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Muzuhashi ムズハシ

Rice 米

31/10/2011

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Many Japanese still have rice for all three of their main meals, and while Japan's food miles are some of the highest - if not the highest - in the world, rice is one of the few foodstuffs in which it is completely self-sufficient. What this means is that almost every square metre of arable land is given over to rice farming, and it's fascinating to watch the process unfold, from ta-ué (planting / 田植え) in the spring to iné-kari (harvesting / 稲刈り) in the autumn.

There is a character (played by Harvey Keitel) in the Wayne Wang / Paul Auster film Smoke, who walks across the road from his shop, sets up his camera in exactly the same spot, and clicks the shutter at exactly the same time each morning. As well as being a metaphor for the the random and yet cyclical nature of life, the resulting photographs demonstrate how one can find beauty and significance in the seemingly inconsequential, and inspired me to do the same thing for rice farming in rural Ibaraki that Keitel's character does for pedestrians and passing cars on a New York street corner.

So, every weekday morning and afternoon from the beginning of May to the beginning of October this year, I stopped to take a photo of the tambo (田んぼ / rice fields) on my way to and from work. Sometimes the weather was beautiful, sometimes there was - quite literally - a typhoon passing through, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, the sky went a kind of purple-y colour. Whilst I would like to have created a proper video that can be viewed full-screen, for the moment you'll have to make do with this Weebly slideshow. As you'll see, it took me a couple of weeks to settle on the ideal spot from which to take my twice-daily photo, and there is a break of about a month during which the rice grows noticeably taller and yellower (I was on my jaunt to Sado Island at the time), but hopefully it will give you a pretty good idea of how the tambo go from mud to rice and back again, in the process providing the Japanese with a large proportion of their daily carbohydrate intake.

To view the slideshow, hover your pointer over the photograph below and click on the 'Play' icon. It's about three or four minutes long, and there is a special bonus prize of, er, a bag of rice for anyone who spots the microlight.
(Incidentally, for some proper 'rice field art', take a look at this post from Pink Tentacle.)
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A tribute to Steve Jobs

26/10/2011

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Back in the late nineties, I was lucky enough to get hold of that most prized of possessions, a Hotmail address with my christian name first, my surname second, and no dots, dashes, numbers or anything else extraneous in between. Purely for illustrative purposes, let's pretend that my real name is Billy Nugget, and that the address in question was billynugget@hotmail.com

Even then, there were already scores of other Billy Nuggets using Hotmail, but I just happened to sign up at the precise moment the original Billy Nugget either decided not to use Hotmail any more and cancelled his account, or died in a freak dog grooming accident. As I'm sure you can understand, I was very pleased about this fortuitous turn of events (fortuitous for me, that is, not necessarily for Mr Nugget). Partly for convenience sake, and partly because I couldn't bear the thought of giving up something so easy to remember, I kept hold of this holy grail of email addresses, and in the intervening years have become well acquainted with the idiosyncracies of Hotmail's service, of which there are many.

For example, allow me to introduce those of you who are not familiar with Hotmail to its 'Contacts' feature:

Like other free email accounts (and indeed mobile phones. And indeed, er, address books), Hotmail allows you to store your friends' / colleagues' / acquaintances' / stalkers' contact details alphabetically. Should you happen to email someone you have not emailed before, or should someone non-suspicious happen to email you, Hotmail will even ask if you would like to add that person's name and details to your contact list. So far so good, and after more than a decade with Hotmail, I now have getting on for two hundred contacts, some of whom I email regularly, some occasionally, and some I will probably never have reason to email again for the rest of my natural life.

