Yesterday in Okinawa, there was an explosion at a construction site. The driver of a mechanical digger was seriously injured, and windows were broken at an old peoples’ home 50 metres away. It wasn’t a terrorist attack but a (hitherto) unexploded bomb, left over from the second world war. A lot of them fell on Okinawa, and even 60-odd years later they can still go off, apparently.
They said on the TV news last night that there was still an estimated 3000 tons of bombs left in the ground …
Watching our usual news programme on the box today just before opening up the shop, and as usual there was a promotion where some company offers a free sample of their latest product for the first so many viewers to send in a postcard. I suppose it’s good market research or something, and occasionally I might have got a case of beer if I’d been quick enough to read the address off the screen. I keep meaning to get a postcard ready for such times…
Today the “present” was 20 packs of Toyota Museum Curry.
Er, … what? As you know, Toyota is a huge car manufacturer based at Toyota City, just down the road, and they’ve got a museum just outside Nagoya, with cars, I suppose. “Oh yes”, says T, “the Toyota Museum cafeteria’s curry is famous.” (!)
So, having gone into the red for the first time since the war on their car sales, I suppose Toyota have decided to diversify a bit.
The day before yesterday was one of those traditional days which are gradually being forgotten – the next day T remembered we hadn’t eaten nanakusakayu: rice soup with early spring greens, which probably tastes better than it sounds. ( Pasta primavera in Italy might be a similar idea. ) I’ve never actually tried it, but I’m sure it would have been just the job for keeping out the recent cold weather.
A quick web search showed that other people have already described this pretty well, so instead of rehashing what they said I’ll just point you to a couple of nice web pages:
Still blooming on Christmas Day, hibiscuses just need plenty of sun.
The hibiscus flower is a sort of Okinawan emblem, but will do well here in Nagoya – they just need a sunny spot, and a couple I had in pots in front of Raffles just kept blooming right through the summer. The recent cold weather was starting to get to them though, so after getting this shot of a Christmas Hibiscus I moved them indoors for the rest of the winter. They’re looking happier now.
Anyway, a belated Happy New Year to everyone, and all the best in 2009!
Japan still uses the “era” system for counting years, based on the current emperor, so this is year 20 of the “Heisei” era. The previous emperor’s reign was known as “Showa” and started in 1925. Amazingly, when I got here in 1976 it was still Showa and the emperor was the same warlord who had presided over the Japanese military regime in World War 2! Now there’s a “Showa village” theme park not far away (maybe I could get a bit of side work there as a “Showa foreigner”?) and Showa is becoming history.
Beautiful old buildings like this are disappearing fast.
If you live in Nagoya, two events that might be of interest:
This one's being held up by the posters on the walls.
Jim’s drawings capture beautifully the Japan that I remember when I first got here. Of course they already had the Bullet Train and enough high-rise buildings for anyone, but away from the main streets that’s how it was. Now everyone seems to live in plastic prefabricated boxes that look like Legoland, and anything not immediately needed is knocked down and replaced with a car park. The system of land tax seems deliberately set up to force people to make money from their property in order to pay the tax. Even Kyoto hasn’t escaped.
Now the bottom’s fallen out of the economy the pace of destruction might let up a bit, but there’s not that much Showa left these days.
The seasons seem to change really suddenly here. Only just over a month ago we were in Nagasaki (first visit) baking under a scorching hot sun in a clear blue sky. West Kyushu felt like a different country from the Tokai strip from Tokyo to Osaka where most Japanese (and foreigners) live. Tonight they’re due to get some snow, apparently.
For many people outside Japan Nagasaki, along with Hiroshima, is mainly associated with the atomic bombing that came at the end of World War Two, but it’s a beautiful historic city and if you’re planning a trip to Japan well worth adding to Kyoto and Tokyo if you can manage the time. The bomb fell in the north of the city and because of the mountainous geography most of the devastation was confined to that area, where some 40,000 people died that day and about as many subsequently. There is now a Peace Park and museum near the epicentre, but we didn’t visit them. I’ve already been to Hiroshima, seen several TV documentaries on the horrible effects of nuclear weapons and consider myself already thoroughly committed to the cause of peace.
