The house across the street...

is no more!
Gone!
With the wind!
And the dumper trucks.
Hence the mid afternoon light we now enjoy.
Dazzlingly, blindingly, wonderful.
We're not too sure what they are going to do with the plot in the future but for this winter at least I reckon we will be bathed in pale sunlight throughout the day.
Still not happy about that spoon though.

All the 4's...

 All the fours then. The symmetrically numbered birthdays are beginning to mount up. As are the grey hairs, wrinkles, botox injections, etc. At least Santa came and left Cian with his sought after baseball glove. Which resulted in a disappointed sigh or two from this dyed in the wool GAA man. Will have to get back to Croke Park more often. That and get the GAA to lift their ridiculous ban on not streaming their games live outside of Ireland. Yes, I know they have a contract with Setanta to show the games live in Irish pubs the world over, but the world over doesn’t apparently include Japan. You can sign up as an individual subscriber to Setanta in China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong, but not Japan.
Why?
Was it something the Emperor said?
Do the GAA realize the sporting and cultural opportunities they are missing in Muroran? The buachaillí and cailíní dying to play the world’s greatest field games instead of shagging baseball?!
Anyway, Cian got his baseball mitt and preceded to reenact Steve McQueen’s cooler scene in ‘The Great Escape’ by repeatedly bouncing his baseball of his bedroom wall and catching it. For about all of 10 seconds until Daddy couldn’t stand the noise any longer and fecked his ball out the window and deep in to the bushes. It was my birthday after all. Plus I’m forty four so I am getting in some practice at being a ‘grumpy old man’.
My mood wasn’t particularly enhanced by the presents I received. A spoon and a hobbit sized birthday card. The card I can understand given that she is not of the race of men (not even of dwarves), but a spoon?!
Hello?
I suppose over the next couple of years I can expect a knife, a fork, etc., until I have a full set of cutlery. And which stage she will then precede to gift me a range of crockery.
All in all not a good day to be in Japan.

It was...

the night before Christmas and Daddy has just come down from the roof where he was installing the landing lights for Santa's final approach. Reckon the big man might have to make a couple of passes over the house considering the long list of presents requested from him.
Christmas in Japan has a somewhat ambivalent feel about it. The main celebrations here are reserved for 正月, the period over the New Year where everything in the country comes to a shuddering halt and they even turn off the electricity in the university (though is most likely due to a 20% rise in electricity prices earlier this autumn. Thank you Fukushima).  Christmas by contrast is a foreign import. While children will receive presents from Santa, and myself and Sanae will exchange gifts (I hope), gift giving doesn't go beyond the immediate family. And it is done pretty quickly too. Tomorrow is not a holiday so Sanae and myself will be in work for 8:00am while Cian, who is on winter holidays, will nevertheless have to be in the children's day care centre at the same time as there is nowhere else to put the boy (though when he gets in one of his stroppy moods, the orphanage is always a tempting option: "No, I swear, we found him by the side of the road"). There will be no turkey, Christmas pudding, Christmas crackers, selection boxes, mulled wine, hot whiskey, Uncle Tiernan slumped in a drowsy stupor in front of the sitting room fire, etc.
Instead Japan has created its own off kilter traditions to mark the day. Christmas Eve for instance, is a night for 'lovers' (though Sanae seems pretty resolute in ignoring that particular custom. Maybe I should serve a few glasses of hot whiskey...). Christmas dinner is often celebrated with a big feed of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Christmas cake consists of this god awful confectionary of sponge cake strawberries, and enough whipped cream to float a cow.
Thankfully here in Teach Gaynor-Takahashi we eschew the worst of these cholesterol enhanced delights though there are a couple of things I could think of to do tonight with the whipped cream...

Progress

They had the digger in today. We're having an unseasonable run of snow-free weather and the ex-county council workers reckoned it was time to get their fingers out of the fig rolls. So big diggers, big trucks, big chunks of house being torn down, and big noise. Cian loves it, as do Mammy and Daddy for the light we are now enjoying in the afternoon. The forecast is for the 'good' spell to continue in to next week so we might well have a very welcome 'bright and non-white' Christmas this year.

Birthday Boy

It's only now, a week later, that the last of the dancing elephants have finally left and things are beginning to return to normal (or as normal as it gets in Teach Takahashi-Gaynor). Ahh 7th birthdays - a day of celebration for each year is the Japanese tradition.
Actually it's not, but it does sound like something they would do over here. In fact the Japanese custom is to have no birthday party whatsoever. They basically accord birthdays the same importance as that day's weather, and rightly so. "Birthday parties are for decadent westerners" as Cian so rightly put it. Furthermore, birthday cakes are for "fat decadent westerners". And don't get the boy started on bouncy 'bleeding' castles.
Birthday presents are, however, warmly welcomed, particularly Cadburys 'Giant Buttons' (and no, it's not too late to send some). A big thank you to one and all for the steady flow of parcels with Cian's name on them arriving over the past week. It helps remind Cian that his family and friends are not only in Japan.

No progress

I fear that my previous post was a tad optimistic. There hasn't been a single chunk knocked out of the walls of the house across the street. The contractors seem to spend their whole time sitting in their vans, engine running, heater on, drinking canned coffee. I am beginning to think they could well be ex Dublin County Council workers. If it was a little warmer out they'd probably be leaning on shovels.
Don't have time to write much tonight as it is a special somebody's seventh birthday tomorrow and myself and Sanae are busy putting the final touches to the balloon collage. And fireworks display. Not to mention the laser show. Come join us tomorrow when there will be creamy and strawberry jam sponge cake for one and all.