Anyway, let's assume I want to send an email to one of those occasionals; one of the people whose email address - and this is a key point - I don't happen to know off the top of my head. As usual, I click on the 'New' option on my Hotmail page and a blank email appears. In the 'To:' box, I begin to type my friend's name - once again, and purely for illustrative purposes, let's call him Harry Pratt. Almost instantaneously, a drop-down menu appears listing everyone on my contacts list whose email address begins with an H: harold.bobbins@gmail.com, horatio-nelson@britishnavy.net, humbert_humbert@lolita.xxx, and so on and so forth. The trouble is, now that I come to think of it, Harry is a bit of a joker, so rather than harry.pratt@gmail.com or harry-pratt1971@yahoo.co.jp or even pratt_harry@dyno-rod.co.uk, his email address begins with crazyharry or bonkersharry or madcappratt or something similarly 'hilarious'.

Now you would think, wouldn't you, that the whole point of a contact list - particularly the contact list for an email account - would be to allow the user to quickly access his or her friends' email addresses merely via the use of their christian name or surname. As anyone with any sense will tell you, it's far easier to remember a couple of key words like, say, 'Harry' or 'Pratt' than it is to remember something far longer and more complicated, like xiekdgijdkaoed.23856308386.harold_h-pratt.jr_the-3rd@itsonthetipofmytongue.org, for example. The mind-bogglingly infuriating thing about the Hotmail contact list, however, is that even though Harry's email address is stored along with his name therein, it is not possible to access that name at the precise moment you need to do so. In other words, the drop-down menu that automatically appears when you begin to type in the 'To:' box is not a list of your friends' names that start with that letter, but merely a list of the email addresses on your contact list that start with that letter, which two things, as we've already discussed, have no intrinsic connection.

What I actually have to do in order to get Harry's email address into the 'To:' box of the aforementioned email is to:

1) Save a draft of the email
2) Go to my contact list
3) Go to the H section of my contact list
4) Find the name 'Harry Pratt' halfway down the page
5) Click on said name
6) When Harry's contact details appear, manually copy his email address [my italics]
7) Go back to my inbox
8) Go to my drafts folder
9) Click on the drafted email
10) Paste Harry's email address into the 'To:' box

Now if you'll just excuse me, I need to pause for a moment and use some punctuation:

#$&'%(")&='~}*<+{>?????!!!!!

Call me a remorseless pedant if you like, but surely, after well over a decade of running what is still one of the most utilised email services in the world, the good people at MSN might have figured out that this small but significant glitch in their system could do with being fixed. More to the point, they have probably received complaints numbering in the tens of millions from disgruntled and remorseless pedants like myself: enough complaints, in fact, to make them realise that perhaps the time may have come to sort things out.

One of the obituaries for the recently deceased Steve Jobs claimed that he had a reputation for prioritising 'form over function', but whoever wrote this had clearly never used a single Apple product. Sure, I have had my fair share of problems with the various Macs I have owned - malfunctioning CD drives, crashed hard drives, dodgy keyboards etc. - but that never stopped them from a) looking good and b) being easy to use. PCs, on the other hand, a) look ugly and b) are not easy to use, and for this, Mr Jobs deserves at least a modicum of retrospective credit.

So what does this all have to do with Japan, I hear you ask? Not much really, except to say that had Bill Gates been born Japanese, PC and Windows users might all be a lot more satisfied with their Microsoft product user experience, and I might more readily be able to access the email addresses of my contacts, thus allowing me to waste even more of my time on Facebook, Twitter and Badass of the Week.
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The roads to Sado - Day 6

24/10/2011

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After the morning commute, there is a period of about four hours during which most of the buses on Sado are idle, so sleeping late rather scuppered my plans for sightseeing. After studying the timetable in some detail, I decided to head for Futatsugamé at the far north-eastern tip of the island (seen from above, Sado is shaped like a kind of laterally elongated figure of eight, with four corresponding 'corners'), and after catching the bus from Sawata to Ryotsu, had to wait two hours for the bus along the coast towards Iwayaguchi. Not only that, but the last bus back from Futatsugamé to Ryotsu departed at 2.30, which meant a ratio of five and a half hours' travelling to just one hour of sightseeing.

