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...