February

You'll have to forgive the paltry number of posts since the start of the new year. In truth there is very little to write about besides a litany of illnesses and ailments. Earlier this month we were supposed to go to Forest Kozan, but the night before Cian vomited quite spectacularly all over his room. So the following morning, rather than marveling at the snow shrouded beauty of the mid-winter forest, we instead spent it wiping flecks of undigested food off the bed, floor, walls, table, books, slippers, and school bag, and probably missed a few other spots as well (but which will no doubt spawn a colony of mold come summer). Subsequent weekends were blighted by blizzards and bad weather, so tramps through the snow had to be reluctantly cancelled.
To my mind February is a month that hangs especially heavy here in Hokkaido. Despite my time here (15 years!), I have never really embraced winter sports; snowshoeing is the extent of my seasonal activity, otherwise I go for a slow, slippery jog. This sense of constant constraint produces an intemperate longing for the future; I am impatient for Spring to come and this expectation of warmer times suppresses any engagement with the present. The result though is that "while we are postponing, life speeds by".
This quote is taken from a book I am currently reading, if you'll excuse the pretension, written two thousand years ago, the Epistles of Seneca (mere letters were beneath the ancients).
As an aside, the university library has a surprisingly well stocked, albeit somewhat dated, philosophy collection. It is particularly strong on classical philosophy and, for some reason, the complete and unabridged works of Immanuel Kant - in the original German. The book by Seneca was added to the library's collection in 1976, and as far as I can discover, I am the first person to have borrowed the book. I am kind of hoping they will let me keep it.
Anyway, Seneca, as most of you probably already know, was corner back on the great Cork hurling team of 17 A.D., winning 5 All Ireland medals and a couple of All-Stars, his man-marking of Cuchulainn and keeping him scoreless from play in the drawn final of 20 A.D. by now legendary.
That was only the half of it as it turns out, for he was also a philosopher in the Stoic tradition, and tutor to the young Roman Emperor, Nero (he of the famous fiddle playing). The book is a collection of letters, sorry, epistles he sent to his friend Lucilus. These letters range far and wide on a multitude of topics, from 'the good which abides', to 'brawn and brain', to 'meeting death cheerfully'. 
I doubt if Seneca ever lived in Hokkaido, but he seemed to capture the mood of February in this part of the world when he wrote: "What man can you show me who places only value in his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily".
Yes, I know, time to hide the kitchen knives from Brian and sit me down in front of the complete series of Fr. Ted (thank God for youtube), but Seneca does have a point. He would, however, be hard pressed to make it here in Muroran on a dull, snow swept Sunday afternoon with the melancholy of Monday creeping closer. He lived in Rome and could always go the Colosseum to watch lions tear men apart whenever he felt particularly despondent. Unfortunately, Muroran offers no such distractions, despite my lobbying the Mayor.
Ahh February. I'll be glad to be done with you.    

In sickness and in health

I have been a tad under the weather for the past 10 days or so, hence (yet another) extended silence. I caught a cold from Sanae which means that it was a highly evolved viral pathogen as it managed to successfully jump the species gap between hobbits and the race of men.
Lying in bed amidst my paracetemol fulled delirium, I was, as you would be, assailed by thoughts of Cartesian dualism and how little control we have over our bodies. I didn't want to be sick, sweaty and feeling like my head was swaddled in thick, barbed wool, but my mental feeling had no effect on my physical body. 
Some 350 years ago Descartes proposed that this mind-body divide occurred because each was made from distinct substances; minds are unbounded thinking, feeling substances, whereas bodies are substances that occupy and operate within spatial boundaries. This though raised the problem of causation - if they are so distinct how to do they interact and influence each other?
Three and half centuries of debate, declarations and denouncements later and the short answer is: we don't know. Which in of itself is quite interesting. If you think about what mankind has achieved in the intervening years in so many other areas of human endeavour, from genetics to digitalization, it is all the more remarkable that our understanding of subjective consciousness and its relationship to the physical world is fundamentally no different from what Descartes proposed back in the 17th century.
This in turn poses a disquieting conundrum for modern science, particularly its materialist tendency to reduce everything to detectable, finite matter such at atoms, protons, neurons, etc. Whereas at one level we can confidently state that the brain is composed of neurons and mental activity is determined by how there neurons interact with each other, at the much more subjective level of how we consciously experience the world around us, we have no idea of how neurological activity gives rise to such consciousness.
Now this may all seem a little bit esoteric to everyone beyond my sick bed, but it has some interesting ramifications. The philosopher Thomas Nagel contends that the mind-body problem is not just a problem of the mind, but is essential to "our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history". For Nagel there is fundamental flaw in what he terms 'materialism' (i.e. that everything, as in 'the life, the universe and everything', can be explained in terms of fundamental matter, yes, those atoms, protons, higgs boson particles, etc., that we all know so well).
However, Nagel's line of argument is that if materialism can't account for consciousness then it can't fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life (though with some of my students that doesn't seem to be an issue). And if materialism can't explain life, then it can't fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. For Nagel, the only way to solve this mind-body-cosmos problem is to radically reconceive what we understand science to be.
Deep breaths, people.
Some time during the third day of my illness, my feverish brain grappling with the import of all this, I thought I had the answer. 
It was 42. 

