The Wises Did Japan

Where To Now?

2008-07-21T04:22:00.008+09:00

So. After two fun-packed years in Japan, we're now back in Magherafelt, in the heart of Northern Ireland. I'd originally thought that this would be the end of the blogging, but now I'm not so sure. I may have poked fun at Kobe Port Tower-kun, but is he really that different from Diamond Dan, the Orangeman?

Looking like a cross between Peter Perfect and a much younger Ian Paisley, the blond-quiffed Diamond Dan has been created to soften the face of sectarianism and, according to Orange Order education officer David Scott, "to be a mentor for young people offering advice on a range of matters encompassing the general theme of civic responsibility". A superhero who doesn't drop litter and takes public transport on the off-chance that he might be able to offer his seat to an old lady, Dan overcame strong competition from the likes of Sash Gordon and the Boyne Wonder.

And then I open this week's Mid-Ulster Mail to find this delightful piece of retro-marketing. Forget the Long Tail, forget search engines, forget punctuation in fact - what your business really needs round these parts is leaflets....

Ah.. it's good to be back...

Wise-san's Surfin' Safari

2008-06-14T17:34:00.026+09:00

There's only so much 'Hannah Montana' and 'Corey in the House' a man can take, and it's measured in nanoseconds, so I do try to take full advantage of the blazingly fast fibre optic broadband that is commonplace in Japanese homes. Here's my current internet Top Ten, in reverse order. Enjoy...

10. Manbabies.com

Incredibly stupid, somewhat disturbing, but alarmingly addictive. My humble offering has been ignored to date, so here it is. My Photoshop skills suck I'm afraid...

9. The Ladybird Book of the Policeman

Quality stuff. Probably won't mean very much to non-Brits however.

8. It's-Behind-You.com (same as 9. Non-British nationals read on...)

Possibly the most depressing site in the world. Not only for our peculiar fascination with panto, but to see the Ghosts of Christmas Past that are annually exhumed for it.

Britt Ekland was once married to Peter Sellers, but is now doing panto in London (a step up from a few years ago when she was doing panto in Worcester...)

Bobby Crush! (Peterborough) Huggy Bear! (Catford) Stu bloody-crush-a-grape Francis! Sue Pollard… All these washed-up lovey-darlings, and many more, continue to tread the boards when they should have walked the plank long ago.

7. The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

And most of the culprits are from the USA. Funny, that.

6. The Perry Bible Fellowship

'Thwack Ye Mole' indeed....

5. The Cremation Society of Great Britain

It sounds morbid, and it probably is, but you just can't knock it for quality data. Who would have thought that the number of deaths in Great Britain hasn't changed appreciably since 1885, although the way we dispose of our loved ones has? Over 70% of all UK funerals are now cremations, compared with just 3% pre-war. There are even international stats - so you can learn that the Italians still shy away from the fire of eternal damnation (less than 10% are cremated), but in space-conscious Japan a whopping 99.73% go up in smoke.

Well, I thought it was interesting...

4. BoingBoing - A Directory of Wonderful Things

Who needs a newspaper anymore when you've got Boing Boing? I don't. Especially as I can't read any of them here.

And now for the Top Three...

3. Puccho

Weird sweets. Even weirder website!

2. An Englishman In Osaka

What this blog would be like if I was better at it. Must try and get to meet the guy before we leave.

1. Photoshop Disasters

Fabulous stuff indeed. Great to see that The Daily Mail is as useless at Photoshop as it is at dispensing any kind of responsible or informed opinion on anything whatsoever.

Shadow pies anyone?

Jessica Wants A Pet

2008-06-07T20:43:00.014+09:00

Despite the fact that she appears to be terrified of pretty much every creature - four-legged or feathered - she has so far encountered (see below), Jessica still wants a pet. This debate has been going on for some time with little sign of any conclusion.

I don't much like pets, coming from the novelty-furry-animal-in-a-cage school of childhood pets where lifespan is measured in months and days - or the amount of time you could be bothered with them - rather than years. Gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs... gnawy, nibbly, rat-type things. The joy of stroking and petting, the scented pine fragrance of fresh wood shavings, all this went out the window when you opened the garage door to a fecal blast of ammonia and you realised you actually had to clean up after the damn things. You did that for a few weeks, got bored of it, and left it to your parents. So I like to think I know a little bit about where 'Jessica having a pet' is heading.

Sarah, on the other hand, is of more rural stock. Sleek, lustrous-coated, protein-bloated red setters bounded across the spacious countryside of her youth, and small furry creatures were strictly for target practice. Sarah would like a dog. A serious dog, not a yappy-type dog. So she wouldn't like this dog - you see a lot of this kind of pampered dog in Japan.

I don't much like dogs either. I'm very uncomfortable with the knowledge that every dog-owner you meet - especially in a place as law-abiding and polite as Japan - will more likely than not have a bag of poo about their person. I saw a man with four Afghan hounds the other day and just shuddered.

Like many things in Japan, dogs certainly don't come cheap (that would be budgies. Ahem..). Forlorn-looking pedigree chums cooped up in glass cubicles go for around 150,000 yen (£725) and upwards. The curious thing about the Baby Dolls pet emporium just down the road is the strange hours they keep, staying open until the early hours of the morning. This does not, I suspect, lend itself to responsible pet procurement. Does the inebriated salaryman lurch out of the snack bar of an evening and think "I know, I'll placate the missus with a cuddly little akita puppy"? Who exactly buys dogs at 1am in the morning except possibly Koreans, for reasons we won't go into here?

But if you just want to test-drive a terrier, or take a Siamese out for a spin, then you can actually rent pets here in Japan. Yappy-type dogs start at around 1,500 yen an hour, and you can rent a proper dog for 20,000 yen (a fraction under a hundred quid) a day. Just hand the beast back just before it evacuates, no need for bags of doggy-do. Just like a car rental - return it with a full tank. In Japan, a dog can be for Christmas, not just for life, it would seem.

It's A Thin Line...

2008-05-13T21:53:00.009+09:00

The Japanese bought an astonishing 273 million digital cameras in 2007 - that's more than two cameras per head of population - so scenes like this are commonplace at the many amateur festivals and events that take place in the parks and shopping centres across Japan every week.

But you have to ask yourself where the pursuit of photographic perfection ends and just being a bit of a perv takes over...

Mother's Day

2008-05-06T20:21:00.018+09:00

May 11th is Mother's Day in Japan and boy, are we spoilt for choice when it comes to gift ideas.

For instance, how can mum fail to be thrilled by the prospect of packing off the little poppets to school with a Happy Meal? We're talking about brightening up that bento box by literally putting a grin on their onigiri. Taking twee to a new culinary dimension, those nice people at Nico make all this possible, and more.

Or how about this? An alarm clock that proves that time stands still for no-one. Hit the snooze button and get back to catching those zzzzs. But 10 minutes later the little sod does a runner and you have to chase it around the room to turn it off. By which time you're wide awake of course, or extremely irritated...

I kid you not: http://www.arktrading.jp/nanda/animation.htm.

Or maybe a range of animal cookware?

Zany Guccho Yuzo - singer, dancer, impersonator and variety artiste - has turned his hand to cookery for national TV station NHK and devised a range of wacky kitchen utensils.

And how cool is this! A Vacuum Tube iPod Amplifier Kit! Ah... er, ahem... that would maybe be more of a Father's Day item...

Sado Island

2008-05-04T19:28:00.037+09:00

Many years ago, there was an old chap who ran a noodle shop. He lived by himself, with just a cat for company. He loved this cat just as if it were a real child. But times were not good for noodles (astonishing enough, in a country where there are still a gazillion ramen-ya - or maybe his noodles were just rank bad). In order to repay the kindness shown by her master, the cat transformed herself into a young female singer. She called herself Okei and sang Okei Bushi (Okei's song) in a mournful tone. You can hear it for yourself here (just select track 5. Sado Okesa). Instantly, her sweet voice (sic) became famous and the noodle shop was raking it in.

Most Japanese are familiar with the legend of Okei and "Sado Okesa" has become a traditional folk song, although some might say that it still sounds more like the cat singing.

So why the convoluted introduction? Well it's Golden Week, and we've just visited Sado Island - the home of that lucky old noodle vendor and his moggy. Sado is a fair old schlep from Kobe. It's in the Sea of Japan, north-west of Niigata, over 300 miles away.

We're not getting any younger, so what better way to acquaint ourselves with a life of elasticated-waist slacks, coach trips and set meals than a package tour? We were on the island barely 48 hours, yet we whizzed around a dozen local sights, stayed in a couple of reasonably modern ryokan hotels and were served most of the creatures that live in the sea. Here are the highlights of our lightning tour of Sadogashima:

Tarai-bune
The tarai-bune is a traditional Japanese fishing boat (or, more accurately, tub-boat) used for catching seaweed, abalone and other mollusks. And tourists. It's paddled around the harbour by ladies in traditional costume, looking ever so slightly Welsh.

Sake Brewery

An interesting new take on the working-brewery-as-tourist-attraction experience - you get the hard sell first (what awards they've won, how great their sake is etc) followed by the chance to taste a few molecules of sake - and purchase whole bottles of it of course - followed by making your own way out the back of the building past people working. Work that was very probably sake-related, but was never really made that explicit. Bit of an anti-climax really.

Ibis Sanctuary

The ibis - or toki, to give it its Japanese name - was once seen all over Japan but is now sadly extinct in the wild. Thankfully the Chinese had a few left that they hadn't eaten, and donated a pair for procreation in captivity on Sado Island. Now the Sado Japanese Crested Ibis Conservation Center has nearly 100 toki, and they are preparing to release some of them into the wild this year. Maybe understandably they were a bit over-protective though, and you could just about make out some birds in a cage, across a field, from behind glass. Although they did provide binoculars, which was very thoughtful of them.

Sado Kinzan
Sado Island is most famous for its gold mine, which only closed in 1989 after nearly 400 years production. One of the tunnels has been opened for exhibition and the whole experience - featuring animated miners depicting the various mining tasks - is really well done, even if the "Please do not touch the robots" signs do rather spoil the ambience a little.

And there were temples - there's always temples - and lighthouses, and glass-bottomed boats tracing the craggy coastline. And fish. Lots and lots of fish. They even bottle fish on Sado island...

FOOTNOTE: while researching Sado Island I came across a quite astonishing website, which photographically does the island far more justice than I ever could - check it out here.

Hello Sweetie!

2008-04-22T21:23:00.034+09:00

Forget the Ideal Home Exhibition. Forget the Motor Show. We've got Kasihaku 2008, otherwise known as the National Confectionary Exposition. Now in its 25th year, literally hundreds of thousands of sweets enthusiasts descend on Himeji for this "showcase for sweets and desserts from all across Japan" (sayeth the blurb).

