Easing back

 This blog has been dormant for a while as life in all its myriad demands and duties drew me away. Over, the past couple of days I have been rereading some earlier posts and they served as a evocative reminder of times past which memory itself had sifted away. At 47 with the neural synapses beginning to splutter, my recall needs all the help it can get. So, I've taken the Lazarus apporach, ressurecting the seemingly dead, in order to have something to jog the mind into remembering as I age.
However, before I can update you on all the goings on in the Gaynor-Takahashi family (rugby! surfing! skiing! mountain climbing! dislocated thumb! fainting in the Memuro Town Hospital's emergency room! etc.), I also need to update you on some rule changes that have been introduced to the blogging-sphere. According to Google:
1: The EU demands that I inform you about cookies on this blog. Yes, you've read that correctly, this blog comes with cookies. There should be a couple of chocolate-chip ones left at the bottom of the page if Sanae hasn't eaten them all. Scroll down and have a look. No, go on, scroll down. I won't tell anyone.
2: You scrolled down, didn't you.
3: My HTTPS setting have been changed so now visitors will be able to view the blog over an encrypted connection. Presumably Jason Bourne is going to rest a little more easy at night after reading this.
4: Russia is a great, great country. A tremendous country. And the Russians? Wonderful, wonderful people.

Coming-up: mountain climbing with Cian.

The 2016 Mizumoto Undokai

Well, I figured if I am going to resume blogging it might as well be with the biggest sporting event of the year. Yes, it was the 2016 Mizumoto Elementary School's sports day. An occasion that puts the Olympics, the Euro Championships, Ireland's tour of South Africa, and the GAA Championship in the collective shade (though the beating Tipp handed out to Cork in the football had us sitting up and taking note).
And what a sporting spectacular we had. Matched in its athletic grandiosity only by the blue skied magnificence of the weather. Which lasted until Saturday evening. Since Sunday we have had constant torrential rain everyday, all day. Cian and myself have taken to going to school/work in the morning in our surfing wetsuits.
But I digress.
Things kicked off with the usual bloodcurling calls to battle from the hoarse throated leaders of the Red and White teams. Which were met with clenched fist power salutes reminiscent of Tommie and John at the 1968 Olympics.

 

Then we had the 80m sprint.
Yes, that screaming streak of black and amber on the outside is indeed Cian in a Kilkenny jersey.

Silver. The gold was won by that poor lad who was clearly off his brown-eyed head on a potent cocktail of methamphetamines, cocaine, angel dust,  anabolic steroids, EPO, and curry powder. Though to be honest if you look at the size of him he could have used a spoonful or two of growth hormones in the cocktail too.
Mind you this shameful display of rampant drug abuse was roundly ignored by the assembled VIPs. One of whom, in the photo below, is the school principal. Can you guess which one?



Next, was the tug of war. Last year the Red team had suffered two straight losses to the White team and as Cian summed it up, Red team were collectively "Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore"!
Suitably enraged, they made it two tugs in a row (?) and left the White team face down in the dust.



Then it was Mammy's turn. As a sort of light relief from the otherwise unremitting tension of the epic battle between Red and White, the school PTA organize a parent's tug of war. Sanae decided to participate and lined up with the only other hobbit present at the Undokai.
Unsurprisingly they lost.
Both the tug of war and their dignity.





Then it was time for lunch, under a tent as the sun had reached its zenith and the temperature had climbed into the mid twenties. Plus, the relay, the day's premier event, was yet to come and we didn't want Cian suffering from heat stroke before hand.



After lunch there was a burst of frenetic dancing to ensure that all the food was digested.



There were a couple of other events involving plastic tape and running aimlessly around but the heat and food had got the better of me by that stage and I kind of drifted off into a prolonged daydream about Galway beating Mayo in the Football Championship.
Just a daydream, though. Sigh.



Finally we came to the relay, the gold standard of modern day athletics. The victors would be walking tall for a year, basking in the glory, a burnished cloud of awed respect following them around wherever the went.
And the losers? Well, over there in the shadowy, cobwebbed corner they'll find the dustbin of history...





I would like to write that it was an unbearably close race that went all the way down the long final straight to the finish line, but in truth by the end of the second leg it was all over as a contest. The Red Team, in their collective gazelle like brilliance, quickly took an insurmountable lead and literally ran away with it as a contest. Indeed, before they even got to their anchor some people had begun packing up and making their way to the exits to beat the traffic.
So, yes the Red Team took home the prize for the first time in three (long) years but you've probably read all about it in the sport's pages.

お玉杓子

 
otamajakushi is the Japanese word for ‘tadpoles’. Yes, it is spring and that means the Gaynor-Takahashi zoo must be replenished with its yearly quota of small, aquatic creatures. Dogs and cats are out as (a) we have no garden to speak of so we can’t leave them outside; (b) all three of us are out of the house from 7:30 to 18:00, so leaving an animal that can poo and pee at will in the house is a non-starter; and (c) in winter it is so cold outside that you would have to keep the animal inside day and night which brings us back to (b). We did consider getting something small and furry like a hamster but there is always the danger that Sanae might get fed up looking after it, ‘inadvertently’ deep fry it and serve it to us for dinner. So we stick with the fish and tadpoles, augmenting this in summer with various stag beetles, noisy crickets, and if we’re lucky, the occasional short-lived firefly.
So yesterday we went to get the tadpoles. It was a nice, brisk sunny day and being the eco-responsible-Subaru-driving-Patagonia-clothed family we aspire to be, myself and Cian cycled up and into the forest.



