Muzuhashi ムズハシ

For my bedtime book I tend to alternate between English and Japanese, although when I finished Anthony Bourdain's excellent Kitchen Confidential the other night, there wasn't much left on our living room bookshelf that I hadn't already read. In the end I settled on Hitorizumo (One-Woman Sumo) by Momoko Sakura, which is a favourite of Mrs M's, but which to be honest didn't look like my kind of thing: as you can tell from the covers, Sakura isn't exactly Andy McNab.

I say 'covers' because like many Japanese books, Hitorizumo comes in two volumes - known as the 上 and the 下 (joh and gé / literally 'up' and 'down' or 'above' and 'below') - and is an autobiographical account in manga form of Sakura's childhood. In keeping with my initial expectations, Hitorizumo starts off with a good deal of what appears at first to be inconsequential fluff involving schoolgirls talking about clothes and hairstyles. As if to emphasise this, Sakura's drawing style is simple to the point of naiveté: the backgrounds are unadorned and the characters rag doll-like, with floppy looking limbs, big round faces and black buttons for eyes. Somehow, though, the more I read, the more absorbed in the story I became, and as I realised, by emphasising the uneventfulness of her childhood, Sakura was, in her own rather subdued fashion, gradually building up to the main point of the story.

The young Sakura - known to her friends as Momo-chan - secretly longs to be a manga artist / writer, but suffers from a chronic lack of motivation, not to mention being fundamentally shy and anti-social. Life - which in the small Shizuoka town where she lives is already slow enough - has a tendency to pass her by, and she is invariably happier watching TV in the lounge or drawing pictures in her bedroom than she is going out or even going to school.

This isn't such a big deal when Momo-chan is at elementary school, but by the time she enters high school, her peers are putting more and more pressure on her to be sociable, and she is heaping more and more guilt on herself for failing to do so. For their high school club activity, Momo-chan and her best friend Tama-chan choose the physics club, purely on the basis that it will give them the most leeway to skive off, and having somehow managed to obtain a ham radio licence - the only pre-requisite to joining - they stop going altogether. Being a girls' high school, the end-of-year open day is one of the few opportunities they will get to meet boys, but the prospect of mixing with so many strangers proves too terrifying for Momo-chan, who sneaks away and spends the day watching TV with her father instead.

In a way that reminded me of Terry Zwigoff's wonderful film Ghost World (coincidentally adapted from a comic strip), Hitorizumo perfectly captures that mood of teenage inertia that anyone who grew up in a small town will recognise only too well. In one memorable sequence, Momo-chan spends an eagerly anticipated New Year's holiday with her auntie and cousins in Tokyo, but rather than promenading along the fashionable shopping streets of Harajuku or bumping into celebrities, she instead goes to a temple - something that she would have done in Shizuoka in any case - and gets an attack of diarrhea after eating some dodgy spaghetti.

Momo-chan's mother is infuriated by almost everything her daughter does - or rather, by the many things she fails to do - and spends almost the entire book telling her off. Her father, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, always taking his daughter's side in an argument and never putting any pressure on her to change her lazy ways. The couple run a grocery store, and while Momo-chan's mother busies herself with the housework, as soon as the shop shuts, her father seems to spend the entire time in front of the TV, a plate of sushi and a glass of beer within easy reach.

It looks for all the world as if Momo-chan will simply drift through life - maybe go to university, maybe get an office job, maybe get married and maybe have children - but at the last possible moment, with her mother's frustration reaching fever pitch, Momo-chan realises that if she doesn't act now, her long-held and still secret ambition will forever remain unfulfilled.

In the event, her mother still isn't satisfied, as Momo-chan goes from sleeping late, neglecting her school work and staying up all night watching TV, to sleeping late, neglecting her school work and staying up all night drawing manga. Her strategy works, though, and this is the point at which the significance of all that inertia becomes clear. In the process of submitting her work to the teen magazine Ribbon (whose website, incidentally, is possibly the most blindingly garish I have ever seen), Momo-chan discovers that she has a unique talent for relating her childhood experiences in essays and manga, and what the reader discovers is that through all those years of apparent inactivity, she has been observing and absorbing, storing those experiences up ready for the day she will re-tell them as fiction.

The happy ending to the book is that after many months of work, Momo-chan at last has one of her pieces published in her beloved Ribbon, and the happy ending beyond the book is that Sakura went on to become one of the most successful manga artists in the country: the TV adaptation of Chibi Maruko-Chan (which Mrs M used to read when she was still at school), is broadcast on Fuji Television in a prime-time slot every Sunday evening, alongside the national institution that is Sazaé-San (both are light-hearted, soap opera-like dissections of Japanese family life).

The great thing about Hitorizumo is that beneath its veneer of girly cuteness lie all the turbulent emotions of adolescence, and all the triumphs and disappointments of an artist trying to find her voice. I defy anyone not to be moved by Momo-chan's disappointment when the first manga she sends to Ribbon fails to get a commendation, or by her final farewell with Tama-chan, who flies off to university in America, and I defy anyone not to cringe with recognition when she falls madly in love with a boy she never even has the courage to speak to, or when she chickens out when presented with a golden opportunity to talk to her favourite comedian (in that sense, Hitorizumo is a reassuring read for anyone who has ever felt that life has passed them by: don't worry, Sakura seems to be saying, there will be another chance).