It's not Japanese if it doesn't have a jingle, and it's not a jingle if it's not stupefying inane and repetitive. This year it's the imaginatively titled "We Love Sweets", sung by the delicious 6-piece girl band 'Milky Hat'. In fact, you can listen to it here.

And you can even download the musical score.

You would have thought that something as cravenly cavity-creating as Sweets Expo would be frowned upon, but not a bit of it. The Japanese vie for top dog status with us Brits for having the worst teeth in the world and I guess they take the view so what the hell!

There appear to be numerous different explanations for the fact that the Japanese have dodgy choppers. No fluoride in the water supply, tight-fisted parents not willing to splash the cash for cosmetic dentistry, even dark tales of sadistic dentists who eschew all forms of modern anaesthetic. My favourite is the theory that Japanese jawbones have gradually got smaller over the last 2,000 years, but their teeth have not, resulting in dental overcrowding to match the housing conditions.

The Japanese seem to have always had a bit of a thing about teeth. Revealing them was thought to be like showing the white of your bones. So tooth blackening - known as ohagura - was commonplace for many years, but it all proved to be a bit of a turn-off for Johnny Foreigner when he turned up in the mid-19th century and the practice was outlawed in the Meiji era.

Now we have tooth greening, courtesy of the JSRD - the implausibly-named Japan Society for the Recycling of Dentures - who are setting up denture deposit boxes in Fukuoka, a city in the south of Japan.

But this is all a massive digression to hide the fact that we saw absolutely nought at Kasihaku 2008 because the queue to get into every one of the pavilions was at least 90 minutes long! But we did manage to catch a show, even if it was a dubious mixture of Minipops and cosplay.

Wow, how dodgy were the Minipops? Maybe Japan isn't such a strange place after all....

Normal Service Is Resumed...

2008-03-09T19:23:00.008+09:00

Due to entirely unforseen circumstances - namely the explosion of my appendix - this blog has been completely neglected of late. Gomenasai. But my fortnight's incarceration in a high-tech Kobe hospital did give me the opportunity for reflection...

It doesn't matter how bored you get, or how many drugs they give you, sudoku is lamer than Shergar.
Emperor Hirohito may have been divine, but he was a very dull bloke. Herbert P. Bix's Pulitzer Prize-winning Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is almost as mind-numbingly boring as sudoku. I'd read all the other English books I own - I bought this in a moment of craven fecklessness.
Sudoku isn't even bloody Japanese - it was invented in 1979 by an American architect.
Old men snore. Horribly. It's like sleeping in a cave full of raptors.
I heartily recommend the Kaisei Hospital Diet: removal of vestigial organ followed by a week of intravenous fluids prior to as much chopped carrots, seaweed and glutinous rice as you can eat, or keep down.
Minimally invasive surgery has some way to go in Japan - they made an incision you could post letters through.

But my recuperation is now complete, the weather is improving and we'll have this blog back on its feet in no time...

Bad Choices

2008-01-13T20:53:00.000+09:00

Forget Bump of Chicken, and say hello to Kobe's very own Permanent Fish, already red hot favourites for this year's daft name competition, and we're only 13 days in.

Seen belting out a version of 'Hound Dog' outside Sogo department store recently, this serious-looking 5-piece boy band have been putting in some much-needed practice since their truly woeful debut on YouTube last year with possibly the world's worst rendition of Uptown Girl.

At the same time, my equally woeful Japanese spared me from a guest appearance on Radio Osaka FM 851's LOVEFLAP. We could see the eager journalist trying to make eye contact with us as we made our exit from the New Year's hatsumoude celebrations at the Ikuta shrine. He wasn't put off when we protested that our Japanese was not up to the task (the DJ apparently could speak a little English) but he did yield to the unbending logic that the good citizens of Osaka probably don't want to hear interviews in English. I asked him where the ridiculous name came from. "Well, you know us Japanese", he said " we like to borrow English names". "Yes, but you borrow all the wrong ones", I replied. The lad smiled politely. They know of no other way of smiling in these parts.

That brought to mind some other inappropriate choices of English that have brightened up our days wandering around Kobe. Like the Floor Guide in the Comme Ca Ism department store...

And we thought this place was a massage parlour, but on reflection I'm not so sure. Maybe it was just auto-suggestion...

Coin-op Chrimbo

2008-01-02T19:22:00.000+09:00

Well, we can't say we weren't forewarned. Last year we were surprised to see so many Christmas decorations around Kobe, and equally gobsmacked by their total absence come the morning of the 26th. This year we went to Tokyo Disneyland and just managed to squeeze in a few hours of Christmas before Santa-san's little salary-elves removed the whole lot, literally overnight. This meant partially restocking all the shops, removing a whole bunch of Mickey Mouse Christmas tableaux, plus a ton of tinsel and a 40ft Christmas tree (below). All between the hours of 10pm when the park closed on the 25th, and 9am the next day, when it was business as usual. Nifty work indeed.
The main emphasis in Japan is on the New Year - Christmas is only really of commercial interest, feeding the national gift fetish. It's literally just another day at the office. New Year is the only time when things really do shut down, and there's not an awful lot for the geijin to do - Japanese friends are with their families and all the museums and public buildings are closed for the week. So, three cheers for Namco Land... it's a coin-op crimbo!

Sarah is a dab-hand at the tippy-tippy and pokey-pokey games. Normally these involve manipulating some kind of crane or hook in the X-Y axis and tipping or snaring the prize and dropping it into the win-chute. This is all something of an alien concept for a Brit, as we are conditioned to believe that anything even remotely similar to this must, by default, be some kind of pikey swizz. But in Japan things are a good deal more honest and it's actually possible to win stuff - just take a look at the impressive haul that Sarah managed to assemble in less an hour...
Speaking of pikey swizzes, there's a curious role-reversal when it comes to the kind of fairground side stalls that seem to be a feature of the many festivals here. The stall owners don't need to bend the barrels of the guns - the Japanese are such terrible shots that is doesn't seem to matter. In fact it's the punters that are given to cheating - the scene below is not uncommon at a number of festivals we've visited, and the guy still doesn't hit the miniature bottle of no-name brandy or the packet of 20 Caster Super Mild (which, ironically, cost at lot less than the 500 yen you pay for your 5 corks).

But back to Namco Land. Jessica and I opted to play a cross between Crompton's Cakewalk and Monopoly, on the grounds that we could figure out the rules relatively easily. You roll medals down a chute to throw the dice and, well, play Monopoly.

We did pretty well, amassing a small bucketful of medals in the same amount of time that Sarah took to rape the tippy-tippy machines. Turning this small bucketful of medals into anything other than a small bucketful of medals proved our undoing, however. The pimply youth on the help desk patiently (using diagrams) explained the process for stashing the medals - when weighed, we had 450 - which involved an eight-digit password of my choice and electronically fingerprinting both my index fingers. So, this was our Namco swag (although we do still have 450 medals in the virtual Bank of Namco, and Jessica's going to have to cut my hand off to get them...).

Not In My Jobbie Description

2007-12-09T20:01:00.000+09:00

I've been travelling quite a bit recently (hence no blog entries for a few weeks), and I got back to the office this week to find on my desk a form and a curious green cellophane bag with two flat receptacles contained therein. "What's this for?" I ask an office colleague. "Er... it's for poo-poo" she replied. "Yeah, right..."

But I should have known better than to think that they're winding up the token geijin. Humour isn't a big part of office life over here. What it means, in fact, is that it's time for the annual kenkou-shindan, the yearly health check-up that all employees, by law, have to undergo.

I had one last year, but as that was part of my induction process, I skipped the main company event, which was a bit like the scene where the scientists take over the house in E.T. - The Extraterrestrial. They did all the usual stuff: blood test, urine test, X-ray, sight and hearing test - normally just to prove, scientifically, that you're fat - but there was definitely no poo-poo involved. I think I would have remembered that.

This is a family blog, so maybe we shouldn't dwell on the methodology of how one obtains the sample, but other questions inevitably arise. What constitutes an analyzable quantity of poo? Do you keep it in the fridge overnight, or somewhere nice and warm? Could I get away with taking in some of Jack's, to spare myself the indignity? And can they tell the difference? ("Wise-san, we have some very good news. You appear to have the poo of a two-year-old").

So many questions, such a poor grasp of Japanese...

Sarah reckons I should take in a pair of my underpants which, while a little harsh, would be very funny. Or maybe I could enlist the help of MacDonalds' latest creation, the McCrap...

POSTSCRIPT: Well, what do you know? They threw in the barium meal too. Whoopee! So, if lining up along the corridor with a bunch of workmates all carrying cups of wee-wee wasn't an enduring enough image in its own right, I was then bunged into a rotating X-ray machine that was straight out of Brazil, while some chap barked instructions at me in broken English from behind a protective screen. "Mr Steve, turn to your right!" "Mr Steve, turn to your left.."
What a day...

The Kanzashi My Mother Wore...

2007-11-13T21:24:00.000+09:00

This weekend we had a bit of Ulster come visit Japan - a couple who live in the very same street as we do in Magherafelt, in fact - so we did the decent thing and took them to a parade.

The Gracia Procession takes place in Nagaokakyo, south west of Kyoto, and celebrates the tragic life of Hosokawa Gracia. Tragic because her old man, a samurai, bumped off his lord and master, “Orange Oda” Nobunaga, forcing her husband to divorce the "traitor's daughter" in shame. Distraught, she turned to Christianity, and Hosokawa-san has subsequently been immortalised as Japan's first (and only) saint, a character in James Clavell's Shogun, and as a somewhat racier reincarnation in Samurai Warriors 2: Xtreme Legends.

After the decommissioning of arms that took place in 1945 under the supervision of General MacArthur, Japan has been a remarkably peaceful place (apart from the odd ‘punishment seppuku’ and ricin attack). For many centuries the two main communities – staunchly nationalist Sinn To and Johnny-come-lately spiritualists, B-UDA – have generally lived together in harmony, but a potential flashpoint has always been the tri-partite enclave surrounding Katsuryuuji Castle.

Miki O’Kamoto of the Gaasaki Road Residents’ Coalition is openly critical of the procession: “Bloody Christians, they’ve been here less than five hundred years and they march around like they own the place. Bring back Togukawa Ieyasu.”

According to the brochure they were using the 'very traditional route', but there was no mention of the location of ‘the field’.

Happily, the parade passed without incident. A spokesman for the local keisatsu-kyoku was pleased that appeals for calm and restraint had been heeded. “This is nothing though – you should see them in the summer. They go bloody bonkers with the old hanabi” he added.

Shichi-Go-San

2007-11-12T20:59:00.000+09:00

November is - according to The Daily Yomiuri at least - a time to "celebrate parents' love for children" at the festival known as Shichigosan. And what better way to prove your love to kids by opening your wallet and haemorrhaging yen?

