The Gambler

Sanae was at it again, throwing bad money after worse. Today was the 59th running of the Arima Kinen (the Arima Memorial Stakes for all you monolinguals - shame on you), and Mammy snuck off down to the local Rice-Paddy Powers for a bit of 'an auld flutter'.
And true to form, she lost.
Sigh.

The Festive Season

There is not much to do in Muroran over Christams. Yes, I know, a rather controversial statement to make but, hey, that's us here at Teach Gaynor-Takahashi, always pushing the media envelope. Unlike back home where the festive season is replete with horse racing (hello Mother and Barry), Christmas swims (hello Uncle Willy), frenzied sale shopping (hello my sisters), inter-provincial rugby (hello Uncle Anthony), things are decidedly muted in this part of the world. Part of this is due to the climate of course - there's not an awful lot you can do when the mercury is resolutely in the minus and it's blizzarding. Shovel snow of course, twice in the same day (as we did yesterday), though that doesn't exactly fill you brimful of joie de vivre. Geography plays a part too for if we were living in Tokyo there would a multitude of cultural events across a multitude of museums, galleries, and concert halls to attend. Here in Muroran we have Sky movies. Mind you in Memuro, where Sanae's mother lives and where we are due to spend the next week, we don't even have that. Nor the internet. There is electricity though, and running water, so by 19th century standards we are larging it.
All this is a long preamble to the long walk myself and Cian took yesterday for the lack of anything better to do. There's only so many times you can re-watch 'Arthur's Christmas' before the suspense wears off (Will Santa get the present to Gwen's house before she wakes up on Christmas morning? He will. Each and every time). So off we went, out into the great white yonder, for a stroll/tramp around the extended neighborhood.
It was cold.
Well, it was cold for me, it was fine for Cian as we were moving at his pace. This is a considerably slower land speed than what Daddy is used to. You would think I would have adapted having been married to a hobbit for a close on a decade now, but no, I feckin froze. Matters weren't helped by all the enforced stops we had to make as 'old man Cian' kept needing a 'break' every few minutes. What normally takes me a brisk 40 minutes took close on 2 hours and by the end of it I knew how Aspley Cherry-Garrad must have felt.

The rest of the day

Well, that was a jolly start to the festive season, I think you will agree. A photograph to send terror into the tiny, terrified hearts of nephews and nieces everywhere: "If you don't go to bed right this moment, we'll call Uncle Brian..." Then just watch those little feet pitter panic patter to bed.
There was a distinctly militaristic feel to the rest of the day. Cian got his wished for aircraft carrier and immediately upon taking it out of the box declared the house was now at 'Code Orange'. He then pointed the ship in the general direction of China/North Korea/Russia and got his fighter jets to fly a succession of 'sorties' throughout the morning. The aim, he announced at a terse 10:00a.m. press briefing, was to give tactical air support to Santa (codename "the Big Red One") as he flew over some of the world's less Christian countries. It was only when Google Earth had confirmed that Santa, sorry, 'the Big Red One', had successfully arrived over Poland and thus entered NATO's airspace, that we were all permitted to "stand down".
Sanae's presents, yes presents plural, had been arriving in the weeks prior to Christmas (a down jacket and the Japanese version of Lord of the Rings books), so there was nothing for her to take out from under the Christmas tree besides Cian's wrapping paper. To cheer her up I got her the complete Japanese horse racing guide to 2015 and gosh, but you should have seen the way her eyes lit up. Like Las Vegas on a Friday night. Or Macao on any night of the year.
Daddy got a long hard look at his own mortality, and an assortment of calendars.
Then it was off to work/school for everyone as this is Japan and, despite the best efforts of Muroran's resident pair of young blue-eyed Mormons (soon to be the subject of another blog), the goat-sacrificing, witch-burning, whale-eating heathens of this country remains resolutely non-Christian.

"It's not the years, honey...

it's the mileage".

Thursday, December 25th, 6:07a.m. 45 years gone.

Twas the night before Christmas....

And all was quiet in the Teach Gaynor-Takahashi. As I write this we are down to "T minus three hours and counting", though I am not too sure what the 'T' stands for. Mind you it won't be quiet for long as there is a desperate need for some wrapping to be done, but a certain somebody has yet to be taken by the "soft embalmer of the still midnight". To help things along I tried reading Keats' poem to him repeatedly but it seemed to make the boy irritated rather than drowsy. Now the problem is that both Mammy and Daddy are all too ready to be embalmed, long before midnight (we both had work today and more tomorrow), but placing presents under the tree still 'wrapped' in their Amazon boxes isn't really keeping with the Christmas spirit. So it is a shared can of Red Bull and iPods on - 'One Republic' for her, 'Vampire Weekend' for me and many more (metaphorical) miles to go before we sleep.

Safe

Well we, here in the blessed town of Muroran where we are all God's children, dodged the weather bomb. We had some strong winds on Tuesday night but thankfully nothing too serious - no blackouts and hence no need to go the "full MacGyver" when it came to our ablations.
Further east though they bore the brunt of nature's fury ("Rarrrrrgghhh!!!" etc.) as the photos below show.
Mind you, there is a good side to all of this fury ("Rarrrrrrghhh!!!"); there is a terrific swell pounding away down at the beach and while dropping, it looks like there will still be something left come Saturday morning.

The weather bomb

In Japan wind speeds are measured in metres per second. So, instead of 130 kilometres per hour, the weather forecast is given as 35 metres per second. This is what they are forecasting for Hokkaido tonight, rising to 40 metres tomorrow (145 kph). As of this afternoon, 3:00pm Japan time the weather chart looks like this:

By 9:00am tomorrow morning it's due to look like this.