The unhappy ending to this blog entry is that Hitorizumo is only available in Japanese, although if anyone out there fancies giving me some cash and permission to take a few weeks' sabbatical, I'd be more than happy to start work on a translation.

I've always been a sucker for any news story that involves bungling crooks, and this one from last week is a fine example of the genre:

On Monday 7th May at around 5.30pm, a 59-year-old woman arrived back at her apartment complex in Nishi-ku, Sapporo, and was checking her mail just inside the main doors when a man crept up on her from behind. He snatched her handbag - which among other things contained approximately 4000 yen (about £20) in cash - and ran off, a moment that was captured for posterity by security cameras in the residents' car park.

As any bag snatcher worthy of the job title will tell you, it's essential to plan your escape route in advance, but being a certified Bungling Crook, our man got on his bicycle and promptly headed towards a dead end at the back of the apartment block. Not only that, but the victim of his crime was hot on his heels, and caught up with him as he was turning around to look for a way out.

While the woman preferred to remain anonymous, she did agree to be interviewed on camera, and appeared on the news filmed from the neck down and with her voice disguised. Here's how she described what happened next:

'I held up my hands and shouted, "Wait!" and then grabbed the shopping basket on the front of the bicycle. I managed to get hold of my bag, and as I was trying to snatch it back, the struggle continued next to the bicycle. I was biting down on the thief's left hand, and you could see it was hurting him, but even so, he didn't make a sound. After he escaped I noticed something strange in my mouth. When I realised it was a finger, I felt rather queasy and spat it out.'

Yes, that's right, in the process of successfully reclaiming her bag, the woman managed to bite off part of her assailant's little finger - a neighbour interviewed for the same news item described finding it on the ground a few minutes later.

Once the thief had extricated himself from his victim's vice-like jaws - she bit down so hard that she broke one of her front teeth - he did eventually make his getaway, and at the time of writing is still at large. Aside from the obvious distinguishing feature of being one fingertip short of a handful, he is described as being in his 30s, between 170 and 180cm tall, and solidly built, with a light-coloured jacket and dark-coloured trousers.

The most amusing thing about the story is that cutting off the top of one's little finger is a common form of penance for members of the yakuza, so while the suspect is almost certainly not a gangster (it's highly unlikely that a proper yakuza would indulge in such petty thievery), he is destined forever to be mistaken for one.

As one news agency rather dryly concluded, 'The police have not revealed the whereabouts of the severed finger, nor have they said whether or not they will take a fingerprint from it to help apprehend the suspect.'

(Unfortunately, two news reports on this story have already been removed from YouTube, but if you fancy reading more about missing little fingers - aka koyubi / 小指 - may I recommend Junichi Saga's fascinating book Confessions Of A Yakuza.)

The one thing I forgot to mention when I was reminiscing about my previous job was the commute, which was often the highlight of my working day. Even though my employers were paying me travel expenses based on covering the 14km round-trip by car, I only did so about ten times in the whole year - usually because I had to take my suit either to or from work, although on one rainy day when Mrs M had to use the car, I wore the suit beneath my waterproofs without causing any obvious damage. The rest of the time I commuted by bicycle: for the first few weeks on onii-san's lightweight semi-racer, and thereafter on the trusty Rock Spring. One fine morning I made it to school on the former in under twenty minutes, while on the latter it took more like twenty-five - sometimes thirty on the way back, as this included a long uphill stretch.

I spent rather more time than was necessary examining Yahoo Japan Map and experimenting with short cuts that turned out to be nothing of the sort, before eventually settling on a route that took me first of all across a four-lane bypass. After this I veered into a narrow side street and past a wood yard, a ramen restaurant and an estate of dilapidated old bungalows (the Japanese equivalent of a trailer park), before the road dropped down into a valley of rice fields. From the brow of the hill, on a clear day you could see all the way to a mountain range on the border between Tochigi and Fukushima Prefectures, sixty kilometres to the north-west, and the pavement in the valley was constructed from large concrete blocks, which during the earthquake had been shaken out of alignment to form an obstacle course of slopes and steps. On the opposite side of the valley was a posh country club, where well-heeled businessmen would go for a quick nine holes or a session on the driving range before work, and beyond that a suburb of sorts, with two pachinko parlours - one abandoned and one still in business - two concrete works, two convenience stores, a beauty salon and a barber shop. There was also a run-down looking hostess bar with an old neon sign, an amateurish, hand-painted portrait of a supposedly glamorous hostess, and five A4 sheets of paper permanently pasted to the wall that read ten-in boshuh-chu (店員募集中 / staff wanted).

