View from the floor

The trouble with blogging is I get tired of my views all the time, so here is a selection of views from my almost-three-year-old, Emma, which she snapped before I could wrestle the digital camera away from her sticky hands.

Dad and big sister

Big sister and big window

My big leg

Big sister's little nap

Big Buddha and a big thumb

Double take

I just finished reading The Double by Jose Saramago (rhymes with Mr Magoo) about a hapless history teacher whose life is turned upside down when he spots his doppelganger, a bit part actor in the Portuguese film industry. Our everyman hero becomes obsessed with meeting him to discover who is the duplicate, and who the original. It's quite a funny book and the author frequently breaks naturalistic literary conventions by popping his head round the door to remind readers about an important point or plot development that we might have missed in the previous chapter. Did I mention that it was excellently translated into English from the Portuguese by Margaret of Dad and Margaret fame (see glossary)? My only quibble with the book is the author's irrational hatred of quote marks and his incredibly long sentences and endless paragraphs. Think I write long paragraphs? Try reading a whole chapter without a line break or full stop for company. Still,old Jose won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so I guess he can do what he likes with the language.

Who was that masked man?

I've had a bit of a cough since Tuesday, but today Yoshie had finally had enough of it and ordered me to the doctors. So, after lessons finished we trundled over to the local hospital (marginally bigger than a UK GP's clinic) which specialises in stomach ailments, but has a drop-in service even for folk with perfectly fine stomachs. Upon entering and telling the receptionist of my condition, I was issued with a thermometer and a surgeon's mask. Fortunately, she didn't expect me to remove any ulcers, just didn't want me infecting anyone else in the waiting room as I stuck the thermometer under my arm. Five minutes later I was in the surgery and was preparing for the fifth degree (it's not unknown to have to give blood, urine and stool samples). The poster on the wall with a variety of pictures of female genital warts didn't exactly settle my stomach. So, I was quite relieved when the doc addressed me in good English (he had lived in Milwaukee for two years) to tell me, very GP-like, I was suffering from a cough and if I insisted I could have an x-ray and blood test as the doctors were going on holiday from tomorrow, but really I had nothing to worry about as I had no temperature. He recommended some pills to deal with the symptoms and to come back in a week, after their holiday, if I still had a cough. Wow, not even a stethoscope in sight. After being given the prerequisite bits of paper, I popped over the road to a building smaller than some garages I've seen, in which seven pharmacists were toiling away. They toiled away some more and provided me with three sets of pills. The cost to me of seeing the doctor? ¥1,170 - about five pounds, and the medicine was ¥600. And I got to keep the mask too, which I wore all the way home, until Yoshie told me to take it off, I wasn't that poorly. Picture by Emma-chan.

Virtually friends

I've got 24. My little sister, Jane, has got 53. My Arkansan nephew, Ben, has got 529. DVDs? Overdue library books? Zits? No, of course not, I'm talking about friends on Facebook. I am hard pressed to think of more than a handful of people that I would truly call friends, yet even I have 24 of 'em on the online social network, as it's called (or a waste of time, as my wife calls it). I would have had 25, but one cancelled his Facebook account because he was sick of people he barely knew knowing everything about him. So unlike blogging, ahem.

A buzz about town

We'd just finished a delicious dinner cooked by the giri-no-shacho (in a previous life she ran a coffee shop with her brother, so she knows a thing or two about whipping up a tasty meal) - we had deep fried white fish that were a little like sardines, a beef and potato stew, a bowl of rice and some salty Korean seaweed, with the obligatory green tea - when my wife's ears pricked up like Chame-chan's when he hears a bird tweeting in the garden. She could hear a buzzing sound, and in between K-chan and Emma-chan's attempts to shout louder than each other, so could I. Have the electrics finally fizzled out in our 32-year-old house (ancient by Japanese standards)? Was one of the florescent bulbs about to blow? No, the sound was actually coming from outside. We opened the front door and stood peering into the darkness, before we realised it was in fact just the buzz of insects, possibly grasshoppers, filling the dusk air with their white noise.

English, but not as we know it

The Good-English-But-Why prize goes to a sign on a paper towel bin I spotted in the Abiko McDonald's: "Would you like to review what your life should be?" Hmmm. Maybe, but I was taken aback to hear such profound thoughts from an object so mundane. The Nearly-But-Not-Quite prize goes to my youngest who announced on looking out the window and seeing a delivery van pulling up, "It's the fishmonkey, Dad." The correct English should of course have been "It's the fishmonger, Dad." Correct, but not as good.

