Red Pigs & Englishmen

Three cheers for the Japanese and their mastery of microelectronics! Thanks to the wonders of digital photography you can now take a million pictures and store them on a piece of silicon no bigger than a postage stamp. Just relying on the law of averages means that at least 2.78 of them will be right on the money. Retouch the 0.78 in Photoshop, drag those 999,997 duffers to the Recycle Bin, and Hiroshi's your ojisan...

So, armed with our trusty 6-megapixel marvel, it was off to Nankinmachi for shunsetsu, literally 'year passing'. The Chinese New Year is something of a moving target, occurring between January 21st and February 20th. This year the New Year began on February 18th. Why so late? Well, 2006 was a leap year, but not just any old leap year, it was a lunar leap year, which means they had a whole extra month!

And 2007 is not just the Year of the Pig. No-one quite knows why, but China uses a strange matrix of animal, element, yin and yang to create their wildly complex calendar. So, technically it's the year of the feminine (yin) fire (red) pig. But I digress...

Nankinmachi is one of the Three Great Chinatowns in Japan (the others being Nagasaki and Yokohama), and is a popular tourist destination. The biggest event in the Nankinmachi calendar is the celebration of the New Year. We arrived in good time and secured a pretty good viewing pitch. A succession of dull but mercifully brief speeches by local dignitaries was punctuated by plaintive cries of "Where's the dragon?" from Jessica, and all the while a steady pressure was being applied to the small of my back by an elderly lady. Our friend Matt experienced similar attention from her husband. The Japanese certainly seem to have a very different sense of proxemics to westerners.

The 'dragon' actually turned out to be a lion, which turned out to be two rather athletic chaps cavorting about in hairy pyjamas, but who were, all the same, undeniably impressive. The celebrations went on throughout the day, including monkey shows, martial arts demonstrations, many more lion dances and culminating in a luminous dragon dance in the evening. Here the technology let me down. Even Photoshop couldn't save the dismally indistinct and blurred apparition that may or may not have been a dragon. Time for some more microelectronics and megapixels, methinks...

Spilling The Beans

After a slight lull in online posting, blog opportunities are coming thick and fast it seems. This weekend it was setsubun - or 'seasonal division' - and another trip down to the Ikuta Shrine.

Setsubun is an occasion for banishing evil spirits prior to the onset of spring. And what do they banish those little devils with? Roasted soybeans of course! With a cry of "Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" ("Devils out, happiness in"). This ritual is known as mame-maki, or bean-throwing.

The beans are usually thrown 'by a respected citizen, like a priest or actor', which would suggest that lucha libre wrestlers, buck-toothed clowns and Disney-esque baseball characters are held in high regard in Japanese society. Unless those were priests and actors.

As one might expect, this is a very old Japanese tradition (dating back to the 14th century) and although the assembled crowd was a little undignified in their scrambling for the flying beans of fortune (you have to eat your age in beans to ensure health and good luck), it was a lively and colourful event. And beans are a distinct, environmentally friendly improvement on the previous means of driving away evil spirits, which was the strong smell of burning dried sardine heads.

Just Over A Mile To An Owl On An Isle...

Dad’s away on business, so how do we entertain ourselves, other than going to MacDonald’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner as Jessica was insisting? Well, just a short trip on the Portliner (the driver-less train from Sannomiya station) is the delightful Kobe Flower and Bird Garden on Port Island - the perfect place if you don’t want to travel too far to entertain a fast-food-obsessed 6-year-old.

Relatively new (it opened in March 2006, more or less the same time as Kobe’s airport, which is close by) the garden is spread across several enormous greenhouses and gives you a chance to get up close and personal with our feathered friends. I was told that Port Island was constructed to provide additional living space for residential overspill from Kobe, but it didn’t quite work out – nobody wanted to live on a small, man-made island apparently - and the place does seem a little deserted, despite having a hotel, a university and several large companies.

First off we took in the owl show - all in Japanese of course, but we got the general idea…they’re huge. You can touch the rather impressive Snowy Owl if you’re feeling brave, or for 500 yen you can have your picture taken with one of the many other species.

The gardens have several large ponds with wild fowl, penguins (more photo calls) and koi . We were told that the 1500 square-metre tropical pond boasts around 100 species of water lily, but we didn’t take time to count them. The children were much more interested in other things (Jessica, the parakeets; Jack, an angel trumpet).

After a coffee under a roof of fantastic hanging fuchsia baskets, we found the petting area. Although Jessica did not fancy feeding the toucans (which will actually very gently lift morsels of grape from your hands) she was much more confident with the smaller birds and parakeets.

Japan is a fantastically clean place, but even so, what did strike us as being bit strange was the complete absence of bird poo. Perhaps the residents were wearing the ‘bird diapers’ we found in the shop on leaving - Avian Attire: Flightsuits with Flair. Combines Fashion with Diaper & Leash Function. Even our Japanese friends found these hilarious.

Editor's note: Steve supplied the title for this blog entry, which is a dig at my Northern Ireland accent apparently...