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.