"Shichi-go-san" means "Seven-Five-Three", and it's a rite-of-passage for girls aged three and seven, and boys age three and five. On November 15 (seven + five + three - geddit?) or more likely the closest weekend, young people all over Japan visit their Shinto Shrine, dressed up to the nines, to be blessed with a long a prosperous life by the kannushi. That's the local vicar in these parts.

Jessica was well up for the significant amount of dressing-up required. The kimono is a complicated affair, comprising various layered undergarments accompanied by some eccentric accessories, including a wide belt (obi), split-toe socks (tabi), sandals (zori) and some brightly coloured dangly stuff (kanzashi) atop an elaborate hairstyle. Not relishing such foppery, my friend Alex and I made our excuses and left the girls to get on with it.

Now, back home we would have no doubt found a friendly alehouse and a football match to occupy the hour or so it took to get Jessica ready. Instead, we scuttled off to Starbucks round the corner and drank Gingerbread lattes. Oh, the shame, the shame...

More pix can be found here.

Charity Bizarre

2007-10-21T18:19:00.000+09:00

Japan is an odd place. Hundreds of years of largely self-induced isolation mean that culture and tradition are deeply embodied in almost everything that goes on, work or play, yet there is still a fascination with things geijin. This, coupled with a national gift for mimickry (well, they did invent karaoke), makes for some alarming incongruity.

Like the Andean pipe band outside Daimaru department store - Peruvian down to their alpaca hats, ponchos and charangos, but entirely of Japanese lineage. Or the kids of the Ramsay Pipeband from Osaka, behind whom we marched up the hill to the Kobe Club Global Charity Festival at the weekend, to the tune of "Scotland The Brave". To watch, as it turned out, Japanese belly-dancers...

The Kobe Club has the faint whiff of local money meets ex-pat over a gin and tonic, and frankly it’s not a whiff we’ve been that keen to savour, but Jessica likes dressing up for the kids parade, and an ‘ethnic food corner’ is always a tempting proposition.

This was our second year, and it was fun to see the same faces again. The aggressive German bloke with his composting worms occupied the same pitch as before, this time refining his ‘Recycle and save the planet for your children…’ opening gambit to “Kids like worms…” He also had a snappy new product name - ‘Can Of Worms’- but this time we were not falling for any of his eccentric earthworm eulogising.

The crap kung-fu guy was back, performing his stiff-armed, martial arts histrionics to the theme-tune of ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ (with carboard cutlass). As if this wasn’t bizarre enough, the fact that he was a lanky white Caucasian gave some reverse polarity to the whole ‘incongruous’ leitmotif. Disappointingly, there was no repeat invitation extended to the existentialist female dancer with a plastic bottle on her head.

But it was, as they say, ‘all in a good cause’, and we did what all good citizens do on occasions like this and bought a collection of sorry old tat - tat du monde, no less - with a smile and an inflated sense of our own benevolence.

State-sponsored Nerdism

2007-10-06T20:02:00.000+09:00

You might expect it from some cheesed-off pen-pusher in Dundonald, but certainly not from the hard-working salarymen of Chiyoda. The Civil Service it would seem, is so universally boring that employees across the world prefer to spend their working hours editing Wikipedia.

Only recently, the Northern Ireland Civil Service was embarrassed by a software tool that can track the IP addresses of anyone who edits this 'people-powered' online encyclopaedia. The edits were pretty puerile - changing an entry on the Koran and adding links to websites that sell Viagra - and a sad endictment of the calibre of an industry that accounts for a mind-bending 63% of the economy of Northern Ireland (for the UK as whole - which includes that crazy NI figure - it's 43%).

But their state-sponsored Japanese counterparts spend their time, among other things, honing the pages devoted to Gundam, the giant manga robot. Gundam - originally known as Freedom Fighter Gunboy - dates back to the late seventies, and has been a major contributor to the phenomenon known here as otaku, or nerd adults.

Japan is so gadget-tastic that it's hardly any wonder that geekdom is in the ascendancy. USB-specialists SoundAlliance make a whole variety of wacky tech products ranging from the slightly useful - memory sticks in the shape of sushi, 'omelette' mice - to the somewhat strange - 'ghost radar' - to the downright weird - business card holders fashioned to look like raw Kobe beef.

Also much in demand - they can only be bought online, and there is a waiting list - is a mouse pad which claims to alleviate RSI, but is actually an enterprising and tactile combo of eroge - manga porn - and silicon implants. Not quite sure why there's a lady pictured tweaking them though.

The latest must-have gadget is Sony's curiously-named 'Rolly'. I say curiously named because it combines letter-sounds - 'L' and 'R' - that give the Japanese the most phonetic distress, so it could be 'Rolly', 'Lolly', 'Lorry' or 'Rorry', depending on how lithe - or indeed rithe - your tongue is feeling. Nice one, Sony.

Although the initial reaction is "Wow, that's cool!", on further inspection it's actually a case of mistaken identity. It's just, well, eccentrically different. We had one demonstrated to us at the local denki-store (you can't buy them yet, you have to reserve them, and even then the girl didn't know how long you would be waiting before you got one). It does all the spinning about stuff, as advertised, but the sound is pretty tinny, Jack would rip the ears off it in seconds, and it has 'fad' written all over it. And it's not cheap, at the best part of 200 quid.

This is kids' stuff - MP3-player meets Furby - and not anything the hardcore otaku is going to fall for. But don't take my word for it, just ask the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

All Mod Cons

2007-09-24T20:04:00.000+09:00

The weather here is still swelteringly hot. Normally it would have abated weeks ago, but the temperature is still hovering around 30 degrees Celsius (and that's nearly 90 degrees in old money) and we're almost in October. Last year the switch from sub-tropical to temperate was almost digital - a 5-degree drop almost overnight and bang! We were in autumn.

In vain we trawl internet weather forecasts in search of some respite. The Daily Yomiuri offers no encouragement, but Weatherbug reckons it might be a more palatable 24 degrees by the weekend, so we'll choose to believe that one then (although it's based in Maryland, so there's no reason why we should).

In Year Two we've set our sights on visiting places further afield than Kobe. Osaka is further afield than Kobe (although as it's actually conjoined in the great conurbation that is Kansai, only just), and we thought we'd take a look around Osaka Castle. Not only is it one of the most picturesque of Japan's fortresses, but it's got air conditioning and an elevator.

Unlike Himeji, which never actually saw battle, Osaka jo (castle) was in the thick of it practically from the start. Built by local-farmer's-lad-done-good (he rose to become the most powerful daimyo in all Japan), Hideyoshi Toyotomi, in 1583, it only lasted 31 years before the second-most powerful daimyo, and Tokyo-based chancer, Ieyasu Tokugawa, laid siege to it in 1614. The Siege of Osaka was a pivotal point in Japanese history - the Toyotomi clan lost and Tokugawa's Edo dynasty was to remain in power for over 250 years.

The Tokugawas went about redecorating their new pad, only to have it struck by lightning three times in the next 39 years. On the face of it, that sounds like bad luck, but if you build a castle in a place called 'Large Hill ' (O-saka), pre-Franklin, then maybe you've got it coming. Although improvements were made to the castle grounds in general over the years, it wasn't until 1931 that the main tower was renovated. But then World War II and a few typhoons clobbered it again and, finally, in 1997, it was restored to its four-hundred-year-old glory.

So, I've done the maths, and it would appear that we just visited a 10-year-old castle, with maybe another 90 years on the clock. But it was a small price to pay for the air conditioning and the elevator.

How To Get Ahead In Advertising

2007-09-17T12:48:00.000+09:00

Now that Blogger has made it possible to upload movies, we can share the many strange audio-visual experiences that make purchasing such a pleasure in Japan. This one is a particular favourite of mine.

Activated by motion sensor, this advert for Malt's beer just repeats the name over and over, culminating in a satisfying fizz (or is it a toilet flushing?). Now what could be simpler than that? I guess the advertising industry in Japan doesn't pay so well.

Compelling though this message is, I still buy Kirin, or whatever the promotions lady is pushing in the store, frankly. Sometimes it's a raffle type of thing, sometime it's a free glass, but mostly it just turns out to be a pack of tissues. You can never have too many tissues in Japan it would seem.

An Age To Get A Bronze

2007-09-02T17:37:00.000+09:00

While the Great Britain and NI squad set themselves the paltry target of three medals for the 11th IAAF World Championships, spare a thought for the host nation. Bigged up massively by a partisan media, by the eighth and penultimate day of the competition, they had won not a sausage.

Hammer-throwing pin-up boy and medal favourite Koji Murofushi can deliver FedEx parcels to China in double-quick time (according to his oft-played commercial at any rate), but he just couldn't bring home the bacon, finishing a lowly sixth.

There was the hugely likable long-distance runner Kayoko Fukushi (pictured below) who contested the 3,000m steeplechase and 5,000m and got pasted in both, but whose post-race jollity in the face of defeat was the very epitome of the Olympian ideal.

Come Saturday, the pressure was on the 100m relay team. Could veteran Nobuharu Asahara, now 35, shepherd a bunch of rookies, one looking like a Japanese George Michael, another a spindly youth with hair worse than Paul Weller's, to the nation's first medal? Evidently the CG department didn't think so. They'd taken the evening off and left it to the local manga guy to graphically depict the fact that the Japanese quartet had posted the third fastest qualifying time. Maybe the presenter on the left did it - he looks pretty proud of himself.

Game though Asahara-san was, his relay squad finished fifth. But they got heroes' receptions anyway.

So, to Sunday morning and the last event in which Japan could possibly win anything (because they were not contesting any of the other finals), the womens marathon. And they turned up mob-handed, with five athletes. The marathon is an excruciating event, not made any easier by 30-degree heat and Japan's punishing humidity. One by one the Japanese competitors reluctantly dropped off the leading peloton, leaving Reika Tosa grimly hanging on, with the weight of a nation on her shoulders and a camera shoved up her nose, for the last 5km.

Although she dropped back to fourth a few kilometres out, just before they hit the stadium she clawed her way past the Chinese athlete to occupy the precious medal position. The crowd went wild, the presenters went bonkers and the cameraman on the motorbike bike wasn't allowed in the stadium. Ms Tosa got her adulation and her dignity restored too. Ganbatte all round!

Knackered In Osaka

2007-08-26T21:15:00.001+09:00

Well, we're back in Japan again after a brief visit back home to Northern Ireland, where we luxuriated in the pouring rain and generally unimpressive summer temperatures. Luckily, we just missed the brutal, pensioner-culling heatwave that hit Japan a few weeks back, but it's still plenty warm enough for us pasty-faced geijin. So it's a big hats off to the poor sods that have to run about in this sweltering heat at the IAAF World Championships taking place just down the road in Osaka this week. Especially this hopeful-looking chap...