The barometric low of 948 millibars around which all those jammed lines are furiously circulating is equivalent to the strongest typhoon to have hit Japan this year. However, unlike the typhoon, this storm is bringing with it sub zero gale force winds and snow. Lots and lots of it. The local NHK weather forecaster, with a noticeable tremor in his voice, told us all to prepare for upwards of 80cms of snow between now and Thursday. All schools in Muroran have already decided to close tomorrow and may do so again on Thursday.
Our big concern is a blackout. Our house is what they call 'all denka', all electricity: everything from the cooking to the heating to the toilet flush is powered by electricity. Should we suffer a prolonged power cut we would have a hard time keeping the house warm (and pleasant smelling).
But all is not lost. Daddy's accumulation over the years of various camping tools means we have a gas stove for everyone in the family, along with head lamps, water bottles, down sleeping bags and, ahem, a portable 'field' toilet. Sanae is really hoping it doesn't come to that though Cian appears to relish the chance to 'get back to nature'.

The Election

Japan goes to the polls tomorrow in a snap national election. Or rather, most of Japan doesn't go to the polls tomorrow. There are two locked in certainties about this election: the first is that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) led by their reactionary, nepotist, politically inbred prime minister Shinzo Abe, will win by a landslide. The second certainty is that voter turnout will be the lowest since the second world war. Here in Hokkaido the consensus is that less than 50% of the electorate will bother turning out and this could drop even further as we are due a bad blow on Sunday with forecasts of 40cms + of snow due to fall. No doubt the LDP will describe their victory as a 'mandate' from 'the Japanese people' to continue their course of fiscal mismanagement and insulting nationalism, but the real winner of the election will be 'apathy'. Which is a pity as the last thing this country needs is a continuing disengagement, particularly by young people, from how the country is politically governed. And the problems are mounting. Earlier this month saw a second successive quarter of minus GDP growth which meant that Japan was officially in recession. The Yen has fallen off a cliff and is now worth 40% less against the dollar than it was in December 2012 (when Abe came to power). This great news for the nation's exporters (accounting for 14% of GDP), whereas consumers (accounting for 61%), who are heavily dependent on imports particularly of oil and food, have been hammered. But because Japanese consumers increasingly don't vote, the LDP really doesn't care. It does care about farmers, and old people, and especially old farmers as these are the sort of people who do vote, so more central heated community centers for pensioners in small, rural villages where the average age is 75+, whereas in towns and cities the waiting lists for kindergarten continue to grow while class sizes in schools are set to increase from 35 to 40 pupils.
Unfortunately, I don't get to vote - apparently "no taxation without representation" doesn't translate into Japanese. Mind you that didn't stop the local LDP candidate, one Manabu Horie (or 'Kojack' as I like to call him) sending me a postcard appealing for my vote. I am not sure what this says about Kojack's, sorry, Horie-san's political acumen, but he obviously knows feck all about the Japanese constitution. Sources close to the one person in Teach Gaynor-Takahashi who does have the vote has said she plans to cast in favor of the communist party candidate. If, it isn't snowing too heavily...

8 today

'Child' no longer fits. He has outgrown the word, both physically and mentally. He's a boy, determined to become his own man. Boundaries set by his parents are being probed and pushed; he increasingly feels the need to stake out his own territory. Only uncertainty holds him back. But that will come with experience, that ever expanding encounter with the wider world. More and more his world and his place in it.
In short he's growing up.
As he should.
Happy birthday Cian.

Coming home

Singapore airport at 4:30am on a Sunday morning. Not exactly swinging but not exactly quiet either. The first flights leave at 6:00am and besides Tokyo, travelers are bound for Guangzhao, Macao, Bhutan, and Manila, exotic locales one and all. And it would seem from the furious gift buying going on in the duty-free area, that these exotic locales are desperately bereft of Marlboro cigarettes and Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey. I content myself with buying a bottle of water and Joshua Ferris' latest book, To rise again at a decent hour. At pre-boarding security I have to hand over my still unopened bottle of water while the Johnny Walker laden hoards clink and clank their way onto the plane. I am sure this is a metaphor for all that is wrong with early 21st century capitalism but at 4:30am I am not up to figuring out what that metaphor may be. At least they let me keep the book.
The flight back to Tokyo is uneventful, though as we were skirting the north west coast of the Philippines, Tyhoon Hagupit reached out with one of its spirals and gave the plane a couple of shakes just to remind us of who is really in charge up here at 39,000 feet. I don't watch movies much any more on flights as (a) they are usually commercial fodder that actively shrink your brain; and (b) I am increasingly suffering from presbyopia (long sightedness) which means I can't focus on anything to close to my eyes like, for example, the small video screen on the back of the seat on a passenger airplane. Vanity (and laziness) has kept me from going to the optician, so I suffer in silence. Or I read, which is much more rewarding than suffering.
Land in Narita airport, gather my bag and then hop on a bus to travel across an hour and a half across Tokyo to Haneda airport. Narita is Tokyo's international gateway airport but does its damnest to make going anywhere else in Japan nigh next to impossible. ANA have all of two flights a day from Narita to Sapporo which means everybody else bar the lucky two hundred or so have to take their weary, jet-lagged, constipated bodies across the city and check-in at Haneda for their domestic flights. Surely there is a metaphor there relating to the sclerosis affecting the Japanese economy but I am not going to indulge you all.
Arrive at Haneda to find that all flights to and from Sapporo have been cancelled until further notice due to heavy snow. Also find the dude who has sold me his 7' 8" Bruce Jones fish and has kindly come out to Haneda to hand it over. So, there I am, wandering around the airport carrying an eight foot long surfboard and wondering how an earth I am going to get it and me to a hotel if I have to spend the night in Tokyo.
Thankfully, an hour or so later ANA announce that the snow has stopped falling and they are resuming their flights albeit two hours late. I fly up to Sapporo on a Pokemon plane surrounded by a large, boisterous Chinese tour group who keep cracking each other up by repeatedly saying "Watashi wa...". The plane is full and I am worried that Bruce may not make it out of the cargo hold in one piece.
He does though, may Buddha bless Japanese baggage handlers. It is -9 when I step out of the airport and trudge through the snow which is an even greater temperature swing than when I arrived in Singapore. Neither I nor Bruce know quite what to make of this. I think Bruce wants to return to Tokyo. My car is covered under nearly half a foot of snow and it takes me nearly 30 minutes to dig it out. I want to return to Singapore but instead I return to Muroran and the warmth of my family. Though Sanae still doesn't know about Bruce.

