Here's to you Robinson-san...

Last Friday was graduation day here in our little piece of snowbound academia. I didn't attend as these displays of alleged educational accomplishment tend to be long on speeches and short on anything that could be termed cognitive sentience. Nor were there any singing-and-dancing vegetables.

For shame.

Plus, my involvement with the students tends to be minimal. Unlike their teachers in the engineering faculty, we forlorn outcasts in the English department don't have much to do with the students beyond our allotted teaching hours. Whereas, for instance, the professors in the School of Electrical Engineering will be expected to do everything for their students over their four years of attendance from initial university orientation to rewriting their final dissertations (true); we get them for maybe one 15 week term and then subsequently, academically speaking, never encounter them again.

Given that we are teaching English this is probably the way both sides prefer it, but occasionally you come across the motivated star, shining all that brighter for the otherwise indifferent gloom from whence she or he emerges.

This past Friday saw me say farewell to two such stars, Kazuma and Hironaru. Both surprised me by coming to my office (separately) to wish me farewell and thank me, yes, thank me for teaching them English. Not that they needed much teaching. Most of their English study they did in their own time - my class hours wouldn't account for their fluency. But I was gratified nevertheless, and proud of them in a way too. Kazuma has secured a job with Sumitomo Industries, one of Japan's largest industrial conglomerates, while Hironaru is off to join Toshiba's international division. Both of them stressed the importance of English in securing these jobs (both of them, as it turned out, had to take English tests and do job interviews in English).

If only I had more students like them, I would (a) perhaps stop my steady slide into jaded cynicism about my chosen, ahem, profession; and (b) be able to kick this bottle-of-Bushmills-a-day habit I have developed.

An Inconvenient Truth

Yesterday we woke up to this:


And this morning we woke up to this:


Sweet Jesus, Mother Nature, just what the good feck is going on?! It's now the end of March which should, by any seasonal measure, be showing some tentative, green-shooted signs of spring. Instead we are still shoveling a foot of snow and cranking the radiators up to eleven.
I mean, where the hot hell is this global warning everyone keeps bleating on about? Melting icecaps, higher sea-levels, warmer winters, hotter summers, increased C02, drowned polar bears, shrinking ozone layer - God, yes please, bring it on I say, bring it on.
Well, okay, maybe not the polar bears, but all the rest, definitely.
According to the Hokkaido Shimbun, we've had the coldest winter in a generation with many places breaking records for the total amount of snowfall. Nor is winter finished with us yet. This evening NHK Hokkaido's somewhat spaced-out weather forecaster (unlike the genial assurances of Gerry Fleming, Ebina-san tends to give the impression that he's been partaking of Abashiri's finest, wildest medicinal herbs immediately prior to coming on air), told us we'd have snow for the rest of the week. Over the weekend we should have a temporary reprieve before another cold spell moves down from Siberia for the first week in April.
So, yeah, Al Gore, you're full of shit. And Russia, goddamn hate the proximity of your frozen landmass.

St Patrick's Day

Yesterday was March 17th and what better way to celebrate our far flung Irishness than by driving an hour and a half in sleety rain to New Chitose Airport to visit the chocolate factory.
We didn't even wear anything green.
It was a dull, late winter's day over here; Muroran had, unbelievably, failed to provide a parade or even dye green the noxious smoke coming out of the steel mills; and the city had seemingly doused itself in a grey shroud of desolation and despair.
So we jumped in my Mazda, cranked up the Boss and declared Muroran a town full of losers and pulled out of there to win, or the airport, whichever came first.
Now this isn't actually as sad as it seems. New Chitose Airport has recently been refurbished and extended. It now has a new international terminal; admittedly an eerily empty terminal. It also got itself some new shops to go along with the crab and salmon mongers; a decent smattering of restaurants and, of course, the Royce Chocolate factory where you can watch them make chocolate.
The 'them' refer to robots. They only make chocolate now but soon they shall rule the world! And we will have to make chocolate for them!! Mark my prescient words folks, New Chitose airport is where the technological singularity will happen. You have been warned.
Anyway, when not being awed by future cacao powered terminators, we looked at airplanes and wondered if we could hijack one of them and flee to Singapore.
No, we reluctantly decided, we couldn't as so we just bought some chocolate and went home.
And that was our St. Patrick's Day which, on second thoughts, was as sad as it seems.