The House across the street

This is the house across the street from us.

It stands, or rather, looms above us on the south side of Teach Gaynor-Takahashi. During this time of the year with the sun low in the sky, it blocks off the sunlight from 11:00 am to about 2:30pm, after which we get about 30 minutes of weak light before the sun disappears for good behind the hills. As you can imagine, this lack of high noon vitamin D is not doing my complexion much good. When we first moved into Teach Gaynor-Takahashi it was May and blocked sunlight was not an issue. You can imagine our happiness that following November when it started to get a bit dark come lunchtime. This continued through the winter until the beginning of March and so unaccustomed were we to the spring sunlight that we took to wearing sunglasses in the house for a week or so until our eyes adjusted. It has been the same every winter since.

Then last Friday evening we got an unexpected visit.
A man came to our door explaining that he was from a real estate agency and that they were planning to knock the house down across the street. Starting from Monday.
To which we replied "WTF?!"
We knew the family living there had moved out in early October but had merely assumed that this was due to the father relocating for work - not all that uncommon here in Japan, particularly for employees of the bigger companies.
However, we assumed wrong.
Turns out that the bunker-like concrete foundation the house is built on is riddled with cracks, and the  rain water has seriously comprised the safety of the entire structure. Should there be any sort of major (or even medium) sized earthquake, the house would most likely collapse. Onto the house behind and below it. Which would be sort of all right because there's an auld bollox living there and him and me have had words. In two languages.



Anyway, the plan is to have the whole thing knocked down and carted away in the next two weeks or so. When I was home for lunch today they were busy decoupling the electricity wires and carting some of the inside out. Cian can't wait until the big digger comes along and, as he says, "knocks the good shite out of the the walls".
Which means all going well it will be a sunny Christmas this year.

PISA

On Tuesday the OECD released the results from the latest round of the Programme for International Student Assessment, better known as PISA. This assessment is conducted every three years and involves testing 15 year old students in maths, science and reading, and how well they can apply their knowledge of each of these subjects. The most recent round of tests were conducted last year, involving 510,000 students in 65 countries. The (somewhat flamboyant) table below courtesy of the Guardian newspaper shows the rankings for all OECD countries in each of the three subjects.

Here in Japan we are suitably pleased with ourselves, though this is tempered by the fact that 'those Chinese feckers' are doing even better. Back home the results make for less pleasant reading, particularly in maths where we are well off the numerical pace set by the Asians.
Since Cian began his formal schooling earlier this year the one thing that has struck me is the amount of lesson time devoted to Japanese and Maths. In a typical week he will have ten 45 minute classes of each, which effectively means double classes in both subjects every day. And this increases as he progresses from year to year. We have also enrolled him in a correspondence course in Japanese as Sanae reckons his ability is not as strong in this area as it should be (which, I suspect, could be due to his bilingualism, a topic I will return to in a future post).
Nor are we unusual in this respect. Private education in the form of Juku or 'cram schools' play a huge if unacknowledged role in children's education in Japan which, I increasingly suspect, supplements rather than compliments what they learn in school. The result is a system that seemingly espouses meritocracy but in reality demands that parents pay for their children's success. And that I would contend is prevalent throughout Asia and thus accounts for much of the PISA results.

Room 237

It is end of term time and Sanae is busy writing up her students' evaluations. There is an art to this. You need to be able to select words that convey muted praise and oblique criticism of young Yuki's progress (or lack of it). Comments like "He's an awful little fecker who's heading straight for a heroin fuelled life on the mean streets of Muroran", no matter how apt, have to be foregone in favour of something won't have the parents apoplectically ringing the school. "Yuki is a child of high spirits whose ability is only matched by his inability" or some such. Anyway, the poor girl will be toiling away at this for the next week or so which means that I get to watch some movies.
Yes!
I know, I know, there should be a smidgen more loving concern for my wife's toil than those three letters, but I don't get to watch much movies any more, certainly not the thematically dark ones I prefer, so
Yes!!
Last night I watched Room 237, a documentary about Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining. The great cinephile David Thomson, in his magisterial 'Biographical dictionary of Film', describes The Shining as "Kubrick's one great film". As this documentary makes clear, he is not alone in thinking that. Room 237 is about those who have come to see The Shining as more than just a compelling pyscho-horror story about a father gone mad. To these people the film is in fact is a repository for a whole range of concealed meanings. Thus we are treated to interpretations of The Shining as an analogy for the Holocaust, an apology by Kubrick for his part in faking TV footage of the moon landings, the genocide of Native Americans, and Minotaurs.
What links the people who hold these disparate views is their shared belief in the infallible intelligence of Stanley Kubrick, a man seemingly blessed with a sort of divine directorial genius that inherently precludes anything as mundanely human as a continuity error. There is meaning to everything that appears on the screen, even the poster of the skier in the background or the number of suitcases on the luggage trolley. In this they share Kubrick's sense of almost paranoid obsessiveness with visual exposition; in The Shining the devil, it seems, is in the details.

Bring on the beef!