I am in Singapore at the moment, ostensibly to attend a conference, but really it is to escape the abject poverty our lives have been thrown into after Sanae's reckless abandonment of our life-savings to the 'gee-gees'. At the moment I am 'pursuing' employment options for the three of us. It looks like I will get a job with a Punjab Indian wrecking crew doing work on the MRT line extension; Sanae might get a job at a Japanese hairdressers, but it looks like we will have to send Cian across the Malacca Straits to Indonesia as apparently this bleeding-heart bastion of liberalism in south-east Asia doesn't permit children under the age of 15 to work.
Mind you, the heat could take a bit of getting used to. When I left Muroran early on Wednesday morning, there was a couple of centimeters of snow on the ground and the thermometer was stuck at -2. When I arrived the same evening in Singapore the mercury was bubbling up at +33. That is a swing of 35 degrees which knocked the living (albeit frozen) shite out of my body.
The hotel I am staying in is just off Killiney road, which is connected to Dalkey road, which in turn leads you onto Dublin Road. There are, not surprisingly, also two Irish bars in close proximity. It would appear Bono and the lads invested in some prime Singaporean real estate.

Killiney road, Singapore: home to the best Irish ramen

Japan Cup - a brief eulogy

Well, that didn't go well. The Gaynor-Takahashi Christmas fund has been utterly depleted and our only hope is that Aunty Ciara will divert one of those poor donkeys she's always sending to Africa over to Muroran.
Mr. D, thank you for the tip, albeit a terrible one. Not too sure what to say to our man in Clare with his retrospective punditry. I don't about west of the Shannon but time travel has yet to be invented in this part of the world. Mind you, none of this has deterred Sanae - the Emperor's Cup is coming up at the end of this month and she is already casting her eye around the house to see what she hock down at the local pawn shop....

The Gaynor-Takahashi Turf Appreciation Society - an appeal

An appeal specifically aimed at our regular punster west of the Shannon.
This Saturday will see the running of the Japan Cup, one of Japan's (and indeed the world's) most prestigious flat races. Not to mention one of the wealthiest in terms of prize money - the lucky fleet footed horse will run away with 1.8 million Euros (which, according to last week's property supplement in the Irish Times, will just about get you a three-bedroom family home in some of the odd numbered postal districts west of the Phoenix Park). It is an invitational only event and brings together the best horses of the flat season from all over the world which, according to the the organizers, enables "local racehorses to have the opportunity to compete against horses of an international calibre and to promote goodwill within the racing community worldwide". It is held on the last Sunday of November each year which means, yes almanac fans, this coming Sunday.
And why am I telling you this?
Trading Leather.
To those aficionados of all things equestrian this needs no explanation. To the rest of you have a look on YouTube at the 2013 Irish Derby.
Now I'm pretty sure Jim Bolger isn't taking the horse all the way to Japan just to "promote goodwill with the racing community" or any of that shite. But I need this verified, and verified by those with their noses in the stables over in Coolcullen (figuratively speaking, though with Clare people you'd never know...)
So Mr. Keane, your expertise please. Could this be another Blackstairmountain or should we use the money instead to buy Cian a half decent birthday present?

I am of course loathe to mention of any this to Sanae for fear of what I may unleash...

And we're back ... again!

I am, I will have to admit, a tad tentative about writing this. I'm not sure where October went - it wasn't for a lack of topics. In fact the opposite; there was so much going on that I figuratively threw my hands up and kind of hoped the blog would write itself.
It didn't, but it took me nearly two months to figure that out.
What spurred this 'comeback' was an anxious phone call from a Japanese friend last Friday wondering if everything was alright. My contract at the university finishes at the end of next March and he was concerned that I might have already departed for foreign shores given my continuing online silence.
Not yet, but as the dark days of winter descend, I may well give the idea some serious thought. And Sanae will no doubt tell me to 'seriously cop on' reminding of my fatherly and husbandly responsibilities, and enough already with the whiny, introspective shite. She'll probably add something about the snow needing to be cleared from in front of the house.
So, we're back and we will have to go back as I have a lot to catch up on. I'll take it in reverse chronological order, beginning with last weekend. (This weekend mainly involved surfing and applying a couple of gallons of wood preservative to the wooden siding on the exterior of the house.)
It was unseasonably mild and misty last Sunday so Cian and myself decided to go for a walk. Well, I wanted to go for a walk and Cian just wanted to get out of the house in case Mammy made him do any more Japanese homework.
First off we stopped at the spring at the end of the road where we found a rather large and lethargic cuttlefish. I think the old boy was preparing to shuffle off to the great aquarium in the sky. Cian had found a baby cuttlefish here the week previously which was duly added to our pet collection (currently: one goldfish, three cuttlefish, and eight loaches. Over the summer this was augmented by some seasonal and very noise crickets and a stag beetle).
After that we headed up into the hills behind our house. We initially planned to follow the gravel road up but Cian considered that too tame so instead we struck off into the mist shrouded forest. Where we unexpectedly came across a deer.

