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.

Binman Brian

Yesterday was an absolute cracker; sunshine, blue skies, 23 degrees and a gentle onshore breeze to take the edge off the unseasonal heat. Unfortunately I couldn't enjoy the day as I was too busy with the Chonaikai.
Ahh the Chonaika. Sounds a bit like the name of a particularly fierce band of Aleutian inuits who used to pillage and plunder their way across northern Japan, but the truth is a bit more prosaic. The Chonaikai is in fact the local resident's association and they are a kind of civic version of the Corleone family. They represent power and you do, not, ever, refuse the Chonaikai. So when they came a calling last week with an offer I couldn't refuse, I didn't. Which meant Sunday morning found me scouring the backstreets of Tenjin-cho for paper and cardboard rubbish of all sorts.
The Chonaikai organize such collections every two months and they collect a fair amount of paper - 4 truck loads in fact, which they take to the recycle center and get paid for. And after that the financial trail runs cold. I'm not sure how much money they get and what they do with it, but it is surely more than the few hundred yen it cost for the bottles of Pocari Sweat we got at the end of the morning.
There were though a number of positives to participating:
(a) Me and my family didn't get "whacked" for not helping;
(b) I got to visit parts of Tenjin-cho I didn't even know existed. Who knew there is a small dam only half a kilometre from our front door with apparently, very good trout fishing?
(c) Despite my 44+ years I got called the Japanese equivalent of "young fella" all morning

Golden Week

Has come around again but this year we don't have such an extended period of holidays. Japan is fairly rigid when it comes to public holidays. If the holiday falls on a Sunday then it is carried over to the Monday, but if should occur on a Saturday, well, enjoy 'your day off' on what is otherwise considered a work day. The other vexing issue with public holidays is that they tend to be clumped together. Although Japan has more public holidays in the calendar year than Ireland (15 as opposed to 9), they are not spread throughout the year. We have two each in January, September, and November, with Golden week accounting for four in the space of seven days. Spreading these out a bit more, say one every month with the remainder bundled together either at New Year's or August, would be a bit more relaxing, ne?
Well, alright 15 days off are better than 9 so less of the whining. 
Anyway, we have had a couple of days off so on Saturday we went to Lake Utonai where a bitter wind was blowing across the water and Spring was refusing to arrive until the place warmed up a little more. So for lack of green things to snap I present to you my photo essay "Tree Bark - the untold story".

 

After meditating on nature and the soul stirring appeal of all things arboreal, we went shopping because Mammy isn't quite taken with all this tree-hugging shite. It was raining at the shopping mall so Cian and myself took shelter in the Lego store while Sanae ran amok with her credit card. And gosh and darn it if we didn't find a must have helicopter. And we had it. Plus we didn't get home until late which meant Cian could subsequently boast to his friends how he didn't go to bed until after 10:00pm!

Sunday we went rock fishing! Yes!! Where we caught: a starfish, a shrimp, some aggressive hermit crabs, a more chilled out crab, a sea snail, a mussel, some baby fish, and a dollop of seaweed. Much to Mammy's disappointment Cian operates a 'catch and release' policy so she couldn't snack on them in the car on the way home.

 On Monday the wind blew hard and we didn't feel like going anywhere in particular. Some days are just like that.
Tuesday found us up in Forest Kozan, our first trip this year for a very relaxed afternoon of ambling around catching tadpoles, admiring cherry blossoms and enjoying the sort of transcendental peace only nature can bestow.
And then it was back to school and work today and the peace transcended and reality reasserted its vulgar self. And no more holidays until August.

Spring?

Spring or what in Japanese they call 'Spring'

The seasons seemed to have accelerated this year, skipping a couple of gears from a wintery first to a full on summery fifth. Last night was the first time we have had rain since April 9th having enjoyed day after day of sunshine. Last weekend saw temperatures hit 23 with beautiful blue skies and warm, dry winds. Today saw normal service resumed with stiff onshore breeze keeping things a tad more chilly and necessitating a quick blast of the central heating this evening (us middle-agers like our creature comforts). Anyway the flip side to all this good weather is that I have purposefully neglected this blog. After five months of winter sunshine and 23 degrees is going to have me back in the water reacquainting myself with the waves and my surf 'brahs'. And then there is the garden, that foot wide strip of foliage that runs along only two sides of the house but takes a surprising amount of time to weed and tidy up.
Oh, and there was the 21km jog around Date which I, ahem, completed in a time of 1:54, some, ahem, 13 minutes slower than last year. But those extra 780 seconds can be chalked up to hard earned wisdom. Last year after Date I ran another half marathon in May in almost the exact same time (22 seconds separated them), which was an incredibly stupid thing to have done so early in the season. By the middle of June I had torn the achilles tendon in my right foot, by August the left foot, all of  which left me hobbling through the Gaelforce West race and having to forego all the events I had planned for the autumn.
Not this year. Slow and steady is the approach peaking on top of Croagh Patrick on the third weekend of August.