  Enda Kenny, the Irish Prime Minister (or 'Ginger' as I like to call him) is in Tokyo at the moment shucking for some of that Japanese yen. Yesterday he met with Prime Minister Abe and they agreed, as Miriam Lord so wonderfully put it, "to let the Mullingar heifers back into Japan". In return Enda was called upon to denounce those Chinese feckers and their hysterical war-mongering. Ginger though was the model of diplomatic circumspection stating that he would like nothing better than "to see peace in our time", and that really "we should give peace a chance", and indeed "peace be with you and also with you".
Although the farmers of Westmeath and its hinterlands will be glad to know that they have regained access to the Japanese beef market, our Enda is only too aware that China is a much, much larger and considerably more lucrative market than here. That is why he made some apparently affirmative sounding comments about understanding Japan's 'concern' and all the recent Chinese chest-thumping, but he also made bloody sure not to say anything that could be construed as criticism of Ireland's largest export market in east Asia.
Meanwhile the Japanese Minister of Education, on a brief visit to planet Earth, suggested renaming Valentine's day 'Ireland day' as (a) the kanji ideogram for the word 'love' (愛) is the first kanji used in writing Ireland (愛欄); and (b) apparently St. Valentine is allegedly buried in Dublin. After a 'humor the amadán smile from Abe and a pat on the head from Enda he was sent back to his spaceship.
Ginger, incidentally, has no plans to come to Muroran and Cian is taking it personally.

The blogging equivalent of the advent calendar

In an attempt to bring some much needed numerical respectability to this year's blog post count, I have decided to try and write something every day leading up to Christmas. As I didn't post anything yesterday, December 1st, I have technically already failed in this endeavour, but that's not my fault. I had to go to Sapporo yesterday for an all day series of presentations on teaching English in primary school. Yes, I know I work in a university but given the English ability of some of my students many of the presentations were quite apt. Plus teaching English to young learners here in Japan is the subject of my by now epic 4-years-in-the-making PhD dissertation. It is a topic that is receiving an increasing amount of attention here in Japan (and elsewhere in Asia) as the widespread belief amongst both parents and politicians is that English is essential for children's / the nation's future. The problem is that securing such a future involves a lot of work, particularly in relation to reforming the current English curriculum away from an exam-based methodology to something more communicative. A further impediment is the lack of trained and experienced English teachers at the primary level. Now, neither of these problems are insurmountable but facile 'tinkering' rather than much needed 'root and branch reform' tends to be the political order of the day. This gives rise to some very pedagogically suspect practices in the classroom. For instance, English education, or rather a diluted form of it, begins in 5th class in primary school. However, students are not given any literacy instruction nor are they formally assessed in the subject. That only begins in the secondary school. The result is lots of aimless 'awareness-raising' games and activities with the happy-clappy, touch-feely intention of making students 'like' English, as opposed to say, using the same time more constructively in actually learning the language. There are a number of reasons for this bizarre situation, particularly the aforementioned lack of qualified teachers, but there is also an underlying fear of what learning English might do to students' Japanese language ability. Japan, like Ireland (and apologies to all you Gaelgoirs out there but admit it, there's not many of you) is a resolutely monolingual society (or at least likes to think of itself as such whilst conveniently ignoring the various ethnic minorities living here). With no real historical (or even contemporary) tradition of bilingualism there is a widespread conception that learning additional languages is a zero sum game, i.e. there is only so much room in the brain for language learning and the more languages you learn the less brain space there is to go around. So while the country as a whole recognises the need for learning English, people are not too comfortable committing fully to learning the language for fear of what it may do to the Japanese language. I like to point out to the students in my classes at the university that if looked at from a global perspective, monolingual speakers are the exception; the rule is usually bilingual or trilingual speakers. But I usually loose them at the word 'global' with that tricky 'l' and 'b' sound combination.

Influenza Part II

It would seem that the Japanese side of the Gaynor-Takahashi family is quite susceptible to influenza type-A. Cian was diagnosed with it on Wednesday, so the house now resounds to his and Sanae's coughs, sneezes, feverish groans, and heart rendering pleas to "end this terrible calumny". Both the World Health Organisation and the Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have established field camps here in Tenjin-cho, but they fear the disease may already be out of hand.
Unless your Irish.
The flu in this part of the world seems to follow the same design fundamentals as Japanese car manufacturers (Mazda, of course, being the honourable exception): exceptionally well crafted, well engineered, but made only for physiologically diminutive natives. Robust, hairy chested foreign barbarians don't bathe often enough and so have, in their filth and squalor, developed immunity to local, rice fuelled viruses.

An autumn walk

While Mammy was battling through her fever (with odd moments of William Blake like hallucinatory clarity “It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. Now get me some chocolate!"), myself and Cian decided to the decent, familial thing and flee, yes flee, from Sanae's sickbed. Pursued by anguished, feverish shouts of "In the universe there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors!!". There is also the front door through which we ran, our pounding footsteps crackling through the brown leaves, and we didn't stop until we reached the top of Rakusan. Where it was a rather nice evening with a luminous sunset, though Cian did say, somewhat unsettlingly, that the scene had a touch of the Hieronymous Bosch about it.