As we stood there for a couple of moments staring uncertainly at each other it brought back memories of the film 'The Deer Hunter'. Micheal Cimino's masterpiece (though Pauline Kael denounced it as 'fascist') came out in 1978 but didn't intrude on my consciousness until the summer of 1982. In June of that year RTE planned to show live the WBC World Heavyweight Championship boxing match Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney (father of George and one of the original Guildford Four). The fight was taking place in Las Vegas which, with the time difference, meant that the fight would be screening at 4:00am. Back then Irish people weren't minded to stay up all night watching tv, because, basically, they couldn't: programming usually stopped some time around midnight and off to bed you were expected to go. But what with the local interest RTE decided to break new ground with this and transmit live. To try and keep the Irish nation awake, they decided to show the Deer Hunter prior to the fight, the first time it was to be screened on broadcast tv. And in the build up they screened lots of promo clips of soldiers, and explosions, and deer, and men hanging off helicopters, and more deer, and all of it seemingly taking place in a jungle in Africa as to me, at 11, that was where all the jungles were. And to the 11 year old me, it looked utterly, feckin, awesome!
But as I was only 11 there wasn't any feckin way I was going to get to see it either. As it turned out not many people did. On the night in question, about an hour into the film, the transmitter up on top of Three Rock Mountain shorted, blacking out screens across the nation. Which meant a generation of Irish people grew up thinking that Russian roulette was a communist card game.
(Actually they didn't as RTE re-screened the film the following night). Anyway all this kind of meandered through my mind as I observed the deer before he bolted into the trees and disappeared. The rest of the walk was pretty uneventful, so I'll end the post here.

 

Our day off

Last Monday Cian stumbled out of bed at the usual time of 6:15 and wandered into the kitchen to find it empty.
On a Monday morning.
So downstairs he went to Mammy and Daddy's bedroom to find out just what the good feck was going on. We, hoping for a lie in to some utterly mad time like seven o'clock, blearily told him today was a public holiday and he didn't have to go to school this morning. Or get up early for that matter.
Later on at breakfast time Cian wanted to know why today, Monday, was a holiday. Sanae whispered an explanation to him in Japanese. It was a bit strange. There were nods in my direction and the word 'Daddy' was repeated a couple of times, but I didn't pay too much attention as I was washing the dishes and trying to catch the pre-eleven o'clock sports news on RTE Radio 1.
After breakfast it got even stranger. Cian brought his cup and plates over to be washed and said "Thank you Daddy for making my breakfast", something he never, ever does. Similarly Sanae was quite deferential to me, politely agreeing to my suggestions on how to spend the day off. And this is something she never, ever does either.
It wasn't until I noticed what the public holiday was for that I realized what was actually going on.
It was "Respect for the Aged Day".
I spend the rest of the day kicking their cheeky fecking arses.

We're back!

What stimulated me into finally breaking my silence wasn't the guilt I felt about failing to reflect on our trip home this summer, or last week's surprisingly enjoyable visit to the Pacific Northwest, but rather the lead story on last night's NHK news.
It was about old people. Really old people. Specifically those over a 100. Do you know how many there are in Japan?
A hundred?
A thousand?
Ten thousand?
Try 58,820.
Yep, there are more centenarians alive here than the entire population of Waterford city (and yes, at times, you would be hard pressed to tell then apart). Females account for 87% of the total which means Sanae is probably going to remarry after I shuffle off this mortal coil at 78 (the average life expectancy for an Irish male, though you could knock off a couple years for the induced stress from having to participate in Cian's school's PTA - the subject of another day's post).
Apparently this total is increasing by three to four thousand people a year which very much makes Japan a country for old men and women. Put it this way its probably the only country in the world where my father could come and visit and be referred to as a 'young fella'.
Back in August I volunteered at the Iron Man Triathalon held around Lake Toya. I was at the finish line translating for the foreign competitors ("Arrrrggghh, can't...move...too...much...pain....aarrrggg"). The third last competitor over the finishing line, after competing a 3.8km swim, 180km bike ride, and a 42.km marathon in 16 hours 52 minutes (just three minutes inside the cut-off time) was Toshio Shiomoto from Miyage. He's 73 years old.
No excuses folks.