Remember the Hoppo Yonto!

Thursday was Hoppo Yonto day in this part of the world. For those of you not up to speed on East Asian geo-political flash points, the Hoppo Yonto are a group of four islands off the east coast of Hokkaido, the start of the long, arcing Kurile chain. Prior to WWII the islands were Japanese territory, but in the dying days of the conflict the Russians invaded (as Russians do) and have occupied them ever since. The Japanese still consider them an integral part of their nation (they are featured on all official maps of the country), and insist they be returned. 



Lest their citizens forget this ongoing injustice, February 7th is officially designated 'Hoppo Yonto Day' and every year the current prime minister, regardless of party alliance, flies up to the godforsaken reaches of Nemuro and makes a perennial speech about not resting until those communist bastards return what is rightfully Japan's.
The Russians for their part marked the occasion this year by buzzing a pair of fighter jets through Japanese air space off the north west coast of Hokkaido. This prompted the scrambling of a pair of top-guns from Misawa airbase in the midst of a howling blizzard, God love them, to chase those uncouth, sovereignty insulting airborne sons of Putin away.
Back in the day when yes, I was the man, I lived for three years in a small fishing village called Shibetsu, which is famous for (a) its salmon museum; (b) a stretch of purposely designed road that uses car tires to play a melody (you can see a video here); and (c) being the closet town to inhabited Russia. At night, having remixed the road music, I would stand on the harbour front looking across the 25 miles of intervening sea at the bobbling car headlights along the coastal road of Kunashiri. I always found it a tad disconcerting that out there in the far, far East, Japan's closest international neighbours bore a marked resemblance to me (right down to the same bloodshot eyes and hacking smokers cough. That was the JET Programme for you back then).
Anyway, every year on February 7th those of us on JET in that part of Hokkaido would be dispatched to an international symposium in Nemuro where we would hash out the intricate, real-politick machinations needed to stop Japan and Russia going to war. Or at least stop their crab fishermen from doing so.
Our 'hashing' would usually continue long into the dark, bitterly cold night; somewhere around the second bottle of shochu Nicholas would come up with a bit of diplomatic brilliance to set this part of the world to rights, but by the fourth bottle it would have been forgotten amidst the karaoke splendour. The following morning we would be awoken by Hayley's rabid parrot pecking us, and spend another day wrestling with this intractable problem, before being bussed out to Cape Nosappu to peer through the blinding snow at  Habomai Rock and the poor Russian bastards who have to man the light house there.
Then I would return to Shibetsu and wonder (a) how the hell did I ever end up the good f*** here; and (b) if I cracked some holes in the melody road, could I get a 7/8 beat thing going on.

Down Tokyo way

 I was in Tokyo for the weekend attending a rather long (winded) AGM for a teaching organization I am involved with. Even though it is only the beginning of February, the city was already beginning its slow, sure embrace of Spring.
I haven’t been there in over a year and coming back I am always eager to immerse myself in the city’s energetic cosmopolitanism.  Dazzled by the gilded splendor and youthful effervescence of Harajuku, I succumb to the momentary impulse of wanting to live here. Yet, even with the plethora of quirky cafes, bewildering array of ethnic restaurants, and the time-consuming delights of all the second-hand bookstores in Jinbo-cho, I still find myself pulled towards Tokyo’s parks, those brief green respites amidst the concrete.
Early on Sunday morning I walked from my hotel to the meeting venue, a two hour stroll that took me from the far side of Roppongi to Yoyogi Park. A cold, windswept Tokyo at 7:30 on a listless Sunday morning loses a lot of its glamour. Around Roppongi Crossing you see the exhausted touts in the all-night ramen shops slumped over the counter, or red-eyed and vacant, scrolling through their beloved smart phones. The shuttered shops at Omotesando silent and aloof, the crenelated and crinkled Prada store brittle in the harsh morning sunlight.
But then you reach the top of Tatedori, cross the bridge and slip through the towering Tori into Meiji-Jingumae. It’s like gently stepping through a sepia toned looking glass. Though with lots more camera toting Chinese tourists.
The sliding sunshine filtered down through the leafy trees (the leafy trees! We won’t see them in Muroran until the beginning of May), the soft trodden gravel underfoot, the whirr-click, the whirr-click of tourist cameras. I tarried awhile, but unfortunately, only a while. The meeting relentlessly beckoned and I had to be there to make the quorum.
From the all too brief sublime to the long, grimly quotient. Could it be...possibly...an over-egged analogy for life?
Or just a blog post too much in love with its own pathos?
You, the reader, decide.