Hot stuff

A close family friend said this blog was fluffy and Apocalyptic in equal measure, but does provide a snapshot of my life. Thanks, that is the primary goal, to shed a little light on the world as I know it, and sorry about all the doom and gloom and unrelenting fluff that is the stuff of my life. I watched the telly for the first time in a week last night, I didn't feel like joining the Sunderland v. Newcastle match as Newcastle was already winning 2-0 and while looking for a film, Yoshie and I found ourselves getting into a documentary that turned out to be An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's slide show about global warming. It was actually very entertaining, (fluffy in an Apocalyptic way) and reminded me of a definition of politics that I had forgotten - politics is showbiz for the ugly. Gore came across as, while a little self-important, an intelligent, compassionate man passionate about the environment and gave an excellent, folksy summary of what a mess we have made of our planet, without hugging a tree once. If only he had shown that kind of passion and ability to communicate when he was up against Bush Jr, what a different world we might have now. It was a good film, despite some minor quibbles I could make,  and was determined to end on a positive note, saying that it was not too late and we could all make a difference. Hmmm, we'll see. Yoshie did comment after the documentary, "Well, we don't really need a car after all, do we?" - words that I may have to remind ourselves of when the message of the Inconvenient Truth has been conveniently forgotten.

Nothing like a lazy Sunday morning

One of the less-well documented drawbacks of working a six-day week is the lack of opportunities for a lie-in. This great institution, which in Britain at least, is observed at the weekend as religiously as, er, church-going used to be in a previous generation, is a time to re-charge batteries, plan great projects for the distant future and snooze before emerging from bed sometime around noon. The prospects today for a lie-in looked good. We had no plans for the day, no imminent visits and there was to be no jogging round the lake (my mentor is running a half-marathon today, so training is off). However, as always, the kids had other ideas and after a brief run around Mummy and Daddy's bedroom at 7am, they settled into a routine of standing on their parents (they call that giving a massage) and clambering up onto the futon cupboard shelf to make a little house. Meanwhile, a delivery man rang the doorbell shortly afterwards and K-chan began lobbying for breakfast/sweeties/television/computer privileges. Ah well, another day begins. There's always next week... 

Going through a bad spell

One of the perils of being an English teacher abroad is it doesn't take long before you forget bits of your mother tongue. In a lesson today with a very nice lady whose daughter lives in Germany, the need for a term for knives, forks and spoons came up and I had to look it up in the dictionary to check the number of 't's it needed. The word, of course, is 'cutlery'. Incidentally, my student said she was eager to learn English partly so she could communicate better with her German son-in-law. I suggested that wouldn't it be better to simply learn German, but she replied, "Oh no, his English is very good!" Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, my spelling has never been brilliant, but out of the daily newspaper game, occasional reading and this blog are the only ways of sharpening the blunt edges of my spelling. When I was in America writing obituaries for the Log Cabin Democrat (that's the newspaper's real name, by the way), I could always claim any misspelling was in fact just British spelling, and the excuse worked vice versa when I returned to Britain fresh from four years of looking everything up in my Webster's Dictionary. These days I have no excuses, and I find my trusty Concise Oxford English Dictionary is getting plenty of exercise. Now, I just need to work on my Japanese kanji...

Sounds of summer

Last night while off on an errand on Yoshie's shopping bike, or momma charu as they are known in Japan, I could have sworn I heard my first cicadas of the year. The large, noisy but harmless insects are synonymous with summer and reign through the hottest months, before dropping from the trees as the cool weather sets in around October. Chame-chan loves to drag half-chewed cicadas into the house as his gift to my mother-in-law, much to the delight of my wife.

Number crunching

I was always better at my reading and 'riting than my 'rithmatic, but here are some numbers that affected our lives today:

300 - number of hits on this blog since going online in March

66 - number of students enrolled in our school

12 - number of students I taught today

7 - K-chan's height rank out of 15 girls in her class (kids line up in order of height in Japan)

3 - number of times I sang "Hi how are you? I'm fine" song today

0 - number of lettuce leafs Emma-chan ate ("I don't want it, Mummy, it's too green")

 

Time to get out of Dodge?

