Summer

One of the things I have never really got used to whilst living here in Japan is the concept of 'summer'. Not the seasonal/weather issue but rather the more temporal notion of it - when it begins and when it ends.

I grew with my clock set to June as the beginning of summer and September as its end. This was due to the rhythms of educational life with school, and later college, designating this the time of sunshine and outdoor play. Or, rather this being Ireland, showers and coming home covered in mud.

Here in Japan the school year for primary and secondary schools runs from April to March. As a result the summer holidays here in Hokkaido are only four weeks long (they are six in the rest of the country). They don't commence until the third week of July and are over by the end of the second week in August.

That, put simply, is not right. Not right at all.

Things aren't much better for my university students. Whereas by the beginning of June I was on a plane to either Munich or New York to earn my dollars or deutschmarks, and came home at the start of September full of stories; in Muroran the students finally finish their exams by the middle of August and are expected back by the end of September: a total of seven weeks in all.

That is not right either.

We are into July now and I still have another four weeks of classes to go, followed by a further fortnight of exams. I impatiently await the middle of August but when it arrives I always sense the summer slipping away before it has even properly begun.

Matters are only made more melancholic by what I term the 'Strangers in the night' effect (yes, after the Sinatra song) of the futile overlap between mine and Sanae's holidays. We get a week at most, in August, after which she is back to school and I am back to taking Cian to and from the nursery school every day and, well, they are not holidays any more, are they.

And it says something about the Japanese mindset that this shared week is deemed sufficient. Indeed, anything longer is seen as succumbing to western decadence and after that it's just a short slippery slope to complete amorality, heroin addiction and the collapse of Japanese civilization.

Which is probably true but I still wish I could blog about the first day of the summer holidays beginning tomorrow.

But enough of the melancholy. Here are some photos of my garden.

Biohazard

Following our wallowing at Kozan, Cian found himself on Monday evening covered in spots. At first we thought some of the local insect population had been drinking themselves stupid on his particularly tasty type B blood ("a beguilingly fruity flavour with more than a hint of cherry and a cheeky after taste"), but it turned out to be chicken pox.

Or rather, sweet mother of Jesus, THE POX!!!!!

Out came the holy water, calamine lotion, rosary beads, cloves of garlic and napalm. Goats were beheaded, chickens sacrificed, and Sanae did the forbidden dance of the Seven Samurai in a vain attempt to appease the angry Gods of the Pox, Itchy and Scratchy.

No, nothing worked. And so Cian was banned from his nursery school, for they feared the darkness would engulf them too. Bitter fools.

And so the boy with the pox had to stay home from Wednesday of last week which meant somebody had to stay home with him and your biohazard beating blogger drew the short, contaminated straw.

In truth, there was nothing really all that wrong with Cian as he received a vaccination for chicken pox two years ago, but four days in a row in the house had the two of us bouncing off the walls and each other.

"Right, time to feed Cian then"

Back to Forest Kozan

While our previous visit to Forest Kozan in May had been all about a huntin' an' a skinnin' an' a cookin' an' a eatin' your forest fresh dinner, this month's encounter was purely primeval: mud.

Lots of it.

And then some more...

I'll have to admit I was quite taken with my swarthy 'man-of-the-earth' look, but she who must be obeyed was having none of it, so it was off to the local car wash for me upon our return home.

Strawberries

Last Saturday was sunny and warm and with nothing better to do, we all piled into Daddy's car and drove the 40 minutes or so to Sobetsu.

Sobetsu is a small town famous for its fruit farms. Depending on the season you can sugar out on strawberries, grapes, cherries, blueberries, plums, peaches and apples. Cian wants to move there.

Sobetsu is also situated in a bowl like valley which means it gets hot, very hot, Dante's Inferno like hot.

No, really.

When we left Muroran it was a nice, easy 20°C - the sort of temperature that engenders a feeling of well being and mint juleps. By the time we got to that little bit of Renaissance Italy, the temperature had crested 30°C and was still climbing. That sort of temperature is good for strawberries, sweat and eternal damnation.

But Cian wanted his juicy red fruit and so, scrambling to get to the greenhouses ahead of a tour bus full of Singaporean tourists, we ran and panted and ate our fill of red, ripe strawberries.

And then we all got sore bellies, so we had to, yes, had to stop at the home-made ice cream restaurant for medicinal purposes.

And then we went home, or rather, Daddy drove home while the rest of the sated Gaynor-Takahashi family fell asleep in Daddy's car.

Time flies

Already the middle of June and I have a grand total of one post for the month.

Well, I've just doubled it. Such is my blogging prowess.

I have been busy of late and to be honest there hasn't been all that worth writing about. Unless you are notably interested in the intricacies of teaching EFL and/or the goings on in a far flung corner of Japanese academia.