The post-Date victory parade

"The Memuro Mucker" as she's called round these parts

Twice on Saturday, yes twice! That's how good the weather was.

Got himself a new set of wheels.

Date Half Marathon - pre race

 I know, I know, you're all thinking "God, can it really be a year already", but yes my friends, times arrow and all that. So here we are, on the eve of the third weekend in April and naturally the eyes of the sporting world turn towards a small coastal town in northern Japan.
Those of you expecting more of the heroics from 12 months ago should take a look at the latest odds from Paddy Powers. I am an outside bet at 33-1 to even finish the race in the time allotted. Training has been, well, 'sporadic' with the more emphasis being placed on rest and recovery than any actual running. A lot of rest in fact, with very little recovery as there really wasn't all that much for me to recover from (unless you count the deciding France-Ireland match in the Six Nations). I am following my namesake Brian O'Driscoll in 'managing' rather than 'pushing' my body. And it has worked. Unlike previous years I am carrying no injuries into the race - my knees in particular are amazingly pain free. I am however, carrying an extra, ahem, 4 kilograms into the race.
Hence, the dwarves from the hills around Lake Toya reckon this could be the year they finally 'take me', most likely when we go through the tunnel on route 981. The word from sources close to the small people (i.e. Sanae) say that our bushy bearded bijou brethren will avenge the slights cast upon them in blogs past at the 15km water station.
Should I make it that far.

A year in a Japanese elementary school

Cian has just finished his first year at the local elementary school and is pretty chuffed at moving up a grade. No longer will he be bottom of the pile. Now he gets to exercise his hard won 12 months of experience over the new first grade students, or 'cherries' as he has already taken to calling them. It has been a year of hard won experience for Daddy too. As first an ALT and latterly a researcher I have spent a fair bit of time in primary classrooms across Hokakido, but it is a very different encounter when one is a parent. What follows are some random observations about Cian's first year in school.
(1) He goes to school a lot; 205 days in a year, compared to 183 days in Ireland. That's over 4 more weeks of classes.
(2) The corollary to that is he has less holidays, particularly in summer, when he is only off for 26 days. This though only applies to Hokkaido and parts of Tohoku. For the rest of Japan summer holidays are approximately 6 weeks long and run through until the end of August. Which would be an ideal length of time to return home for the business end of the GAA championship. Instead Hokkaido has longer winter holidays, nearly 4 weeks compared to 2 everywhere else in Japan. Ostensibly this is so students can 'enjoy winter sports', but in practice it is to save on the heating bills for schools. Bar the bean counters at the prefectural board of education, nobody is happy with this arrangement; not the students, the teachers, nor the parents.
(3) Cian does not have to wear a school uniform. On occasion he has gone to school in his pyjamas (top only). Such feckless parenting can of course be entirely blamed on his Mammy.
(4) However, Cian and his fellow students all have identical school bags. They are rectangular in shape and made of the same material as the protective clothing worn by the bomb disposal team in the film The Hurt Locker. These things are indestructible. Which may explain why we ended up paying close on 200 Euros for the bag. Or rather Cian's grandmother did. Apparently the tradition in Japan is for grandparents to buy their grandchildren's first school bag. At 200 Euros a pop, it is one Japanese tradition I am very happy to uphold.
(5) Cian walks to school with group of 4 of his classmates. This is not mere chance. All first grade students are assigned to such groups and must follow a specific route to the school. Thus in the morning Cian meets his group at 7:40 at they all walk up to school together. Or they used to until Cian and his friend Ryuto got fed up with the other two girls talking and walking slow, and decided to run up to school instead so that they could have a quick game of dodgeball in the school gym before classes started.
(6) Students must be in the school by 8:10. Classes don't start immediately. First there is getting the books and other materials ready for that day's classes, then attendance is checked, class announcements read out, there is a 15 minute silent reading time where students can read what they like. Finally, at 8:40, the first class commence. There are 4 classes in the morning and one in the afternoon (though in second grade he will have two classes in the afternoon twice a week). He has a twenty minute break mid morning and an hour and ten minutes for lunch.
(7) Lunch is a hot school lunch delivered daily. Students in Cian's class are assigned in rotation to bring the lunch trolley to the classroom, serve the food, tidy up everything afterwards, and bring the lunch trolley back down to the school entrance. They don't get paid for this.
(8) Students also have to clean their classroom everyday. And the corridor in front of it. And the toilets. They don't get paid for this either.
(9) Unfortunately this behaviour doesn't transfer to the home. Ask Cian to help with the dinner or tidying up and you are met with comments about 'child labor' and 'in servitude'. Then he takes up a guitar and sings about 'not working on Maggie's farm no more' and how 'a change is gonna come'. These references, it should be pointed out, are completely lost on Mammy who gives a clip on the ear and orders him to set the table or he's going to spend the night in the bin station across the road. Again.
(10) The school building is quite old and in winter, quite cold. There are no radiators in the classrooms only a gas fired stove in the center of the room. The stove has two settings: molten metal making blast furnace hot, or off.
(11) I know this because there are three 'open class' days throughout the year, one in each term. As the name suggests, this when Cian's class is opened to the parents to come see the magic. Some parents bring cameras, others video the proceedings, and all of us hope that our respective offspring, please God/Buddha, don't do anything too embarrassing in front of us all.
(12) There is a lot of paperwork involved in being a student at a Japanese elementary school. Pretty much every single day Cian returns home with a sheaf of notices, flyers, requests and other assorted printed paraphernalia. As anecdotal evidence suggests that this is repeated all across the country, you can understand why the world's forests are disappearing so fast.
(13) One of the notices is the class diary. We usually get these 3 or 4 times a week, depending on how busy Cian's teacher is. Besides keeping parents updated on what the students are learning in class, they also contain copied examples of various students' compositions. After a while you begin to notice that (a) the same students' writings keep appearing; and (b) how well these students write, both in terms of content and handwriting skill. Cian by contrast has featured only once, in twelve months, and his writing resembled the sort of hieroglyphics found on the walls inside pyramids.
(14) Mind you the boy is a whizz at maths, but sums never get featured in the diary.
(15) Cian doesn't like his homeroom teacher. Or rather her gender. He'd rather have a man, because he's pretty sure a man would put maths in the class diary.
(16) You can imagine his disappointment then when he found out today that he is going to have the same homeroom teacher for second grade.