I just finished reading James Kunstler's The Long Emergency, all about the imminent depletion of the world's oil, and I tell you what, it makes for frightening reading - all the more so because his arguments are persuasive, are presented matter-of-factly, and his predictions of future problems (the book was written in 2004) appear to be coming true. If I may summarise (pay attention at the back now, I may ask questions at the end):

1. The world appears to have hit peak oil production. This means that the existing fields are pumping at maximum or are nearing depletion and there are no more great finds to be had in the world (the big companies have been looking).
2. Whether we blame Americans for driving their V-8s enormous distances to pick up the kids from soccer practice and a Big Mac or two, or the Chinese for wanting a slice of the industrial pie, it is beside the point; the world is consuming ever more of a finite resource.
3. America (and Britain I might add) has been blindly following a course of suburban living based on a misplaced belief in the eternal existence of cheap oil to power the luxury of living miles away from any amenities. Without oil, the suburbs will become the new slums - neither close to urban convenience, nor able to function as a true rural economy.
4. Biofuels are a con. It takes as much energy to turn the crops into fuel as they can produce. Meanwhile, less land is able to be farmed for food, which will exacerbate world hunger.
5. Solar panels and wind turbines can only exist in the shadow of an oil-based economy. How do you make the components without oil? Oh, and hydrogen fuel cells eat up more energy to create than they can produce.
6. We are running out of natural gas, and all the cheap coal has been mined already.
7. Nuclear power works, but has obvious dangers and requires a strong central government to ensure its safe use.
8. There are about 6 billion people on the planet. Before industrialisation there were around 1 billion. Without the feedstock of oil power and natural gas fertilisers, we have about 5 billion people more than can be fed by a pre-industrial (ie organic) agriculture. How secure is any society or government going to be when the vast majority of folk are starving? Expect wars over resources, civil strife and scapegoating of preceived enemies.
9. What future civilisation there will be will be small and local. Globalisation is dead in the water without cheap oil. The world of Wal-Marts, supermarkets and fast food, dependent on supply lines stretching around the world, is approaching its sell-by date.
10. The future will be nasty brutish and short for most of us. Want to survive? Sell your house in the suburbs, avoid the big cities and find a small town with access to good farmland and build strong relations with your neighbours. But I got to Kounoyama first, OK?

A bird in the hand

At the end of lessons today, I had a chance to ride my old mountain bike round Teganuma Lake. The lake is the third dirtiest in Japan, a fact the locals have up in lights (no really, they have a 20ft sign by the lake). The lake used to be the dirtiest in Japan, so folks round here are happy to chart the lake's drift down the list of shame. Whether our lake's performance is due to clean-up efforts or the rest of Japan's lakes going to ruin, I don't know. Anyroad, it affords lovely views and doesn't smell and has a great cycle path winding all the way round it - about 20km in circumference. Rude of me not to have introduced the other amenities beside the lake, they include:

• A swanky library featuring a grass roof  you can walk around on.
  
• A bird museum featuring lots of stuffed rare birds (no wonder they are rare...)
• A water museum featuring, er, exhibits about water and such
• A couple of nice parks with playgrounds and picnic benches
• A bait shop where you can rent giant fibre glass swans you can pedal around the lake (unless you allow your two-year-old to steer, in which case you barely make it from the jetty before your 30 minutes is up)

I have no pictures of the giant swans or stuffed rare birds, but in keeping with the avian theme of this post, here is a picture of a pigeon sitting on our front garden fence I snapped one morning back in January.

 

In the running

Guess what I was doing at 8am this rainy Sunday morning? Sleeping off a well-earned hangover? Eating pancakes with the kids? No, I was huffing and puffing round Teganuma Lake in a worn-out T-shirt, paint-splattered shorts and trainers. After a few beers with my neighbour back at Christmas we agreed it would be a great idea to run the Teganuma half-marathon in long-distant October. Well, it's not so distant now and training started today. We ran with his 58-year-old colleague. I thought it was just a 3km trial run, but we got to the little bridge 20-odd minutes into the run and his colleague said, "Well, that's three kilometres, let's turn back now." Yikes, 6km in total. Still, we made it back to base only a little out of breath, although my neighbour's friend had barely broken a sweat.