Perhaps once or twice a week, a people carrier would pass by with one of its rear windows rolled down. Come rain or shine, a child of about four or five years old - presumably being driven to kindergarten by its mother - would lean out of the window and shout 'HELLOOOOOO!!!' although I rarely reacted quickly enough to say anything in reply.

In the morning, that long uphill stretch was a relaxing freewheel through a large industrial estate, in whose central car park truck drivers would be emerging from their cabins after a night's sleep, and various tradesmen and travelling salesmen would be chatting with their colleagues or sipping on vending machine coffee.

At the bottom of the hill the road ahead was blocked by a landslide that had yet to be cleared even a year after the earthquake. Here I turned right along with the rest of the traffic and into a short tunnel, at the other end of which was a wide river valley.

On some mornings the surrounding hills were shrouded in mist, on others the sunlight sparkled on the river, and on still others the wind whipped up the valley and I was sprayed with standing water by passing cars. In the morning a pair of tombi (鳶 / black kites) would eye me suspiciously as I passed beneath their perch atop a streetlight, and in the afternoon scores of them would circle high above the river, their tails twisting back and forth as they changed direction in the updraft. Slender white shirasagi (白鷺 / heron) stood at the water's edge while their human counterparts ventured out on long wooden boats: in the winter they fished for ayu (鮎 / sweetfish), and for a few weeks in the autumn for the salmon that swim upstream to spawn (the bodies of those salmon that failed to survive the journey lay on the riverbed for weeks afterwards).

The river marks the border between the so-called city where I lived (it's more like a town) and the so-called town where I worked (it's more like a village), and on the other side was a mushroom farm that gave off a stench like a cross between raw sewage and rotting flesh, a Yakult shop with its fleet of three-wheeled delivery scooters, a tiny police station, and an even smaller shrine on the pavement beneath a garden wall. Such shrines are erected by bereaved relatives after a road death, and this one was made from a couple of breeze blocks, a jizoh (地蔵 / small stone statue in a red cap and jacket), some opened cans and bottles of drink to keep the departed spirit from going thirsty, and two vases that were regularly replenished with fresh flowers.

I could tell if I was on time by whether or not the school bus was parked outside the local kindergarten (it left at 8.20 on the dot), and on the last narrow street between the main road and the school, one angry dog would strain at its rope as it tried to scale the garden fence and attack me, and one placid dog would gaze benevolently from its blanket-lined basket a few doors down.

For several months over the winter I wore a waterproof jacket, woolly hat, fleece and long trousers, while in the summer months, even at 8am the temperature was in the twenties. As well as cycling home in the snow, one afternoon last September I did so in a typhoon: admittedly, the storm didn't reach its peak until a few hours later, but I still had trouble staying upright, and the next day the river was twice as deep and twice as wide as usual.

(A geeky aside: while you might expect a bicycle to be cleaner after it has been ridden it in the rain, in fact the opposite is true, and the Rock Spring was always at its grubbiest after bad weather, its white frame splattered with mud and its chain clogged with oily gunk.)

Every day on the way home I would pass the same group of elementary school children with their yellow hats and red satchels. Although I was speeding past on the opposite side of the road, over the course of the year we managed to turn this into a kind of mini-English conversation class, so:

First kid in the group - 'HELLO!'
Me - 'HELLO!'
Fifth kid in the group - 'HOW ARE YOU?'
Me - 'I'M FINE THANK YOU, AND YOU?'
Tenth kid in the group - 'I'M FINE THANK YOU!'
And so on and so forth.

At least for the next couple of months my journey to work will only take five minutes, and I won't see any tombi, or shirasagi, or salmon (although I do pass a different and even angrier dog), and apart from anything else I've already put on weight from the lack of exercise.

Mrs M is pregnant!

Actually she's been pregnant since late last year, but I've waited until well past the antei-ki (安定期 / literally 'stability time' - ie. the point at which it's OK to tell your friends, relatives and readers) before writing a blog post about it.

Surprisingly enough - and in the first of what will no doubt be numerous differences between the British and Japanese experience of child rearing - while I would describe Mrs M as beings six months pregnant, she would describe herself as being seven months. When I first found out that Japanese babies wait for ten months before entering the world, I thought that I was dealing with a fundamental biological discrepancy, but no, when it comes to measuring one's term, the Japanese use lunar months of 28 days, as opposed to calendar months of between 28 and 31. Confusing, yes, but logical too when you consider body clocks, menstrual cycles and so on.

By the time our little one is born, I will have fulfilled my ambition to delay becoming a father until my fifth decade, and the first time we went to our GP for advice was more than two years ago, in early 2010.
'You're both fit and healthy,' he said, 'so there's no need to start running tests. Think of it this way: you've got twelve goes between now and next spring, so I'm sure you'll come back to me with good news before then.'
Twelve goes later nothing had happened, although the GP in question was none the wiser, as by that point we had moved to Japan. Rather than a GP, when you need medical treatment here you go straight to a specialist, so once we had settled in, we registered with the nearest sanfujinka (産婦人科 / maternity-gynaecology clinic). All four doctors at the clinic - mum, dad and their two daughters - are members of the same family, and dad - let's call him I-sensei - was the first one we met.
'Do you understand Japanese?' he asked me.
'By and large,' I said, 'although I'm not very good when it comes to accents and dialects. I prefer "NHK Japanese", if you see what I mean.'
'Did you hear that?' said I-sensei to one of the nurses as he went through to the next room. 'I speak standard Japanese!'

