Out and about

As winter's icy grip slackens our thawing thoughts turn to spring.
...
Yes, I'll give you a moment to savor the alliteration.
...
We took ourselves off for a walk last weekend, the first one that didin't necessitate dressing up like Scott of the Antarctic and bringing 2 days worth of food supplies with us, just in case.
We headed for Chikyu Misaki, Cape Earth, which has been voted Hokkaido's most scenic spot by, well, I don't who exactly. But whoever they are they would do with getting out and and about Hokkaido a bit more.
Anyway, as there was a bit of a biting westerly wind blowing (I know, I know, alliteratively effortless), we made for the shelter of the sea side, descending a winding trail to the city's boarded up Marine Research Centre and the sheltered cove it overlooks.
We spent an hour doing little else besides enjoying the sunshine and aimlessly pottering around, though Cian did attempt some fishing by lobbing large rocks into the sea hoping he'd hit something.
He didn't, so we're planning to return this weekend, weather permitting, with fishing rods and nets as Sanae reckons "there's food to be had in these waters". Though given past experience we may just end up eating seaweed again.

Blackstairmountain

On Saturday morning as I was browsing the Irish Times online, I came across the following intriguing headline: "Ruby Walsh travels to Japan to team up with Blackstairmountain". I was, well, intrigued, so I read on. Seems that Blackstairmountain (who is a horse by the way, lest some of you were thinking that a mountain range from south Carlow had relocated to Japan) had come east to take part in next month's Nakayama Grand Jump, the richest grand national in the world. On Saturday he was running in the Pegasus Jump Stakes, the designated 2 mile and a furlong qualifier for the big race. Trained by Willie Mullins. And Ruby (sings "Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!") had made the 20 hour journey to ride her.
Like I said intrigued. Patriotically so. Years ago, I used to take quite an interest in the horses; summer evenings spent with Aunty May at Leopardstown, the big days out at the Curragh, the stop everything for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, and even working as a security guard at the final fence at the Irish Grand National in Fairyhouse.
So I called up to Sanae, "Are they showing the racing from Nakayama on television today?" They were, but only from three o' clock and the Pegasus Jump Stakes was off from two.
But that wasn't going to put Sanae off. The girl likes her horses too. How much so I was about to find out.
She gets on the internet, tap-tap-tappity-tap, makes a phone call to 'some people she knows'.
Who are?
'In the know', is all she replies.
By now she's got this slightly manic gleam in her eyes.
Turns out that the race is being screened at the Japan Racing Association's (JRA) off-track Tote facility here in Muroran. So, yes we can see the race.
More importantly though for Sanae is that we can also bet on the race.
Down to the JRA we go.
As soon as we enter the complex you could physically see Sanae's heart begin to race as a excited blush spread across her cheeks, her breathing quickened and her hands started trembling from the sudden surge of adrenaline. The manic gleam in her eyes had been replaced by one of complete obsession.
"Is Mammy alright?"
"I think so Cian, but I have only seen her like this once before. At Limerick Junction when we were on our honeymoon and she was pregnant with you. I thought it was just her hormones, but now I am not so sure..."
I turn to confirm this with Sanae, and she is ... gone.
Disappeared.
We scan the hall and can't see her anywhere.
Ten minutes later she returns clutching a betting slip. In those ten minutes she has learned how to use the Tote and put a three thousand yen each way bet on Blackstairmountain.

