asazuke

Life in Japan, food, music, whatever…

Rumours 18 March, 2011

Filed under: news — johnraff @ 2:55 pm
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After major disasters communication breaks down and rumours can get out of control. After the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 Koreans were accused of poisoning wells and many were killed. In spite of our modern telecommunications, some of the same can still be seen after Japan’s 3/11. In Tokyo there has been a wave of panic buying – instant noodles and the like disappearing from shops, and long queues to buy petrol. Fuel shortage in fact has been a major problem in getting relief to survivours of the earthquake.

They’re having a really hard time. Many people had taken refuge in isolated places, with roads destroyed and no fuel for trucks, so had to get through the recent cold wave without enough food, water, heating oil, blankets, medicine… Supplies are only now, a week later, starting to get through to some extent. Many are elderly and already some have died.

Meanwhile the nuclear reactor at Fukushima is an ongoing story. Today they’ve been spraying it with water, which might help cool things down, and are working on getting power back to the coolant pumps. Maybe we can avoid a general meltdown. Fingers crossed. American, Korean and British authorities have apparently told their nationals to evacuate to 80Km from the Nuclear site and many Japanese are trying to do the same. Those who can are said to be moving from Tokyo to cities further west. Some resident foreigners are already leaving the country – apparently the price of an air ticket to Beijing has gone up from the usual ¥30,000 or so to around ¥200,000!

Rumours abound, carried by email, twitter, all the modern tools of communication which are supposed to give people ready access to the truth. Traditional broadcasters are urging people to get their information from radio and TV, and maybe they have a point here.

Of course the worst rumour mill of all is the stock market – everyone wants to be one step ahead so buying and selling turns on a whisper. Yesterday, on the basis that Japanese companies would be wanting to repatriate some of their foreign holdings for reconstruction at home, the yen shot up to a ridiculous rate of 76 to the dollar at one point. It’s back at 82 now, but Tokyo stocks are well down on a week ago…

 

Earthquake! 12 March, 2011

Filed under: incidents,news — johnraff @ 3:01 pm
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That was a big one.

The biggest since they started keeping records some time in the Meiji era in fact. The first we knew of it was when the radio made that beeping noise that means an earhquake warning. They brought this system in a couple of years ago – it picks up the P-waves that arrive first and gives you a few seconds to get under a desk before the slower, but more destructive, S-waves arrive. However they said it was coming to the north of the country so here in Nagoya we didn’t worry too much. Maybe half a minute later the people in the Tokyo studio started to talk about being severely shaken, you could hear shouting in the background, and the sound was getting a bit fractured. Still nothing in Nagoya, though.

It took about a minute for the waves to reach us – long, slow, swaying too and fro, like being on the deck of a ship. A feeling that makes you doubt your senses – solid ground is not supposed to move like that. I don’t usually get seasick, but after what seemed like ten minutes (probably less) of this both T and I were feeling a bit queasy with landsickness. Eventually it came to an end. “Is it over?” You can’t be really sure if the ground has stopped moving or not. Thankfully, no damage had been done to our 2-storey building, or anywhere in Nagoya. Those slow waves can be very destructive to high-rise buildings apparently, but in this case most of the damage was done by the tsunamis which followed shortly after, in the Tohoku region mostly.

There have been several smaller earthquakes lately and I think people now take tsunami warnings somewhat seriously, so most of the inhabitants of the towns and villages that got wiped out had managed to get away to higher ground. At the moment they’re talking about maybe 1,500 people killed or missing which, while high of course, still seems small in the context of the devastation which took place. (Have a look round YouTube.) Tsunamis are still being recorded now, a day later, and the latest news is of molten caesium leaking from a nuclear power station…

Thankfully, everything’s OK here, but they have a lot of clearing up to do in the north of the country.

 

Our Mayor: Part Three 4 March, 2011

Filed under: news,politics — johnraff @ 2:34 pm
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The story goes on… Kawamura won his election, by a landslide. He got re-elected as mayor of Nagoya, got his candidate elected as governor of Aichi Prefecture (where Nagoya is) and got his proposition to recall the city council passed – all with big majorities!

