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....