One Saturday last summer he gave a lecture at the clinic about the science-y side of conception and pregnancy, and the various treatments on offer should they be necessary. The most reassuring fact of the day was that the average man is capable of fathering a child until he is seventy-five years old (I almost punched the air and shouted 'Get in!' when I heard this), but according to I-sensei, while my tadpoles were both energetic and longevitous, they were emerging in comparatively small numbers - the average school, so to speak, has 50 million members, whereas mine were in the 10 million range. In order to counteract this shortfall, he suggested that we move on to The Next Stage: jinko-jusei (人工授精 / artificial insemination, which for the sake of brevity I'll refer to as AI). This meant a lot more trips to the clinic for Mrs M, as there were injections to receive, prescriptions to pick up, and the AI process itself, which without going into too much detail, involved my tadpoles getting some assistance on their journey to meet Mrs M's egg  - a bit like being given a lift to work rather than having to walk all the way there, if you see what I mean.

After two months of AI and still no result, I-sensei said that it might be time for The Next Next Stage, so as well as my tadpoles getting a lift to work, Mrs M underwent an additional series of injections - one a day for ten days, to be exact, and a process that was, quite literally, a pain in the backside - to enable her to produce multiple eggs simultaneously (this is standard practice with fertility treatment, and increases your chances of having twins to one in five, as opposed to the usual one in a hundred or so). He also referred me to a nearby hinyoh-ka (泌尿科 / urology clinic) for a more thorough check on my tadpoles.

This was, it has to be said, one of the less dignified episodes in my life so far, and took place on the eighth floor of a rather run-down office building (the clinic was on the verge of moving to new, purpose-built premises nearby). After taking my blood pressure, the head nurse - a middle-aged woman with a tobacco-tinged voice and a no-nonsense manner, no doubt developed over many years of dealing with sheepishly embarrassed men like me - said that she needed a sample of my shoh-sui.
'Shoh-sui?' I said.
'She means pee,' explained Mrs M (a polite euphemism, the literal translation of shoh-sui / 小水 is 'small water').
This required filling a paper cup to about the halfway mark, in a toilet that was directly off the reception-area-stroke-waiting-room, and which had a door that was rather tricky to lock: although it didn't happen while we were there, countless patients must have suffered the misfortune of having someone walk in on them in mid-small water.

Once the nurse had taken some blood to be sent away for analysis, it was time for the most important sample of the three. For this I was given another paper cup, and led downstairs to a little room with a sofa, a TV and a selection of magazines and DVDs (thankfully, the door lock here was more secure and easier to operate than the one on the toilet).

In yet another room - this time with a bed and some machines that looked very much as if they might go 'ping' if you pressed the right button - the nurse taped two sensors to what are referred to in Japanese as one's kintama (金玉 / golden balls). This was to make sure they were functioning at the appropriate temperature, so I lay down for a few minutes watching the figures on a digital readout waver by fractions of a degree, and then stood by the bed for a few more minutes doing the same thing. The tricky part came when the test was over, and I was left in the room to remove the sensors: particularly when it's adhered to one's nether regions, surgical tape isn't ripped off in a single swift and momentarily uncomfortable motion, but rather in a series of protracted and agonisingly painful ones.

Mrs M and I were then admitted to the urologist K-sensei's office, where he produced a garland-like string of different sized yellow plastic eggs. These are for assessing the relative dimensions of a patient's kintama, and reminded me of the set of different sized rings Mrs M used in her previous job at a jewellery shop.

'This may feel a little cold,' said the nurse as she then applied some gel to my lower abdomen and kintama, in readiness for an ultrasound scan. For minimum patient discomfort, the gel had been warmed up in advance, although the unexpectedness of this was probably more disconcerting than if it had been cold in the first place.

Once the tests were over and I was finally able to put my trousers back on, K-sensei said that my tadpoles were fine - their image through a microscope was on a TV screen in the corner of the room, and apparently, if a certain number are active within a certain area of the screen, you're in the clear. Where I-sensei was a kindly, professor-like man who wore John Lennon spectacles and used standard Japanese, K-sensei was shambling, eccentric and spoke in a kind of incoherent mumble, as if his voice were a poorly tuned radio, and had a habit of propping his trendy, rectangular specs on his forehead, from where they would promptly fall back down onto the bridge of his nose.
'The results of your blood test will be back in three weeks,' he said. 'But that's just a formality, really - there's a condition called koh-seishi koh-tai (抗精子抗体 / anti-sperm antibodies) that we have to check for. I'm sure that if you keep trying you'll get pregnant before long.'
'This may sound like a strange question,' I said, 'but do you think I should stop riding my bicycle?' (Along with wearing loose-fitting underwear, the standard advice in the UK is to lay off the cycling if you're trying for kids.)
'No effect at all,' he said. 'Some professionals suffer from ED, of course, but that's only if they're cycling for very long distances.'
'ED? What's that?'
'Erectile dysfunction.'
'Ah, I see.'