Now, I’m sort of in two minds about this. Of course I’m delighted those over-paid councillors will get thrown out, kicking and screaming till the end no doubt, though some of them seem to be coming round to the idea of having their salaries halved to 8 million yen a year ($100,000), now that it’s that or no job at all. That’s still a pretty good income I’d say – certainly more than I’ve got any chance of ever seeing…

On the other hand, Kawamura’s main platform seems to be “less tax” and he’s planning to cut Nagoya city tax by 10%. That appeals to most people for sure – who wants to pay more tax? Well… when they ask Scandinavians, for example, how they feel about their incredibly high tax rates, most of them seem to think it’s OK, because they get back pretty good government services in return. There’s the rub – what city services is K. going to cut to pay for this 10%? At the end of the day it’s a redistribution of income back to the rich, who have more tax to cut, from the poor who would benefit from the city services to be axed.

So is he a democrat, fighting city hall for the common folk, or a disguised conservative demagogue? It gets murkier too: at the national level the ruling DPJ is in trouble. Their popularity is collapsing, partly because of, again, taxes. There’s no escaping (in my opinion) that the rising proportion of elderly people in the population, along with the huge national debt, mean an increase in tax is coming, like it or not, along with a fall in standard of living in all the “developed” countries. My personal complaint is that the government want to raise this money by increasing consumption tax, which hits the poor hardest, rather than income tax. This comes just after reducing corporation tax by 5%, along with backing out of all kinds of promises made in their pre-election manifesto: child allowance, free motorways… People are getting fed up, and “wrecker” Ozawa, who’s caught up in another money-politics scandal, sees an opportunity to divert attention from his wrongdoing and set himself up as a kind of champion of the poor.

A lot of the DPJ diet members owe their seats to Ozawa, and when the current Kan cabinet excommunicated him last month for his sins there were rumblings and stirrings in the ranks. It now looks as if a split in the party is not out of the question. This is where Kawamura steps in. He’s an old Ozawa associate, and he’s been seen in meetings with the old fox lately, about who knows what, but Kawamura’s “Less Tax Party” which is about to fight in the Nagoya city council elections might get into some sort of coalition with a breakaway Ozawa wing of the DPJ, destroying the government so many people hoped would put an end to the old style money politics of the LDP.

One up for The Wrecker, and of course the equally unpopular LDP must be delighted.

 

The end of Sumo? 4 February, 2011

Filed under: customs,news — johnraff @ 2:56 pm
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…could be. The TV news yesterday was full of revelations about what police investigating illegal gambling had found on sumo wrestlers cell phone records. Very incriminating stuff suggesting bout-fixing was rife. This comes after a series of scandals over the last couple of years – dope-smoking Russians, the Bad Boy Asashoryu from Mongolia, a baseball betting ring and a young trainee beaten to death – very serious and after the baseball thing last year NHK dropped their live broadcast for a season. This, however, could be the worst yet, in terms of the future of this quintessentially Japanese “sport”.

Is it a sport or a rite? It takes place under an awning like a shrine, and starts and finishes with a lot of ceremony indicating its probable origins. Whatever, these days it still has a lot of fans who expect not to know the outcome of a bout until it’s over, and hold their breath to see who’ll end up the champion this time. Will it be Hakoho yet again? That could be all over. Now it looks as if a lot of results could well have been arranged in advance, wht’s the point of watching? The TV companies will probably agree, and the Ministry of Culture might well cancel sumo’s status as a public body with tax exemptions…

What’s more, there was a lot of money moving around behind the scenes here: so who stood to gain from knowing the sumo results in advance? Presumably betting was going on, with unsuspecting punters being taken for a ride by yakuza, probably. It all looks a horrible mess, and really could be the end of the sport, at least for a while till they get things straightened out, if ever.

Yesterday was also Setsubun. “Out, demons out!”

