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.