All of which was made a tad more strenuous that it should have been by Cian’s refusal to raise his saddle. He claimed that all his friends have their saddles low. I pointed out that all his friends are smaller than him and need to have their saddles low or their feet wouldn’t touch the ground. You, Cian, I argued, have the opposite problem: your saddle is so low your knees are almost banging into your chin. Still, he wouldn’t listen to solid Irish reason, but kept the saddle low, looking like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.

Cian and Peter Fonda go for a ride.

We found the tadpoles, or rather tadpole eggs as most of them haven’t hatched yet, duly scooped up some and brought them home. Turns out we brought more than just ‘some’ home. When the silt had settled in the glass tank and we could see things clearly, we had a lot of eggs in there. A lot. Mammy wasn’t happy, visions of hoards of frogs overrunning (over-leaping?) the house at the end of June. We promised that we’d let them loose before then, probably into the garden of the old decker who lives across the road from us.

Mitsubishi - the Japanese Volkswagen

You may have got echoes of this over the ether these past few days, but Mitsubishi motors has followed Volkswagen in revealing that it too had, gasp, falsified its emission figures for its cars.
And not to be out done by the Germans, the company admitted today that it had been at it for nigh on quarter of a century. Yep, since 1991, the mileage figures touted by Mitsubishi for all those millions of sold Pajeros, Shoguns, Lancers, Outlanders, etc. were as believable as the Easter Bunny.
In fact, the company had been manipulating the numbers for so long that they went from being 'falsified' to 'accepted company practice'. This, according to the Japan Times, is how the President of Mitsubishi Motors (pictured above) explained the remarkable longevity of the company's malfeasance:
“We are not sure if they were even aware that it was the wrong method. When it started, they might have thought it was correct, and that thought was then passed down, so it is possible that they did it without questioning why”.
This is a classic Japanese answer to a typical Japanese problem - 'the tyranny of tradition' as I like to call it. We've always done it like this so why should we change it, even if the method is shamelessly wrong/illegal.
Or rather, mind-blowingly, expensively illegal. For the four most recent car models affected (sold domestically since 2012), the financial damage to the company is estimated to top 100 billion yen. And the accountants can't get their heads around the last 25 years and the millions of cars sold worldwide because, like, man, those, numbers, are like, just, like, cosmically freaking big, man.
I'm glad to be driving a Mazda, but we are thinking about (gasp!) changing cars to something a tad bigger and right now, if you think about it, there may be no better time to buy a ... Mitsubishi.

Sankanbi

Well, that went surprisingly ... well. On a lovely, sunny Saturday morning I strolled up to Cian's school around 8:30 and found myself the first parent there.
Such is the enthusiasm of the foreign parent.
Cian's teacher, no doubt impressed with my enthusiasm, beckoned me inside the classroom rather than have me mooching around in the corridor, scaring all the other parents away. Plus the kids in his class kept coming up to the door window and making faces at me. As I was happily making faces back at them, the teacher probably thought it was best if I was in the class where she could control all of us.
Cian was sitting in the back right corner of the classroom so I decided to stand behind him so that (a) I could observe his behaviour during the lesson; and (b) subsequently apologize to his teacher for his behaviour during the lesson. Cian usually ends up sitting somewhere along the back row of the classroom. This is due to the fact that as he is so big students sitting behind him can't actually see the blackboard. He is also too big for his chair and his desk. By 6th class he will be lucky to get through the classroom door without banging his head off the top of the frame.
The lesson was about what the students are planning to achieve in the coming academic year. In groups of four and five, the students came to the front of the class and read out a summary of what their aims are as 4th year students. These were broken up into:
gakushuu: educational or academic aims
seikatsu: school life
kokoro: personal development
For gakushuu a lot of the students opted for learning to read and write more kanji, or doing better at Maths. Cian hoped to do both. Nothing from nobody about learning English. So nul points from the hairy foreign parent about that aim.
Seikatsu was dominated by a burning desire to win at this year's sport's day. Cian's class had been humiliated by the other fourth year class in last year's games. In the intervening twelve months, revenge had curdled into a bile so bitter they were spitting it out as they announced their intention to annihilate their neighbors in the next classroom. It was almost North Korean in its hysterically baroque intensity.
Kokoro was all about helping the new first year students, those innocent little tykes who still didn't know how to get to the gym and were convinced that the toilets were haunted. No mention of who had convinced them the toilets were haunted, but I could spot a few of the usual suspects from where I was standing.
At the end of the school year the students will be held to account as to how close (or far) they came to achieving these aims. In fact it will be included as part of their report card, along with their progress in maths, Japanese, science, etc.
After the class it was off to the gym for the PTA meeting.
I was only foreigner there.
And more surprisingly, one of the few men there. If you ever want a quick indication of how progressive a school is, check the gender ratio at its PTA meeting. Unfortunately, the parents at Cian's school were solidly in the conservative education-is-the-mother's-responsibility camp, with us new age men types conspicuous by our presence. Daddy's work, or, as this was a Saturday morning, go off to baseball practice or whatever, but they sure as oestrogen-filled hell don't turn up for no emasculating PTA meeting!
Goddamn!
Which is unfortunate, as the PTA meeting was quite informative and provided a sort of behind the curtains peek at the priorities set by the school and the parents. For Cian's school this meant expanding the school library, safety patrols in the morning and afternoon when the students are coming and going from school, and hiring teaching assistants for maths classes.
By contrast, in Sanae's old school (she was transferred at the beginning of this month - more anon), the priority was keeping the kids out of the local borstal and confirming which parent had custody of the kids after the latest round of divorces.
I, thankfully, wasn't chosen for anything - yet. It is still early in the year and I may well have to 'volunteer' for events as they arise.