 

Our Mayor – continued 17 December, 2010

Filed under: city,news,politics — johnraff @ 2:32 pm
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Takashi Kawamura - mayor of Nagoya

Maybe you remember this guy? The mayor of Nagoya I wrote about last March. His attempt to force the city councillors to cut their numbers and pay by half has been simmering on since then, but recently it got more exciting. The collection of signatures for a petition went ahead in November and, after a slow start, they eventually got some 400 + thousand within the couple of weeks allowed. It was tight, but they made a big push in the last week and ended up with more than the 360,000 (1/5 of the electorate) needed to call a popular vote on dissolving the council. BUT – the Nagoya electoral commission ruled about 110,000 signatures invalid, taking the total below what was needed. Oddly enough, most of the members of that commission are ex-councillors…

It didn’t end there though. There was a chorus of complaints, and people who checked their names on the petition found they had been invalidated for some pretty poor reasons: a single mistake in the address or phone number, smudge on the paper, illegible signature… Kawamura’s supporters put in complaints on sme 35,000 of them, maybe the ones they thought had the strongest case of getting through, and after more checks – all of this costing a fortune in taxpayers’ money – eventually got another 12,000 valid signatures, enough to get over the quota!

So now there will be a popular vote here in Nagoya on whether to dissolve the council, and hold another election. It looks as if the vote will succeed, and there’s a good chance that the new council will have enought sympathetic members to pass Kawamura’s motions to cut their pay by half. They’ll still get 8 million yen (~$95,000) which is enough to get by, I’d have thought…

 

70 milliseconds 15 December, 2010

Filed under: news — johnraff @ 1:11 pm
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Last Thursday, along with the live broadcasts from yet another grand illumination somewhere with 500,000 LED lights twinkling in some shopping mall, was a news item about a temporary power drop in our area. Because of trouble with a transformer somewhere the voltage dropped by 40% for about 0.07 seconds… That’s right, it wasn’t a power cut, just a reduction, for less than one tenth of a second. As a result, factories all over the area came to a halt, some shut down for a day or more, and a Toshiba semiconductor plant’s output in January and February may be cut by 20~30% as a result. Hard to believe, but it’s true.

 

Animals again 9 November, 2010

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 3:05 pm
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The last couple of weeks there have been news reports of bears. Appearing in all kinds of places they shouldn’t – the other day a lady came home to find one in her kitchen – and sometimes attacking people. These are big dangerous animals with sharp claws and teeth and people sometimes get killed. This would have been unheard of a few years ago when all the bears were in the north of the country, but wild animals are becoming a problem in the countryside.

Life with things lurking in the bushes has been a regular theme around here though. The first year we arrived there were some nice yams growing in the field, of which I dug up some and left the smaller ones to grow next year. No such luck – the wild boar got to find out about them, and dug all the rest up. We had regular visits from them – they are strong animals and dug big holes in the ground, throwing large rocks about the place. When all the yams were gone, over a couple of years, they tried bracken roots but I think they must have found everything that wild boar like because they don’t come round so much these days.

The big menace these days (apart from worrying about bears) is the deer. Their numbers are increasing apparently, and they eat any young shoots and leaves they can find.  We never used to have any problem at all growing all kinds of things but these days I usually find fresh droppings around when we arrive on Sunday, and anything not inside the 3m net I put up to keep them out will get munched as soon as it appears. Other attackers in the past have been monkeys – they go for things you can pick like pumpkins or eggplants, so with the deer on the leaves and boar for roots they’ve got everything pretty well covered. Oh yes, there are crows who like tomatoes too. Other more harmless creatures that have shown up around the place are rabbits, fieldmice, weasels (or are they stoats?), tortoises, toads, snakes, pheasants, grouse (?), tanuki, and probably others I’ve forgotten…

What’s going on? Well, there are various reasons apparently – a big one must be the post-war boom in forestry when a lot of the natural forest was replaced with spruce and cedar plantations: dark dreary places where nothing grows, and nothing can live. This is made worse because there’s no longer any money in it, so everything’s neglected and tangled up with dead branches. Another is that as the rural population dwindles – all the young people moved out to the cities and those who are left are getting old – the villages are also half-abandoned and the area between vegetable fields and forest, the so-called satoyama, is reverting to wildness, so animals can get right up to the fields. Again, there are fewer hunters around now. Young kids aren’t attracted to all the blood and entrails that go with it.