Three weeks later we went back to the urology clinic, where I donated another blood sample, another half-full paper cup of small water and another school of tadpoles.
'Your tadpoles are fine,' said K-sensei - they were darting around on the same TV screen in the corner of the room - 'I'd be perfectly happy if these were mine. But...' He let out a long sigh as his spectacles plonked back down from his forehead to his nose. 'You can't get pregnant naturally. The test came back positive for anti-sperm antibodies. We'll run another one to make sure, but your only option now is taigai-jusei (体外受精 / IVF).'

While we were both practically speechless with shock, it was quite a relief to know exactly what we were dealing with. Plenty of people who have nothing to physically prevent them from having children take a lot longer than two years before they manage to conceive, but Mrs M had suspected from the start that something was amiss. As anyone who's ever tried it will tell you, IVF involves large amounts of time, money and stress, coupled with a comparatively slim chance of success, but at least we could now entrust ourselves to medical science, rather than having to cross our fingers every month and hope the stars of fertility would somehow align in our favour.

Shoh-shi koh-reika (少子高齢化) describes the modern Japanese phenomenon of a declining birth rate and an ageing population, and because of the former, the government is desperate for its citizens to procreate. Up until a few years ago, and even if you were paying your national health insurance every month, having a baby would cost you somewhere in the region of £1000, and even more than that if you needed a caesarian, an epidural or an extra few nights in hospital to recover from the birth. Nowadays, though, most local councils will foot the bill for everything, including part or all of the cost of at least a couple of tries at IVF. So while Mrs M and I would still have to deal with the time and the stress, at least we wouldn't have to shell out too much cash for the privilege.

A few days later - partly out of habit and partly because she had a couple left over from her last trip to the chemist - Mrs M took a pregnancy test.
'I'm not sure if this is right,' she said, 'but there's a line.'
'Really?'
'It's a bit faint, though.'
'It must be faulty.'
'There's one more left in the box. I'll try again later in the week.'

At the second attempt the line was more distinct, and when we went to see I-sensei to make absolutely sure, he confirmed the good news.
'But K-sensei said it would be impossible for us to get pregnant without IVF,' said Mrs M.
'It does happen sometimes,' said I-sensei.
'Perhaps Caucasians are biologically different...' mused K-sensei after giving us the result of the second blood test, which confirmed the positive result.

If you have anti-sperm antibodies - which as K-sensei explained are normally caused by trauma to the kintama, although in my case the origin was unclear - even if your tadpoles manage to swim all the way to their destination, the antibody stops them from fertilising the egg: like a kind of kamikazé tadpole, they effectively self-destruct. But - and this is the important part - the anbtibody isn't present in the tadpole himself but in the liquid he swims in, from which he is removed in preparation for both AI and IVF. Even so, while K-sensei was (probably) wrong and I-sensei was (probably) right, Mrs M getting pregnant was still mathematically unlikely and spiritually miraculous, albeit in an athiest, secular kind of way.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, it's not twins.)

Ever fancied a change of career? I thought that I was being fairly radical by packing in my job as a sound recordist and moving to Japan to teach English, but a recent edition of the TV show Waratté Coraété (笑ってコラえて / Try Not To Laugh) featured the story of a sound recordist whose life underwent an entirely different - and frankly much more impressive - transformation.

Hiroshi Kikuda usd to work for NHK, and as well as the usual TV fare, specialised in recording classical music. During time off from a job in Vienna in 1996, Kikuda bought a second-hand violin from an antiques market, and having taken it back to Tokyo, decided to try his hand at making one himself. He joined an evening class, and over the next four years made ten violins, eventually plucking up the courage to show one of them to an expert.
'This is very nice,' said the expert. 'But it's not a violin.'
'Rather than being halfway to my destination,' explained Kikuda, 'I realised that I had only just set out on the journey.'

Not long after, Kikuda came across a violin made by Nicola Lazzari.
'This was what I had been aiming for all along,' he said. 'And if I was ever going to make a real violin, I realised there was no choice but to learn from the man himself.'
Lazzari's workshop is one of over 130 in Cremona, Italy, the city where Stradivari - the most famous violin maker of all - plied his trade in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and home to Lazzari's alma mater, the Cremona International Violin Making School.

Kikuda talked to his wife Hisako about going to study at the school, and far from telling him to pull himself together and stop being so stupid, she said that if he really wanted to become a violin maker then he had better do it properly.
'If someone finds what they really want to do,' said Hisako, 'that's an amazing thing.'
'She didn't so much push me into going to Italy,' continued Kikuda, 'as physically throw me.'

Kikuda spent the following year studying Italian, although by the time his interview came around he was far from fluent, and ended up repeating the same phrase over and over again: 'I want to study at this school!'