Without a word to the rest of the increasingly unsettled Gaynor-Takahashi family. We have a few minutes before the off so we sit down. And then the comments start coming from her.
"This would be a good place to come in winter when the weather is too bad to go anywhere else. You could spend the day here. It would be good fun".
I look around at the overwhelmingly male, overwhelming over 60 clientele, crunched into hard, uncomfortable chairs, chewing on pencils, the pages from the racing papers strewn around them, fueled on diet Pepsi and Lipovitamin D (the Japanese equivalent of Red Bull).
"Yeah, fun".
A few minutes later.
"Lot of old people here. It must be fun when you are retired to be able to spend the whole day here, enjoying the races".
I am not sure but I think 'enjoying' for Sanae means "gambling with your weekly pension".
And finally;
"You know, you can gamble online too. And on races overseas".
I looked long and hard at my wife then, or rather who I used to think my wife was. This was a different  Sanae, a Sanae from the dark side.
Darth Sanae, the gambler.
And Cian is Luke. Which means I am the, eh, Queen of Naboo.
Throughout all of this I have been explaining to Cian that Blackstairmountain is an Irish horse, he has come all the way to Japan for this race, and if he has come all this way his trainer must think he has a good chance of winning.
Cian wants to know if horses get jet lag.
Good question.
No idea.
Really should ask the experts. Barry?
Anyway, amongst the three of us there is a lot of talk about Blackstairmountain. Now this isn't lost on the regular punters scattered around us. Nor the fact that I am the only foreigner in the place; I could well have been the first foreigner there ever. As the clock ticks down to two o'clock there is a slow but steady stream of regulars heading to the betting windows.
The odds on Blackstairmountain started out at 7.2 - 1 (yes, they decimalize the odds here. It's Japan after all). With Sanae leading the way, the Muroran money starts flowing down from the north and the odds begin to shorten. This spooks the big boys down in Tokyo and more money goes on the Irish challenger. So that by the off she is the favorite with her odds down to 4.3 - 1, ridiculously short odds for a horse that has never run on this course before, a fast right hand course too, out of stalls and she may well have jet lag.

I try explaining this to Sanae but she is in the grip of a passion that obliterates all else and her world is now Blackstairmountain, 2 miles one furlong and the finishing post.
They're off! (You can watch the race here).
Well, the other 12 horses are off. Blackstairmountain doesn't seem to really want to leave her stalls, ambles out and within five seconds of the start I can tell that we've just blown three thousand yen. As have numerous other punters around us who have immediately begun to glare in our direction and snarl.
The horse finishes 9th out of 13 and if I had my way she would be for sale in Tesco's meat section on Monday morning.
I take Cian's hand and pull my wife out of there before a mob of increasingly irate pensioners turn on us.
"That was fun", says Sanae. "We should do it again next month".

Home

As the plane swung low across wind flecked Tokyo Bay on final approach to Haneda airport I thought to myself "it's good to be back". Which made me realize that I have come to consider Japan 'home'.
Which it is, I suppose, but as an emigrant its a little disconcerting to find yourself pining for fluffy white rice as opposed to mashed potatoes. 
I had a 90 minute lay over in Haneda - just enough time to do my souvenir shopping and hope I could appease Cian with a scale model of the Japanese government's official plane (Air Force Ichi) in lieu of a Texan fire engine. I sweetened the deal by adding a strawberry mousse to the package.
Then it was a turbulent hour and a half up to Chitose where, the Captain informed us, the temperature was currently minus five. Did the usual mad dash to the airport train station, made the Hakodate train and was back home in Muroran by 10:30 that morning.
Ahh, 'home'. Who'd have guessed I would find it here?

LAX

Or Los Angeles International Airport to give it its full title. The airport is reminiscent of the old Bangkok airport in the mid 1990's; dated, ramshackle, confined, badly in need of refurbishment if not outright demolition. As I arrived on a domestic flight I had to walk nearly a kilometre to get to the international terminal on a narrow sidewalk, all the time weaving my way through lines of grumpy people waiting on pick-ups, taxis, shuttle buses, or just waiting. There seemed to have been a rampant outbreak of food poisoning prior to my arrival as there were vivid splashes of vomit on the sidewalk and dripping off one of the escalators. The noise was insistent, very LA I suspect; the constant irritated beeping of horns, yells, shouted negotiations between the taxi drivers as to which car picked up which passengers.
Inside the airport was no better. Lines at security were long and slow, and what our American cousins term 'airside facilities' (i.e. duty free shopping, restaurants, cafes, etc.) consisted of a couple of kiosks and a packed 'Samuel Adams' cafe. And nothing else. And this is supposed to be land of the brave and the free and the consumer. I am afraid Cian there will be no fire engine this time. For that you can blame the resolutely socialist infrastructure planning of the airport authorities.
I should have gone with the good old boys to Houston. Instead I have 12 long hours to Tokyo ahead of me, during which time Wednesday, March 20th will disappear in one of those space-time continuum paradoxes that afflict Michael J. Fox and trans-Pacific flights.

