TORIBIA - sayonara
The last episode of Trivia was on TV last night, and a sad occasion it was too. Fifteen minutes of genuinely funny / interesting material stretched over two hours. However, right in the middle of it was a section about my favourite Japanese food - Yaki niku.
Here is the trivia: In Japan it is illegal to eat the spinal chord, brain and gums of a cow. However, it is not illegal to eat cows nipples. (Roll Footage of chubby bloke eating cow nipples fried before his very eyes. Comment - It's rubbery and delicious)
We are then told the next trivia: Though it is illegal to eat the gums, spinal chord and brains of the cow it is not illegal to eat:
Answers on a postcard in the comments section please. Infinite satisfaction to the first one hundred correct answers. What is the man eating in the picture?
Sunday Photobogging 5 - the impact of wa on toilets
Long gone are the days where I would happily squat down outside for a bit of a pontificate, newspaper read or stab at the tetris chapion title. Ah the breeze wafting around my thighs, birds and butterflies stopping for a howdedo. Since the injunction was passed I have missed my little peaceful squat in the park.
For those of you who like to pass waste in the wild, this is the place for you. One the one side the neo-asian decor and bamboo sink area provide a delicate counterpoise to the full length window onto the private garden area.
Sportsday
Alas, last Saturday I had to work. I had to go to the school Undokai, which is kind of like a sportsday but not as well. It was especially gutting as there was a separate paying opoortunity to work in Nagoya for money.
Anyhow - in Japan they have dancing and stuff as well as running races. I assume it is aimed at trying to bring some of the more athletically challenged member of the school into the limelight. Luckily I was not called on to display my sad state of fitness. My new lifestyle starts here.
The weather dude cast his pall over the day with his threats of rain, which he was willing top act upon but not enough to ruin the day. I have recently come to suspect that my old mate Dr. DogChop over at Ph Level may have been mistaken in his comments about the weather dude. I begin to suspect that yahoo weather have been subcontracting to a network of oldwives, housewives and grannies for their predictions.
Back at the Ranch the teachers were getting to exercise their imaginations a bit with the games and activities for the day. Two weeks of solid preparation went into the day, and I could tell. Below are two examples; Big ball rolling whole school race and Three pointed relay with cardboard caterpillar track event.
The blue team won this by some considerable distance.
This one shold be in the Drunken Olympics. The kids only had to do it in straight lines, but I would make drunken adult men try to go round corners to double the viewing pleasure.
In the evening there was the standard party with traditionally expensive Japanese food which mostly gets left because everyone is busy talking and getting drunk. This is the point at which I definitely got beastly drunk and possibly did something embarassing. I have no memory of doing anything taboo, though that is not always such a good indicator. Anyhow, I managed to snap-off a shot of the first remove so that you know what expensive Japanese food looks like. Here it is
Also, I've dropped another in the lies section.
Yesterday, Nick sensei did his new flash with play...
Yesterday in pictures:
C from up the road came to my school to teach the kids about her native South Africa. It was great - thanks C! I took this using my super duper new flash-gun that does everything for me. Great!
There was a lot of nice light on my way home so I stopped to make a record of the occasion. This is two minutes drive from my house...
This is the other side of the mountain to the town where I work.
Nearly trod on this guy before seeing him. I suspect he was already dead as his legs ended at the knees and he wasn't moving.
Here you see sunset over rice, stubble and burning material to reintroduce some nutrients to the soil. The rice is over half in now and the temperature is dropping to merciful 22s and 23s when it isn't sunny.
Finally, I squuezed another one out in the lies section -
check it out if you have five minutes spare!
Update time
No time for anything so good as a real post so you will have to do with some other stuff I have been up to recently:I've written a short role play in honour of my mother on the fiction bit.I wrote a short euphamism on the Tony Clifton Experience, which seems to be dying, alas.I have also put a few photos online after signing-up for Flickr. You can have a look at them here. This is work in progress. Hopefully I will get some photos of my area online for my Auntie Linda who is coming to visit! I think it must be about fifteen years since we last met (she lives in Australia now) so I am very excited about that.Also, my cousin and her boyfriend are coming at some point, too. That means two lots of people to enjoy my last six weeks or so in Japan with.Finally, I got a flash-gun for my digital SLR so I should have some fun learning how to use that in the next few weeks. Hopefully that should feed back into some new kinds of photos soon.
Why do you have such a downer on living in Japan, UTR?
OK, OK - I know I go on about being a bit tired of it all and really I do generally quite like it here. A few people were a bit interested in my philosophical asides on Japanese culture, so I thought I would go for another. Pehaps think of this as a cautionary note for future visitors to these green and brown shores.
