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As the plane swung low across wind flecked Tokyo Bay on final approach to Haneda airport I thought to myself "it's good to be back". Which made me realize that I have come to consider Japan 'home'.
Which it is, I suppose, but as an emigrant its a little disconcerting to find yourself pining for fluffy white rice as opposed to mashed potatoes. 
I had a 90 minute lay over in Haneda - just enough time to do my souvenir shopping and hope I could appease Cian with a scale model of the Japanese government's official plane (Air Force Ichi) in lieu of a Texan fire engine. I sweetened the deal by adding a strawberry mousse to the package.
Then it was a turbulent hour and a half up to Chitose where, the Captain informed us, the temperature was currently minus five. Did the usual mad dash to the airport train station, made the Hakodate train and was back home in Muroran by 10:30 that morning.
Ahh, 'home'. Who'd have guessed I would find it here?

LAX

Or Los Angeles International Airport to give it its full title. The airport is reminiscent of the old Bangkok airport in the mid 1990's; dated, ramshackle, confined, badly in need of refurbishment if not outright demolition. As I arrived on a domestic flight I had to walk nearly a kilometre to get to the international terminal on a narrow sidewalk, all the time weaving my way through lines of grumpy people waiting on pick-ups, taxis, shuttle buses, or just waiting. There seemed to have been a rampant outbreak of food poisoning prior to my arrival as there were vivid splashes of vomit on the sidewalk and dripping off one of the escalators. The noise was insistent, very LA I suspect; the constant irritated beeping of horns, yells, shouted negotiations between the taxi drivers as to which car picked up which passengers.
Inside the airport was no better. Lines at security were long and slow, and what our American cousins term 'airside facilities' (i.e. duty free shopping, restaurants, cafes, etc.) consisted of a couple of kiosks and a packed 'Samuel Adams' cafe. And nothing else. And this is supposed to be land of the brave and the free and the consumer. I am afraid Cian there will be no fire engine this time. For that you can blame the resolutely socialist infrastructure planning of the airport authorities.
I should have gone with the good old boys to Houston. Instead I have 12 long hours to Tokyo ahead of me, during which time Wednesday, March 20th will disappear in one of those space-time continuum paradoxes that afflict Michael J. Fox and trans-Pacific flights.

The Jet Set

So, it's just after seven on Tuesday evening and I am sitting in the departure lounge at Dallas-Fort Worth airport with some good old boys watching the college basketball.
I have no interest whatsoever in college basketball but I am grunting along with them in all the right places to maintain my newly achieved 'good old boy' status.

Though I need a pair of cowboy boots.
And a considerably larger gut to truly qualify.
I am at the start of my 24 hour journey back to Muroran, and even though it is still winter and, well, still Muroran, I will be glad to get back.
It is indicative of just how spectacularly dull Dallas is that it has forced me to write those words.
Oh, the good old boys are all leaving - their flight to Houston has just been called. And yes, I did say "I'll catch you down the road, pardner".
Anyway, Dallas. Bland beyond despairing disbelief. Or certainly the downtown, where I was staying and attending a conference. If I had a car, sorry 3.5 liter, V-6, 290 horsepower built in the US of goddamn A Ford Explorer (which seems to be the jeep de jure here in the Lone Star state) and got out and about a bit then maybe my opinion would have been different.
But I doubt it.
I came to the airport early this evening to see if I could buy a fire engine (and Cian, if you ever read this years in the future, let me apologize once again. But Daddy did try to find you one), because the only shops in downtown Dallas are 7-11, a PVC drugstore, and rather incongruously, a Neiman Marcus store (a very upmarket clothing shop for the failed fashionistas out there). And nothing else. Just street after street of boarded up store fronts and entire skyscrapers with 'For Sale/Lease' signs in front of them.
'Downtown' to my mind means the bustling centre of a city, predominantly given over to shopping and banks. Not vacant office buildings, boarded up windows and advice from the hotel concierge not to go for a walk after dark.
Alright, have to go, my flight has been called. I have a three hour layover in Los Angeles, so if the lines for security aren't too long, I will write another post from there.