More selfishly, we only had a couple of days, and there were other places we wanted to visit. The centre, round the harbour, seems to have been pretty much untouched by the bomb and there are beautiful old temples, churches and houses. Nagasaki used to be a very important port and has a long history of contact with foreigners: Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, British… all of whom have left traces. Add lots of hills with views, nice old trams they’ve bought from other places too short-sighted to keep them, a fantastic view from a nearby mountain of the city and harbour, good food and a different culture from Tokyo, Nagoya or Osaka and you can see why it’s a popular tourist destination. (We must have been off-season because there were huge almost-empty carparks everywhere.)
Goa? Brazil? No, Japan.
Winter starts quite late here and we were lucky to catch three blazing hot days – Summer’s sayonara party. There’s some beautiful countryside around and the blue sky, blue sea and lush sub-tropical greenery almost reminded me of Okinawa. The plants that grow around there are not the same as what we have here – there seemed to be many that I’d never seen. I don’t claim to be a Christian or anything (hard-line fundamentalist agnostic maybe?) but have to say that there are some really beautiful churches in the area. There have been Christian communities there for hundreds of years and some fishing villages have a local church instead of the usual shrine or temple. Even for a Westerner the effect is quite exotic.
Out of the handful of places we had time for I would recommend So Fuku Ji. This is an old temple, built by Chinese so it looks quite different from the usual Japanese temple, but not gaudy at all. That garish tinselly style I’ve assocated with Chinese temples up to now seems to have been subdued a bit and the result is peaceful and beautiful. Running out of time, we took a taxi back. Hearing that we had just visited a Chinese temple and hadn’t been to the peace park he remarked that the peace park should have come first. I could have pointed out that I was British and not responsible for dropping that devilish weapon, that I had taken part in a (tiny) anti-war demonstration, that I already knew plenty about what happened, that more people had died in Tokyo and Okinawa and many millions in Europe, but anything I said would have sounded as if I was belittling the dreadful suffering of all the innocent people who had that thing dropped on them, so I kept silent.
Sou-fuku-ji in Nagasaki
Maybe we should have visited the Peace Park.
I mean, really, surely this is a bit soon? I feel more like Scrooge every year, but it’s still early November, Christmas is a month and a half away and already we have to listen to Xmas tunes in the supermarket, be wished “merry Christmas” in commercials on the telly and see illuminations and Xmas trees going up everywhere. Times are hard and I suppose the shops want to sqeeze out every yen they can, but I’m not looking forward to six weeks of this. The final insult is that when 25th December finally arrives there won’t be a trace of any of this Christmas stuff to be seen! “Christmas Ib” as it’s known here is the climax on the 24th, Christmas day doesn’t exist and the countdown to New Year will be underway.
It was hard not to get caught up in the enthusiasm over Obama’s election. That guy’s certainly an inspiring speaker, and he’ll need every ounce of it to get the American people to come along with some of the hard decisions that lie ahead.
Those eight years of Bush have cost the world dear and things are going to get pretty grim, but, finally, do we have a glimmering of hope?
Nagoya Grampus (football) supporters on TV today were waving posters with a picture of Che Guevara and the slogan “Pride of Nagoya”.
Thought you’d like to know.
There was a little spot of bother at Chubu Airport this morning. Someone forgot to plug in one of the 7 metal detectors people have to walk theough on their way to the departure lounge so, for the 5 minutes it took to notice it, some 20 people got through unchecked. Once they were in the departure area there was no way of telling which passengers were the ones who had slipped through so everyone had to be checked again. Some people had already boarded their plane which was starting to taxi out for takeoff, so they had to be brought back for a metal-check too. Some flights were delayed by 2 1/2 hours, but in the interests of anti-terrorism…
Just a minute – what actually would be the probability of a terrorist being among those 20 people, given that they would have been expecting to be metal-checked? Pretty close to zero,I’d have thought. On the other hand, maybe the person who left the plug out was in league with the evil-doers and told them about their window of opportunity. In that case, once they were in the departure lounge they could have hidden the knife, or whatever, under a seat or somewhere. The same goes for the people on the plane. Once a weapon has got past the check barrier it’s going to be pretty much impossible to find, so all that re-checking was quite meaningless.
Don’t think this is another of those “Japanese are brainless automatons” postings. I’m sure nonsense like this goes on all over the globe.
Sigh…
This is the avatar I use on various places on the web - you might possibly run into it somewhere.
asazuke 