The facts:
We were on our way to buy M a new Nintendo DS lite prior to heading off seaking thrills, spills and automobills in the mythic land of Mie. We were on a smallish suburban road perhaps two minutes from the town centre.
The road we were on meets a rail-line for the Omi-tetsudo (the most expensive railway in the country). There was a guy in his big boxy van in front. He slows down almost to a stop, looks both ways and then off he goes. All of a sudden a copper appeared out from behind a tree and hares off after him blowing on his whistle. The guy was rumbled.
The supposition:
We are off into the realms of possibilities now, but I very strongly suspect that this guy has been collared for not stopping at the crossing. Though he stopped, looked both ways and then went, he has probably been copped on a technicality. I suspect that either his wheels were still rotating minutely or that he didn't stop for some proscribed ammount of time. So he obeyed the law in intent and did nothing too seriously wrong, but he got done on the letter of the law.
This kind of thing is not unusual. This is part of Japanese life training, a basic part of their social education. Where there is a protocol it gets stuck to. The japanese are great masters of methodology and process. This is what fuelled the economic miracle of the 80's and the subsequent failure to predict that the bubble would burst. So the cops here have a manual and that is good enough for them.
I don't really ever have problems with the police, save one time when my friend Rob and I accidentally wandered into a hostess bar and got hit by a huge bill that we weren't willing to pay without making our displeasure felt. "Right then," I said, "call them!"
The same thinking is also there in the banks, the post office, the town hall, the schools, the trains, the whole works. The Japanese have grown up with these little bits of bureaucratic nonesense and so that is their benchmark. This drives me nuts because it wastes my time (I have the patience of a hung-over Rotweiler) and it means I get sidetracked into these crusades "to change things for the better".
The Japanese mentality extends into everyday life. Particularly into conversation, which is somethign I enjoy extremely. To put it simply, the Japanese talk in exasketch - basic objects connected by lines. Wheras, in comparison, westerners talk in picassos and sculptures. This means that despite a strong command of the language I still struggle to express more elaborate ideas because the Japanese do not use them very often. Japanese culture, and in particular spoken language, is really simple. I make no judgement about which is best I am just telling it the way I see it here.
So, as a language teacher you can imagine that this causes some problems at work. As opposed to somewhere like France or Spain, just teaching the units that make the sentences and pointing out the differences with the native language is not enough. The concientious teacher has to teach the student how to construct a conversation or paragraph in English. General Macarthur, the American put in charge of Japan after the second world war, was famously quoted as describing the Japanese as "a nation of twelve year olds". While I think this sentiment is trash, I think I can see how he might have come to this conclusion having talked to several Japanese people by this stage.
So if you want to know why I am so badly itching to leave Japan (as distinguished from getting back to my family and the UK) it is becuase of the evil menace of bureaucracy, it's fingers in every pie, and the lack of a good chat now and again.
Of course this all boils down to my view of bureaucracy and what a good chat is.
Neo-classical art with boats
Some of you out there may remember my interest in
Modern Art With Boats back in May. I thought it was a passing fad but aparently it goes on all the time. Look!
Mie produces the goods again!
This time there is a definite ivy covered motif comon to certain kinds of neo-clasical folly seen in the grounds of English country houses.
These busses are hiding sheepishly, no doubt embarrassed to have accidentally come to the wrong party. You will notice the car in picture #1 is not so worried. Note that the keikuruma (light car) had folded up like a blanket in whatever crash it had been through. Extremely safe as long as you don't drive them.
Danger zone #5 - no danger
The weekend saw us travelling to Mie as part of the extended birthday celebrations for M. Mie is to the south of where I live with the mountains inbetween. If you look at a map of Japan, look for the big lake and then go South. There should be a little bulgy-type peninsula thing. That is the Ise (E Say) peninsula.
As well as the aquarium, of which I may post pics if God and my workload spare me, we also wanted to experience the local delicacy, ise ebi. Big prawns to me and you. Here they are!
This one was Mariko's and, starting top left and continuing clockwise, consisted of seaweed soup, kombu (a diferent kind of seaweed, I think), pickles (Japanese ones, made with salt not vinegar), a bit of orange, a muscle and a cockle (cooked), Tuna sashimi with nori (dried seaweed) on rice and deepfried prawn, octopus and oyster.
This was mine, mostly similar, though mine had no sashimi and the deepfried gear was limited to two eight inch long prawns, sliced down the middle before bread-crumbing, in the middle at the top.
I spend a bunch of time complaining about Japanese food but this was great and really cheap into the bargain. The whole meal cost about fifteen pounds and would easily have cost twice as much in the UK. Highly recommended.