Yee

and indeed, hah!
This blog is coming to you from the fine city of Dallas in God Bless Us One and ALL, Texas, in the United States of goddamned America.
I have only just arrived after three flights and close on 24 hours of traveling and to be honest, I am jet lagged out of my mind, so this post is probably not going to make all that much sense (do they ever, I here you say).
At the moment I am experiencing an ongoing swaying motion that has me lurching left and right to compensate for the residual air turbulence as my body reckons I'm still flying.
Mentally maybe.
So Dallas. First impressions are of the airport, the interstate, big Ford pick-ups, the Dallas-Fort Worth Gun Show this weekend, and the Dallas Morning News' comprehensive guide to St Patrick's Day festivities in the city. Speaking of which, I went for a brief walk a couple of blocks around the hotel and came across a Mexican Bar called 'Sol Irlandes', where Seamus Stout will providing the live music from nine tonight. 
You couldn't make it up.
I am ostensibly here to attend (and present at) the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, but as The Dubliner Pub is organizing a 'Block Party' all day on Sunday and, yes! 'With or Without U2' are performing, I may just have to rearrange my priorities. 

Storm

In early March of 1999 I was in my car heading reluctantly home to Shibetsu after a weekend spent amidst the bright lights of big city Obihiro. I was trying to outrun a fast approaching storm and even as I left the city for the four hour drive back, the wind was picking up and the snow had started to fall. I should have left earlier, much earlier, but hubris and a hangover had kept me from going. So I pushed it, my trusty Cynos driving dangerously fast on route 38 and I arrived in Kushiro shortly after six. By now the snow was falling heavily and being blown hard by the ever strengthening wind. Usually I stopped in Kushiro for dinner, but I kept on, hoping my luck would hold all the way home.
It didn't.
About half an hour out of Kushiro on the rapidly disappearing road to Nakashibetsu I was stopped by a police car. Just beyond them a large barrier had been swung across the road. They had closed the road and I was diverted west, towards Shibecha. A little further on another barrier loomed into view and I had to make another turn left. The wind was howling now, flinging the snow in great white sheets across the road. I had to dim my headlights as full beam was reflecting off the snow and effectively blinding me. I crawled along at less than 20 kph, trying to steer through the drifts that were increasingly blocking my progress.
That part of east Hokkaido is flat open countryside, one of the few arable plains in all of Japan. The farms are big and open; the fields are not bordered by ditches or trees the way they are back home. Instead there are huge swathes of open land to make it easier to use farm machinery and allow crops to catch as much sunlight as possible during the short summers out there. In winter though, this untrammeled space means that the wind can blow unimpeded, picking up the dry, powdery snow off the fields and piling it metres high across roads and against the windward side of houses.
The storm got stronger, the wind driven snow obscuring everything; I could no longer discern where the road was and slowed to a stop. Immediately the snow began to drift around the car. I tried to drive on but my wheels spun uselessly. I was well and truly stuck. And I had no idea where I was stuck. Somewhere northwest of Kushiro, but closer to Shibecha than Nakashibetsu.
I spent along, anxious, sleepless night in my car. I had enough sense to turn off the engine and was lucky to have had a sleeping bag with me, so I crawled into that and waited out the storm, praying that one of the big transport trucks so common to that part of the world wouldn't crash into me. I didn't leave my hazard lights on as I didn't want to run down the battery.
My dawn the next morning, the wind had abated somewhat but I knew little else beyond that. The snow had drifted up and over the top of my car and both doors were frozen shut. Just after eight a road crew finally got to me and dug me out of the snow. They were quite taken aback when a gaijin got out to thank them in bad Japanese for rescuing him. Turns out that over 60 cars had to be dug out from the roads in the region that morning. I finally got back to Shibestu at midday, following a slow moving slow plough for much of the way.

Last weekend a similar, albeit considerably more severe, storm hit the same region. Nine people died in it, the worst death toll from a single winter storm in Hokkaido in over 40 years. A woman and her four children were caught in a snow drift just outside of Nakashibetsu. The mother called a number of times for help, but such was the ferocity of the wind and the amount of snow that had drifted onto the road that it took the rescue services 2 hours to travel the four kilometers to where the car was stuck. By that time the car was buried under a 2 metre high snow drift. When they finally got the car door open they found that the family had died from carbon monoxide poisoning; the mother had kept the engine running to keep the car warm, but the drifting snow had blocked the exhaust pipe so the fumes had been forced under and then into the car.
Elsewhere, people were found frozen to death in fields and by the side of the road after they had abandoned their snow trapped cars and attempted to walk to safety, in some cases only a few hundred metres from their homes. The saddest tragedy was of a 53 year old, recently widowed father and his 9 year old daughter. They had gone to the local town to buy a cake for Hina Matsuri or Doll's Festival, which is traditionally a day of celebration for girls. On their way back home their car got stuck in the snow. Again, the father made repeated calls for help but the rescue services were already busy answering similar emergency calls all across the area and couldn't respond. Anxious that he was running low on petrol and wouldn't be able to keep the car warm, he decided to walk to a friends house some 700 metres up the road. The following morning the police found father and daughter covered in snow, huddled in front of a barn, halfway between the car and the house. The father had frozen to death, but in dying he had saved the life of his daughter as he had covered her with his body, clasping her close to him thus saving her from the worst of the wind and the cold. She survived the night with only some minor frostbite.

