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.
Incident at the airport 6 November, 2008
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…
Osaka revisited 8 October, 2008
Last week we went back to Osaka for another Daihachi Ryodan gig. The last time was the Haru Ichiban festival in a beautiful Spring park, but this one was at a funky place called Rain Dogs in the Umeda “entertainment district” – a zone of cheap eating and drinking places, interspersed with various disreputable-looking establishments offering some kind of “service”… Very much an Asian city scene packed with neon signs, strolling customers, hustlers,sounds, smells… and much bigger than any equivalent in Nagoya. Osaka is big – with 6 million people, and then Kobe and Kyoto close by, this is an urban conglomeration to rival Tokyo/Yokohama.The Osaka expressway is quite something – this maze of overhead highways snakes to and fro between high-rise buildings just like something out of the comics that were around when I was a kid. The difference between that view of the future and the reality it’s turned out to be is that the people in those pictures looked happy and relaxed as their futuristic vehicles flew here and there – now everyone’s late for a meeting or something and stressed out. Why do we have to spend so much of our time going from one place to another these days?
Topping the bill at Rain Dogs was Noboru Abe and the Magic Animals (I wish I’d thought of that name!) who were really good, in an odd sort of way. No spectacular solos or anything, but an original groove and interesting vocals. One of those bands that creates their own world. I suppose they’re a sort of cult band – they don’t even have a web page. Abe san is a dai sempai who in 1998 was hanging out with Mickey Hart when I was just starting College, and one of the moving spirits behind the Haruichiban festival.
Kansai (Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and district) is kindof cool these days and you can hear kansai ben on NHK where before it was all standard Japanese, a bit like the increase in regional English on the BBC. Osaka is sometimes compared with Birmingham in the UK, but the people remind me more of Londoners – quick talkers, great sense of humour (Osaka’s the centre of manzai ), on the lookout for a quick profit but friendly and kind. They make good audiences too, and Daihachi’s performance went over quite well I think. A nice outing.
Weekend Sunshine! 21 September, 2008
Listening this morning to “Weekend Sunshine” I got all nostalgic listening to early Pink Floyd, grooved on Malians Rokia Traore and Issa Bagayogo… finished off with Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell… If you live in Japan and don’t know this NHK FM radio programme you’re in for a treat. Check out this week’s playlist. Of course the DJ Peter Barakan is a fellow UK citizen, about my age and arrived in Japan about the same time, so I suppose it’s not so odd there’s some musical affinity, but when I discovered this programme two or three years ago Japan was a better place to live.
Saturday morning 7:15 to 9:00 is not a time I’m usually too active, so I use our video recorder to record it. They have built-in timers, usually hi-fi sound these days (in fact these days everyone except us has got a dvd recorder) and you just have to connect an fm tuner to a “line in” socket at the back somewhere. (I’m sure the same would work with a dvd recorder.) Anyway there’s a good quality sound recording on the video cassette and I can copy stuff I like onto an audio cassette (yes we’re pretty retro round here) or maybe some day I’ll figure out how to get it into the computer as an mp3 file or something. Anyway, it’s great music.
With online stores and illicit downloads from the web radio programmes might seem a bit outdated but I still think there’s a place for a DJ who can turn you on to things you might not have found otherwise. I’ve discovered so many excellent musicians thanks to Peter Barakan’s show. Keep up the good work!
While on the subject, another NHK FM programme I like is Masakazu Kitanaka’s World Music Time. A bit variable, but sometimes you get a great collection of sounds from some country you knew little about.
animals 13 September, 2008
Out in the wilds of Gifu it’s really the animals’ territory not ours; we’re a sort of Last Outpost of Civilization and as soon as we let up our guard for a moment the jungle tries to take over. The plants and the animals are both cooperating in this and it’s all we can do to try to keep even. Meanwhile, in a pitifully small way, we try not to destroy the environment more than our laziness demands and one example is that we keep most of the organic refuse from Raffles’ over the week, take it out to the country in a Compost Bucket and try to make compost instead of throwing it out for Nagoya City to dispose of. Making compost itself has turned out to be harder than you might think – it seems to be important not to let it get too wet – but before that can even start some of the local animals would rather go over it, pick out some of the choicer titbits for their lunch, and spread the rest in a smelly mess around our garage, where the bucket’s contents mature for a week before joining the main compost heap.