Influenza

On Friday afternoon Sanae and Cian went down to the local hospital for anti-flu shots. On Sunday morning Sanae returned to the same hospital where she was diagnosed with the flu (type A for all you pathologists out there). Now the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me suspects there is something afoot here. You get an 'alleged' flu vaccine costing close on 6o euros yet within 48 hours you are spending over 100 euros on a doctor's diagnosis and the medicines he's prescribed.
Coincidence, eh?
Nah, me neither. I reckon the massive medical-industrial complex is behind all this, the same shadowy enigmas who unleashed the ebola virus on us, hooked an entire generation on prozac, and convinced the world that smoking causes cancer.
Yeah, right. I'm onto you people now. Big pharma you'd better watch out. The Muroran Mulder is coming after you....

Hello winter, my old friend...

We have been enduring an unseasonal cold spell for the last couple of days. Mind you, considering the terrible devastation that has befallen the Philippines I am not sure if I can really justify the use of 'enduring'; it has certainly been cold and snowy, but far from life threatening. Spirit slumping perhaps.
Since Sunday we have had successive falls of snow and have had to take out the snow shovels a full month earlier than usual. Cian, having been born into this climate, is happy out, his mother is busy cranking up the central heating, and his father is concerned about he is going to pay for the central heating now that electricity prices have been raised 10%.

winter tires

Or should that be 'tyres'? One of the more insidious effects of living a long time in Japan is that your spelling takes on a distinctly American bent so that superfluous 'o's go missing (as in 'colorful'), the depraved French derived 'metre' becomes the phonetically more helpful 'meter', while 'enquiry' and 'inquiry' can take a whole class to tease out their etymological differences. Such issues crop up quite often in my classes principally due to the fact that my students have been schooled in American English whereas yours truly is a (somewhat rueful) user of British English . "But you're from Ireland" some of the smarter students will point out. "Yes, but we suffered from 800 years of linguistic oppression, so my lexis is a victim of history". Occasionally the odd Hiberno-English expression slips through - "Jaysus Satoshi, but ye made a right feckin arse of answering that question" - but by and large I succumb to the type of banal speech patterns favoured by 98FM presenters, what I call the Mid-Atlantic DJ accent.
But I digress. Today was a fine, sunny day but we are due to get our first big winter storm on Monday (with 20cms of snow), so it was time to equip our cars with winter tires. Here in Hokkaido car ownership involves more than just a car; it necessitates owning two sets of tires (a separate set for winter and summer), two sets of wipers (ibid), a boot big enough to hold a snow shovel, ice-scraper, jump cables, a tow rope, and in my case a metre (er?) long cast concrete slab. My car is (somewhat inanely) a 2 wheel drive (Mazda don't sell manual transmission 4 wheel drives and I like to think I am not quite at the age for an automatic), so to avoid fishtailing around icy corners, I put the concrete slab in the boot above the rear axle.
Works for me. Plus having a 2 wheel drive means I take more care in winter whereas 4 wheel drivers tend to take false succour in their cars' abilities and drive way too fast. Or at least Sanae does. I think she has been taken in by the Japanese tire manufacturers advertising of total control over the roads (and the rebel alliance).

To be honest I try to limit my driving in winter as much as possible, preferring to walk everywhere. It helps that the university is only a few minutes walk away, Cian's school is directly across the road, and there is a small supermarket just down the street from our house. Sanae's school is further away so she does have to drive, but does so on city streets where (despite her best efforts) she can't go all that fast. A colleague of mine comes to work from further afield and every winter he has a tale of woe about getting stuck in snow, sliding into ditches, or roads being impassable.
Ahh Hokkaido - I wouldn't be writing this if I lived in Kobe.

Kobe

Kobe is a small(isn) city in the western part of Japan close to Osaka. (A geographical aside: although most maps show Japan slanting down in a sort of sloped North-South direction, here the country is divided into East and West with North being used for Hokkaido while South refers to Okinawa. This is a legacy of Japan's feudal past during which time neither Hokkaido nor Okinawa were considered parts of the country. And yes, you have my permission to use this tidbit to wow everyone at Christmas parties. Who be the urbane Orientalist? You be the urbane Orientalist, now finger-flip your chopsticks). I last visited the city some 14 years ago for the now legendary JET Programme renewers conference. At the time I was living the life of the vampire alcoholic - partied all night, slept during the day. I didn't see much of the city and to be honest, I didn't much care.
I was young and high spirited.
God, was I young.
And 'high spirited' is a polite way of saying, well, you know.
This time around middle-aged respectability has taken hold; marriage, fatherhood, responsible job, inability to hold my liquor, so I got to see more of the city.
Of all the places I have been in Japan (surprisingly few), Kobe currently gets my vote as Japan's most liveable, cosmopolitan city. It is compact but blessed with a compelling diversity of attractions - cultural, culinary, shopping, and entertainment. There is something for all of its citizens. And a pretty diverse bunch they are too. Following the Sakoku period when Japan shut itself off from the rest of the world, Kobe was designated as one of the commercial ports through which trade with Western countries could take place. This led to a rapid influx of foreign ships, companies, and ultimately residents. They in turn established a foreign quarter that thrived in the pre-war years. Both a major war and an earthquake destroyed much of this history, but what buildings are left have been carefully restored and are now the city's chief tourist attraction. Kobe's importance as an international port remains - it is Japan's fourth busiest - and this is reflected in the wealth of the city. Put simply, it is a rich city, one that wears its prosperity well.
Coming from Muroran, a place that is literally falling apart, it is quite a shock to arrive in Kobe and realise that not all of Japan is succumbing to a demographic wilderness. In Kobe you understand why Japan in still the third largest economy in the world. In Muroran you wonder why they haven't already shut up shop and sold what's left to the Chinese.
So, yes Kobe appeals to me even more so now as we head into the long dark winter. I may not be able to party like it was 1999 again, but I am pretty sure I would be able to appreciate the city's more subdued charms.