We're still not savvy enough to understand much of what they're saying on TV, but we get the general drift. Much of the coverage is unashamed media lionising of whichever Japanese athlete is taking part, irrespective of how dismally they perform. In today's 100m semi-finals, for example, you would have thought that Nobuhara Asahara had smashed the world record judging by all the post-race close-ups. But no, he'd trailed home stone last.

But we're warming to the whole ganbatte (do your best - a big deal in Japan ) spirit of the thing. Post-race interviews with grinning athletes who have just been slaughtered but still have the demeanour of "well, I gave it my best shot and can't complain about that" are quite refreshing. Certainly a lot cheerier than all those former-soviet-bloc Anna Bolikovas with their Myra-Hindley-with-a-mullet scowls.

We can tell the genuine world class domestic contenders by the amount of pre-race advertising they feature in. Hammer thrower Koji Murofushi is obviously a real star, featuring in ads for FedEx, an energy drink and what appears to be an advert for combine harvesters.

The presentation team are a bit more MTV than BBC, although you wouldn't catch the likes of Des Lynam or Sue Barker shuffling quite so much paper about as the presenters here. Some of it even had scribble on it - a very poor show. Carl Lewis (seen, here, right) is looking a bit knackered these days too. The woman above was translating, and not chatting him up.

As this sports reporting involves just sitting on my bum watching the telly, I'll try to file more on the World Championships as the week progesses - hey, Japan might even win something and who knows what would happen then? Orderly rioting in the streets perhaps?

Creature Discomforts

2007-07-22T19:19:00.000+09:00

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!

2007-07-04T20:21:00.001+09:00

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

2007-07-01T09:48:00.000+09:00

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...)

Peace and Love, Man...

2007-06-10T18:54:00.000+09:00

What with my mum being a bit bothered by the earthquakes and all, I'm sure it will comfort her to learn that we are living in the 5th Most Peaceful Nation On Earth (and more than a little bizarre that we came from the 4th Most Peaceful). But it's official, according to the barmy statistics compiled by the Global Peace Index, and reported with some gusto in Japan.

Top of the 'not bothering anyone lately' pile is Norway. No surprises there - the Norwegians wouldn't say boo to a goose, and it's over a thousand years since the Vikings strutted their stuff around Europe. Just a cursory check of their monarchy over the years tells it own story - the short-lived but fierce-sounding Eirik Bloodaxe (930-934) succeeded by the likes of Magnus the Good, Olaf the Peaceful, Sigurd the Soft, Noggin the Nog (OK, the last two aren't real). Norway just pipped New Zealand, who are just too bloody far away from anybody to cause any trouble.

But Germany at number 12? Two places higher than Switzerland, those very paragons of neutrality who haven't upset anyone, ever? Surely not? I would imagine that getting a serious pasting in a relatively recent and major worldwide conflict has to dampen one's ardour for international conflict, but having your military capability completely dismantled as a result would be the more likely reason. Rather like Japan.

On the face of it, Ireland is a bit of a puzzler, given that these people have been fighting the English, and each other, for 800 years. But then I'm sure the distinction will be made between North and South, turning a blind eye to the fact that the South was essentially the ammunitions dump and terrorist hideout for the conflict in the North for so many years.

But it's all peace and love in Northern Ireland these days, and I think I know the reason - water rates. Although we've been away for almost a year now, I've been following the news back home, and the evil English finally hit paydirt with their cunning plan to charge people in Northern Ireland for their water. This is a completely normal and uncontroversial tariff in most places - we pay for our water here, no problem. But the Emerald Isle is so-called for a very good reason - it pours with rain all the time. Ask an Irishman to actually pay for water and all hell breaks loose. Before you know it, Paisley's cosying up to Adams and Mad Martin's his second-in-command at Stormont, collectively outraged at such a monstrous violation of human rights and threat to rising house prices. If only the Brits had thought of that all those years ago. They must be kicking themselves.

And who's that languishing at number 96, sandwiched between Yemen and Iran? Yes, it's the United States of America - the latter-day Flashman of the Third World. But don't worry guys - if you can just manage to reduce those non-UN military deployments over the next year, you should be able to give Guatemala a run for its money in 2008.

J-Pap? Maybe Not!

2007-05-28T21:30:00.000+09:00

We've been trying for almost a year now to 'get into' Japanese music. Well, that's a lie actually. We very quickly scaled down our aspirations and have been trying to find any kind of indigenous music that is tolerable. Watching MTV Japan is a bit like watching a succession of Eurovision Song Contest auditions, but with much better videos. A quick roll-call of J-Pop gives you a clue - Rip Slyme, Mr Children, Bump Of Chicken...

Yes. I'm afraid that really IS Bump of Chicken...

It's not that they are lousy musicians - quite the contrary in fact. The precocity of youth here is quite frightening. No hanging around on street corners menacing the elderly for them, they're all indoors polishing their fretwork. It's just that the music is so utterly derivative and well, dull. Unlike manufacturing, music isn't just about build quality.

And they've got no excuses - the Japanese music industry is the second largest in the world, so there's no shortage of cash. Million-selling records in Japan are not as frequent as they used to be, but they still exist (unlike the UK, where it seems you can just email your mates these days to get to Number One). The highest-selling single in Japan was in the 70s, when some dodgy nursery rhyme sold over 4 million copies. This pales into insignificance compared with the biggest-selling single of all time - Elton John's horrible Candle In The Wind - which has amassed an astonishing 26 million sales worldwide. But then credit where credit's due - Japan's sales are achieved solely in Japan. After all, no-one else is going to buy this stuff.

The Yoshida Brothers are pretty interesting on the face of it. 'Their axes are old school, their music is new school' proclaim their marketeers. Their 'axes' are three-stringed shamisen, and you have to hand it to them for even having the idea of covering Brian Eno's By This River from Before and After Science (Yoshida Brothers III). Respect indeed. Unfortunately the whole twangy-plink deal that is the charm of the shamisen doesn't have legs - in fact it really starts to get on your thrupennies after about 15 minutes.

But recently we have happened upon a band that we think aren't half bad at all. Oreskaband are a six-piece girl band from Osaka who are smart enough to mine a genre that is quintessentially derivative from the outset - ska. Maybe it's because I'm from Coventry, the (second) home of ska, or maybe it's because I'm just over the hill, but there's a hint of Specials, Dexys and Roland from Grange Hill's sister about this bunch. What a treat they are. Check out their website. And remember where you heard it first...

The Lesser Spotted Geisha Bird

2007-05-20T19:08:00.000+09:00

The ultimate hostess with the mostest, the geisha is a Japanese icon. The two most famous hanamichi (geisha quarters) can be found in the current and former capital cities, Tokyo and Kyoto. So as part of the itinerary for my parents' recent visit, a trip to the latter for some geisha-spotting was a must.

Arthur Golden's 1998 novel Memoirs of a Geisha - set in the Gion district of Kyoto - revived interest in an aspect of Japan that is as romantic as it is ambiguous. The film it spawned was a little too Mills and Boon for my liking, and wasn't so well received in Japan, mainly because it rather insensitively cast two Chinese actresses in the the lead roles. A bit like casting Brigitte Bardot as Mary Poppins. Well, maybe not.

The word geisha literally translates to "arts person" or "one trained in arts" (gei = art, sha = person). They are a dab-hand at dancing, music, poetry, flower arrangement, calligraphy, serving tea (quite an extravaganza in Japan) and not looking bored in the company of men.

An estimated 10,000 geisha (geiko in Kyoto dialect) still ply their trade in Japan, although you are much more likely to see maiko (apprentice geisha) or even elaborately made-up tourist faux-geisha (for about £150 you too can be geisha'd up). To become a true geisha takes approximately six years training, costs an estimated £150,000, and will set you back £300 a month in dry-cleaning alone. So it's perhaps no wonder that the true geisha leave the shuffling around the streets of Kyoto in their high-heeled wooden geta to the rookies.

I've no idea whether the girls we saw on the steps of the Kiyomizu-dera temple were maiko, gaiko or just plain fako, but they looked pretty impressive. Next time we'll ask them to play us a tune. Or show us their laundry receipts.

Flower Power

2007-05-18T21:14:00.001+09:00

Apologies for the fact that this blog seems to turn into an online botany class from time to time, but there are certainly petals a-plenty in these parts. It's fueled by the fact that I've got myself into an ongoing photography competition with the guy who runs networks and IT. As you do...

The first challenge was photographing the Luminarie last December, but to be honest, every photo I've ever seen of the Luminarie looks pretty much the same, and unless you're using a pinhole camera, or painting it with poster paint using your feet, you're going to be there or thereabouts. I think I was hard done by though, losing out in a very close office poll. Foolishly I chose to play the art card, rather than the tried and tested method of a grinning daughter under an arch, which would have definitely sealed the female vote.

Then I was absolutely slammed by some pretty impressive blossom pictures by the indefatiguable Inamura-san, who travelled the length and breadth of the island to capture almost every strain of sakura known to man (for which he also bought himself a new lens, I later learnt. Grrrr..).

So, it's May, and azaleas - or tsutsuji - are my weapon of choice. Sorakuen Garden has a stack of them, it's just round the corner, and it's only 300 yen entrance fee.

There is still some dispute over the this, but I reckon I won the Battle of Tsutsuji, for the simple reason that my picture has a bee in it. And that's something that independently moves about, and is stingy and mildly threatening - ergo, it's a much more challenging composition. Inamura-san won't have any of it though, and has challenged me to a June duel - hydrangeas at dawn! Watch this space...

Slap Happy at the Festival

2007-05-13T20:43:00.000+09:00

If you've been following this blog you may recall that on New Year's Day we saw a band of taiko drummers at the local shrine. I took quite a lot of photos of them that day and showed them to my Japanese sensei, Yuka. By coincidence, Yuka knew those very same drummers and effected an introduction that would culminate in Jessica and myself, bedecked in happi and hachimaki, slapping cowhide in a somewhat wayward fashion on a float in the 37th Kobe Matsuri less than five months later.

I've always been quite partial to a spot of taiko - I've seen the Kodo drummers three times, as recently as last year in Belfast. So when I found out that Yuka knew the people who ran the local drumming club I was initially quite excited about 'having a go' myself. I was brought down to earth rapidly by the bloke who ran it, who rather brusquely replied that my intended two years sabbatical in Japan was nowhere near long enough to learn taiko. In hindsight, what he actually meant was that I was middle-aged, unfit and having a laugh, but this was tempered by the suggestion that maybe Jessica could give it a whirl and I could watch.

So, since January, Sarah and myself have taking turns to take Jessica to Kobe Daiko every Saturday, and the three of us have tried to deduce what on earth is going on, as the lessons are delivered in Japanese and the rhythms annotated in hiragana. To her credit, Jessica has progressed very quickly from scratching her bum and pulling faces to giving it a real go.