Japanese current affairs

Today was a big news day in Japan. April 1st marks the start of both the financial and educational year here so any policy changes (tax increases, new curriculum, teacher numbers, etc.,) relating to them are implemented from today. The biggie this year is the rise in consumption tax (sales tax or v.a.t.) from 5% to 8%. This has been greeted like the financial apocalypse. For the past month the media have been running daily stories on how this is going to adversely impact on people's lives. They have a point: there are 2.2 million people on welfare (a record high), with 63.8 million people receiving some form of pension, and as they are on fixed incomes the 3% hike in the tax represents a 3% reduction in the money they receive. This against the back drop of higher food and electricity prices due to the deliberately weak yen - 'deliberately' in order to boost the profits of Japan's large export manufacturers, which in turn raises share prices and dividends, and hence benefiting the better off who can easily absorb the 3% tax hike.
They don't call it a regressive tax for nothing.
It should also be pointed that the likes of Toyota and Sony, the export poster boys of the Japanese economy, by some estimates only account for 10% or so of total GDP. Any policies, such as a weaker yen, that favor them do so at the expense of the rest of the country, particularly ordinary Joe Watanabe.
While the rise in sales tax had been an ongoing story, the other big news arrived suddenly yesterday evening with the announcement from the International Court of Justice that Japan's whale hunting was illegal and had to stop.
Now.
Since 1988 Japan had been hunting whales in the name of 'scientific research', killing approximately 10,000 whales each year. The Court, albeit in polite legalese, termed this explanation "a crock of shit". Again in polite legalese, they pointed out that "feck all scientific findings had come out of the whale slaughter", and most of the 'research' was on how best to serve and eat whale meat. Not that it is even all that popular over here any way. But whale hunting is regarded as a 'traditional way of life' and traditions rather than cetaceans tend to be uncritically upheld in Japan.
Mind you, there is a not terribly subtle reek of hypocrisy to the whole thing. If you ban killing whales, then why not tuna fish too, or cows or pigs? Is it because eating beef and pork is culturally acceptable to 'western' nations, but orientals eating whale meat is regarded as barbaric?