The Jet Set

So, it's just after seven on Tuesday evening and I am sitting in the departure lounge at Dallas-Fort Worth airport with some good old boys watching the college basketball.
I have no interest whatsoever in college basketball but I am grunting along with them in all the right places to maintain my newly achieved 'good old boy' status.

Though I need a pair of cowboy boots.
And a considerably larger gut to truly qualify.
I am at the start of my 24 hour journey back to Muroran, and even though it is still winter and, well, still Muroran, I will be glad to get back.
It is indicative of just how spectacularly dull Dallas is that it has forced me to write those words.
Oh, the good old boys are all leaving - their flight to Houston has just been called. And yes, I did say "I'll catch you down the road, pardner".
Anyway, Dallas. Bland beyond despairing disbelief. Or certainly the downtown, where I was staying and attending a conference. If I had a car, sorry 3.5 liter, V-6, 290 horsepower built in the US of goddamn A Ford Explorer (which seems to be the jeep de jure here in the Lone Star state) and got out and about a bit then maybe my opinion would have been different.
But I doubt it.
I came to the airport early this evening to see if I could buy a fire engine (and Cian, if you ever read this years in the future, let me apologize once again. But Daddy did try to find you one), because the only shops in downtown Dallas are 7-11, a PVC drugstore, and rather incongruously, a Neiman Marcus store (a very upmarket clothing shop for the failed fashionistas out there). And nothing else. Just street after street of boarded up store fronts and entire skyscrapers with 'For Sale/Lease' signs in front of them.
'Downtown' to my mind means the bustling centre of a city, predominantly given over to shopping and banks. Not vacant office buildings, boarded up windows and advice from the hotel concierge not to go for a walk after dark.
Alright, have to go, my flight has been called. I have a three hour layover in Los Angeles, so if the lines for security aren't too long, I will write another post from there.

Yee

and indeed, hah!
This blog is coming to you from the fine city of Dallas in God Bless Us One and ALL, Texas, in the United States of goddamned America.
I have only just arrived after three flights and close on 24 hours of traveling and to be honest, I am jet lagged out of my mind, so this post is probably not going to make all that much sense (do they ever, I here you say).
At the moment I am experiencing an ongoing swaying motion that has me lurching left and right to compensate for the residual air turbulence as my body reckons I'm still flying.
Mentally maybe.
So Dallas. First impressions are of the airport, the interstate, big Ford pick-ups, the Dallas-Fort Worth Gun Show this weekend, and the Dallas Morning News' comprehensive guide to St Patrick's Day festivities in the city. Speaking of which, I went for a brief walk a couple of blocks around the hotel and came across a Mexican Bar called 'Sol Irlandes', where Seamus Stout will providing the live music from nine tonight. 
You couldn't make it up.
I am ostensibly here to attend (and present at) the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, but as The Dubliner Pub is organizing a 'Block Party' all day on Sunday and, yes! 'With or Without U2' are performing, I may just have to rearrange my priorities. 