When it comes to festivals, the Japanese certainly don't hold back, and the Kobe Matsuri is the biggest in the region. It is particularly renowned for its samba dancers, seemingly on the grounds that they apply the same approach to clothing as to the infamous waxing technique.

Jessica was willing enough to perform on the stage, but was not so impressed with the idea of appearing on the float, which was the exact opposite of how I felt about things, except I was none too keen on the float either. We struck a deal that Jessica would consider doing the float if I was prepared to make a fool of myself. I reasoned that I would at least be a moving fool, only fleetingly bearing my incompetence to the Kobe masses.

The taiko kids range in age from about four to nine, and they are superb. The mums are better than I could ever hope to be, and they all profess to be only making up the numbers. The morning stage performance went without a hitch. Jessica looked nervous, but acquitted herself well, and we then had a three-hour wait for our slot in the five-hour procession - we were number 91 in the queue. Although the festival route took 30 minutes to navigate, it was over in a flash. The exhilaration of the occasional sequences of drum-pounding that I could actually do, brought into sharp relief by Jessica's rolling eyes at the more frequent bits that I couldn't. At the end of it I was completely knackered, but the sense of achievement - and relief - was palpable.

The above photo will be submitted to Kansai Time Out's Chinatown Section 'How Many Chins?' competition.

Nuclear Family Outing

2007-05-06T10:39:00.000+09:00

My parents are making their first ever visit to Japan, so it's back on the Shinkansen again as we make the trip west to Hiroshima, just an hour away on the sleek 500 series. A largely non-descript industrial city prior to August 6th 1945, Hiroshima was incinerated, and instantly redefined, when it became the recipient of the world's first atomic bomb. The 'city of water' - so called because it straddles the frond-like delta of the Oota River - in an instant became one of the most powerful images of the twentieth century.

I'd read John Hersey's 'Hiroshima' at school. Commissioned by The New Yorker in 1946, Hersey interviewed six survivors of the blast to relate a tragically human dimension to the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; in stark contrast, at the time, to the mostly statistical, political and questionably moralistic reporting of the event. It's both a fascinating and chilling read, so it was an eerie experience stepping off a tram at Genbaku Dome-mae to find the remnants of what used to be the Prefectural Commercial Exhibition building, and which is now simply known as 'The A-Bomb Dome'.

The Peace Memorial Park covers a sizable area - previously the Nakajima district of the city. Opened in 1955, the Peace Memorial Museum tells the story of Hiroshima before the bombing and of the aftermath. Despite the grim subject matter, it is not overtly grisly, although it maybe dwells a little too much on the statistics of nuclear fission - all of them very, very big, by the way - towards the end of the tour, turning it into a bit of a fourth-grade physics lesson in the process. But the message is crystal clear - nuclear weapons are very, very bad - and not surprisingly it's a lot more compelling coming from the memoirs of the hibakusha (survivors of the blast, of whom there are still an estimated 80,000 living in Hiroshima today) than the massed ranks of the Birkenstock-shod middle classes.

But life goes on. The fear that nothing organic could survive the aftermath of the nuclear bombing for many generations has proved to be unfounded, and Hiroshima is a thriving metropolis looking ahead to the future that cannot, and maybe should not, forget the legacy of its past. As evidenced by the entry in the local listings magazine for the Hiroshima Youth Hostel: "A-bomb survivors share their experiences the first Saturday of each month from 19:00. Followed by origami project. All welcome."

Blossom (Part 2)

2007-04-09T21:44:00.000+09:00

Spring is a busy time in Japan, horticulturally speaking. Shortly after ume, there is peach blossom (momo), but these are both mere au d'oeuvres for the main course that is sakura. The national flower, and a very cheesy song, cherry blossom is a delicate bloom, lasting little more than a week, and there is much speculation about, and anticipation of, when this annual event will occur. A unexpected deluge of rain, or an unseasonally strong wind can ruin the spectacle in an instant. As the Japanese are obsessed with the weather, this allows them the luxury of killing two birds with one stone.

By general consensus the optimum day for sakura viewing this year was April 7th, coincidentally Jessica's birthday, and we took the train to Shukugawa, about halfway between Kobe and Osaka. Stretching a little over 4km, some 2,300 cherry trees line the banks of the Shukugawa River.

People back home might wonder what the big deal is about cherry blossom. We've got one in our garden and its bloody annoying actually, as all it does is drop cherry stones into the fish pond. But when you see 2,300 of them you cannot help but be impressed by their ephemeral beauty. Sarah commented that it's like being in a strange snow scene; strange because it's not cold and it's not winter.

The locals are impressed too - they flock in droves to the nearest blossom-heavy beauty spot to indulge in hanami parties - a diminution of hana mimasu, or 'looking at flowers'. They picnic along the banks of the river, munching on maki and sipping from cans of Kirin. Unlike any event in the UK where alcohol is involved, there is no lewd or disorderly behaviour, and any rubbish is neatly stacked in the correct place (no doubt sorted according to recyclability). This is Japan. You can have a good time without swearing loudly or showing anyone your buttocks.

What is a little strange is the fact that the 'river' seems more like a storm drain. We first noticed this in Kurashiki, and it turns out that all rivers in Japan are like this, because they effectively ARE storm drains. Japan's mountains are so close to the coast, and the country so prone to typhoons, that the cities are very vulnerable to flash-flooding. So the all rivers have been literally engineered - clad in concrete with deep banks - to more or less eradicate this risk. So while nature rules supreme along the river bank, cherry stones are the least of the problems facing freshwater fish, who are busy strapping on their crampons to negotiate their way upstream.

Blossom (Part 1)

2007-04-04T20:34:00.001+09:00

Although Japan is famous for sakura, or cherry blossom, it is the plum, or ume, that is associated with the start of spring, because it flowers first. The Hanezu Odori - dance of the red plum blossom - takes place towards the end of March every year at the Zuishin-in Temple. Beautiful and curvy-rooved though they are, temples are already starting to look well, a bit like all the other temples, so the prospect of some flowers and a bit of dancing to liven up proceedings was all the incentive we needed to board the train to Kyoto.

The dance commemorates the love affair over a thousand years ago between the poetess Ono-no-Komachi and Fukakusa Shosho, a courtier who sought her hand. Shosho was supposed to make 100 nightly visits to prove his love for Ono. Sadly he died after the 99th visit. So Japanese....

What's even more impressive about this story is that I've mentioned it since to a number of people here and they ALL seem to know about it. The fact that 10th century poets are so easily recalled says a lot about the value placed on tradition in Japanese society, and compares starkly with the fact that we'd probably struggle to remember Yoko Ono, let alone someone who died in 900 AD.

From Zuishin-in it was a short subway ride to Nijo Castle. We'd been here before, almost a year ago, but it's such an impressive place that it was definitely worth another visit. Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over a thousand years up until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when that privilege was passed to Tokyo. Nijo Castle was built in 1600 by the Tokugawa shogunate at the height of its powers and is quintessentially samurai. In fact it was here that the final Tokugawa shogun returned political power to the Emperor, effectively marking the end of the samurai.

For extra security, and to guard against incursions from ninja assassins, the floor was suspended above the frame using special iron clamps, and moved up and down over the fixing nails when walked upon. The nails rub against the wood and create a sound similar to the cheeping of a nightingale - hence the name, 'nightgale floor'. In case you're wondering, it sounds like this. A pretty tone-deaf nightingale maybe, but you get the general idea.

Tourguides R Us

2007-04-01T21:31:00.000+09:00

Gomen nasai... it's been over a month now since we last posted anything. But with the recent visit of Sarah's sister we've engaged in a flurry of geijin activity, all of which is grist to the mill for a blog site like this. So, what's one of the first things you think about when you have visitors? Taking them on the world-famous bullet train of course.

We planned a trip on the Shinkansen to Okayama, en route to Kurashiki, a small picturesque town about 100km west of Kobe. There are three different types of 'bullet train', but the fastest, and by far the most space-age looking, is the Nozomi. Flashing through the Hyogo countryside at speeds approaching 300 km/h, the train named rather disturbingly after the Japanese word for hope deposited us at our destination in just 30 minutes. From Okayawa it was just four stops on the slow train to Kurashiki, although this journey was considerably more perilous, on account of the terrible smell emanating from the slack-bowelled old lady sharing our carriage.

Now, being British and male, I am already quite fluent in the Japanese vernacular for whiffs and pongs, from chotto kusai ("a bit smelly") to jup-pun matte kudasai ("I'd give it 10 minutes if I were you"), but mere words could not describe the sensory onslaught that was to ensue as the obasan staggered out of the lavatory. Jessica's facial expressions transcended all language barriers as we fought for breathe, trying desperately hard not to laugh at the same time.

Kurashiki is a quaint town, famous for its rows of storehouses surrounded by white walls along the Kurashiki-gawa River. Not unlike a Japanese Bourton-on-the-Water, in fact. After a while it began to rain, so we sought refuge in the nearby Museum of Folkcraft. For 700 yen each we were treated to the finest display of crappy old pots and baskets for possibly yards around. The pots weren't even that old, and many of them not even Japanese. There were pre-revolutionary ceramics from Iran, which might sound impressive, but they only pre-dated the revolution by one year, being made in 1978. I've got punk records older than that.

Red Pigs & Englishmen

2007-02-20T22:09:00.000+09:00

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

2007-02-04T15:30:00.000+09:00

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...

2007-02-03T10:20:00.001+09:00

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...

Half-term Report: Must Try Harder

2007-01-21T21:03:00.000+09:00

How time flies - we've been in Japan for six months already!

I've been taking Japanese lessons now twice a week since October and while I feel I'm beginning to understand the basic structure of the language, I have reached that tricky phase where the act of proffering a tentative sentence elicits a return volley of Japanese that I still can't quite comprehend. It was much easier when we could just gesture pathetically, with a look of compete gaijin incompetence. People would then feel honour-bound to speak perfect English for our sole benefit.

Learning Japanese is hard. Harder even than finding out that you can only buy trousers at Gap, not just because they can accommodate your gargantuan waist size, but because they offer 'easy fit', which is marketing-speak for 'fat arse'.

Japanese is actually relatively paired down, as you might expect from a culture renowned for an aesthetic of simplicity. There are far fewer tenses than English. There are no possessive forms of nouns or pronouns. There are no plural forms. But their absurdly complicated numbering systems more than make up for this. On the face of it, Japanese numerics are commendably straightforward - eleven is '10 1', twenty is '2 10s' etc. But the numbering system is different when it applies to objects, as opposed to people. And age. And small things. And long things. And flat things. There are zillions of them, and there are no rules, you just have to learn them.

My particular favourite is the fact that the counting system for rabbits is the same as for birds (itiwa, niwa, sanba...). Allegedly this is because Buddhists are forbidden to eat anything with four legs. Evidently partial to a bit of rabbit stew, the enterprising monks of ancient Japan classified rabbits as birds.