His application was successful, and Kikuda and Hisako moved to Italy, where as well as twelve hours a week of violin making, Kikuda had to study the standard high school curriculum of maths, history, English and so on, in a class where most of the other students were aound half his age. Three years later, in 2004, Kikuda didn't just graduate, he scored 100% in both the practical and academic facets of the course.

While he was still studying, Kikuda had begun to visit Lazzari's workshop, and once the course was over, asked Lazzari to assess his latest effort.
'It's nice,' said Lazzari. 'But it's not a violin.'
Still, Lazzari was sufficiently impressed with Kikuda's ability to take him on as an apprentice, and Kikuda spent the next two years watching Lazzari intently, making copious notes and continuing to hone his craft.

At the end of the apprenticeship, Kikuda showed Lazzari yet another violin.
'It looks beautiful,' said Lazzari. 'But it sounds awful.'
'I had become too focussed on the appearance of the violin and lost sight of how it was supposed to sound,' said Kikuda, and perhaps spurred on by the thought that failing to make a go of it in Cremona would mean a return to sound recording (which you can take it from me is a terrifying prospect), Kikuda persevered.

In 2005 he entered one of his voilins in an international competition in the Czech Republic, where among other things, it was assessed based on how it fared when accompanied in performance by a full orchestra. Out of a total of forty entries, Kikuda's violin finished in fourth place, and like Lazzari, the judges at the competition praised it for its appearance rather than its sound. But at both the 2006 Wieniawski competition in Poland and the 2007 Tchaikovsky competition in Russia - two of the three most prestigious competitions in the field - his violins won the grand prize, and this year he aims to complete what would be an unprecedented grand slam by winning the third, which just happens to take place in Cremona.

When Kikuda - who as you might expect is a modest and softly spoken kind of fellow - was interviewed with Hisako for Waratté Koraété, they reflected on how coming across that second-hand violin in Vienna had been a life-changing moment, and how Kikuda had named his first gold-medal-winning violin 'Elfo' (that's Italian for elf, in case you weren't sure): at the time, his wife was obsessed with the Orlando Bloom character from The Lord Of The Rings, and the couple now have a poster of Bloom on the wall of their apartment. 'The first poster I've ever bought!' confessed Hisako.

To round off his appearance on the show, Kikuda was interviewed via a satellite link-up to Italy, and listened as the vioinist Mariko Senju played the same piece of music by Bach, firstly on an original Stradivarius, and then on one of Kikuda's violins. As it happened, Kikuda had worked with Senju back in 1999 when he was still a sound man, and confessed that at the time he hadn't had the confidence to ask her to play one of his violins. He said that if he could be granted one wish, it would be to hear what his voilins will sound like in two hundred years' time, when they will have grown up, so to speak (several times in the programme he referred to the violins as being like his children), and indeed, the Strad really did sound richer and deeper than Kikuda's violin, which was described by the show's presenters as sounding younger and fresher.

Among other things, the programme included a brief sequence about the violin making process itself (the thin black lines around its edge, for example - known as purfling - are not painted on but inserted as incredibly fine pieces of marquetry, and help prevent the main body from cracking if the instrument is dropped) and a sequence in a Tokyo music shop where Kikuda's violins are on sale (not that most people would be able to afford one: while a factory made violin can be purchased for as little as £100, a Kikuda will set you back the best part of £10,000). The one thing that wasn't mentioned was whether or not Kikuda himself has learned to play the violin, but then again, I assume he's too busy making them for that.

Kikuda's blog can be found here, and the homepage for his workshop in Cremona can be found here (both in Japanese).

I had intended to work at the friendly, rural junior high school and friendly, rural elementary school for another couple of years, but just before Christmas a friend of mine made me a job offer I couldn't refuse, and as of this month I shall be working at not one but five friendly, rural junior high schools in the next town (and to Mrs M's delight, earning an extra few thousand yen into the bargain). So before I forget what it was all like - and if it's OK with you - I'm just going to pop on my rose-tinted spectacles and go for a quick jaunt down memory lane.

As you may remember from my posts about baseball and soccer, I spent the first fortnight of the summer holidays having a go at the various club activities on offer at the school. Possibly because most such sports were originally imported (while some schools have kendo or judo clubs, that wasn't the case here), the chants and calls employed by the students as they played were almost exclusively in English - or rather, a brand of English specially adapted for use by Japanese teenagers.

When I was with the tennis club we shouted 'Naishoh!' ('Nice shot!') when a point was won, 'Naisu catchee!' (a sarcastic 'Nice catch!') when the ball went out of play, and 'Faitoh!' ('Fight!') for any exhortation to try harder. With the basketball club it was 'Naishuu!' ('Nice shooting!') when a point was won and 'Domai!' ('Don't mind!') when the ball went out of play. And with the volleyball club it was 'Chaa!' when there was a 'Chance!' to win a point and, er, 'Spaiku!' for a spike (ie. what you or I would call a smash).

