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.