The new school year

The new school year started for Cian this week. Hard to believe but he's now in 4th class. Where did the time go? And what was I doing when it went?
As usual after his first day Cian arrived home with small forest's worth of paperwork: timetables, school lunch menus, explanations, forms to be filled. Among the highlights were:
1: His year long schedule, from now until March 31st, 2017, with all the events of the year from school days to holidays, sports day parents' days, etc. already decided and dated. Most impressive is the fact that Cian will attend school for a total of 208 days this coming academic year. That's nearly over three weeks longer than the slacker páistí back home who can only manage 183 days. For shame. No wonder the country is such a mess.
2: His daily timetable. Every day school starts at 8:20 (though Cian is usually there by 7:45 in the morning such is the boy's enthusiasm for educating himself. Actually, that's not true. He goes that early so he can play dodge ball in the gym before classes start). On Mondays and Tuesdays he has five classes which means he's finished around 2:15pm. On the other days he has 6 ("feckin!") classes which means he doesn't finish in school until close on 3:30. Then its over to Daddy's office in the university for some world class English language education ("for fecks sake!").
3: Entreaties and/or veiled threats to 'volunteer' to join the Parent Teacher Association. The PTA is akin to the Teamsters in the US in the 1970's: seemingly friendly enough and concerned with the betterment of the school and students, but God have more mercy on your doomed, bloody soul should you ever cross them. In Japan the PTA isn't just a forum for blowhard parents to sound off on whatever minor inconvenience irks there little Satoshi. Rather, it is integral to the smooth functioning of the non-academic aspects of the school, particularly sports day, the graduation ceremony, after-school clubs, and eh, flower planting in spring. However, their zeal can be a bit full on and many parents, like myself and Sanae, who work full time, are loathe to give up what little free time we have, particularly on the weekends. This seems to be a bit of a trend as in the new school year letter/threat from the PTA, they stated quite forcefully that all parents are expected to volunteer for at least a minimum of 2 years while their children attend the school.
The first PTA meeting of the year is on this Saturday morning and in a very canny move, Sanae has decided to dispatch me to see how they react to having a big hairy foreigner in their midst. She has also warned me that I can't let on that I understand Japanese. Not something I should find particularly hard to do. I will let you know how I get on in the next post.
4: The map. Yes, a map. Every year we have to submit a hand drawn map to the school showing the route Cian takes from our house in his epic 800m journey to the school. As neither we nor the school have moved since he started you would think the cartographic powers that be would be content with the map we submitted in his first year, but no. Every year requires a newly drawn map just to confirm that (a) Cian still knows where he is going; and (b) that in the intervening 12 months no new topographical features like a sudden mountain range have popped up along the 800 metre route. I was highly tempted to submit a copy of a map from Middle Earth showing Cian traversing the Misty Mountains before cutting south through Mirkwood, and heading across Dagorlad before arriving at Mordor (or Mizumoto Elementary School to give it its official title). But Sanae didn't think that was funny.
She is a hobbit after all, so she probably took it a bit personally.

Skian Cian

Last Saturday we finally got ourselves off to Rutsutsu to enjoy some of that fluffy powder snow that part of Hokkaido is covered in. It was a beautiful day with barely a whisper of wind and a warming sun beaming down on us all day.
Cian (and Sanae) had spent the previous month attending ski lessons at the local ski field in Muroran which was kind of good in that in the space of a week he jumped from level 4 to level 2. The lessons were also kind of bad in that they were also, well, lessons and so inherently boring.
So today the boy got to be who he wanted to be on the slopes - we got to see Cian free styling it, a sort of modern Miles Davis of the powder.
There are two videos. You can see the first one
here
This is a kind of a promotional film for the splendor and beauty of skiing amidst volcanoes and, eh, trees. He likes to ski between them, around them, and on occasion, into them.
The second video is
here
This is, well, frankly, thrilling. It is akin to the prelude at the start of a James Bond movie where 007, after stealing another incredibly important something or other, flees from the baddies' alpine redoubt down some gravity defying slopes towards what seems certain death. Or at least for Daddy who had to film whilst going down the gravity defying slopes without any ski poles.