The Japanese will counter with "well, you have collective nouns'. Which we do indeed, but these terms are just for pub quizzes, they are not in common usage. You might see a bloat of hippopotami or a coalition of cheetahs at the zoo, but it's a bit different from ordering two bottles of beer (ni-hon, onegai-shimasu, in case you're wondering). Thankfully, there are still some things we can stick two fingers up to, and for...

As if learning the lingo wasn't difficult enough, learning to read is another thing altogether. There are three character sets - kanji, hiragana and katakana. There are around 4,000 kanji characters, of which I know about 10, like river, mountain etc, which isn't too much use frankly. Hiragana is an attempt to simplify kanji using around 40 or so syllables, and katakana uses a phonetically identical syllabary, but describes what the Japanese call 'loan words', which are typically English words that have become commonplace in daily language.

Of the three, katakana is the most instantly gratifying for a gaijin, as it is essentially like an 'I-Spy' code. Ha-n-ba-ga, for example, is your Macdonalds staple food, although a little more convoluted is the burger chain name itself: Ma-ka-do-na-ru-do. But Katakana doesn't teach you any Japanese, it just makes you realise how much English has been exported overseas.

Jessica has hit the ground running, and has already memorised the hiragana syllabary, so she'll be handling most of our domestic administration before too long. We've given up all hope of ever understanding enough to read kanji though. People ask us what is the most different thing about living in Japan, and I usually reply that it is having to take our mail to work to have someone explain to me what it is about. Very disorientating...

Anyway, I'll sign off this entry with a summary of my most impressive linguistic gaffes to date, something which I'm sure that I will have to regularly update:

Introducing Sarah as 'my crab' to the immigration department official (kanai = wife; kani = crab)

Thinking I was telling someone they were a bit drunk, when I actually said that they had done something very rude to a lady (yo chatta = drunk; ya chatta = very rude act with lady)

Constantly mispronouncing 'teacher' - a little bit embarrassing as my Japanese teacher is a woman (sensei = teacher; sensai = former wife)

As you can see, the margin for error is pretty small...

The Year of the Boar

2007-01-04T11:35:00.000+09:00

Ushering in the New Year was a pretty low-key affair this year, probably because we don't know anybody here well enough to gate-crash their New Year's Eve celebrations, but at least we were spared another year of Hootenanny! and Jools Holland's jazz-been chums on BBC2.

We'd been warned that the New Year holiday is pretty much the only time of the year that Japan actually stops to take a breath, effectively shutting down for a full three days. Certainly only a handful of shops were open, but it didn't seem to deter the crowds from roaming the city centre shopping arcades in a curious, Romero-esque kind of way.

But there was no need to panic because you can always rely on the hyper-industrious Chinese to offer a supporting hand to the inveterate shopper, and Motomachi Chinatown proved to be a hive of activity.

We did manage something more commendably traditional though, when we came across what seemed like a trillion Kobe-ites queuing to enter the Ikuta shine. This event is called hatsumoude, or 'first shrine visit'. The Ikuta shrine is one of the oldest shrines in the country, reportedly dating back to the beginning of the third century. Despite being nearly two thousand years old, it boasts a website with Shockwave Flash. Now there's progress for you.

High up on the gate to the shrine was a troupe of taiko drummers of varying ages - The Partridge Family meets Kodo - whose skilful, metronomic thumping really added to the sense of occasion.

On entering the shrine, visitors queue to purchase a fortune scroll. If it's good, they keep it. If it's indifferent, or indeed bad - and there are apparently some real stinkers - they fold it and tie it to a tree for the gods. So, bit of a win-win scenario all round then. They then approach the main altar and cast coins, perhaps by way of compensating the gods for all the rotten luck they've just sent their way.

There is also the opportunity to purchase good luck charms, arrows - necessary to ward off demons - and have a go on a good old-fashioned tombola, with the chance to win a Nintendo Wii game console (natch..). We won a can of cold coffee and an oversize 1,000,000 yen banknote sponsored by Kobe Sauna & Spa. Jessica was impressed though, even more so when a helpful couple explained that if you pin it to your wall upside down it would ensure that money would fall into your home in the New Year. Jessica wanted to know whether that would be coins or paper money...

Japan uses the same animal zodiac as China, but in the late nineteenth century switched to the Gregorian calendar, so their shogatsu (New Year) kicks off on January 1st too. 2007 is the Year of the Boar, by the way. Although you might be forgiven for thinking it is the Year of the Cheetah here, thanks to the total over-exposure of the Cheetah Girls - an irritatingly catchy, somewhat podgy girl band - on the Disney Channel.

Christmas in Kobe

2006-12-27T20:43:00.000+09:00

We've been in Japan for over four months now, and we've reached the point where the words 'roast chicken' can induce at the very least a glassy expression accompanied by wistful foody reverie, and at worst mild catatonia. With seemingly every cultural dish under the sun within a half-mile radius of where we live, we just cannot manage to track down a good, old-fashioned English roast.

Our friends have employed search engines, scoured phone books and even e-mailed the British embassy (which was very sweet of Chikako - thank you!) and the best they could turn up was an '007 Evening' in Osaka, some 30 minutes away on a very fast train. Such, it would seem, is the general disdain held for English food in these parts.

So Christmas dinner for the Wises this year was beef teppanyaki on the 6th floor of a building in downtown Sannomiya. With nary a gravy boat or brussel sprout in sight.

Christmas in Kobe is pretty much like any other day in Kobe. Which is pretty weird from a Western point of view. ALL the shops are open, most of them selling the Japanese version of 'Karisumusu Cako' - a relatively lightweight little number made of sponge cake and cream and topped with strawberries.

What is even more strange is the almost digital way in which Christmas just disappears. By Boxing Day all semblance of festivities - merchandise, decorations, great swathes of blue LED lights (make a note that they will be in your shops next year - the future may be bright, but the future is blue, not orange...), even the bloody cakes, all just disappear into thin air, to be replaced by New Year celebratory items of a more oriental flavour.

Not that Jack was particularly phased by any of this general strangeness. He took his second Christmas in his stride, wondering what all the fuss was about...

COMING SOON! It's been commented on that Jack hasn't featured too much on this blog, so over the upcoming holiday (yes, we do get one, eventually...) I will put together a Jack Special and introduce you all to... Anpan Man! (to be continued..)

Putting Blackpool in the Shade

2006-12-14T21:49:00.000+09:00

Every year since 1995, Kobe has staged an illumination festival as a memorial to the lives lost in the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. The Luminarie attracts on average a staggering 4.5 million people, which is one million more than attend our own venerated luminous event, Blackpool Illuminations, which lasts over two months. It's the equivalent of the entire population of where we live - Northern Ireland - going three times. And it's so impressive, it's probably worth going to three times.

Every evening for two weeks just before Christmas, roads around the downtown Motomachi district are cordoned off and an army of hired hands with flashing batons shepherd the many thousands of visitors towards a street decorated with an estimated 200,000 light bulbs.

The Italian designers responsible for the Luminarie use a street in the more up-market shopping district of Kobe to create a kind of baroque tunnel of light, giving it a festive tweak with specially commissioned orchestral music. Locals complain about the excessive crowding, but on a cool, clear night we found that the mass of spectators moved fluidly and it was not particularly overbearing. I felt a little out of place carrying a camera - with so many 4-zillion-megapixel mobile phones in evidence it seemed more than a little old-fashioned.

The Luminarie culminates in the park outside the Kobe City Hall. Here there is another impressive pavillion of arches and light and the inevitable 'yatai' - market stalls selling among other things the even more inevitable takoyaki, a truly repellent fried dumpling made of batter and fried octopus. The only redeeming feature of the many, many takoyaki vendors in Kobe is that they all seem to employ the same cartoon octopus featured in that fantastic episode of The Simpsons - 'Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo*'.

Tacky , or even takoyaki, though it is, it doesn't plumb the depths of the some of the life-threatening fayre on offer last time I went to Blackpool a few years back. Although we could probably make a small fortune over here importing 'Kiss Me Quick' hats...

* never shown in Japan, apparently, on account of the scene where Homer hurls the Emperor of Japan into a pile of used "sumo thongs". For those of you have seen this episode it is hard to think of any part of it that is NOT offensive to the Japanese.

Live from Kobe... it's the Quiz of the Week!

2006-12-04T22:04:00.000+09:00

Your chance to win a bottle of sake! All you have to do is guess what this is - snapped while wandering around Kitano. First correct answer (not from Japan) wins a bottle of Kobe's famous rice-based brew.

And the correct answer - mailed in by Mr Huckfield in Coventry - is that the somewhat grotesque tableau above is composed of the drying fins of the blowfish, also known as the puffer fish, but known around these parts as the fugu (literally 'river pig'). Although the fugu itself is already something of a delicacy, apparently the Japanese also like to lightly toast the fins and infuse them in hot sake.

The fugu is a deeply unattractive fish, although much more famous for its amazing toxicity. Its organs are loaded with a neuro-toxin over a thousand times deadlier than cyanide, and the little fellow is thought to be responsible for around 100 deaths a year in Japan, although admittedly these tend to be in rural backwaters.

It is alleged that the same toxin present in the fugu is the main ingredient in voodoo zombie potions, something given credence by reports that in certain regions of Japan people leave the body of a fugu eater lying beside his own coffin for three days before burying it. If the body doesn't decompose, it isn't dead.

Chefs have to be specially trained and licensed to prepare and cook fugu. There is a written and practical test; apparently only a quarter of applicants pass the written test, and the practical test includes eating the fish that has been prepared. Perhaps not surprisingly, I couldn't find any statistics on how many fail that practical test.

Only 30 Shopping Days to Christmas...

2006-11-26T15:56:00.000+09:00

And that includes Christmas Day itself, by the way. Despite the fact that most people in Japan consider themselves Shinto or Buddhist, Christmas certainly seems to be very popular judging by the amount of seasonal merchandise on display in downtown Kobe. No sooner had the Halloween festivities finished than the jack o' lanterns and ghouls were speedily replaced by 'Merry Christmas' signs and (rather cool, it must be said) blue LEDs threaded through trees. But then it's no surprise really when you consider that a nation so dedicated to shopping is hardly going to pass up the commercial bonanza on offer courtesy of old Santee Claws (a salient reminder that the genius of Disney marketing can effect a seamless segue between the two occasions).

In Japan it is actually common to give Christmas presents. Parents give presents to their children, but children do not give presents to their parents. The reasoning behind this is that only Santa brings presents, so once the children no longer believe in Santa the presents are no longer given. Utterly logical, as you might expect. Christmas cake is also a little different from Western expectations, comprising a sponge cake with whipped cream and strawberries!

So what can you buy with your hard-earned yen in these parts? Well, not surprisingly, it's more a question of what can't you buy. As the weather wasn't too great this weekend, we went Christmas shopping...