The following photo I can't really explain. It had nothing to do (as far as I could tell) with the chocolate factory, but this is a Japanese airport after all, so a life-sized furry cow is probably mandatory . And don't get me started on the bears...

And another one

This time down Tokyo way at 9:05 Japan time. Initial reports are of a magnitude 6.1 quake. No tsunami warning has been issued and as I write this, there are no reports of serious damage.
Though two 'temblors' in quick succession this evening have left us a tad apprehensive. Time to check our earthquake emergency kit, methinks.
Oh, and hello Mr. D.

Temblor

Is the term NHK (Japan's public broadcaster) uses for earthquake. At 6:08 this evening we had a magnitude 6.8 temblor off the east coast of Hokkaido. We had just started eating dinner (Mammy's delicious Butadon*) when we noticed our bowls shaking, then the table, floor and pretty quickly the whole house.

I think it says something about the cultural differences that infuse our mixed marriage that, while Cian and Sanae dived under the table, Daddy made a lunge for the computer and started tweeting and emailing and skypeing anybody who would listen (which turned out to consist solely of Mr. D - as always, my thanks to Meath's goateed wonder).

A tsunami warning was then issued for the Pacific side of Hokkaido and northern Honshu but as I type the only tsunami registered has been all of 10cm high, which begs the question as to how they can tell it is different from a normal wave.

There have been no reports of damage down Fukushima way but given the mendacity of TEPCO and the Japanese government over the last 12 months, I doubt they would tell us anyway.

Should there be any further developments, I will of course keep you informed. The you being Mr.D.

*a bowl of rice topped with thin sliced pork that has been simmered in a sweet sauce. It is one of the reasons why I am still living in Japan. That and the can't-look-away ongoing car crash that is the Irish economy.

Muroran's X Factor

On Friday Cian's Nursery School had their end of (school) year play.

'Play', listen to me.

This was an astonishing showcase of raw talent, a bold, visceral reminder of the power of the stage to illuminate and define the human condition.

The plot synopsis defies, well, synopsising. It was Brecht's 'Three Penny Opera' re-imagined, a 'Three Yen Opera' if you like, with music by Sondheim and produced by a gimlet eyed Balzac, both enthused and dismayed by present day Japan.

There were scathing critiques of the slow sclerotic collapse of Japanese politics and the 'parsley' politicians who thrive in it. There were withering references to the 'lettuce' like leaders of the country, and the 'carrot' kings of industry who, eh, are orange and stop you from getting scurvy.

I will admit that my Japanese language ability was not quite up to the finer points of the play, particularly the extended 'call and response' enacted in deft tercets between the three 'Carrot Ministers', as the following clip so wonderfully illustrates:

And the moves; that grace, that effortlessly matching of music with motion, lyric with gesture to bring such a physical heft to the lyrical attack. It was like watching operatic rugby.

And as for Cian, well, I don't think comparisons with an early Nuruyev are too out of place - that same carefree albeit predatory aquiline expressionism and unlimited talent. Surely, he will follow in Rudolf's pointe footsteps and bestride the ballet world like a long-legged giant, before embarking on a series of homosexual affairs, getting strung out on heroin and ultimately dying of AIDS at 55.

Then again, maybe not.

But we are thinking Juilliard from this autumn.

These are the dog days of winter; you get glimpses of the end, as happened last week. The temperature stayed above freezing for a couple of days, the sun shone and the snow began to melt. Windows were opened on Saturday morning to let in some fresh air in a house that hadn't breathed it for nigh on four months. I spent an enjoyable two hours traipsing up and down Muroran dake while Cian and Sanae allegedly practiced their skiing (though all they had to show for their efforts were some hot cocoa stains around their mouths).

And then a cold air mass slunk out of Siberia and relentlessly pushed its way south. As I write the snow is falling thick and fast and the weather forecaster said we could prepare ourselves and our snow shovels for 50 centimetres of snow tonight. Which means that the Gaynor-Takahashi Specialist Snow Clearing Squadron will have to get out of bed extra early tomorrow morning. Or rather the Irish member of the GTSSCS will have to haul his hairy ass out of bed and around 5:30am and start clearing snow.

And I wasn't even born in this feckin part of the world. Not even feckin close.

You would think that those that call themselves 'dosanko' (Japanese for those born in Hokkaido) would be naturally inclined towards all this freezing weather snow shite, but no; the only thing they are inclined to do is to pull the blankets up further and warn me not to bang the door on my way outside.