Aside from stretching, squat jumps, press-ups and so on, we would start the day with at least ten laps of the school grounds, to be completed within a certain time limit and accompanied by a chant of the club members' own devising. The volleyball girls would maintain a continuous call-and-response of '[name of junior high school], hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-hoooh!' and the tennis girls would chant '[name of junior high school], faitoh, ho, ho, hoooh!' Before the basketball girls started jogging, we stood one at a time on a kind of podium next to the playing field for koédasu (声出す), which entailed each of us in turn shouting the name of the club, our own name and our aim for the day - eg. 'I WILL PRACTICE HARD AND SUPPORT MY FELLOW CLUB MEMBERS!' - at the tops of our voices.

M-sensei was in charge of the table tennis club, and on the day that I joined in fully lived up to his reputation as the angriest teacher at the school. Each member of the club keeps a notebook in which they write about what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis and reflect on how their practice and tournament matches went, and M-sensei berated the students for their lack of application in fulfilling this task for the best part of three quarters of an hour. In fact, he spent most of the morning in a barely concealed state of frustration and anger, and the entire time we were in the sports hall, I only saw him smile once.

Then again, the table tennis club is the most successful at the school, and its members regularly progress from regional to prefectural tournaments (despite having the tidiest pitch, the soccer team hasn't made it beyond the first stage of a tournament in more than five years), so this climate of fear seems to do the trick.

More significantly, such a regime really does appear to instill confidence in the students. My playing partner for the morning was T-kun, who is somewhere on the autistic spectrum and hardly utters a word during the normal course of school life, but who patiently took me through the basics of the game in simple Japanese, and who appeared to be taking it very easy indeed as we knocked the ball back and forth - once or twice I even noticed him suppress a smile after I had played a particularly poor shot.

Club activities were a lot less formal at the elementary school, although H-sensei, the 5th year homeroom teacher, did a very good job of knocking the brass band into shape. At the beginning of last April, most of its members had never even picked up an instrument, but for sports day in September they performed a selection of pop songs, film theme tunes and the school song, all while marching in formation.

As it turned out, H-sensei was classically trained, and explained to me that she only became a teacher after much soul-searching over whether or not to try her hand at being a professional musician instead. She also re-wrote a Japanese folk tale in easy English for her homeroom class to perform at the end-of-year culture festival, where along with demonstrations of their acting, writing, arithmetic, skipping and unicycling skills, almost all of the students did some kind of musical performance.

While only one student fainted from the heat and only one was injured seriously enough to be taken to hospital during the junior high sports festival, its culture festival only went ahead with the aid of large numbers of surgical masks and large amounts of prescription cold medicine. But where the elementary students tend to be slightly off key in an endearing kind of way when they're singing or playing, the junior high students sounded like full-blown professionals for the inter-class chorus contest. Formation dance routines copied from the latest pop videos received the biggest applause, but the highlight of the day for me was a swinging, jazzy waltz performed by five members of the brass band - I'm a sucker for underdogs, and the quintet's tuba player was the fat kid with chronic eczema..

The students I most enjoyed teaching English to were the tokubetsushién (特別支援 / special needs, which after studiously consulting his dictionary at the beginning of the year, my fellow teacher K-sensei insisted on calling 'the handicapped class'). Because there were only four of them, there was more time to get to know their personalities than in the usual classes of twenty or thirty-plus, and in any case, they were an inherently memorable - if rather motley - group.

Like the aforementioned tuba player, A-san was overweight and suffered from eczema, not to mention permanently greasy hair and a uniform that only saw the inside of a washing machine about once a month. But despite such obvious drawbacks, she had a pretty good grasp of English and the kind of sunny personality that could brighten up the greyest of days, and while a certain amount of what she said was impenetrable - she would sometimes rock back and forth in her chair and talk to herself - we would often share a joke with each other as she waited for the other members of the class to finish writing. K-san was the quietest of the four, and another A-san the most awkward (sometimes she would sit through an entire lesson grumpily staring out of the window and refusing to answer any questions, even from K-sensei), but the star of the show was I-kun.

For roughly fifty per cent of the time, I-kun had a cold, a stomach ache or some other indefinable illness, and when he wasn't excusing himself to go to the loo, he would be blowing his nose on the roll of toilet paper that was always close at hand, and throwing the remnants into a tatty old cardboard box he used as a wastepaper basket. For the remaining fifty per cent of the time, though, I-kun was unstoppable, and instead of studying English in the conventional manner, treated our lessons as a kind of free-form word association game. Whenever he managed to come up with a correct answer - which was mostly, it has to be said, by pure chance - he would exclaim, Ah! Yappari, oré wa tensai da! (あっ！やっぱり、俺は天才だ！/ 'Ah! Just as I thought, I'm a genius!'), and while most of his gags will be meaningless to a non-Japanese speaker - in fact, most of his gags will be meaningless even to a native Japanese speaker - I made a note of some of the ones that made me laugh:

For the days of the week: 'Monday, Tuesday, Queuesday...'
Or: 'Saturday, Sunday, nandé?' (nandé means 'why?')
When counting: 'thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-Doraémon...' (Doraémon is a famous cartoon character)
Or: 'thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-san...' (san is Japanese for the number three)
And in the same vein: 'ten, twenty, santy, forty...'
Instead of 'I leave home at seven forty', 'I leave home at seven horse'
Instead of 'Her husband Koji teaches Japanese', 'Her brass band Koji teaches Japanese'
Instead of 'Miss Green', 'Miss Glico' (Glico is a famous confectionery company)
K-sensei - 'What's the past tense of "have"?' I-kun – 'Ham and egg!'
And instead of 'I like tea', 'I like unchi' (unchi means 'poo')

Rather than sharing a single table, the special needs students preferred to spread their desks around the classroom, and I-kun was always furthest from the blackboard. Even when copying word-for-word, his spelling was atrocious, and at first I put this down to his learning disabilities. Eventually, however, I came to the realisation that he was merely short sighted.

'Do you wear contact lenses?' I asked him.
'Yes, yes. I wear contact lenses,' he replied.
'Does I-kun wear contact lenses?' I asked M-sensei later that day (as well as the table tennis club, M-sensei oversaw the special needs students).
'No, he doesn't,' said M-sensei. 'His mother won't let him.'

The following lesson, I-kun was sitting in his usual position at the back of the classroom, and instead of a dialogue from the textbook about school timetables, he wrote this:

I have FOR GENERAL WRITING
They are ADHESIVE STICK
The ZEBRA
How PLASTIC ERASER MADE IN JAPAN

In other words, he gave up trying to write what was on the board and instead copied whatever English he could find on the items in his pencil case.

Despite his hard-man image, M-sensei was the most visibly emotional of the teachers during the graduation ceremony at the end of March (he had taught I-kun at elementary as well as junior high school), for which the kocho-sensei made a typically rambling speech about a spacecraft that was lost for several years on its way back from collecting samples in a far-flung corner of the solar system, and a musician who became successful despite going blind after a childhood illness.

Apart from the graduation ceremony, beginning of term ceremonies, end of term ceremonies, clubs, lessons and exams, there were plenty of other events to keep the students occupied. These included sankenkai (散見会 / open day), ohsohji (大掃除 / spring cleaning) and sohkohkai (壮行会 / a rousing send-off to the summer sports tournament, for which a group of students in bandanas and white gloves chanted and gesticulated along to the rhythm of a big bass drum, and which looked and sounded like something from a Kurosawa samurai film). There was work experience week, school council elections, a drill for evacuating in the event of a disaster, and a drill for evacuating in the event of a suspicious intruder. A visiting high school headmaster made a speech about 'What it means to become an adult' (which despite the title had nothing to do with sex education), and one day we were all shown a video about bullying, which coincidentally was one of the most post-modern experiences of my entire life (I was in a school sports hall with some junior high school students, watching a video in which some junior high school students are in a school sports hall watching a performance of a play by some junior high school students that depicts the true story of how one of their classmates was bullied, and is performed on a stage set that recreates one of the classrooms at the school. As well as flashbacks to the bullying and to how the bullying was then turned into a play, at the climax of both the play and the video, the girl who has been bullied, who is playing the role of herself in the play, breaks out of character and delivers an emotional speech to the audience - or rather the audiences, if you include those of us watching the video - as herself. Confused? Unless you happen to be Noam Chomsky, I should hope so).

When writing about the junior high school in particular, I have tried to emphasise how friendly and relaxed it was, but despite his apparently laid-back attitude, the kocho-sensei ran a very tight ship, where even the slightest transgression from school rules was deemed unacceptable - normally the student in question would be surrounded by a posse of teachers, given a very stern talking to and leave the staff room in tears. The school was such a nice place to work precisely because the students hardly ever caused trouble, behaved badly during lessons or vandalised school property, and precisely because they always said hello when they passed you in the corridor, and always addressed those students in the years above them as 'so-and-so senpai' (先輩 / senior) rather than just by their names.

At a rehearsal for the graduation ceremony, the students' conduct was monitored down to the minutest detail, including how to stand up and sit down, how to bow while both standing up and sitting down, and even how to walk out of the hall at the end of the ceremony - a reminder of which was displayed behind the scenes on the day, and reads as follows:

- Sitting bow
- Hands when bowing - don't let them hang
- Girls' hands - don't open them, don't curl them up into a ball (cat hands)
- How to walk when you leave - don't let your mind wander
- How to replace your graduation certificate (when you are sitting down)

On one of my last days at the school, a former student dropped by to let us know the results of his university entrance exams, and while he was chatting with the other teachers, I went outside to load some things into my car. His girlfriend - who told me that she too was a former student - was loitering at the front door.
'You can go into the staff room and say hello if you want,' I said.
'I'm not allowed.'
'Why's that?'
'Having your hair dyed is against the rules.'
Her hair had reddish-brown highlights, and even though she had long since graduated from the school, its regime still applied. I wonder if I'll still be under the same spell in three years' time?