The Niseko Classic

The Niseko Classic, or 'Le Tour de Niseko' as us aficionados of all things two wheels refer to it, was held last Sunday week. It was the first time the event was held and about 200 hundred of us pedaled up to the start on a bright, warm morning. Or rather starts as there was a 140km course and a 70km course. I had toyed with the idea of doing the longer run but after a 40km practice ride up to Forest Kozan and back my arse said definitely 'no'. And it wasn't too keen on the 70km course either.
The longest I had previously ridden was 50kms last year in the Cavan kayak-run-ride competition. My training this year had consisted of two there-and-back rides to Forest Kozan, one in June, the other earlier this month. With Cian's help I figured out that came to 80km and after Cian and myself had mentally wrestled with the double figures subtraction we finally concluded that that was 10km more than the race distance.
No problem then.
So last Sunday I woke up at 4:20, ate a power breakfast and motored off to Rankoshi where the 70km race was due to start. It was to finish at Hirafu in a sort of loop-and-a-bit course, which turned out to be a bit problematic. According to Google maps it would take me 2 hours to get there so I left just after five to ensure I was there in plenty of time for registration.
Google maps is a lying sack of shit.
I was there by 6:30. The only thing earlier than me was the dawn. Eventually the organizers and other competitors arrived and we got ourselves set for our 8:30 start. Prior to this the officials gave a run down of the race details and safety guidelines none of which I paid any attention to as it was all in Japanese. Plus, I was too busy eying up my fellow racers.
They all had shaved legs.
By comparison I looked like a wooly mammoth stuffed in to a pair of too tight bicycle shorts. But a manly mammoth, happy with his hairy hetrosexuality.
We assembled on a sloped slip road just off the main road. There were cameras, an incessantly chattering man with a microphone, and some local people gathered to see a little bit of history. The starter raised his pistol, BANG! and we were off!
Or rather everybody else was off. I, on the other hand, fell off my bike.
No, seriously, I did. Right at the start, I fell of my bike. It was the feckin clip-in pedals; I couldn't get my shoes slotted in properly, couldn't gain enough speed to get up the slip road, so instead I toppled over sideways and down the ditch. Meanwhile the man with the mike was going "Good jaysus would ye ever look at the hairy legged foreigner! What an arse, ladies and gentlemen, what an arse".
I finally managed to get back up on my bike and get some going-forward going, but left my dignity behind me in the ditch.  The main group, or le peloton, were already half a kilometre ahead and disappearing around a bend in the road. I, still at kilometer zero, put the hammer down and sped up and around the bend only to find that everyone had disappeared. It was like all the riders had been instantaneously whisked away to heaven in cycling's equivalent of the rapture while the hairy legged non-believer was left to sweat it out on the empty roads between Rankoshi and Iwanai. Spooky.
I continued pedaling and after a while some stragglers/fellow sinners began to appear in the distance. First up was the fat guy in sandals and beach shorts on a 1970's Peugeot racer who looked like he'd tagged along in the hope that we were all going to the beach.
And swooooshhh, I put the hurt on him.
Next up was a guy wearing the complete Team Cannondale kit. As I caught up with him he gestured towards his arse and said "一生に?" ("Together?"). This was my first road bike race, ever, so I wasn't not too sure what to make of this. I hadn't seen such a gesture since those glittering evenings in the Imperial Hotel in downtown Sydney, where as an only recently lapsed Irish Catholic fresh off the plane, I was introduced to a whole other pink world I hitherto never realized had existed. I can definitively say that the impression Oxford Street and its environs made were 'indelible'.
I pointed towards my legs, the intended message being "Hairy you see. Comfortable with my hetrosexuality". But he gestured towards his arse again.
And then I got it. He wanted to draft, work in turns leading into the wind which was, it had to be said, blowing pretty stiffly in off the Sea of Japan.
I'd never drafted before so I wasn't too sure what it involved in terms of technique, speed, timing, pretty much everything. So I tucked myself in behind his rear wheel, counted to ten, pedaled like a mad bastard to get in front of him and continued to pedal like a mad bastard, until he cut in front of me again. We continued like this for a few kilometres until we were both absolutely knackered. I was subsequently talking to a biking friend of mine who explained that drafting is about pacing. You do it to conserve energy whilst still maintaining a fast pace. It is not, apparently, about cycling like a 'mad bastard' or 'bâtard fou' as we say on le Tour.
We eventually split. I didn't realize it at the time. It was only after I had counted to fifty and wondered why the lazy fecker wasn't taking his turn in front that I turned around to see Team Cannondale wasn't there any more. On and on I wended my solo way along side the Shiribetsu river. I was pedaling into the sun by that stage and combined with the wind I could feel by skin begin to crispen. The cool waters of the river looked very inviting.
Back in to Rankoshi, past the man with the mike; "Look its the hairy legged foreigner! He's still on his bike! Unbelievable!". And then into the hills.
I liked the hills. We spent a fair amount of time climbing them, a good 15km or so on an average 7% slope. And this was where the legendary Gaynor engine, honed on the playing fields of St. Finians GAA pitch all those years ago (and yes, I did cover every blade of grass), asserted itself. Going uphill was when I put the hurt in and hauled myself from somewhere in the low 90's to a top 80 finish.
Yes!
Plus when I finally reached the crest and plummeted downwards I managed to go faster than I ever had on a bike before, surpassing the speed record I achieved last year on the hill outside of Lubbinlee during the Cavan race (an event I highly recommend by the way. The sponge cake you get at the end...). There were times on the descent when I swear I could hear the first rumblings of the sonic barrier. I was like Chuck Yeager on a bike.
And then my arse started to get sore and no combination of saddle shifting, short tugging, or pedal standing could get it to stop being sore. And I still had 20kms to go.
And on I went dear reader in an increasingly solipsistic world of posterior pain which, no, wasn't reminiscent of those heady nights on Oxford Street in Sydney. I may have been a lapsed catholic getting off the plane but I was, by God, still a hairy-legged hetrosexual!
I rode on past the nice policeman who wished me good luck in English and all the cars waiting patiently for us riders struggling by while the traffic is temporarily halted on our behalf. That last 20km seemed a lot longer and tougher than the first 50.
The final hill up to Hirafu hoved into view, I put in a last frenzied burst of pedaling and passed some diminutive female rider with whom I had my own private race over the last 5km or so as we yo-yoed back and forth in front and behind each other. Yes! I am the man. The hetrosexual man. Albeit with an arse like a homosexual (though I really wouldn't know).
It took me 2 hours 57 minutes to complete the race at an average speed of 23kph. The winner, by contrast, came in 2 hours 11 minutes and averaged 31kph. Now, I don't mean to be a bad (73rd placed) loser but I think you'll agree that a time and average speed like that demands a blood test. Or at the very least a sniff of his water bottles.
After the race we had to wait on the bus back to Rankoshi. This took nearly as long as the cycle as we had to sit through all the announcements, speeches, awards (in all 17 categories!) and the cupla focail from each of the award winners. And no after race massage facilities. Even Cavan has those.
But yes, as my mid-life crisis gathers pace, I will no doubt be back for more. But before that there is a little something called 'Gaelforce West' in three weeks time.