The Pox!

Look at him, fear him, revile him. The dread postules, angry red and rife across the pallid body. Suppurating and scabbing, raw evidence of the infection within.
Sorry, don't know what came over me.
Cian has chicken pox, or rather, 'The infected one has the plague' to be more exact. I have fled to Kobe in western Japan - I would rather take my chances with a typhoon than with 'bio-hazard boy'. I've told Sanae I will only return after Cian is given the all clear by the doctor, and she burns all his clothes. And his bedding. And while she's at it, some of her CDs, as while they themselves are not infected the musicians are clearly contaminated by a complete lack of talent.
Word of Cian's condition has unfortunately gotten out and our neighbours are getting restless, demanding a sacrifice be made to the gods of pox, chicken, rooster, and Colonel Saunders. They seem to have a couple of carpenters amongst them and a pretty detailed idea of the type of sacrifice the gods will be happy with.

I am hoping that by the time I get back from Kobe things will have either quietened down, or burnt themselves out.

More to come

Up here in Hokkaido typhoon number 26 left us relatively unscathed (except for a record early snow fall of 30cm in the east of the island), but further south around Tokyo, people weren't so lucky. The small volcanic island of Oshima, some 120 kms south of Tokyo, was the worst affected. Torrential rainfall triggered a pair of huge mudslides that engulfed a residential district killing 28 and leaving another 18 still unaccounted for. And unfortunately there is more of the same to come. Typhoon number 27 formed a few days ago and has turned into another powerful storm, slowly making its way northeast towards the Japanese mainland. It is due to cross over Okinawa on Thursday before doglegging north east and heading across western Japan on Friday. And guess who is due to fly into western Japan on Thursday evening for this year's JALT conference in Kobe? And if that isn't enough metrological excitement for one week, coming right behind it is typhoon number 28.
I will probably pack a lifejacket.

Batten down the hatches

There is a rather large typhoon heading our way at the moment. Excitable media types are calling it a "once in a decade" storm. It is due to slam, yes slam, into Tokyo tomorrow morning, Japan time, before  accelerating northwards. Here in Muroran we should be spared the worst of it, but further east in that enchanted land they call 'Doutou', they are expected to take a bit of a battering. In my three years living out there pretty much every autumn was marked by school closures, flooding, and blackouts as late season typhoons hurtled their way through east Hokkaido. No such luck for Cian though; it will be a wet and windy walk to Mizumoto elementary school in the morning.

Sunday in Muroran

It turned Autumnal with a vengence today. Whereas yesterday morning I was out and about in a t-shirt, shorts and sandals, today was a day for the woolies. The wind blew hard from the north west, the rain splattered down angrily, and thoughts turned to switching on the central heating. We are hoping to hold out until November (due to the ongoing shutdown of all nuclear power stations in the country our electricity prices have risen by 10% since the beginning of September), but the plummeting temperatures and biting winds are testing our resolve.
So the hitherto usual indian summer Sunday mix of walks, cycling and gardening had to be replaced with something a bit more indoorsie. Thankfully Muroran had laid on a veritable cultural smorgasbord of activities to take our minds off the weather. First up was a visit to the Muroran Plastic Model Club (since 1967) who organised an exhibition of various model airplanes, ships, tanks, transformers, etc.
And it was freaking awesome!!!
Or just freaky, depending on your point of view.





A lot of time and love went into making these models. The first I can respect, the latter methinks is a tad misdirected. Anyway, our inner nerds temporarily assuaged, off we headed to the Fishing Port Festival!
Unfortunately, the cold and the howling wind put paid to the 'grab the salmon in the pool' event, but it was still all go at the indoor market.





After that double whammy, we needed some chilling out of the emotional kind, and so we wended our quiet way to the Autumn Bonsai exhibition, a sort of leafy, botanical Bon Iver album for the soul. Enthused by the craft and skill on display I let slip to one of the organisers that I too grew a couple of Bonsai. Whereupon I was urged, good naturedly, to join their group and so lower the average age to something closer to 60 rather than 80. I politely demurred, the surfing lifestyle still more appealing than the sedentary one, but I promised the nice man that I would get back to him in a couple of years.





We finished our tour with a visit to the SL Steam Engine, once the pride of JR Hokkaido, now standing slightly forlorn in old Muroran.