Turned on and turned off

We got cable TV today. I know this is not particularly earth-shattering news, the rest of the world and his dog has had giant plasma TVs fed by satellite for a couple of years now, but the slow advance of TV technology into my home put me into a bit of a funk. I had prided myself on being able to tell my students airily, "No, actually we don't have a car or a TV." Now, only the lack of a car remains as our sole other-worldly credential. Yoshie was excited to watch things in English and wanted the kids to see cartoons and the like in English (although, paradoxically we don't want to encourage our kids to watch too much TV). I flipped through the channels and after watching a report on chaos at Heathrow T5, a bit of a movie that I'd seen before and a roundup of Premiership games that I can't watch, I turned it off and returned to the world of words, reading a bit and blogging a bit. My reading didn't cheer me up much, I'm engrossed in a political history of oil and how we don't have much of it left. The Long Emergency, by James Kuntsler, a New York Times columnist, makes for compelling, if depressing reading. His thesis is we are addicted to oil, without it our societies don't work and we have no realistic replacement for it when it runs out - which will happen for folk in this generation very shortly. I'm half way through the book and am getting a bit worried - he effectively debunks the myths that free market economics will sort out the problem (there just ain't enough of the stuff in the ground left) and pooh poohs the notion that some alternative silver bullet high-tech solution will save the day. However, the sub-head to the book is "Surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st Century," so I'm hoping there will be some ray of hope to cheer me up and save my children's generation. In the meantime, here are two jokes to take your mind off doom and gloom. Where do British detectives live? In Sherlock Homes of course. Ahem, and where do Bobbies on the beat live? In Letsbe Avenue. The old 'uns are the best, eh readers?  

School ties

I really felt like I was in Japan today. When you spend most of your day teaching English, speaking English, reading English papers and websites and watching Premier League football (did you see the cracking match in the Champions League a couple of days ago that Liverpool justly won 4-2 against Arsenal?) it is easy to forget that you are actually the other side of the world. But today, I sang the Japanese national anthem Kimigaiyo (well, others sang, I stood respectfully,  thinking how similar the tune is to "Zou-san, Zou-san" - a Japanese children's song about an elephant). Why the sudden taste of patriotism? Because it was K-chan's first day at primary school and she went through nyugakushiki - the school entrance ceremony. It was sort of a cross-between a British school speech day and a parish council meeting. It involved speeches from the headmaster, PTA representatives, city hall representatives, telegrams from the mayor and local nursery schools, and there was a perfunctory inspection of K-chan's new classroom. K-chan performed brilliantly, no tears and she raised her hand and said "hai!" at the right moment when her name was called in front of the assembled 200 or so parents. While I was a little concerned about the weight and difficulty of the standard-issue text books and rigid system of numbered desks all facing the teacher - no open-plan, non-hierarchical nest of tables here - K-chan was delighted with it all. She loved all the books and the fact she has her very own desk - right in front of the teacher. Even better, she's next to her nursery pal Tama-chan. Here, she is pictured showing off her new school equipment to Emma-chan in our front garden. I have also included a picture of the proud parents, not out of vanity, but to mark the occasion - it is the first time in almost a year that I have worn a tie (since quitting my job at the Derby Evening Telegraph on May 18, 2007, actually, but who's counting?) 

London calling

Think you've got it tough? Spare a thought for one of my students. Her husband's company decided to pack him off to London for two or three years (at their discretion) with less than a month's notice. Oh, and by the way, my student, who had no particular interest in moving from their newly bought flat, is pregnant with their second child. So shacho and I have been working feverishly on a survival course for her stint in London, and I have to say, she has coped amazingly with her change in circumstances. I have high hopes she will thrive in the Big Smoke. For her last lesson, she said she wanted a few pointers of what to expect in her new life so the culture shock wouldn't be terminal as she left the terminal, er, so to speak. Anyroad, here is our top 10 list of the key cultural differences hard for Japanese to fathom, but which they must negotiate to survive life in Blighty:

1. Trains are often delayed or cancelled altogether. In fact, trains are so often late that a 10 minute delay on an intercity train is considered being on time.
2. If you make an appointment with a plumber for 2pm, he may well not show up until 5pm and very often will not show up at all. You should wait one hour after the hypothetical arrival time before ringing to enquire politely where the blazes the so and so is.
   
3. When going to a party, it is rude to arrive on time. A quarter or half an hour late is far more polite.
4. Neighbours will often feed your cat if you go on holiday, and expect reciprocal rights.
5. Never leave anything you value out of sight. This includes bags, wallets and children.
6. Never leave your car running as you pop into the newsagents.
7. Never sign or buy anything from people at your door or on the phone.
8. Electricity bills are based on inaccurate estimates and come every three months. Water bills have to be paid twice a year. Council tax is every month, except at Christmas. Always check bills because they are frequently wrong.
9. You can't survive without a car, but driving in London has been made as inconvenient as possible.
10. Nobody wants you to see a doctor. When trying to make an appointment, if asked "Is it urgent?" always answer "Yes , it's urgent."