The garage shutter doesn’t come quite down to the ground and there’s about 10cm clearance at the bottom; room for a small animal to get in and mess with the compost bucket inside, which is exactly what’s been happening recently. The other week we discovered the probable culprits. While we were having breakfast outside T. suddenly went “EEEK!! A wild boar!!!”. Wild boars can be dangerous and I jumped up in a hurry but it had already gone. “Look under the house!” – so I had a look (Japanese houses are raised up a bit) and saw three little tanuki sneaking away. (not wild boar fortunately) Apparently they had put their heads out from under the house – must have looked cute, but T. didn’t appreciate it.
Anyway, they were probably the ones opening the rubbish (the bucket has a lid) and making a mess in our garage. I tried putting a biggish stone on top, but the next week they’d still managed between the three of them (or maybe with help from their mum if she was able to get under the shutter) to knock over the bucket. OK, this time a really big stone – even three tanuki together won’t be able to knock this down or get the stone off:
big stone on bucket.
Ah, but…
The following week:
lid off, stone still in place
How they did it beats me.
Anyway, I’ve now got a big barrel over the bucket with the stone on that, which seems to be doing the job so far.
Guerilla Rain 4 September, 2008
Guerilla Rain is what they call those sudden fierce downpours that seem to be getting more and more common. What we’d call flash floods I suppose. In July they had an attack in Kobe, where four people were swept away, then in Tokyo five sewer workers.
Last Thursday night we had a taste here in Nagoya. It suddenly started pouring, water came in under out garage shutter, and while we were nervously watching the TV news we noticed a pool forming under out living room window. I ran out and pulled off the dead leaves that were blocking the drain hole of our veranda (got soaked in the 3~4 seconds that it took) and the 15cm of water that had built up soon went down… They were saying later that in Nagoya about 100mm of water fell in that hour. Down the road in Okazaki they got 140mm, many houses were flooded, and again two people were drowned. One old lady was found washed up on the coast 40 Km away. More recently, some places in the area have had 400~odd mm of rain in 24 hours.
These are serious quantities of rain when you think about it. 500mm is half a metre of water spread over many square kilometres. No wonder little streams turn into raging torrents, and mountains crumble. While Japan certainly gets plenty of rain, this is unusual for August, or any time for that matter. The cause seems to be that the Pacific high pressure area that usually brings the hot but clear Summer weather has given up, swathes of hot moist air are coming up from the South and colliding with cold air from the Asian continent – right here.
Still, there have been no typhoons up this way so far (touch wood) so we’re luckier than people in the Caribbean who seem to be getting hit by one cyclone after another, not to mention India, where a river has changed course. Back in the day, everything used to be blamed on The Bomb, now it’s Global Warming, though that seems more credible.
unfortunately
Autumn already? 27 August, 2008
We drive out to our country place every weekend, pretty much. I’m feeling increasingly guilty about this for the CO2 we’re contributing and thinking we should have got a hybrid instead of the otherwise nice VW. However there’s no way to get there by public transport so the only option would be to sell up. Maybe some day we’ll live out there all the time…
Meanwhile it’s a much-needed antidote to city life. The air tastes good, about one car an hour passes by and every week you can see the seasons have moved on a little bit. The insect voices are different, the wild flowers are different, the angle and colour of the sun are different; what a difference a week makes! Two weeks ago there were hordes of small red dragonflies over a nearby rice paddy- a sign of Autumn even in the sweltering heat of mid-August. Last week the rice had turned golden – pretty much ready for harvest – and, as if someone had turned a switch, this delicious cool breeze began to blow, followed a couple of days later by rain, cloud and last Sunday evening out in the hills was quite chilly. Around 7:00 I heard a deer cry, which is something you usually get in October or November. (The mating call of the deer round here is quite eerie – more like the screech of a banshee than anything you would expect.)
Meanwhile, back in Nagoya a cricket is chirping softly outside, among the rubbish bins.