There is a similar storm forecast for tomorrow but the hope is that people will have learnt from the terrible events of last week and stay at home and wait for it to blow past.

March

The first of March. 
Oh how the spirit soars. Especially when I look out the kitchen window and see this...

The first snow of what the weather forecast warned would be a three day blizzard with an expected 50 centimetres of snow by tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile Cian is slumped on the sofa with a feverish cold, falling in and out of a fitful, cough racked sleep.

And what does my man Seneca have to say about such a sorry state of affairs?
"The wise man is joyful, happy and calm, unshaken; he lives on a plane with the gods. Now go, question yourself; if you are never downcast, if your mind is not harassed by any apprehension, through anticipation of what is to come, if day and night your soul keeps on its even and unswerving course, upright and content with itself, then you have attained to the greatest good that mortals can possess".
Fine words, but nothing about shoveling a half metre of snow, an activity I doubt many gods would undertake.

February

You'll have to forgive the paltry number of posts since the start of the new year. In truth there is very little to write about besides a litany of illnesses and ailments. Earlier this month we were supposed to go to Forest Kozan, but the night before Cian vomited quite spectacularly all over his room. So the following morning, rather than marveling at the snow shrouded beauty of the mid-winter forest, we instead spent it wiping flecks of undigested food off the bed, floor, walls, table, books, slippers, and school bag, and probably missed a few other spots as well (but which will no doubt spawn a colony of mold come summer). Subsequent weekends were blighted by blizzards and bad weather, so tramps through the snow had to be reluctantly cancelled.
To my mind February is a month that hangs especially heavy here in Hokkaido. Despite my time here (15 years!), I have never really embraced winter sports; snowshoeing is the extent of my seasonal activity, otherwise I go for a slow, slippery jog. This sense of constant constraint produces an intemperate longing for the future; I am impatient for Spring to come and this expectation of warmer times suppresses any engagement with the present. The result though is that "while we are postponing, life speeds by".
This quote is taken from a book I am currently reading, if you'll excuse the pretension, written two thousand years ago, the Epistles of Seneca (mere letters were beneath the ancients).
As an aside, the university library has a surprisingly well stocked, albeit somewhat dated, philosophy collection. It is particularly strong on classical philosophy and, for some reason, the complete and unabridged works of Immanuel Kant - in the original German. The book by Seneca was added to the library's collection in 1976, and as far as I can discover, I am the first person to have borrowed the book. I am kind of hoping they will let me keep it.
Anyway, Seneca, as most of you probably already know, was corner back on the great Cork hurling team of 17 A.D., winning 5 All Ireland medals and a couple of All-Stars, his man-marking of Cuchulainn and keeping him scoreless from play in the drawn final of 20 A.D. by now legendary.
That was only the half of it as it turns out, for he was also a philosopher in the Stoic tradition, and tutor to the young Roman Emperor, Nero (he of the famous fiddle playing). The book is a collection of letters, sorry, epistles he sent to his friend Lucilus. These letters range far and wide on a multitude of topics, from 'the good which abides', to 'brawn and brain', to 'meeting death cheerfully'. 
I doubt if Seneca ever lived in Hokkaido, but he seemed to capture the mood of February in this part of the world when he wrote: "What man can you show me who places only value in his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily".
Yes, I know, time to hide the kitchen knives from Brian and sit me down in front of the complete series of Fr. Ted (thank God for youtube), but Seneca does have a point. He would, however, be hard pressed to make it here in Muroran on a dull, snow swept Sunday afternoon with the melancholy of Monday creeping closer. He lived in Rome and could always go the Colosseum to watch lions tear men apart whenever he felt particularly despondent. Unfortunately, Muroran offers no such distractions, despite my lobbying the Mayor.
Ahh February. I'll be glad to be done with you.