Sports Punditry

Well, well, who was the prescient sports pundit calling the Wexford-Clare replay all the way from Japan. I reckon Davy Fitz won't be attending the Enniscorthy Strawberry festival this year. As for Wexford, I think a semi-final is within their grasp. You read it here first.

George O'Connor, clearly thrilled to have dethroned the reigning All-Ireland hurling champions.

Last weekend

Was a good weekend. The weather gods smiled benignly upon us and we got over to Lake Toya for our first barbecue of the year.
And nobody got immolated!
Though we burnt and chomped our way through a fair bit of Tokachi pork.
Which we then followed with some locally made whipped ice cream (or 'soft cream' as they term it here).
For Daddy all this was fuel for the ride on the bike there and back, all those calories long gone by the time I finally rolled home. For Sanae and Cian it was, ahem, fat which had firmly adhered to various arses by the time they drove home.

Well, well...

I'm pretty certain the sporting world didn't see that one coming. A drubbing dished out on their home turf. Home fans, so sure, so certain, shocked into tearful silence. Had it been a boxing match the referee would have called a halt to proceedings before half time.
And then a few days later Germany do something similar to Brazil. Could they be the new Kerry? Shall we henceforth refer to Deutschland as 'the Kingdom'? Thomas Muller even looks a bit like the Gooch (though admittedly only after a skinful of pints and in poor light. And pouring rain. On a bad road out of Dingle).
Meanwhile Clare - any mention of the Banner county needs to be quickly followed by 'the skin of their teeth'. There's long grass and then there's the strawberry scented stuff found in Wexford Park. You'd like to think that Clare know what's waiting for them, but I don't know. The U21's won Leinster last night and the inside word from Oulart the Ballagh is of a growing confidence of a scalp being claimed.

Wexford legend George O'Connor reckons that the Model County could defeat the reigning All=Ireland champions this weekend.

The World Cup - some thoughts

(1) Japan finished last in their group and over three games amassed a points total of one. They 'won' this single point after grinding out a nil-nil draw against Greece who played all of the second half with only ten men. Prior to the tournament the Japanese sports media were confidently predicting that not only would Japan progress from their group, but they would at least get as far as the quarter finals. I term this the 'Pearl Harbour Syndrome' - the irrational belief that despite glaring evidence to the contrary, Japan, simply by dint of sheer determination and lashings of Bushido spirit, can and will prevail.
(2) Is it just me or did the entire Chile team look like 11 convicts who had just escaped from the Santiago Prison. I mean all of them were sporting some serious tattoos and bad-ass haircuts. And what on earth was Andre Agassi doing coaching them?
(3) There should be an Irish word for 'schadenfreude'. I don't know about England (or Italy) but Luis 'Jaws' Suarez is welcome in the Teach Gaynor-Takahashi anytime.
(4) That Messi lad - Argentina's answer to Joe Clooney.
(5) And you can tell that Colombia are basically Banner boys at heart (and foot).
(5) Back in 2006 when Italy last won the world cup a number of the chippers back home gave out free fish and chips to celebrate. I am just wondering what would be given free if the Colombians won...
(6) The Germans: efficient, ruthless, machine like. Basically football playing panzers. Insert your dodgy stereotype of choice here.
(7) Greece - could they actually afford to attend the World Cup let alone progress to the second round? Wouldn't they have been better off quietly auctioning off their place to the highest (backhand) bidder - akin to how Qatar 'won' the right to host the World Cup in 2022.
(8) Goal line technology! What the World Cup needs are some white coat wearing, flag waving umpires. They would have saved FIFA millions - a hot meal after the game and petrol expenses is all they require. Plus their impeachable neutrality would have seen no penalty awarded to Holland and Robbens sent off for the sort of diving that you usually only see at the Olympic pool.
(9) As Cian so rightly pointed out, when all is said and done the World Cup can't hold a candle to the hurling championship.

The Longest Day

To mark the return of sunshine and the longest day of the year, we took ourselves off to Lake Shikotsu near Chitose last Saturday. While Daddy spent two frustrating, curse-filled hours trying to assemble his folding kayak (you trying do it with a set of badly photocopied instructions in Japanese), Cian and Sanae were making peace with the watery world around them. I eventually got the damn thing assembled and paddled around the lake for a bit without sinking, but by that time it was getting dark so I only managed a 40 minute session. Cian in the meantime was intent on depleting the lake's entire stock of fish but Mammy insisted on a catch-and-release policy.