Storm

In early March of 1999 I was in my car heading reluctantly home to Shibetsu after a weekend spent amidst the bright lights of big city Obihiro. I was trying to outrun a fast approaching storm and even as I left the city for the four hour drive back, the wind was picking up and the snow had started to fall. I should have left earlier, much earlier, but hubris and a hangover had kept me from going. So I pushed it, my trusty Cynos driving dangerously fast on route 38 and I arrived in Kushiro shortly after six. By now the snow was falling heavily and being blown hard by the ever strengthening wind. Usually I stopped in Kushiro for dinner, but I kept on, hoping my luck would hold all the way home.
It didn't.
About half an hour out of Kushiro on the rapidly disappearing road to Nakashibetsu I was stopped by a police car. Just beyond them a large barrier had been swung across the road. They had closed the road and I was diverted west, towards Shibecha. A little further on another barrier loomed into view and I had to make another turn left. The wind was howling now, flinging the snow in great white sheets across the road. I had to dim my headlights as full beam was reflecting off the snow and effectively blinding me. I crawled along at less than 20 kph, trying to steer through the drifts that were increasingly blocking my progress.
That part of east Hokkaido is flat open countryside, one of the few arable plains in all of Japan. The farms are big and open; the fields are not bordered by ditches or trees the way they are back home. Instead there are huge swathes of open land to make it easier to use farm machinery and allow crops to catch as much sunlight as possible during the short summers out there. In winter though, this untrammeled space means that the wind can blow unimpeded, picking up the dry, powdery snow off the fields and piling it metres high across roads and against the windward side of houses.
The storm got stronger, the wind driven snow obscuring everything; I could no longer discern where the road was and slowed to a stop. Immediately the snow began to drift around the car. I tried to drive on but my wheels spun uselessly. I was well and truly stuck. And I had no idea where I was stuck. Somewhere northwest of Kushiro, but closer to Shibecha than Nakashibetsu.
I spent along, anxious, sleepless night in my car. I had enough sense to turn off the engine and was lucky to have had a sleeping bag with me, so I crawled into that and waited out the storm, praying that one of the big transport trucks so common to that part of the world wouldn't crash into me. I didn't leave my hazard lights on as I didn't want to run down the battery.
My dawn the next morning, the wind had abated somewhat but I knew little else beyond that. The snow had drifted up and over the top of my car and both doors were frozen shut. Just after eight a road crew finally got to me and dug me out of the snow. They were quite taken aback when a gaijin got out to thank them in bad Japanese for rescuing him. Turns out that over 60 cars had to be dug out from the roads in the region that morning. I finally got back to Shibestu at midday, following a slow moving slow plough for much of the way.

Last weekend a similar, albeit considerably more severe, storm hit the same region. Nine people died in it, the worst death toll from a single winter storm in Hokkaido in over 40 years. A woman and her four children were caught in a snow drift just outside of Nakashibetsu. The mother called a number of times for help, but such was the ferocity of the wind and the amount of snow that had drifted onto the road that it took the rescue services 2 hours to travel the four kilometers to where the car was stuck. By that time the car was buried under a 2 metre high snow drift. When they finally got the car door open they found that the family had died from carbon monoxide poisoning; the mother had kept the engine running to keep the car warm, but the drifting snow had blocked the exhaust pipe so the fumes had been forced under and then into the car.
Elsewhere, people were found frozen to death in fields and by the side of the road after they had abandoned their snow trapped cars and attempted to walk to safety, in some cases only a few hundred metres from their homes. The saddest tragedy was of a 53 year old, recently widowed father and his 9 year old daughter. They had gone to the local town to buy a cake for Hina Matsuri or Doll's Festival, which is traditionally a day of celebration for girls. On their way back home their car got stuck in the snow. Again, the father made repeated calls for help but the rescue services were already busy answering similar emergency calls all across the area and couldn't respond. Anxious that he was running low on petrol and wouldn't be able to keep the car warm, he decided to walk to a friends house some 700 metres up the road. The following morning the police found father and daughter covered in snow, huddled in front of a barn, halfway between the car and the house. The father had frozen to death, but in dying he had saved the life of his daughter as he had covered her with his body, clasping her close to him thus saving her from the worst of the wind and the cold. She survived the night with only some minor frostbite.

There is a similar storm forecast for tomorrow but the hope is that people will have learnt from the terrible events of last week and stay at home and wait for it to blow past.

March

The first of March. 
Oh how the spirit soars. Especially when I look out the kitchen window and see this...

The first snow of what the weather forecast warned would be a three day blizzard with an expected 50 centimetres of snow by tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile Cian is slumped on the sofa with a feverish cold, falling in and out of a fitful, cough racked sleep.

And what does my man Seneca have to say about such a sorry state of affairs?
"The wise man is joyful, happy and calm, unshaken; he lives on a plane with the gods. Now go, question yourself; if you are never downcast, if your mind is not harassed by any apprehension, through anticipation of what is to come, if day and night your soul keeps on its even and unswerving course, upright and content with itself, then you have attained to the greatest good that mortals can possess".
Fine words, but nothing about shoveling a half metre of snow, an activity I doubt many gods would undertake.