Footloose

Well, we’re back. Belatedly. Slinking our way in the side entrance to the blogosphere, wiping our mouths, brushing away the crumbs, blowing the dust off the keyboard and wondering if anybody (a) noticed we were gone; and more pertinently, (b) will anyone notice that we are back?
As to excuses? God, I don’t know. There are a myriad of them but they can be basically summed up in the phrase ‘willful neglect’. I hadn’t meant the gap to grow so long and silent, then again neither, presumably, had J.D. Salinger.
As you can see the interval hasn’t done anything for my modesty either.
And it’s not like I didn’t have anything to write about; we had Ireland, the weather, the weather in Ireland, the weather in Ireland on a Saturday in August atop of Croagh Patrick; counties Dublin, Down, Kilkenny, Kerry, Cavan and Mayo; an All-Ireland hurling semi-final; Edinburgh; some epic surfing; Joshua Ferris; Kevin Powers; Top of the Lake... the list could go on.
But priorities people, priorities. What has really motivated me back into blogging mode was Cian’s gakugeikai last weekend.
The gakugeikai is what you would call ‘the school festival’ in less civilized parts of the world. But the linguistic comparison doesn’t do it cultural justice. It would be like comparing  the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s revered New Year’s Concert (this year to be conducted by the inestimable Daniel Barenboim), with last Friday’s edition of the Ryan Turbidy show. 
There were weeks of preparation, ‘preparation’ being a synonym for blood, sweat, and tears. Showing my age here, but in the original Footloose movie, there is a montage of Kevin Bacon, to the sound of ‘Never’ by Moving Pictures (which, even after all these years, can still get my blood stirring, though I think that may be due more to nostalgia for my lost youth than any particular love for the song. I saw the film in Celle, a small town in then West Germany [yes, both the film and I are that old], when I was 14 and at my most musically impressionable), and he’s dancing and jumping and twirling and basically leaping about like a mad young thing off his head on too much Club Orange (as my innocent 14 year old self thought at the time). You can see the clip here.

Cian watched it and thought it pathetic. (Liked the music though). What he and the rest of the 1st grade had to endure for ‘showtime’ was akin to the physical torment of those ship wreckers in Bangladesh, but to a steady 3/4 beat.
The result though, I think you will agree, was spectacular. It can be experienced in its complete, surround-screen, technicolor Busby Berkeley like splendor here, complete with delirious hand shaking from the camera man, overcome as he was by the sheer awesomeness of the spectacle he was recording.

Tour de Kilkenny

Not content with free-wheeling my way across the wilds of Connemara and skipping up and down Croagh Patrick, I have decided to further embrace my mid-life crisis by signing up for the Tour de Kilkenny this coming August bank holiday weekend.
And that would be the 110 kilometer Tour de Kilkenny.
It should prove... interesting. I haven't ridden a road bike since my utterly awesome black Raleigh racer which I last took for a spin in the late autumn of 1991. (After that I got my first provisional driving license and it was a case of 2 wheels good, 4 wheels faster).
In preparation for Gaelforce West I bought a second hand bike (sight unseen, on ebay), and I figured if I have the bike, I might as well put it to some use. Hence the 110 kms ride around some of the more scenic roads of southern Kilkenny.
The only slight snags to this otherwise brilliant plan are:
1: My bike is in a box in the back shed behind my sister's house in County Down where, yes indeed, the Mourne Mountains do sweep down to the sea.
I, as some of you may have gathered from this blog's faint scent of vinegared rice and sun-dried salmon, am not in County Down. This means that the earliest I will get to ride my bike for the first time is some 4 days before the Tour de Kilkenny (though that could well be 3 days before as I'm not too sure if there are any pedals on the bike. Must ask my sister to check).
2: I won't be fit enough to get beyond the Kilkenny ring road. I did go for a long ride on my mountain bike last weekend around Muroran and my God people, my arse. My sorry, sore, hairy arse. I am a jogger, not a cyclist. It felt like I had been terrorized by half of San Francisco. If this is what if feels like to be gay well, lads, you're welcome to it. No objections mind, just I won't be joining ye at the YMCA. No matter how much free beer you offer me (cf. my wide-eyed experiences in various bars along Oxford Street, Sydney, circa 1996).
Anyway, unfit, probably pedal-less but secure in my hetrosexuality, I hereby issue an invitation, nay challenge to you to join me in a spin around the black and amber roads. Further details are available at the following link:
http://www.marblecitycyclers.com/tour-de-kilkenny/

Australia 16 - Lions 41

Mumble, mumble ... well, ahem, done...mutter, mutter...
(sound of humble leek pie being eaten)
mumble, mumble ... Gatland et al happily adrift on the seven seas of Leigh... mutter, mutter...
(sound of humble leek pie being choked on)
mumble, mumble ... the score would have reached triple figures if BOD had been playing ... mutter, mutter ...
(humble leek pie abandoned)
mumble, mumble ... glad to see Sexton get his first cap for Wales though ... mutter, mutter....

Brian O'Driscoll

I could rant and rave all I want (as so many others justifiably have) about the (insert your choice of expletive here) inane decision by that (insert your multiple choices of expletives here) Warren Gatland, but what's done is done.
I am not too sure if there is a Welsh word for 'schadenfreude', but should the Australians win on Saturday, our cousins across the Irish Sea are going to find themselves alone and an adrift in a sea of it.
In the meantime, here is Hitler's reaction to the dropping, nay felling of BOD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deg1bQt1rzQ&feature=youtu.be

Hokkaido Bears GAA

Yes, you read that title correctly. When the history of the GAA in the 21st century comes to be written, the small town of Jouzankei will merit a mention. It was there last Sunday that Hokkaido's first GAA club emerged, blinking in the strong June sunshine, unsure of itself, but willing to have a go anyway. 24 of us turned out, most of us gaels lost to parishes and towns all across Ireland, finding ourselves the other side of the world kicking an 0'Neills ball around and grinning with the sheer incongruous delight of it all.
We hailed from Kildare, Donegal, Carlow, Galway, Kerry, Dublin, Clare, Down, America, England, Australia, Japan and places in between, and if some of us had kicked better balls in younger days, we made up for the wayward passes with our consistent enthusiasm. 15 minutes aside we played and for those of us on the wrong side of 40 they were some of the toughest 15 minutes we've wheezed our way through in a long, long time. Shouts of "let it go, let it go now!" and "watch yer house!" brought a nostalgic tear to the eye, as did the sight of so many puffing furiously on fags during the half time break.
Our aim is to have a fully fledged team up and, well, if not running, jogging gently by this time next year, with the hope of participating in the Asian GAA Gaelic Games competition come the following year.
And after that, Croke Park, the third Sunday in September when the inaugural Japan teams sweeps the competition on their debut.