It was well worth the trouble, though, as Futatsugamé - not to mention the scenery along the way - was enchanting. The further along the coast we travelled, the narrower and more circuitous Route 45 became, and at Futatsugamé itself, there was a hotel, a campsite and very little else. From the bus stop, a path led down through the trees, and arriving at a headland at the far end of the campsite, this was the view - and the sign - that greeted me.
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Based on its double-hump-backed profile, the name Futatsugamé (二ッ亀) means 'two turtles', and particularly on such a fine, still day, the narrow sand bar leading out to an idyllic island looked positively heavenly: like those metaphorical depictions of the afterlife in which one crosses over from the real world to an ethereal paradise. A few fellow tourists were relaxing on the beach or swimming in the sea, but I just sat in the shade of a tree and took a few photos, before climbing back up to the hotel, buying a drink from a vending machine and getting back on the bus.

Sitting across the aisle from me was Johannes, who I recognised as the same person that saved me from heading the wrong way out of Aikawa the previous afternoon. Johannes was gangly and almost hippy-ish, with thick-framed spectacles, a bandana and a long, frizzy ponytail. Originally from the old East Germany, he now lived in Kyushu and earned his living as a freelance writer.

'This may sound like a stupid question, but what language do write in?' I asked him.
'English,' he said. 'I went to university in America and I used to show experimental films in a kind of road show. We travelled all over the place and I ended up writing a book about it. I had a proper job before I came to Japan, but now I write full time - I'm about to have a book published about North Korean cinema.'
'I didn't even know there was such a thing.'
'That's partly why came to Sado, to interview Charles Jenkins. He starred in a few North Korean films after he defected.'
'You mean propaganda films?'
'They were proper feature films, although he was always cast as the evil western bad guy. North Korea was part of a group of what used to call themselves "non-aligned" nations - they all made really boring films and showed them at each other's festivals. I went to a festival in North Korea myself recently, although even now the western films they show are very "safe".'
Johannes often writes about Japan for japanvisitor.com (you can find a brief biography and a selection of his other articles here), and with the eye of a true travel writer, as the bus wended its way back along the coast, he spotted a village with the intriguing name of Kuro-himé (黒姫 / Black Princess - purely out of curiosity, I later Googled the name and found out that in 1651, Kuro-himé had an official population of just six people, and even now is reputedly home to various ghosts and goblins). Back at Ryotsu, Johannes wished me luck with my own writing and went to catch the ferry to the mainland, while I waited for yet another bus to Sawata.

In keeping with my remedial grasp of mathematics, I had only just realised that I had five rather than four more days in which to make it back to Ibaraki (I left on the 21st and had to return on the 31st, which means ten days, right? Wrong!). Reasoning that it would be nice to have a day off before going back to work on 1st September, I booked in for just one more night at the campsite, and while I didn't realise it at the time, this would prove to be a very wise decision indeed.
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I was at the izakaya by eight o'clock as planned, and by way of indicating that I was the guest of honour, O-san me at the end of the bar and to his left, which was flattering but at the same time less than ideal, as it placed me downwind from an almost continuous fog of cigarette smoke (O-san was one of those chain smokers who is so anxious to start their next cigarette that they stub the previous one out when it is only half-finished). Presently we were joined not just by S-san, who sat at the opposite end of the bar, but by another S-san - let's call him S-san II - who as O-san's junior and S-san I's superior, sat between the two of them.

S-san II was in his late forties or early fifties and what you might call well-groomed: he had a suspiciously flawless tan, his hair was dyed black and permed into a kind of semi-bouffant, and when he was pouring a drink he had the ladylike habit of extending his little finger away from the bottle. When he talked, though, I couldn't help but be reminded of Finchy from The Office: the nightmare sales rep and unreconstructed MCP.

'I was out drinking the night before last,' said S-san II, 'and we ended up at a karaoké place with these girls. I can't remember much after the first couple of songs because we were so drunk, but on the way back to the hotel I fell into a bloody rice field! My suit was absolutely covered in mud - I had to wash it in the bath - and I had my laptop with me as well. Lucky I didn't drop that too.'

