winds in Hokkaido, particularly in winter, blow from the northwest to the southeast and, as events at Fukushima proved, 20km downwind from a nuclear reactor in the midst of a meltdown is not the ideal place to be.
Like I said, inane.
All this though is more about politics than safety per se. In April the reactor at Tomari will be switched off for a mandatory maintenance inspection. However, restarting the reactors (two others at the same plant have been shut down since last year) requires the official agreement of the local town authorities (as is the case throughout Japan. It is this refusal of agreement by these local towns that has suspended the other 52 reactors).
Getting their agreement requires (a) convincing the residents of Tomari that the reactors are safe; and (b) convincing them of the deft brilliance of their evacuation plan.
So, Buddha forbid there should be a large earthquake and tsunami off the west coast of Hokkaido, but if there should, don't worry, we'll put you all on buses, drive you down to Kutchan and hey, deep crust pepperoni specials all round!

Up Mountain

We spent Saturday in Sapporo, or rather under Sapporo. While Mammy went shopping myself and Cian availed ourselves of a ¥1,000 all-day norihodai ticket for all forms of public transport. Train, tram, subway, bus, husky; if it moved we rode it. This is basically what a trip to Sapporo now entails for me. Back in the day when I was the etc., etc., Sapporo = Susukino, Rad Bros, late night ramen stalls and thundering hangovers. Now the only bit of Susukino I get to see is the subway station as we whizz up and down the Nanboku line for a couple of hours.

Thus to try and stave off increasingly poignant feelings of middle-aged inadequacy, I took myself off up Muroran-dake this morning where I met an 81 year old man coming down from the summit. He told me that he climbs the mountain pretty much every week in winter, weather allowing. Given that it was -10°C, snowing, with a pretty stiff westerly wind blowing, 'weather allowing' must mean a complete whiteout.

I'm not too sure if I feel less or more middle-aged inadequate after talking to him.

Last Sunday

- Daddy, I want to go sleighing.
- Cian, it's too cold.
- But I want to go.
- Cian, look outside. It's snowing, it's windy and the weather forecast woman said it's -5 °C outside today. Just look out the window. It's like this:


- But if we go sleighing we'll get warm.
- I'm already warm. I just spent the last two hours shoveling snow while you were watching Curious George.
- But I want to play outside!
- And I want to watch the Ireland-France rugby match.
- But Ireland are going to lose.
- Probably.
- So let's go sleighing.
- No.
- Daaaddddyyyy!!!!
- Okay, after the match. Alright?
- Well, oooookay, I suppose.
.......
- There's no match.
- What daddy?
- There's no shagging match. The referee has cancelled the game. Said it was too cold.
- Oh. Can we go sleighing now?
- No, the referee said it was too cold to go sleighing.
- No he didn't.
- He did. He said it in french.
- What! No he didn't!
- He did. He said it very quickly. 'Un match avec le cancel, voulez vous frigid, ne c'est pas'.
- Daddy!!! You said we can go sleighing after the match. There's no match so we can go now.
- But it's cold and windy and snowy and...
- Now! Daddy, I want to go now!
- Oh for chrissakes. Okay, okay. We'll go. But it won't be fun.

It was great fun.