I have my classes, I have my research (which involves weekly visits to a number of local elementary schools) and I have my meetings.

Lord, do I have my meetings.

To earn your stripes here in tertiary-land it's not enough that your students rank you up there with Socrates and your research is getting the Nobel Prize people excited, you also have to be on committees with names like "The Committee for Progressing Local Area Relations". Being a member of said committee involves a lot of meetings which, I think, in some form of obscure mathematical calculation, equates to progression.

These meetings have names like "Advancing Strategies for Locally Integrated Research Activities in the twenty third year of the reign of the Heisei Emperor".

It usually takes me a good ten minutes or so with my dictionary to figure out the title of the meeting by which stage (a) I still have no idea what it is actually about; and (b) the committee chairman has launched into a long, meandering speech that, like the rivers in Fermanagh, wanders rather than flows, and I am abjectly lost and give up any hope of comprehension.

So, I keep my head down and pray I won't be asked to comment. Unfortunately, my god is an irritable god and every now again I am asked my opinion. I usually declare that at this early stage of the research activities it is unclear how they will progress, but I am confident that if we all pull together, progress they will, and his majesty the Emperor will look back on his twenty third year as being a particularly bountiful one. Or words to that effect.

Then I go back to sleep, or rather, I try, desperately, not to go back to sleep, but the Chairman has this soft, quiet voice that lulls you with its steady monotone, so that your thoughts begin to slide, your gaze blurs, eyes droop, head begins that slow roll and loll and zzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Summer?!

After more than a week of rain, fog, more rain, fog, rain interspersed with fog, prolonged outbreaks of foggy rain, and temperatures that barely scraped into double figures, today summer sent us reeling with shockingly blue skies, remorseless sunshine and temperatures that joyrided into the low twenties. Us poor Hokkaidoians (Hokkaidoites? Hokkaidoers?), with our default setting always switched to winter, didn't know what the hell hit us. The heat, the glare, the pale flesh wantonly exposed by yours truly as I threw satorial caution to the hot winds and donned a t-shirt and shorts, thereby single handedly lowering real estate values in the neighbourhood by a good "Jaysus, would ya look at d'arse on dat fella" twenty percent.

It was also a day for surfing.

But, I didn't go as I was too busy gardening. Yes, gardening. Hallo tweeby, middle-age, how are you my green-fingered friend?

Spring, for all you processed food eating types out there, is when it is all at for the digging and the planting and the watering and the warning Cian not to put any more water on the lettuce, ah for feck's sake, look at them, they might as well be seaweed you've poured so much feckin water in there now. Go off and annoy your mother, there's a good boy.

With the weather we've been having, we're behind the seasonal clock this year, so today was all "vegetables go!" as we endeavoured to catch up or, in Cian's case, drown the lettuce. Even in our sliver of a vegetable garden (roughly the size of your typical dinner table), we managed to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, soy beans, basil, egg plant, peppers, rice, yes rice (in a paddy no less), and very wet lettuce; along with the usual fruit suspects: strawberries (if the feckin ants leave them alone), raspberries, blackberries, black currents and mulberries (if Cian leaves them alone).

Do not fear, dear reader, I will, of course, keep you updated on how our garden goes.

Movies and Marriage Part II

As a Communication Studies graduate (class of '94, also reached the semi-finals of the university soccer tournament that same year - a defining era in my young life); I take it as my God-given academic right to hold forth at length about matters celluloid. And to choose the sort of movies we watch here in the Gaynor-Takahashi 'Palace of Light'.

Along as they are love stories.

"Believe it or not, halfling", I said to my beloved wife, "there are romantic movies that do not involve Hugh Grant or adaptations of Jane Austen novels." And so I made her sit down beside me to watch Dr. Zhivago. Yes, that Dr. Zhivago, the David Lean epic, based on the book by Boris Pasternak.

"I never heard of it", said she who is not of the Race of Men.

"What!? One of the greatest love stories ever to grace page and screen. Oh my dear, you are in for a treat, albeit a fairly long, four hour one, but a treat nevertheless. With intermissions, for, eh, treats".

"Just put the feckin DVD on and shut up".

And so we settled down to watch, on Blu-ray no less, one of the great love stories of the twentieth century.

45 minutes into the movie and Sanae has had enough. Not even a quarter way through and we already have had a murder, a massacre, a rape, an attempted suicide, an attempted assassination and some implied incest.

"I though you said this is a love story!"

"Well, it's a Russian love story", I weakly reply.

"Enough" bellows she who is not of the Race of Men but who is quite formidable when annoyed.

Out comes Dr. "Feckin shite" Zhivago, and in goes Sense and Sensibility. And yes, it was the version with Hugh Grant.

Dr. Zhivago - greatest love story ever, or "feckin shite"?