On a warning note, the brand of Ise-ebi doesn't really mean much any more. The guy who ran our hotel was telling us that the supply of locally caught prawns is nowhere near the level of demand so the local businessmen cater to visitor expectations. Which is the polite way of saying that most of the prawns come from way out in the Pacific and are sold in Ise.
This didn't bother us too much because we usually eat cheaply anyway and the prawns don't taste any different. He also added in passing that it was the same for the Matsusaka beef, up the road. Now M's mum bought a couple of kilos of this for about a hundred quid a year back. Was it real or bogus. Two facts which will serve as food for thought, if you will.
There is no mandatory monitoring of trading standards in Japan. There is no Health and Safety exec. Chilling.
A sign of the times - or what I saw this weekend #1
Travellers beware!
What they don't want you to know! Gangs of pelican youths are roaming the streets locking the heads of passers-by in their vicelike jaws of fishy death!
Crikey! Look at this beauty! 40% pokemon, 40% rabbit (as in sex and the city), 80% fear. This thing is a sex manchine! It's three pronged penis of death reaches all the right areas. How does it manage to use such mighty tackle? Poke'm in!
Time remaining...
Two hundred days or so! One hundred and sixty or so left to work, then about twenty of messing about and sorting out my stuff. Moving house also to be done in this stage. Primarily to Mariko's Mum's house, terminating at Dad's back in the UK.
This should be followed by about six weeks in Thailand, doing a CELTA certaificate and beefing-up my PADI scuba qualifications. I don't think i will get up to dive master in the time, though I will certainly get some of the more groovy bits and pieces done, like wreck diving and so on. I might also get a course in thai cooking done. Then it will back to Japan for a brief stop and then back to the UK. Alas, it is starting to look as though Mariko and myself will be going separately, though I hope to talk her out of that idea.
Another countdown is also underway. Woe is me: My household PC is very sick. It seems to have the computer equivalent of ebola as well as the immune deficiency. The bigger issue is the random cut-outs that it throws out with increasing regularity. Somewhere in there is a hardware issue. Precisely which piece is a mystery, as until it cuts out everything seems fine. I suspect the graphics card, as the cooling fan fell off a few months back. Buying a new graphics card might only lead to the computer not working slightly more expensively.
To tell it like it is, I am buggered if I am going to put any more money into that computer. So in sixty to ninety days, I am buying a mac. To be more precise, I am after a new MacBook. Presumably on sale at MacDonalds? "Shake, fries and a Macbook, please. No Gherkin on the macbook, please."
Dear North of England
Dear North of England,
I hope you are keeping well and starting to overcome your medical issues. I hope the dehydration is on the mend. Central Japan sends it's love.
I am writing to say thanks for the other month, when I came back to visit and brought my girlfriend over with her sister to see what it was all about. They both had a great time and said they would come back again. If you could pass on my particular thatnks to all the various pubs and drinking establishments we visited, that would be nice. The value of your pubs was not lost on them.
I would like to say a special round of thanks to all the yobs, teenagers, bigots, racists, sexists, fuckwits, con-artists and police. It would not have been the same without their contribution. They stayed out of sight admirably. Only one slipped through the net, a "can I borrow 7p?" artist in the centre of Manchester, and he was dispatched without bloodshed or heated words.
A special series of thanks to the busses, trains, taxis and aeroplanes, all of which turned up, and what's more, on time. I would like to thank the planets for aligning to make this happen for the week, uninterupted. If, as I suspect, this never happens again, it will have been enough.
Yours sincerely,
Under The Radar
Yes, Lonely Planet did claim that it was the dullest place on the planet. One Word: Doha.
Two words: Didn't sleep.
Six words: Didn't want to miss my plane.
The lonely planet, which I only read grudgingly and call The Book, has this to say about the cultural / actual desert in which I stopped-over:
"Around the Gulf, Doha has earned the unenviable reputation of being the dullest
place on earth. You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who'll claim the place
is exciting."
I really wanted to give the place a chance. It is not really geared-up for someone to just drop-in and have a bit of a look around. That is all I wanted. I wanted to sleep on the plane from Manchester, spend the day in Doha being multicultural and then catch my ongoing flight to Osaka feeling vaguely like Lawrence of Arabia. Here are the main points.
- Disembark, enter terminal building (so named for the feeling it engenders), look for a sign and follow everyone through the baggage check thingy. See a guy come out shouting that people who wanted to go into the city shouldn't go through with everyone else.