Although the weather seems to have been getting warmer for a while now this summer in particular was very hot and the crop of acorns and other things that bears and their friends like was bad. Bears have to have a good feed before they hibernate, so have been forced to check out peoples kitchens.

There are hungry bears in the woods.

 

Farmlog 24th October 2010 28 October, 2010

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:46 pm
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  • News on TV the night before of a bear being seen just a few minutes up the road from our place, on the Nagoya side too! Not to happy about this- there have been a lot of reports of bears this year and a number of people have been attacked, but up to now they’ve all been further North. They’re dangerous animals and I hope none start hanging round our house…
  • Smoke everywhere on Sunday. It’s the season for clearing up and everyone’s burning dead leaves and branches in the garden. The smoke lingers in the wet rainy air.
  • A “matsutake for sale” sign. Matsutake are a wild mushroom which the Japanese love, and when T was a child you could just go out and pick them, but they’re getting scarcer and these days you pay 3000yen or more for a pack of two or three in a supermarket! Now on top of that the “matsukuimushi” (pine-eating insect) is destroying pine trees something like the Dutch Elm Disease in Britain, and the matsutake, which grow under pine trees, are being hit too. Probably the guy with the sign was selling mushrooms from North Korea.
  • Min temp 9°C, max 21°C
 

And the loser is… 27 September, 2010

Filed under: news,politics — johnraff @ 9:47 pm
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…China I’d say. I thought the first rule of diplomacy was not to cause your opposite number to lose face, and the Chinese are supposed to have mastered this stuff 4,000 years ago, but it either hasn’t occurred to them, or they’re so fired up about the Senkaku/Daioyu islands thing that they don’t care, but their behaviour is being nervously watched all over SE Asia. Vietnam, the Phillipines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei all have territorial disputes with China, and the Big Cuddly Panda image China has been trying to sell in the region is being seriously undermined by their bullying tactics towards Japan – cutting exports of rare earths, discouraging tourism, clamping down on trade in general, arresting four Japanese on spying charges and now sending more ships to the region. If as big a country as Japan can be treated like this, they might ask, how would we little ones get on?

Of course Japan lost a lot of face, but no-one cares that much about Japan these days anyway…

The winner? America of course. All that fuss about bases in Okinawa might just fade away as everyone in the region rediscovers how much they love Uncle Sam. Personally, I’d say “a pox on both your houses”. Just hope it doesn’t lead to a war or anything…

 

Farmlog 12th September 2010 16 September, 2010

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:40 pm
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  • A small praying mantis in the kitchen as we’re getting ready to leave Nagoya. This “exotic” insect is quite common out in the country, but you don’t often see them in town.
  • Stopped off at the bank ( a different one from the bad karma bank ) and there were little piles of salt on each side of the entry to the ATM. Salt is a purifier, like the sake at festivals, and you sometimes see it outside a bar or restaurant intended to ward off bad spirits – either to improve business or because of some incident they want to expunge. I wonder what happened at this bank?
  • Lots of brown kids at the supermarket. It’s been a long hot Summer and Japanese have lots of melanin so they tan easily. T can get a tan in an afternoon that would take me a whole Summer! Being white is more cool these days but I’m old-fashioned and still a sucker for brown skin…
  • On Sunday evening or so The Front passed through and we switched from the humid Summer air to cool dry Autumn in a few hours, with some rain in between.
  • Now being very careful about what might be in clothes that are lying on the floor!
  • Working on the chillies and heard a lot of excited bird chatter. Eventually in a nearby cedar I saw a couple of tits, a small mejiro and what looked like a finch, maybe others, flying around……a snake. Some kind of small snake had climbed up the tree, looking for eggs or chicks I suppose, and the birds were co-operating in trying to scare it away.
  • Listened to the Sumo on the radio in the car driving back to Nagoya. Sumo’s been under a cloud lately with a whole succession of scandals: dope-smoking Russians, bad-behaving yokozuna Asashoryu, sadistic death of a young apprentice and yakuza connections… NHK punished them by not broadcasting live from the last tournament, which was in Nagoya as it happened.
  • Min temp 19°C max 30°C