Of the two lakes we visit in the summer, I prefer Shikotsu. The other one, Lake Toya, has more cafes, a very good bakery and the occasional farmer's market and thus appeals more to Sanae; but it also has crowds and a rather daft policy of permitting jet skis on the lake which, to my jaundiced occidental eye, sits rather oddly with it's designation as a national park. Lake Toya also has a series of monolithic hotels from the brutalist school of architecture dominating one of the shorelines. In summer this area has a firework extravaganza every single night for three months. Lord knows what the local wildlife must make of it. Mind you given how noisy the jet skis are roaring back and forth across the lake, there either well used to the noise or deaf.
Lake Shikotsu, by contrast, is where you have a better chance of brushing up against the sublime. Jet skis are banned, there are only a few small onsen hotels and guesthouses corralled away on one corner of the lake and much of the shore is inaccessible by car (Lake Toya has a road ringing its entire circumference). Thus it doesn't take much walking or paddling to leave the modern world behind and get lost (sometimes literally) in nature's quiet splendor.
And finally... Friday had been our wedding anniversary and we asked Cian to take a picture of us to commemorate the day. I think the boy nailed it.

Sports Day Part II

They held it on the Saturday. Despite Muroran, as of today Friday, having set a new record for successive days of rain (16 and counting), students, teachers, parents and conditions underfoot last Saturday were all declared 'fine'. So at 5:30 in the morning the fireworks went off and a startled Sanae leapt out of bed muttering the Japanese equivalent of "Sweet mother of Jesus you've got be fecking kidding me!" Cian was already bouncing around his room with excitement, all ready to go despite the event not starting for another three hours. And he has to be dragged out of bed usually.
Adding to Sanae's disconcertment is the fact that she had told her mother the evening before that the Sports Day would be postponed until Sunday so her mother decided to arrive by bus on Saturday afternoon. At 5:45 Sanae makes a frantic phone call to her mother. She says she will drive here. Now it's my turn to mutter "Sweet mother of Jesus you've got be fecking kidding me!" I brace myself for a call from the police at some stage during the morning.
But first I have to take my sorry, still bed-warm arse up to the school to queue for a 'top spot' in the school ground from which watch to proceedings. By the time I get there the queue is already 50 people long. And it's still not 6:00.
Stereotypes be damned - this county is utterly mad.
Anyway, they open the gates, we splosh through the Somme like mud and stake our places around the track with various bits of plastic sheeting which the wind then promptly blows away as it is fairly gusting out there. I find the least water-logged spot I can find and stake our claim. I feel like a homesteader circa Wyoming in the 1870's. I'm also a hungry homesteader so I go home and have breakfast.
At 8:30 we are all back up there. Sanae's school was due to hold their Undokai on the same day but sense prevailed and they postponed it till the Sunday so she was able to take a couple of hours to watch Cian's. (Her school had scheduled classes instead of the Undokai. Like I said, this county is mad).
I'm heading back to the car to get some umbrellas when I hear a "Brian!". I look up. It's Sanae's mother. It's 8:45. She has gotten here from Obihiro in less than three hours. My jaw drops. I have made the same journey countless times and motoring along the highway at 100kms it still takes over 4 hours. She must have been driving at close to Mach 1 to get here in that time. Sanae is stunned as I am when she sees her mother.
But no time to consider the multitude of laws her mother has broken for the games have begun! To give you the highlights:
Cian won his 70 metre sprint. The Tokyo Olympics beckon as does a raging debate over which country he will represent.

To give you the lowlights:
Cian was on the white team. The white team finished last in the relay, lost the tug of war, and didn't throw nearly enough rice balls into the net in the admirably clear titled "throwing the rice balls in the net" competition.
Red team, as we say back home in GAA circles, wiped their arses.

"Anyone buying or selling the Undokai tickets?!"

Japan: land of advanced water treatment technology

Lunch time.

Reminiscent of the ploughing championships.

The white team - putting a collective brave face on the results.

Dancing. No, really.

And it didn't rain. Until the exact moment the Undokai was declared over and the first drops started to fall.

The Deluge.

It has been raining. Consistently, incessantly, continuously since Friday the 6th of June. In the previous eight days (and counting) we have had over 400mm of rain, which for the imperial minded amongst you equates to 675.8 gallons (approximately). It hasn't been the intemittent showery rain Irish summers are cursed with, but rather full-on, don't stop till you've had enough, biblical downpours. For two days running they have had Muroran on a 'Red' landslide warning and all trains between here and Sapporo have been cancelled. Even the ducks are complaining.
I'm thinking of building an ark.
So, it is wet, thoroughly aquatic even. And tomorrow is supposed to be Cian's sports day. There is a more than a watery whiff of deja vu to all this. Last year we experienced similar conditions and the Sports Day had to be postponed. In fact, pretty much every year we experience these conditions but those in charge seem to be happily oblivious to this.
Unlike the rest of Japan Hokkaido, you are often told, does not experience tsuyu - the rainy season. That's a lie.
In the 16 years I have been living in Hokkaido every June brings with it prolonged, persistent rain that can last up to three weeks before it finally relents. Now, this isn't the case for the whole island but rather just the Pacific side, so people lucky enough to be living in sunny Sapporo are happily oblivious to our sodden, damp, mold ridden existence here in Muroran.
So June - the weather is never good, usually not even close to middling. But yet all the schools in the city persist in holding their sports days in June. And why is this? Well, again you will be told that it is 'traditional'; since time immemorial sports days have been held in June. But 16 years have also taught me that 'tradition' is in fact the Japanese word for 'stifling inertia'; nobody in a position of authority is willing to step up and say "Arrah lads, for feck's sake, enough of this wet shite. We're not fish. Why don't we shift the whole extravaganza to the beginning of July? Tends to be sunny then".
So June, tomorrow to be exact. Or inexact, as of this time of writing Cian's school still hasn't decided whether or not they will go ahead with the event. And as of time of writing it is, to use a meteorological term, pissing down outside. Earlier today I took a photograph of the sport's field at the school. Short of a giant with a giant hairdryer magically appearing and spending the night blow drying the ground, there is no wet way the surface will be fit for anything else besides paddling.