The view from here

If you don't suffer from hay fever, April is one of the best months in Japan. The cold of the winter is forgotten, the rainy season and the heat of summer are a while away and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom for a week or so. Yes, it's time to appreciate the fleeting beauty of nature... by consuming alcohol and junk food and for the little 'uns, roller-blading and grass-surfing down the nearest hill. If you live in Kounoyama, that means a five-minute walk to Teganuma lake (below). See the slideshow on the right for more pictures of our trip this afternoon with neighbours to enjoy hanami - cherry blossom viewing.  

 

What a wonderful world

I forgot to mention what a great time we had on Friday. One of our first students, Junko, invited us to her mother's place who was having a party for 20 foreign university students over here on an exchange programme. Our daughters put on their best party frocks and we set off down the road in Junko's classmate's car. As a special treat, Junko's classmate, Miwa, tuned in to the American Services radio and in between military-approved news items, Cheryl Crow blared out "If it makes you happy..." The evening certainly did that. We met folk from Norway, Sweden, Uganda and the States - a lively lady called Faith from Chicago who, can you believe, actually preferred Hillary to Obama. There were perhaps 30 people in the room eating a feast of tempura, yaki soba, and fried chicken... and the wine, beer and sake flowed (thanks Miwa!). Even a magnitude three earthquake, which shook the building for an ominous 15 seconds or so, failed to stop the conversations. We all had a great time and Yoshie said it was like being in a foreign country. There were perhaps people from 15 or so different nations, but the common language was English, even among the older Japanese folks there. There's a lesson for you.

Red badges of courage

Sorry I haven't written for a while, I blame global warming. Not only have the cherry blossoms come out a little early this year (see below for sample tree snapped in the yard of Katherine's new primary school one minute's walk from home), but of greater impact to me, the first mosquito of the year found its way into the house on Thursday night. Despite an extensive array of what Americans call bug screens on the windows, the little blighter made itself at home in our bedroom at 3am and kept me up with its whining wings for a good hour. It tormented me as Yoshie slept. If I covered my head with the duvet, I couldn't hear the thing, but couldn't breathe, and if I risked exposure to the air, its drone would send me into involuntary fits of slapping myself in a bid to kill it. In the morning, I woke up bruised, but intact. K-chan, who had crawled into our futons at some point in the night, slept like a baby, but had two bites on her cheek as her red badges of courage.

No more gardening on TV

There used to be a lovely house just round the corner. It had something rare in Japan - a messy front garden with two 30-year-old televisions decaying by the road. All it lacked was a pickup on blocks and it could have been out Greenbriar way in Faulkner County, Arkansas. As it was, it provided me with the best joke I have come up with since moving to Japan. On the top of the TV cabinets the owners had put some potted plants. Whenever I passed by on my bicycle with K-chan, who has mastered two wheels now, I would say, "Is there anything good on TV... no I see it's still gardening." She would laugh (at me), knowing I had made a Dad joke. Anyway, the house and TVs are no more, they have been flattened and I wonder what will sprout up in their place. This being Japan, we won't have to wait long to find out. In a month there could well be a multi-story apartment complex. Watch this space, I will be.  

French is the way forward

I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of a language that has no masculine and feminine inflections and has words that most of the time are easy to pronounce. Yes, I'm talking about English, and frankly, I think it has had its day. Far too many people speak English already, and everyone else who doesn't yet speak the lingua franca wants to speak it. It's time we fought back. I think French is a far superior language and culture and henceforth we shall be conducting all lessons in French and shall be adopting French forms of address and styles of dress. This will be the last post in English and from now on please refer to this school as Le Tour de Francais. Avec poisson d'Avril. 

End of a chapter or two

One of the luxuries of being out of the journalism game is I don't have to keep up with the news every minute, so it came as a surprise today to learn of the death of Arthur C. Clarke 12 days ago. His 2001: A Space Odyssey series of books (he wrote four) are classics of their kind and show how fantastic sci fi can be even when it is rooted in science, rather than fantasy. In other book news, I popped down to Arai Bookshop, which is perfectly placed between Tennodai tube station and Mister Doughnut (Mister Doughnut is a close personal friend of mine). It was the last day of business for the shop before it undergoes conversion into a fast-food outlet. The owner, Toshiko Arai, is a student of mine. She took over the place from her father who died three years ago. Squeezed out by competition from the internet, book superstores and declining numbers of avid readers, the shop has more value as a piece of real estate than as a general bookshop. If it were me, I'd fight tooth and nail to keep it alive, but I suspect the passion for the shop died with the father. While I was there, I picked up some bargains, some DVDs of classic movies  - To Kill a Mockingbird, The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, The Great Dictator and Casablanca. Is it fitting or just sad that it was DVDs and not books that were my last transaction with the bookshop?