Movies

Every Friday for the past month I have been going down to Hakodate at the southern tip of Hokkaido to teach at a university (it's a part-time gig; don't worry, I am still the shining star at Muroran). The journey usually takes two hours by train but with the weather we've been having this winter, delays and stoppages have been all too frequent. On my way back to Muroran I have whiled away the hours stuck in a snowdrift somewhere near Yakumo-cho by catching up on my movie viewing. And as I know you are all desperate to get my insights on same prior to the Oscars, I thought I'd share some of my rather random thoughts on things Hollywood.
And they were all Hollywood. Dodge-driving, hamburger-eating, goddamned-made-in-the-United-States-of-f***ing-America! © Hollywood. I have a slew of Johnny Foreigner films on my hard disk but I still haven't discovered which viewer I need to download to get the subtitles to work. Hence the reason 'A Separation', 'Certified Copy', 'Kid with a bike' and 'Of Gods and Men' remain unseen.
So, in no particular order we have...Contagion - virus runs amok, wreaks havoc with Steven Soderbergh's color schemes and it's all the Chinese's fault.
This was a competent, well-made movie that, to my jaundiced agnostic eye, came across as a thinly disguised creed to Christian fundamentalism. How else to explain the fate that befell Gwyneth Paltrow's character and all she came in unclean contact with. She's a divorcee, worse, an adulteress who clearly enjoys the Hong Kong high-life and she's dead within 15 minutes. And she is responsible for launching a contemporary version of the Black Plague. And as (a) sin is obviously hereditary, and (b) he's not biologically related to his sainted stepdad, her son is dead within a further three minutes.
Meanwhile, her sad sack, everyman husband - a rather rotund Matt Damon - has a seemingly God-given 100% immunity from pretty much everything: viruses, fashion sense, having anything that hints at a 'good time'. Moreover, such is his white-bread, mid-western goodness, that he keeps his own (biological) daughter both virus-free and virginal despite airborne germs and the moody attentions of a lusty young fella from down the road.
So, kids remember: sexual repression saves! Sin, particularly of the sexy kind, will surely kill you!! And never, ever, party on down like its 1999 in Hong Kong, or you will surely unleash the next apocalypse. Amen.
Next up was Moneyball, or rather "An Ode to Late American Capitalism starring Brad Pitt in side-profile and a goddamned-made-in-the-United-States-of-f***ing-America! © Dodge pick-up truck". This movie left me wanting to re-watch 'Battleship Potemkin (which you can see here) and join the Communist Part of Japan (and which you can join here).
I mean, are we supposed to admire Mr. Pitt's character in this? Applaud his integrity in turning down an offer of $12.5m to manage the Boston Red Sox in order to stay with his beloved San Francisco Statistics or whatever the team was called? It’s not like he faced a Sophoclean dilemma: the Red Sox or poorhouse penury. A character who, we are lead to believe, foregoes the big bucks for fear of what a cross-country move may do to his relationship with his daughter, yet at the same time shamelessly dispatches unwanted players (and presumably their families) all over the country like so many postage prepaid, bat-swinging serfs.
Utterly inane. But so utterly American too.
Next, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (TGWTDT), David ‘Freud’ Fincher’s latest. It would seem that Mr. Fincher is methodologically working through his many and varied neuroses on the washed-out, color-faded big screen.
We’ve had schizophrenic homoeroticism (Fight Club); S&M (Seven); obsession (Zodiac); envy (Social Network); repression (The Game); and maternal love (Alien 3 - seriously). I haven’t seen Benjamin Button so I can’t comment but from the trailer it seems Brad Pitt is a dwarf in it. Hello?
Now we have TGWTDT and it seems that Mr. Fincher has decided to lavish upon us a veritable Swedish smorgasbord of emotional extremes. I should be honest here and say I didn’t like Stieg Larsson’s book which may explain why I am not particularly impressed with the movie either. Both are polished enough, just enough, to make the reader/viewer overlook how complicit we are in the vicarious gratification we derive from reading/watching all the pain on display. And ‘display’ is a key word here, I think. Mr. Fincher, in his mastery of the technical aspects of film-making - lighting, blocking, point-of-view, editing, audio, etc., - in effect ‘displays’, in the anesthetized aesthetic meaning of the word, rather than shows. We watch, we may even enjoy, but we are never let empathize.
Finally, The Kids are Alright. I didn’t watch this on the train, but rather at home with Sanae. Actually, I didn’t really watch this at all, only the first 45 minutes of it or so. The three-quarter hour mark seems to be the acceptable cut-off time when I can quietly leave the sofa without provoking my wife’s considerable ire.
So a movie about a lesbian couple, their two teenage children and their sperm dad. Call me a Jesuit but I just couldn’t get into that. Sure, I had a sort of anthropological curiosity about this sort of family life in contemporary California, but, you know, I’m not a lesbian (I’ve taken the blood tests); I didn’t particularly care what happened to these people, as they are not my people. They don’t play GAA, listen to the Sawdoctors, or go sleighing in a snowstorm on a Sunday morning.
So 45 minutes in I got out. Sanae enjoyed it though, but she also enjoyed The Proposal, so you may take that endorsement as you please.

Winter Jogging

Note: the following post has been jointly rated R18 by the Irish Film Classification Office, The Motion Picture Association of America, the Eiga Rinri Kanrai Iinkai, and my wife. It contains pictures of spurious near-nudity and bodily hair, which may cause some of our more easily, ahem, aroused readers to entertain thoughts of full body contact 'hey makarena'.

One of the great challenges of winter here in Hokkaido is maintaining some semblance of fitness. This can be achieved by either (a) shoveling snow every feckin day; (b) steroids; or (c) jogging. I do all three (as can be seen from the photos below showing my muscular physique, toned legs and lactating breasts).

The key to jogging in sub-zero temperatures is layering. Actually, come to think of it, the key to jogging in sub-zero temperatures is not to go jogging at all, but unfortunately the steroids have decimated my common sense.