Sports Day

Saturday, 5:00am
Am awoken by the sound of Cian scampering down the stairs and into the toilet for an exceedingly early morning 'poo'. Today is his undokai, his first in elementary school and the boy is literally shitting himself with excitement. However, outside the rain is pouring down. I tell Sanae not bother getting up as its bound to be cancelled.
Saturday, 5:30am
I'm just drifting back to sleep when Sanae's alarm goes off and the girl gets up. It's still pouring outside. I point this out to her. In Japanese. But no, until official confirmation is received, she is in full on preparation mode. Should you live long enough in Japan you become painfully aware that following the rules too often triumphs common sense.
Saturday, 6:00am
I am just crossing over that fine line between drowsy wakefulness and pleasant slumber when the phone rings. It is the school telling us the undokai has been officially cancelled. The rain continues to pour down. Cian has started singing the 'shake samba' to Sanae's mother who is staying with us for the weekend. I give up and get up.
Saturday, 11:30am
The rain ends, the clouds clear and the sun comes shining through. Low tide is just after midday, so I grab my Bruce Jones and head for the beach. In life, my friends, you just have to play the hand that's dealt you. And if that hand is an afternoon's worth of surfing, then them be the (left-hand) breaks.

Sunday, 5:30am
Sanae's alarm goes off. There's no rain this morning. She has to be up at the school ground to claim a viewing place.
Seriously.
Parents queue up to bag the best spots around the track. By rights this is the father's job but I claim cultural ignorance of such bizarre oriental customs. Sanae told me later that when she arrived there was already a queue of 20 people ahead of her. When the school principal let them into the ground they sprinted, yes sprinted, to stake out the prime viewing spots.
Sunday, 6:00am
There is the sudden onset of an artillery barrage. Or at least it sounds that way. In Japan schools notify parents and residents that 'sports day is a go' by letting off a series of deafening fireworks. At six in the morning. As several schools throughout Muroran were holding their undokais on the same day, this resulted in a barrage of early morning explosions across the city, not unlike, I suspect, Sarajevo circa 1994.
Sunday, 8:00am
The Takahashi members of the Gaynor-Takahashi family set off for the school, a good hour before events begin. I begin eating breakfast.
Sunday, 8:30am
I am still eating breakfast but have to field an exasperated call from Sanae as to why I'm not there yet. Because, I reasonably reply, things don't begin for another half hour and it's only going to take me about 8 minutes to walk up there. Reason, however, has no place on undokai day. Only emotions are welcome, especially those that run high.
Sunday, 8:52am
Arrive at the ground. They haven't even begun the speeches yet.
Sunday, 9:00am
Speeches begin.
Sunday, 9:16am
Four speakers later, the speeches end. I have no real idea what the School Principle, the head of the PTA, the representative from the city's Board of Education, and the local residents' association said, but I'm feeling pretty fired up all the same.
Sunday, 9:20
Events begin with some blood curling speeches from the leaders of the red and white teams respectively. Unlike back home, sports days in Japan are all about the collective rather than the individual. The entire school is divided up into red and white teams and results in the various activities go towards a points total. The team with the most points wins which ensures that individual glory is subsumed into the greater good. (If only some of the Clare hurlers could buy into this philosophy).
After the near hysterical rallying of the bán and dearg troops, 6 representatives of each team come forward and engaged in a dance off.
No, seriously.
A dance off.
I was so taken aback by the sheer Zoolander like awesomeness of it all that I forgot to take a video. And I will regret that till the day I die. It was like everybody was Kung Fu fighting, but to really, really bad Japanese pop music. Still, there kicks were indeed as fast as lightening. And yes, for some of us, it was a little bit frightening.
Huh!


It took a while for both the crowd and competitors to calm down after that display of expert timing, but then it was on with the games.

And the highlights were:

(1) Musical: the 'Shake Samba' was finally revealed in all its legs-and-arms-akimbo-purple-pom-pom glory. I have previously blogged about Cian's nascent talent as this century's Nureyev, but to see it begin to bloom into its full carnival like splendour... I tell ya, he'd kick Michael Flatley's arse any day of the week.

 (2) The tug of war. Despite Cian's hackle raising roar of defiance - a sort of one man Haka - the white team were out muscled by the communist Reds. Too much individualism, not enough collective state socialism was Sanae's take on it.



 

(3) The 60 metre dash. I think the dancing took a lot out of him. That or his body was still caught up in the samba rhythm. How else to explain his unique 'windscreen wipers in heavy downpour' sprinting style.