Peace 15 August, 2008
Today, August the 15th, is the day the Pacific war ended in 1945, and the event is marked with ceremonies all over Japan including a speech on TV by the Prime Minister. Coming in the middle of the “Obon” holiday, when returning spirits of departed relatives are entertained for a few days, the timing is perfect. While I remember the boys’ comics when I was a kid were full of war stories with heroic Brits and evil Germans, commemoration of the war seemed to be mainly about giving thanks for the sacrifices of troops who died. Japan has its own Yasukuni Shrine for that, but it is unfortunately tangled up in right-wing nationalism and attempted revision of Japan’s historical record, which is nowhere as well known to most people here as, for example, that of Hitler in Germany.
The main message here is “never again”. While atrocities committed in Asia cannot be denied, the Japanese people themselves suffered terribly during and after the war – the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was really horrible – and seem to have lost any faith in war as an instrument of foreign policy they may have had in the 1930’s. I think the same might be said of most Europeans. Both have fully tasted the bitter fruit of extreme nationalism. Others might take note.
Here in 2008 the world doesn’t seem such a peaceful place: wars, invasions, massacres of innocent civilians continue, spurred on by greedy, short-sighted governments’ cynical distortion of peoples’ natural love of their place of birth into fanatical nationalism. Well, if we don’t move on from that soon and get together to deal with the real issues that face all humanity, then there won’t be too much more history.
(…all we are saying…)
Here we go… 9 August, 2008
OK for the next two weeks or so you won’t be able to switch on the box without seeing some (mainly Japanese) athletes winning a medal, or failing valiantly. The Olympic circus is on. (Oddly, I still haven’t got the Theme Song branded into my brain yet. I think there is one, and I remember at the time of the Aichi Expo you heard it 10 times a day on the radio and TV.) The time difference with Beijing is only one hour here so we’ll get all this stuff in real time, replacing all our regular programmes so the NHK producers, actors and other staff can take a Summer holiday. At this time of the year the programmes are all repeats anyway, so it won’t make that much difference really…
It’s alright I suppose – last night I watched the opening ceremony for an hour and a half till I got Spectacle Overload and fell asleep. The Chinese are justifiably proud of their recent economic progress, and want to show off a bit, like Japan at the time of the Tokyo Olympics when the Bullet Train had just been built and the nightmare of the war and its aftermath seemed over. Of course China still has a lot of unfinished business, politically maybe most of all. The long post-war hold on power of the LDP in Japan might look a bit suspicious democratically, and certainly allowed a lot of corruption to creep into the system, but at least they could be thrown out of power in elections in principle, actually were on one occasion I remember, and might well be at the next one… No such chance in China. Control on access to information and freedom of expression make it easy for rulers to do whatever they want, and corruption, at least at the local level, seems to be rife. Add a devastated environment, huge inequality of income, no free education or free medical care any more, numerous riots and protests all over the country and the potential for some kind of explosion is certainly there. It wouldn’t be nice for anyone, inside or outside the country. (Still, we have the encouraging example of South Africa, which seemed to be headed for a bloodbath till the white minority peacefully handed over power.)
Anyway, the Olympics – Chinese tend to get very indignant at the idea that the Tibetans or Uighurs might take advantage of this opportunity to express their grievances, but they’ve certainly got plenty to be aggreaved about and I wouldn’t be that surprised if there were some incidents. Otherwise, good luck to the athletes who’ve prepared so long for the Big Event!
Fingers crossed.
Cloudy Tanabata 8 July, 2008
Today is Tanabata – a day full of associations with the Summer stars and the Milky Way. Unfortunately, on the 7th of July your chance of being able to see any stars is pretty low, as it’s the middle of the rainy season! In fact, “the 7th day of the 7th month” should really be by the lunar calendar, which would put it about a month later, in early August, when you’ve got a much better chance of a star-filled Summer sky. Some places in Japan have Tanabata festivals in August, but the official date is the 7th of July, i.e. the lunar date has just been switched to the Western calendar with no adjustment for the (about) 1-month difference. The same happened to the “first day of Spring” and most other events on the Japanese calendar since it was changed to the Western Gregorian system in 1873.. Apparently the current Meiji government saved a month’s worth of civil servants’ salaries that way, but we’re still living with the consequences…
asazuke 