Creature Discomforts

Summer in Japan is the season of hanabi (fireworks - literally 'flower fire'). Displays here normally last a whole hour and, this being Japan, you are told beforehand exactly how many fireworks they are going to detonate in that time. The main Kobe event takes place in the Port area in August, and by all accounts is something of a spectacle. As indeed it should be - they are letting off 6,000 fireworks.

Unfortunately most of the hanabi displays around these parts are in August, when we shall be back in Northern Ireland to view the damage done to our home by a foul and inclement summer in Blighty. But we did manage to track one down on Awaji island, which is about 30 minutes by car from downtown Kobe. Awajishima is famous for two things - the 3.9km Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world, which connects it to the Honshu mainland, and being the epicentre of the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. Not surprisingly, the islanders tend to celebrate the former, rather than the latter.

The event was held in the Prefectural Park, and the organisers made a whole day of it, with a snow machine (which coped surprisingly well in the scorching heat), a collection of sorry animals in various degrees of distress, and a full programme of traditional musical entertainment and lantern balancing.

An Englishman in Osaka already highlighted this very humourously in his blog article 'Animal Prison', but either there are no animal rights activists in Japan or, if there are, they are way too polite. Dotted around the park was a diverse collection of sorry animals, each of them the sole, sad representative of their species - Noah's Ark sponsored by Poundstretcher. People gawped at a fed-up fruit bat, a piqued penguin, a somewhat ticked-off tortoise and a very pissed-off possum - all of them being subjected to the most terrible child abuse (abuse by a child, that is). In the middle of all this was an innocent-looking fish tank, next to a harmless gecko, that contained a quite evil-looking scorpion (apologies for the picture quality below). The tank was open, and there wasn't an adult with a day-glo jacket proclaiming 'STAFF' to be seen.

But we were to witness far worse scenes of creature trauma when we happened upon the aquatic concentration tanks that housed the luckless octopi and hamo (a type of eel for which the Naruto Strait between Awaji and Shikoku is famous). Here the kids ran rampant, chucking the poor, slithering fish in the air, on the grass, and at their mates. All this taking place just a few feet away from where the creatures were soon to be put out of their misery by being either boiled (Mr Octopus) or barbequed (Mr Slithery Fish). A delightful combination of nutrition and entertainment.

The day just flew by and before we knew it, it was time for the fireworks (5,000 of them - as advertised). And we found out how they strung it out for an hour - by taking lots of fag-breaks in between the warimono and the katamono. But it's only their second year at Awaji island, so maybe they're still figuring it out. Or maybe the chap doing the barbeque was setting them off.

Ooh! Tsuyu Sir!

We're all up early at the weekend to get down to some serious ojisan-jostling at the Kobe Municipal Arboretum, which boasts a fine collection of hydrangea - ajisai - and a spectacularly boring promotional video.

June is tsuyu, or rainy season in Japan, and rain is good for ajisai. The hydrangea is known as the fickle flower, on account of its ability to change colour according to the pH level of the soil, in a sort of litmus-paper-defying way, if I remember my school science lessons correctly (blue when the soil is acid, pink when alkaline). The samurai hated them apparently, because they associated change of colour with change of loyalty, but then it probably wasn't the done thing for the warrior class to confess to liking shrubs.

We're starting to notice something of a pattern now on our floral exploits. Whenever there's a flower to be looked at, there's a boatload of them. The arboretum reckons they have around 50,000 hydrangeas, although they seemed to have an equal number of old folk with an equal number of megapixels at their disposal.

I think that's about it for flowers this year. We'll miss the sunflowers in late July as we'll be back home for a few weeks, and that's about it until chrysanthemums again in September. My snapshot nemesis, Inamura-san, has thrown down another challenge - flowers from Ireland versus flowers from Japan. I looked up which flowers are in abundance in Northern Ireland in July and all I could find was the daisy, so I think we'll pass on that one.

All Made Out Of Ticky-Tacky

Curiously, it would appear that all cars in Japan have an English brand name, despite the fact that they are built for the domestic market. The marketing execs at Mitsubishi have probably mastered a Google search by now, so the days of calling cars 'Starrion' and 'Guts' are long gone, but there is still some merriment to be had at the expense of Japanese motor manufacturers.

Whereas western car makers have always had a taste for the flamboyant with marques such as Mustang, Stingray, Spitfire, Testarossa (Italian for 'red head' but far too close to testosterone to be a coincidence), Japan has carved a niche for daft. I must confess that I've never actually seen any of the more infamous names - the Yamaha Pantryboy, the Honda Life Dunk, or the Isuzu Mysterious Utility - but there's plenty more where they came from.

Mazda have a couple of stunning beauties - the Bongo and the Scrum Van - while Honda have the Mobilio Spike and the curiously named That's, which is similar to Suzuki's embrace of inanity with Every, and Daihatsu's boringly obvious Move.

But what is far more disturbing than the names is their sheer ugliness, and these hideous Bauhaus-inspired automotive monstrosities are just everywhere. Nissan started the trend in 2001 with the candidly named Cube (pictured above), which is now in its third iteration. According to their design team: "the four key themes of "naughty, relaxing, compact and agile" are embodied in the design... a design with clear originality, (and) functionality that provides "joy of use, and loyalty-inspiring appeal". Yeah, right. This is design-speak for a brief that screams "give me something cheap and stackable, that won't look out of place in a Japanese car park. Oh, and we can't afford a wind tunnel".

So I thought I'd offer my services to the Japanese motor industry with a bold neo-classical interpretation of modern go-anywhere travel that combines centuries of Asian tradition with a German sense of fun and spontaneity. I give you... the jinja kampa!

(make the most of it, the next blog entry will be about flowers again...)