Socks are always a safe bet, and we've got Kutsushitaya Socks, proudly boasting of their merchandise that "knitted with a workman's spirit, they represent an air of the time" (although it must be said that in our house said air is not always so fresh). Despite sounding for all money like a communist manifesto, it's actually just Japanese for 'socks shop'. Nice socks though.

It would be most unlike the Japanese not to inject proceedings with just a hint of sauciness, and here it is, in the form of some very un-PC apparel for the young lady wishing to partake of the Christmas spirit and maybe cheer up some old fat blokes in the process.

There were a huge number of these costumes, all variations on the same theme but with ever more imaginative names, like 'Milky Santa Girl', 'Soft Honey Santa Girl' and my personal favourite 'Pixie Food Santa'. Jessica chose her favourite too, although we didn't buy it. There didn't seem to be many takers for the 'tall bloke in a schooldress' costume in the background either.

Still stuck for a present? Forget ipods - we've got iFish! We've got spatulas in the shape of frogs. We've got shoes with animal faces on.

And if all else fails, for those very special ones we've got that old favourite, the bowl of fruit, although at a somewhat eye-popping price. This little ensemble below - let's see, there's a melon, an apple, a pear, and orange, some other bits and bobs hiding around the back... oh, and a basket - will set you back a cool 48 quid!

Fishing For Cormorants

2006-11-19T22:19:00.000+09:00

Arashiyama lies on the outskirts of Kyoto and is a popular destination for tourists, particularly in late November, when the Japanese maple explodes into a riot of orange, gold and crimson (known as 'koyo'). There are plenty of things to see there, including the Togetsukyo Bridge and the Tenryuji (Heavenly Dragon) Zen Temple.

The temple was built in 1339 and has burnt down a total of eight times since then, which seems more than just a little careless. Maybe it was all that meditation - forgetting that the oven was on etc - or just smoking in bed (cigarettes are outrageously cheap in Japan). It even withstood a crunching encounter with Jack's choppers as he came a bit of a cropper crawling across the wooden flooring. The current building is 'only' around 150 years old, but is impressive nevertheless. Even more outstanding is the landscaped garden, one of the oldest in Japan, which also dates back to the fourteenth century. The garden is a fine example of the Japanese gardening art of 'shakkei', or 'borrowed scenery' - using natural landmarks outside the garden's boundaries to create a grandiose visual composite.

We took a boat ride up the Hozu River, populated mainly by courting couples rowing, no doubt in preparation for many more years rowing (an English linguistic joke for my Japanese friends). We were punted upstream by a relatively sprightly but somewhat weather-beaten octagenarian local. Alex, our resident 'local' and surrogate guide, informed us that in the summer the river is famous for the spectacle of 'ukai', a traditional and rather bizarre practise involving painstakingly-trained birds on the ends of leashes. As Alex went into more detail, and collectively the jaws of all those present thudded in unison onto the picnic table in the long, thin boat, we learnt that for over a thousand years the locals have tied strings around the necks of cormorants and used them to catch fish.

The lease has a dual purpose - providing both the means to control the birds and at the same time restricting their windpipe just enough to make sure that fish are not swallowed and can be subsequently squirted back out for supper. Truly mind-boggling stuff - and to think we give the Japanese grief for whale fishing!

Postscript: While I'm not taking any sides in this particular debate, the Japanese are quite defensive about the whole whale fishing thing. First off, the minke whale is not even close to being an endangered species, and there is a suspicion that bleeding-heart western liberals might actually think it's spelt 'minky', and therefore might, just might, be a little bit cute. And even though us Brits can blame foie gras on the French, it's a recorded fact that we have fed cows... to cows! ...so we're hardly squeaky-clean on animal rights.

PS: Just in case you're wondering, I didn't take the picture above - you can find out more about the wonders of ukai here:

http://www.phototravels.net/japan/ukai-cormorant-fishing.html

Waterworld Part II

2006-11-06T20:46:00.000+09:00

In stark contrast to Universal Studios and its teeming hordes of thrillseekers, this weekend we ventured forth about a mile down the road to the Kobe Water Science Museum. Along with about fourteen other people. Which is a little sad, because water is far more important than Woody Woodpecker's missus or a rubbish Kevin Costner film.

For a refurbished rapid filtration plant, the Water Science Museum is actually quite a grandiose appointment. Quite why it was deemed necessary to engage celebrated architects - in this instance one Kozo Kawai - to design sewage works is a bit of a mystery, but he did a nice job. To add to the general feeling of bewilderment as you approach the building, there is a quite impressive sculpture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Immediately outside the museum there was a splendid opportunity to take arty photos...

Not to be outdone by the likes of Universal Studios, you rather suspect that the local municipal authority had spent a small fortune on their own lovable hosts - in this case it is the Mi-ckle Family, the "fairies of the water".

But then, especially considering it's approximately a fiftieth the cost of Universal Studios, the Water Science Museum stands its ground well. There were plenty of things for Jessica to press, push, pump and squirt, and even though everything was in Japanese (something which, so far, we've not found to be the norm, to be honest) there was a discernible point to everything. And from a purely personal point of view, I found that there was at long last a discernible point to Mr Rhodes' achingly dull Geography lessons at school - this was the first time I had ever seen an Archimedes' Screw, even if this one was made out of polythene hosepipe, as opposed to being fashioned from wood and bronze, as he told us it was.

All in all, 200 yen well spent then...

Burgers and Broomsticks

2006-10-30T20:37:00.000+09:00

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. When you're living in one of the most densely populated countries on the planet*, and one with an obsession with western culture to boot, then maybe you shouldn't be too surprised to find that Halloween weekend at Universal Studios in Osaka is absolutely chocka...

The idea was sound. Book a hotel just 500m beyond the perimeter gates and purchase a two-day pass. Make a reconnaissance mission on the Saturday, ready for a full-blown dawn attack on the Sunday. The gates opened at 9am, and we were at the ET - The Extraterrestrial ride at 9.07am. The queue time was already 60 minutes. Welcome to Japan.

I'd been to Universal Studios in LA before. It's got a - undeserved, I think - reputation for being a bit naff, possibly because Disney has got Mickey Mouse and Universal has got, well, Woody Woodpecker, a character who is indeed very naff. For a start, he doesn't even have an identifiable female counterpart. Who is Mrs Woody Woodpecker? We have to ask this question, as we saw Woody Woodpecker in a dress, and we have to explain this to our children. Is it Woody Woodpecker's transvestite friend?

But the films/attractions stand up well - ET, Terminator, Shrek, Jurassic Park, Spiderman, Waterworld... Ahem. Did I say Waterworld? Well, at least they've salvaged a decent attraction out of it.

Universal Studios Japan opened in Osaka in March 2001 and survived successive scandals over being built on top of a toxic waste pit, serving past their sell-by date burgers and not declaring the amount of explosives used in their shows, to attract over 8 million visitors in 2005. It is now the ninth most-visited theme park in the world. And it's far better than its US counterpart, not least because it has the advantage of being more modern, even if it lacks the Studio Tour element.

Jessica wigged out completely at 'Backdraft' (Sarah's favourite), freaked out on the 'Jaws' boat ride, but recovered sufficiently to enjoy Waterworld and Shrek before wreaking terrible revenge with a truly painful 'Toto and Friends'. Ouch! That one hurt... (see montage below). Something for all the family indeed...

* Actually, I was quite surprised to find out that Japan occupies a lowly 30th spot in the Most-densely-populated-countries-of-the-world League Table. Monaco is top, but I always thought that was a principality. Then there are quite a few other equally daft places, like Vatican City, Gibraltar and the Maldives, but it turns out proper countries like Bangladesh, Taiwan, Netherlands and Belgium all have greater population densities than Japan. So that's a rubbish theory then...

In The 'Hood

2006-10-22T20:08:00.000+09:00

A busy day in the 'hood today. In the Kitano neighbourhood, that is. First off, there was the Kobe Global Charity Festival with the kids' fancy dress parade up Tor Road. Given it's late October, we made the (in hindsight, wrong) assumption that it would be a Halloween fancy dress parade and went the whole nine yards to kit Jessica out as a scary witch.

She maybe did not thank us, then, as she joined the merry throng of Disney Princesses, Buzz Lightyears and Pirates of the Caribbean making their way up the hill to the Kobe Club...

There was a potential silver lining, however, as my make-up handiwork brought me to the attention of the organising staff who asked me if I would like to do the kids' face-painting. I politely declined (as I can only do scary witches), but I must say it did cross my mind that it could be an attractive proposition in a year's time when I've had chance to think of something a bit more subversive. Perhaps political despots through the ages, in disguise. Hitler would be a bit difficult, but maybe Stalin as a cat? Or Chairman Mao as a panda?

The event itself was worthy, but just a bit too Peace and Love, punctuated by some crazy Australian dancer/mime artist who mystified everyone - kids included - with her bizarre and erratic dance performance (part of which involved a hat featuring a half-full bottle of mineral water - go figure...). All of which was nicely juxtaposed by a Japanese lady wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words 'Ace Military Death'.

We eventually had to do a runner from a German guy who was pestering us about earthworms. His sales pitch was a sharp one though. Starting off with "You have a baby, you must be interested in preserving the planet?" (errr... yes?), he thrust a questionnaire into our hands: Do you recycle? Do you want to save the planet? Do you want to... (substitute some other worthy cause here)? Do you want to keep earthworms? Of course, laudable as it might be to have 'the Lexus of composting units on your balcony', we had to swerve this one. Besides, we've got Jack, and he's proving to be an exceptionally efficient composting unit right now.

In the afternoon we explored the 'Ijinkan Residences' of Kitano. Kobe was one of the very first Japanese cities to be populated by foreign settlers, and in the late nineteenth century westerners began to build their palatial homes on Kitano's hillside.

Of wooden construction and looking decidedly colonial, the 'gaijin manshuns' are interesting only in so far as they are incongruous, but they don't really stand the test of time. We took a look around the English House. A very brief look, actually, for our 1400 yen, as about 4 minutes after we purchased our tickets, we were overrun by a Japanese wedding party, who proceeded to occupy all available rooms, including the one with the flea-bitten moose-head (of which you don't get so many in England, actually).

Sadly, it's just 'quite a big house'. Paint peeling, overall a bit tatty and crammed with a pot-pourri of 'English' paraphanalia of dubious provenance, including a Beefeater and a suit of armour. And we thought we were the only ones peddling this sort of nonsense? Not so, it seems...

Fortresses and Festivals (part 2)

2006-10-08T19:33:00.000+09:00

During autumn and spring, there are literally hundreds of festivals - called 'matsuri' - taking place all over Japan. Some are huge - attracting many hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the country - but most are local. We were lucky enough to find a matsuri in the suburbs of Himeji, just a few stops on the train from the castle (special thanks to my friend Vincent for his Photoshop genius - see right).