- The next stage was a bit odd. I got a free breakfast and was told to come back in half an hour, when I would be allowed out. Breakfast was a slab of meta-fried-egg, non-rectangular non-triangular toast and a cup of ribena. I went back down to the reception wher I was told there was nothing to be done and to wait with a big bunch of other people over there. "What over there," I asked. Yes, over there. "What, in the corner?" That's right, I was told to go and stand in the corner. To my sleep deprived mind (it was 6am and I hadn't managed to sleep on the plane) this presented some existential issues. Maybe he was the teacher and I the border guard? I mulled it over, went back and spoke to a third person who correctly spotted that I didn't have anything better to do than waste his time for the next fourteen hours. We reached an arrangement, by which I was quietly slipped back under the rope, as it were.
- Getting a visa. Like the bloke in Massive Attack sez, gettin' a Visa Card Nowadays isn't hard. Though if you don't happen to have one, getting the other kind of visa is bloody hard. I had to open a bank account to get a Qatari bank card to pay the 12 pounds to get the visa. The woman stamped something in my passport and then litterally scribbled over the top of it.
Up to this point I was getting tired and irritable. Luckily things started turning for the better. The taxi-driver took pounds. He let me name my own exchange rate and kept the twenty pound note as a souvenir. This was not the last time this happened. I asked to go to the city centre. He took me to, not the city centre, but actually a shopping centre in the midde of nowhere called City Centre. Thanks, goodbyes, camera out. The transition from air-conned taxi to rarified desert at 42 degrees caused even the plastic parts of my camera to mist-up. Stood around and sweated for ten minutes while my camera warmed-up.
I killed time until Starbucks opened (The Cafe, Behemoth. I don't go here unless I can't help it). Killed time in starbucks by attracting attention using my Lancashire County Cricket sun hat. I killed time wandering around looking at shops until the internet cafe opened. I grimaced at other foreigners also wandering round trying not to fall asleep. I checked the net for details of the city. Enough to get me to the stuff that I wanted to see. Arabian art, the weapons museum, the national museum, the cultural museum.
"I want to go to the ethnographic museum."
"Wha?"
"A museum about people."
"National museum?"
"No. I want to learn about people in Qatar."
"I only know the national museum."
I inwardy sigh and off we go, me planning the ask the guy at the museum about the other museums and wondering whether this guy had stolen the taxi. We fire round the roads and roundabouts. We arrive at about 12 o'clock. "It looks awfully closed." I rap on the glass of the information window. The guy in there tells me the place doesn't open til 4pm. Because of the heat. No he doesn't know any other museums. Back to the shopping center.
Next began a six hour battle against sleep. I wandered. I sat and read. I sat. I had a burger king just for the hell of it. I wandered round. My sleep-addled brain made the best of a bad job.
At about 3 o'clock I stumbled into a shop shop selling Egyptian stuff, run by an Engyptian guy. Honest to god he looked like the Scorpion King. I bought something for Marikos birthday, which I cannot say any more about because she might read this. While we were haggling I somehow managed to end-up fixing the guys computer. Coffee was had, sadly not the arabian coffee I was hoping for but Gold Blend or something of that ilk. We had a bit of a chat. He showed me a pickie of his girlfriend at their engagement party. He told me that he wasn't going to marry her. He showed me a picture of himself a few years back, this time with hair. He looked like the Doughnut king there.
We watched a couple of videos of his favourite belly-dancers from back home. I found it strange that I should get on so well with a complete stranger, chatting bizarrely like there was no tomorow, though in fact there had been no yesterday.
More bizarrity at the airport. Some fifteen-year-old travelling alone latched onto me and struck up a conversation. I think he said he was from Kenya. He mentioned having been to Dubai and being off to India to see his grandmother. I had another one of those cultural line-crossing incidents where the questions started innocuous and worked upwards, like a shoddy chiropodist. Where do you live? What do you do? Do you have a girlfriend? Oh you live together? Do you sleep in the same room? How do you warm your girlfriend?
Honest to god I am not making this up. I am kind of used to this sort of situation now. "Do you always walk up to people and ask them questions like this," I asked, not harshly. He became embarassed and asked me some questions about my job, Marikos job, etc. As I went into some detail about what M does, the guy across from me closed his book with a snap and said, "Your conversation is much more interesting than my book. What does she do again?"
Thus began random conversation #3 which lasted me up until boarding my flight to Osaka.
So what, I can hear you wondering, was the point of this story? Well, the point is this: When I write, and especially when I write fiction (when I can be bothered) I get the feeling that what I am writing is not coming from me but some thign that I found and used. These three, the kid, the shopkeeper and the journo (the third guy) will probably crop up somewhere down the line. The journo will save a life, the shopkeep will probably become rich and the kid is going to die in a most dismal manner at the start of a screenplay or novel.