You'd like to think that common sense would prevail but as last year abruptly proved, common sense has no place at the Sports Day.
Instead we will be notified by fireworks at 5:30 tomorrow morning.
No, really, we will.
Communicative devices like telephones and email are just way to unreliable and, let's face it, untraditional.
So should all systems be (unbelievably) go we will be notified by a series of city wide explosions at the crack of dawn. If sense prevails then the silence should be deafening.
I will keep you posted.

Health

Earlier this week Cian woke up in the morning and before going to the toilet had to stick a film of plastic to his arse. He had to this for two days in a row. This wasn't something Mammy and Daddy thought up because the boy refused to tidy up his room  but rather a school mandated health inspection. They wanted to check for pinworm eggs. No, seriously pinworm eggs.
Do you even know what a pinworm is?
Neither did I but here's a helpful explanatory diagram:

To be honest I found it all a tad insulting, the implication being that such is the squalor and degradation the Takahashi-Gaynor's are living in the educational authorities have to test for intestinal worms. Before I could drive a JCB into the school gates Sanae pointed out to me that (a) all the kids in all the schools in Japan are tested; and (b) these tests have been going on ever since the sun god Amaterasu descended from the heavens and complained of an itchy arse.

The Northern Horse Park Marathon Event

The title says it all really. Another month another marathon event that doesn't actually involve running a marathon. In my case it was half a marathon while for Sanae and Cian it was, ahem, 2.5 kilometres. But they were a long 2.5 kilometres.
The marathon-that-wasn't was held in a large stud farm just a short gallop down the road from Chitose airport. Unlike the Date half marathon the numbers participating tend to be considerable smaller (in the hundreds rather than the thousands) and the food you are supplied with after the race is exceedingly tasty (even if Sanae did end up in hospital on the Monday, but more of that later).
Tired of Daddy stealing all the athletic glory, Mammy and the young fella decided to "go for gold!" and enter the two and a half thousand metre sprint, sorry, marathon race. This in turn gave rise to bouts (three) of intense training over the past month when some of the runs stretched to almost 20 minutes.
Yes, 20 minutes. The Clare hurlers wouldn't push themselves as hard.
So Sunday rolled around and we rolled out of bed at the ungodly hour of 6:00am to get to the race. Then again this is Japan and they do ungodly quite well.
Cian and Sanae were off at 9:00am while Daddy didn't unleash his hairy legged magnificence until eleven o'clock.
Cian and Sanae were finished by 9:17am. Which meant (a) they had obviously imbibed some of the same stuff that the trainer Al Zarooni was wetting the horses oats with back home; and (b) Daddy had to sit and twiddle his thumbs for an hour a half. Which I duly did albeit in my car as it was fecking freezing out. There was an unholy wind blowing, listen to me, a full gale howling across the Park, picking up some of the recently foaled foals (?) and hurling them into the tree tops. Where the crows pecked them to death while the thunder rumbled.
Gothic were the conditions.
Eleven finally rolls around and we are off. Or everyone else is. Daddy has taken shelter from the wind in a stable and whilst burnishing my horse whispering technique ("Listen Neddy, stay away from Tesco, you hear me. Stay away from Tesco, particularly the meat section"), miss the sound of the starters pistol. So I am the last across the starting line.
That wind, though. Blowing mean and hard. For the first 5km though it's at our backs so some of the smaller, lighter Japanese runners find themselves being whooshed down the road. However, we then u-turn around and run smack into it for the next 11 kilometres. Around the 8km mark I begin to think I am hallucinating. Up ahead of me there is a runner wearing a green and gold top which looks remarkably like the Kerry jersey.
I get a bit closer.
It is a Kerry jersey!
WTgoodF?!
I hammer away for a couple of minutes and finally catch up with this far flung exile from the Kingdom. Turns out to be Mick from Ballybunnion who I played football with last summer and works on the Irish owned stud farm down Hidaka way. I had met him earlier this year at the Ambassador's reception but I don't think either of us expected to cross paths close on 9km into a half marathon on a windy as feck Sunday in Chitose. We chat for a few minutes, or rather splutter out a few gasped words in between our panting before I put the afterburners on I disappear off into the distance. Damned if I am going to shame my Causeway ancestors by finishing behind a Ballybunnion man.
The wind continues to blow.
After an hour and fifty four minutes I finally cross the finish line, exactly 27 seconds slower than my time in the Date half marathon. This is uncanny. Spooky even. Last year my time difference between the two events was 23 seconds. Henceforth I will now be known as the Metronome Man.
The post race feed is as good as I remembered with steak fillets, curry rice, ham steaks, steaming bowls of ramen and a very nice man with a barrel on his back dispensing free beer to all and sundry. Cian and me want to take the nice man home but Mammy says no.
Unfortunately, for Sanae the post race meal proved too rich for her gall bladder free body and she spent Sunday night in a prolonged intimate embrace with the toilet before spending a rather anxious Monday down at the local hospital wondering if her pancreatitis had flared up again. (She reckons the steak fillets were sourced from Tesco).
Cian on the other hand was splendidly impressed with his own athletic prowess. Immediately after the race he reckoned had passed "at least 10" other runners. By Sunday evening that had increased to 20 and by Monday morning he estimated he had easily sped by 50 people. Next up for Cian Gebrselassie Takahashi Gaynor is the Forest Kozan Green Race in September though he plans to get in some high altitude training around Athgoe hill this summer.