Almost every neighbourhood has at least one matsuri in late summer/early autumn, traditionally related to the rice harvest. Each Shinto parish has their own 'yatai' - also called 'mishoki' - an ornate mobile shrine made of cypress wood that can weigh a couple of tons! The yatai are carried to the (non-mobile) shrine literally on the shoulders of the locals. And they do this sporting a brightly coloured headband - denoting their particular Shinto parish - a matching shirt and wearing no underwear, just 'mawashi', a loincloth made of canvas that shows off buttocks particularly well (in fact, it was noted that this was the biggest collection of bare bottoms that either Sarah, or Alex's wife Chicaco, had ever seen). The elders are allowed to wear a watch and smoke fags, and take crafty snifters of sake from hip flasks.

The shrines are hugely impressive and extraordinarily beautiful (click on the images below to see just how finely detailed they really are). One of the locals told us that to build one from scratch would cost around $100,000. It is lovingly maintained for the matsuri, and housed in its own special 'shrine garage' when not in use. For the procession, it also houses four drummers and a quite substantial taiko drum.

The raising of the yatai is accompanied by a quite violent rocking motion and chanting (presumably ancient Banshu dialect for 'strewth, that's bloody heavy mate') before it is hoisted aloft by up to 30 men with a victorious roar. It is then manoeuvred in a haphazard, rather dangerous-looking manner towards the shrine - it is said that this weaving to and fro is a deliberate act, to 'amuse' the gods. There are even 'fighting festivals' where the same shrines are used as weapons, to ram other shrines!

Preceding the grunting assemblage of semi-naked men and expensive shrinery is a phalanx of 'nobori' carriers - a bamboo pole carrying a 7m banner of embroidered thick silk. Those with no shrine-carrying or banner-hoisting to do, carry 'shide' - a 7-foot pole with brightly-coloured paper at its head, resembling a giant chrysanthemum.

We got chatting with some of the pink-clad 'neriko' (the guys who carry the yatai), who explained that they represented the Kamo shrine. They were an incredibly friendly bunch, hoisting Jessica up on to the yatai, and offering me the chance to be an honorary Kamo for the day, although I didn't take them up on their offer of hauling the yatai around.

The matsuri was a fabulous find, a glimpse of everyday Japan that displayed a community spirit and pride in tradition that was something to be admired. In stark contrast, it must be said, to my dim memories of carnivals as a kid, when hairy old fat blokes dressing up as comedy nurses and shaking buckets of loose change on the back of lorry would pass for a procession. Well, I suppose we do hairy better than the Japanese...

Fortresses and Festivals (part 1)

2006-10-08T11:15:00.000+09:00

About 50km west of Kobe is the city of Himeji, famous for one of the best preserved of all of Japan's medieval castles. It only takes about an hour to get there on the Sanyo line, with a further 10 minutes walk from the station. It is reportedly the most visited castle in Japan, probably the most photogenic, and certainly much better constructed than Takeshi's.

A fortress has stood at the site since the 14th century, but it was the great shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu who created the amazing construction that still stands today, in the early part of the 17th century. The grounds are now landscaped with cherry trees and cypress pines, but originally they would have housed the shogun's personal army of samurai warriors (see map, below). The castle has never seen a battle, which accounts for its amazing condition, so they must have been pretty scary warriors.

Himeji castle had everything that Jessica's Disney-warped imagination pre-supposed it should - moat, six-storey keep, a maze of baileys, turrets and curved ceramic roofs, all creating a bastion of unbelievable picture-book majesty and beauty. There are websites that do the castle far better justice than this blog, but here a few pictures to give you a feel of the place (click to enlarge).. .

Haircut Sir?

2006-09-23T22:12:00.000+09:00

Now I've had a few dodgy haircuts in my time. For instance, when I had the quiffectomy in Palo Alto in 1997 and ended up looking like Julius Caesar.

When we lived in Kilburn my coiffure was attended to with varying degrees of competence by some very amiable Arsenal-supporting Kurdish refugees.

Only recently I had a worrying hair experience in Magherafelt with a hairstylist (?) from Toomebridge whose heavily bandaged finger made any sensible trimming impossible. Typically British, I cheerfully paid up, tipped the lady, and said thanks for a palpably wonky haircut.

In all of the above instances I was at least able to communicate with the person with the scissors, so the prospect of getting a haircut over here was a little bit daunting to say the least, especially as hair is a more valuable commodity for me these days.

As luck would have it, there is barbers just round the corner - a 'high-tech' barbers actually, as per the revolving sign outside. After consulting the Lonely Planet phrasebook, it looked a fairly straightforward process. "O-o-ne-gai shi-mas to-ri-min-gu" is "I'd like a trim please", although this just elicited a puzzled look from the middle-aged proprietor. She then asked some scruffy young kid in the queue what he thought it meant, and he just smirked. The general consensus seemed to be that it was a pretty odd request.

But I had a back-up plan - the universality of barbering means that a 'number three' should be the same anywhere in the world, and I know 'number three' in Japanese (san ban). So, no problem, with a few hand gestures, some buzz-buzz sounds and some san bans, my haircut specification could be adequately explained.

But there was a problem - the woman had no clippers (at the time, I thought this was a bit naff for a 'high-tech' barbers, but afterwards I studied the sign more carefully. This was in fact a 'high technique' barbers - see pic, right - so fair play to the lady, she had scissors and a cut-throat razor and that was your lot. She was an artisan.)

So eventually I did what all English people seem to do in this kind of situation. I explained what I wanted in English, regardless of the fact that she didn't understand a word, and sat down to let fate take its course.

And she did a top job. Far better than the trendy Cupertino stylist, the Kurdish rebels (but not the same banter), and the cack-handed Mid-Ulsterwoman. So I'll surely be going back ("Ma-e to o-na-ji" - "Same as before" please).

But this time I won't ask for a torimingu, as when I asked a colleague about this at work he said this was 'trim' in the context of dogs or hedges. No wondered she looked puzzled, and no wonder the kid smirked. And no wonder it's a bloody Lonely Planet for anyone using that phrasebook...

I Know We Shouldn't...

2006-09-23T21:58:00.000+09:00

But it's just too tempting when you come across a poodle parlour that is trying to project a classy image, but calls itself...

And the clothing accessories emporium down the road is just plain WRONG...

Jessica's New School

2006-09-20T23:01:00.000+09:00

Jessica is now into her third week of school and so far seems to be thoroughly enjoying herself.

St Michaels International School (http://smis.org/head.html) is situated opposite NHK (a useful landmark in the first week) on Nakayamate-Dori (dori means street). We leave our apartment in the morning, turn left and walk for 6 minutes, turn right and there it is. So we’re pretty close.

The school is next-door to the Kitano Meister Garden, a rather quaint building with little craft shops selling hand-made goodies including bread, jewelry, chocolate and ice-cream. So there’s often a stop-off there after school.

Her first day passed off much like any other first day back at school. A few nerves and some hand-holding, but as soon as the bell rang (or rather the clock chimed), all the children lined up and in they went. Jessica has been lucky in that over the summer the school has undergone a lot of refurbishment and her year is in a brand, spanking new classroom.

The school has around 155 pupils and there are 24 in Jessica’s class. Lessons are in English and Jessica seems already very fond of her teacher, Ms Shy. They have Japanese lessons, and though I’ve yet to hear any local lingo from Jessica, I’m sure she’s picking up plenty.

There are couple of other newbie kids as well, which helps, not only Jessica, but also myself with the usual mother’s playground chats. There was a ‘Meet and Greet’ for parents and teachers in the second week and it was good to speak to a few other parents in the same boat as ourselves.

School starts at 8.50 (although most kids seem to be there from 8.30) and finishes at 3.15. Homework can be pretty taxing and between ice-cream and little brothers there are plenty of distractions, but it eventually gets done.

So far Jessica has not shown any particular aptitude for sports but with PE twice a week and weekly swimming lessons, you never know.

Squirty Bum Toilets

2006-09-18T17:59:00.000+09:00

While the Japanese are not much cop at inventing things themselves, they are streets ahead of anyone else when it comes to taking other people's ideas and making them actually functional. Take the bidet, for example. Invented by the French, but kind of useless. Normally found adjacent to the toilet, it not only necessitates an undignified repositioning of one's buttocks but wastes space to boot.

The savvy and space-conscious Japanese not only make the whole bottom-cleaning process much easier but chuck in some microelectronics as well! Take a look at this little beauty - the INAX CW-RZ101...

By far the coolest gadget in the house (beating the gadget that remotely programmes the bath to fill at your preferred temperature and depth, because all of the instructions are in Japanese so we can't...), all you have to do is press a single button and hey presto!, a pleasant and effective cleansing. Blue for boys and pink for girls. Two nozzles for the ladies - front AND back bottom.

The one thing we don't quite understand though is the fact that there is another remote on the wall, in addition to the one shown on the picture here, a mere two inches to the right of one's bottom, and which we would have thought to have been more than adequate.

Even more bizarre is the fact that we discovered that the remote is detachable from the wall (see above). Given that the toilet is almost microscopic in its dimensions, we can only assume that this is for playing bottom-cleansing pranks on unsuspecting gaijin guests.

You have been warned....

And just in case you think I'm making this up, you can find out more here: http://www.knovelty.com/bidets6.htm

Important note: Sarah does not approve of this particular Blog entry.....

Where We Live

2006-09-17T18:10:00.000+09:00

We live close to the Kitano district of Kobe, just 10 minutes walk from the city's central station, Sannomiya.

Kitano is well known for its 'gaijin' community, which means we can buy Weetabix and Marmite with relative ease. Here is a picture of our apartment (right).

One of the the things that strikes you about Kobe is the dizzying array of street furniture. Or, to be more precise, air furniture, as every road is festooned with cables and what appear to be heavy duty transformers hanging from lamposts (see pic below). Obviously, given that we are in earthquake territory, there is good reason for not putting much underground, but it doesn't look pretty. In fact, as furniture goes, it's worse than 1970s Parker Knoll...

But then, just another 500m down the road, we have this beautiful garden. No nasty overhead cables here!

Jessica and Jack enjoy going to the Sorakuen Garden...

The only downside to this is Jessica now wants a dog...

First Impressions

2006-09-16T21:36:00.000+09:00

Japan in the summer is a brutally inhospitable place for four palefaces from Northern Ireland, which is mainly why we started this blog so late. Temperatures in the mid-30s and humidity that hits you like a wet duvet as soon as you leave the confines of your apartment made our first weeks here somewhat undignified. So we didn't want to write about that.

However, as the temperature is now beginning to drop to a more agreeable 25 degrees, we can once again begin to function as human beings again instead of scaring passers-by and restauranteurs with our impressive feats of perspiration.