(3) Thankfully by the time of the relay race he had managed to get his arms back under control. Ahh the relay. For sheer, heart stopping drama the only comparison I can make is with the '94 All Ireland Hurling Final between Offaly and Limerick. This race had everything - a seesawing change in positions throughout, deft baton passes, spills, falls, amazing turns of speed, and a photo finish.
You can, if you can take the tension, watch it in its entirety here.
11:30
And it's all over. At least for Cian and the rest of first class. The rest of the school has to plough on until half two, but after the relay everything else was just anti-climax. Emotionally we scaled the heights and then the sparse, wind blown tundra stretched before us and, well, I have no idea where I am trying to go with this analogy.

 

"We choose to build this human pyramid here today and do other things. Not because they are easy, but because we are Japanese".

Gaelforce West

So what are you doing on Saturday, August 17^th?

Nothing. Really? Well how about this: you and me, we rock on down to Glassilaun beach. Yeah Glassilaun, out west, way out west. Synge country, Playboy of the Western World and all that. It’s there on the road out beyond Leenane, this side of Newfoundland. 

Anyway, they’re organizing a bit of a run there, 10km I make, no, no, 14km there after telling me, all along the coast. Smashing scenery, you have the Mweelrea mountains sweeping down to the sea, you have the shore, the sand, the stones, the, eh, sheep, you know the whole John Hinde postcard thing.

So what do you say? 14km, a gentle jog along some of the most glorious, God-given scenery this island has to offer followed by pints in Gaynors in Leenaun.

Oh, hang on, there’s more apparently. A kayak section. After the run, you jump in a kayak and paddle across the fjord there. Ahh that’s lovely. Then we can double back for the pints in Leenaun.

What, hush down there, let the man speak. There’s more. Well, now. Right, it seems after the kayak there’s another bit of an auld jog up to the delphi road. Apparently its a bit boggy in places. That said there’s a wonderful wee restaurant up in Delphi that does a lovely bowl of soup. We could aim for that then - we’d need it I’d say, to be honest with you. And thus, suitably fortified we can head south back down the road for the scoops.

What?! Say again... there’s more. What? Go away. Really? A bike section. Right, yeah, I’m with you, go on. How far, like? Good jaysus, how many. 33 feckin kilometres. That’s a fair auld pedal all the same now. As far as Croagh Patrick you say. Ahh sure, if you have the weather for it and it’s lovely country to be up on the back of a bike. Plus there’s a great pub up in Murrisk that does this smashing seafood chowder. Not to mention the pints. 

So what do you say? You up for it? Course you are?

Ahh lads, don’t be telling me there’s more. There is ... what?

You what?

You feckin what?!

Your telling me, serious like, that we have to run up and down Croagh Patrick after dismounting from the bike.

That’s a big ask now. Especially after the bike. But I suppose we’ll put up and shut up. But then it’s down to Murrisk for the victuals. And let that be the end of it.

What?

It’s not what?

The end of it. You’re telling me there’s more. How much more?

12 kilometres on the bike on the back road into Westport. Why? Cause the race finishes there. Fair enough. I’ll probably be finished long before that, but I’ll give it a bit of d’auld Stephen Roche and freewheel across the finish line.

I can’t, can I. Why not? You have to leap off the rothar and run the last kilometre to the line. Run you say. Crawling would be ore like it. Probably pitifully crawling too. 

And then we’re finished? Are you sure? No swimming out and around Clew Bay or anything like that. 

Fine, grand then. We’re finished, so it’s a shower (optional), a bite to eat and off to Matt Molloys for a feed of pints. 

So you still up for it? Course you are. 

I’ll see you all then on Glassilaun beach on the morning of the 17^th. 

You can enter here.

And yes, I already have.

Hachiman Shrine

We took ourselves off for a bit of stroll the weekend before last as the sun, well, it wasn’t exactly shining, but as the fog was a little less dense than usual, you could catch glimpses of this glowing orb in the sky.

We went to Hachiman Jinja (shrine) near the old port. In over eight years living in the city it was my first time to visit. While I can’t say that those eight years were blighted by my ignorance of the place, it was still a pleasant surprise. That said, the bar is set quite low in Muroran, so ‘pleasant surprise’ can be applied to anything that isn’t made from corrugated iron and/or belching noxious smoke.

Anyway we pottered around for a while ringing bells, clapping hands, splashing water and generally letting the gods at Hachiman know that we were here and could they please do something about the fog. 

Turns out they were the wrong gods. Enshrined at Hachiman is Ukemochi-no-Kami (the goddess of food) who, according to Wikipedia, “was visited by Tsukuyomi as she prepared a feast by facing the ocean and spitting out a fish, then she faced the forest and bountiful game spewed out of her mouth, finally turning to a rice paddy she coughed up a bowl of rice. Tsukuyomi was so disgusted he killed her. Even her dead body produced food: millet, rice, and beans sprang forth. Her eyebrows even became silkworms”.

To which all I can say is “eeuuughhh”. I am totally with Tsukuyomi-san on this one. Though I can relate to the eyebrows-becoming-silkworms. I wonder if anything similar happened to her ear-hair. I am expecting mine to turn into creeper vines.

But I digress.

Also there is Kotohira-no-kami, the god of the sea, who is a whole lot more acceptable than his fellow food-regurgitating deity.

Thankfully there were a couple of late blooming cherry trees to distract us from the thoughts of bountiful game spewing and coughing up rice bowls, though Cian reckons he wouldn't mind giving the latter a try.