The first layer is essentially wind protection. It also makes you look a bit 'gay Central Park jogger', but its either Hammerstein & Rodgers' musicals on my iPod, or death from wind-chill.

Hello limbs (note toes still tapping to 'West Side Story').

Next is the inner 'core warmth' layer and yes, my head really is that big.

Now steady ladies (and fellow 'Oklahoma' fans) - we are getting to the first layer, to some of you perhaps, the 'finest' layer. These should wick sweat. In any direction. But wick. Wick. Wick. Wick.

And finally (feel free to swoon), we have my rampaging body hair. After 14 successive Hokkaido winters, my body has evolved a sort of thick, matted, coarse rug covering, that traps both warmth and small hibernating animals. I am a walking rebuke to all those bat-shit crazy Creationists out there, which is why I am banned from the state of Kentucky.

Such is the neo-Darwinism I embody (evolution on speed as it were), that I have developed copious amounts of toe hair too. And yes, I would like to share that with you all. (Note: the donut-shaped bulge around my waist was due to the distortion effect of the lens, the close focal point, and the low f-stop. It was in no way due to the double-chocolate-chip muffin I have with my mid-morning cup of tea).

Speed

"Right, so, like man, there's this, like, bomb man, on the sleigh, right, and if, like, you, like, go any slower than, like mach 1 or something, like, it's gonna explode, right".

"Awesome, dude".

Basically that is what Cian and myself were thinking as we headed up to the slopes behind the house for our weekly sleigh-of-death routine. 'Cos there's being alive, and then there's living a life. Dude.

Think about it.

Then think about this: with a fall in gradient of 1:63 (i.e. for every metre travelled the slope drops 63 sweet-mother-of-Jesus centimetres), down a slope 85 metres long with a backing wind of 27km/h and with a combined weight of 100 kilograms, depending on our initial acceleration, we could reach escape velocity within 30 metres of our start.

Or so Cian told me. I was just completely taken in by the awesome rush that was sure to happen once we got that red rocket on the snow-covered road.

And whoosh! Away we went.

There were, as befits any edge-of-the-seat, sleigh-by-wire riding, some 'Bail! Bail! Bail! moments along the way.

But we are fairly confident that we will be wearing the green as Ireland's best medal hopes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

"When we sung of hope..."

ハイツ　カサブランカ - Heights Casablanca
Back in the day, and man was it ever the day, the little village of Makkari in the slumbering shadow of mighty Mt. Yotei, was the place for men.
Called Ben.
And the women, oh the countless women, who loved them.
And, oh cruel, cruel time - who were lost to them.

A place of pilgrimage. Even for those of us cast to the far frozen wastes of Eastern Hokkaido, where we were closer to Russia than our nearest McDonalds.
On a Friday, weather and insomnia be damned, I would jump in my little Toyota Cynos (a great car; a great, fucking car, man) and battling my way through hoards of ravenous bears, spawning salmon, desperate deer not to mention one 24-hour-Kamik-boot-wearing-fully-paid-up-loon out Bekkai way, drive immeasurable miles for immeasurable hours just to enjoy, albeit all too briefly, some of that Makkari magic.

Through the great windswept hills of Kushiro, across the lush plains of Tokkachi, up, up, up and over the mighty Hidaka mountains, along the serene shores of Shikotsu-ko and then, as you drew closer to Kimobetsu you could see the sky glow from the bonfires.
And the fireworks, streaming up into the night sky, their momentary splendor scattering amongst the stars.
Coming down Route 66, as the road slid gracefully through the potato fields and the neon began to dazzle, you could hear the music: the Magnetic Fields, unadulterated Appalachian bluegrass, Ride, Tindersticks, Wilco, Creeper Lagoon, lots of banjos; the sound rippling out through the sweet night air.
And then you were in the village and the girls. The girls, brown-eyed and cute, in gaggles of two and three, wandering around Makkari, expectant, excited, uncertain as to whether they should really be here or back home studying for their High School entrance exams.
Finally, you'd get to Heights Casablanca, tired, wrung out; but all that vanished after the first can of Asahi Super Dry. And the weekend would disappear into itself and we'd sing of hope and life was all about now.

And then Sunday evening would come and rent the magic asunder and we would disperse into the twilight, back to our mundane selves, taking only with us memories and hangovers and the promise of the next time.

And somewhere along the line the next time became the last time.

Ahh Makkari...

Even now it is a place of pilgrimage for those who went and never quite left.

And for cute girls too still trying to grasp some of that ethereal magic.