When S-san II found out that I was from England, he told me about a homestay trip during his student days.
'I stayed with a family in Bournemouth,' he said. 'The worst thing was the hot water - you had to wait for it to heat up!'
'I should think it was good for your English, though.'
'Sort of. I could understand the children I was staying with, but I had no idea what their parents were talking about at all. A group of us hired a car and drove up to London - we went to that place...what was it called? You know, the one with all the strip clubs.'
'Soho.'
'Yes, Soho! We drove to Edinburgh, too, and it wasn't as far as I thought - only took us about five hours.'
Somehow I had the feeling S-san II didn't go to Edinburgh for the architecture, and as the evening progressed, I was worried that the three of them might decide to introduce me to some of their hostess friends and keep me boozing until the early hours. As it turned out, though, they were tired after a long day at work, and at 10pm O-san paid the bill as promised, and left me with his business card and a promise that he would be in touch the next time he visited the Hitachi branch of his kimono company.
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Hirakata 平潟

17/10/2011

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It wasn't until we woke up on Monday morning - a bank holiday - that Mrs M remembered it was Otoh-san's birthday, so while she popped out to buy him something cake-like, I wished him many happy returns as we had our breakfast in front of the TV. 
'If you don't mind me asking,' I said, 'how old are you now?'
'67,' he replied, 'although I look about 57.'
Once Mrs M had arrived back from the cake shop, the five of us went for a day out in Hirakata, where Otoh-san's brother Yoshihiro lives with his family.

Hirakata lies just before the border with Fukushima Prefecture, so we wanted to do some disaster sightseeing on the way, and came off the Joban Expressway at Kita-Ibaraki to join the coast road. The journey - which took us through a series of tunnels in the mountains above Hitachi - would normally have cost about a thousand yen, but as a way of boosting the economy and encouraging tourists back to Tohoku, the government has made expressway travel free of charge for pretty much anyone who lives north of Tokyo, a special offer that runs until August next year.

After parking at a convenience store, we wandered over the road to the hotel where Yoshihiro oji-san and Hisako oba-san got married about thirty years ago. Okah-san reached into the cool bag she had brought with her and handed us each a slice of Swiss roll - Otoh-san's birthday cake - which we ate as we looked out at Futatsushima (二ツ島 / Two Islands). The name is a little misleading, as Futatsushima is more like one rocky outcrop, although Otoh-san insisted that a second, smaller 'island' had been washed away in the tsunami. A little further north at Ohtsu Bay there was nothing that you might call devastation - no boats stranded on the quayside and no wasteland where there used to be a town - but probably a quarter of the houses at sea level had been stripped back to their foundations, and just around the corner, a famous old building called Rokkaku-doh (六角堂 / literally 'hexagon hall') had been washed into the sea.

While the grounds of Rokkaku-doh (which I'll post about in more detail another time - it was built by a Meiji Era renaissance man called Tenshin Okakura) have been closed indefinitely, there is a pathway to one side that leads down some slippery concrete steps to the water's edge. From there you can just about see the headland where the Rokkaku-doh used to stand, and both Onii-san and I were soaked by incoming waves as we tried to get a look.

In Hirakata, Hisako oba-san runs the family restaurant - called Mori-moa - which is on the second floor of a small, burgundy-coloured building on the harbour front, and when Otoh-san tried to drive into the first-floor parking bay, there was a loud scraping noise from beneath the car.
'Ah, I should have realised!' he said. 'The car's heavier because there are five of us.'
'The road's probably lower than than it used to be as well,' said Onii-san.

As Hisako explained when we went upstairs, during the earthquake the whole town had sunk about 40 centimetres into the Pacific, although an old photograph on the wall showed how much Hirakata had already changed before 11th March: a large part of the harbour had been reclaimed to create a car park and provide better mooring for fishing boats, and a long concrete wharf had been constructed at the mouth of the bay - something that almost certainly saved the town from more serious damage.

'The tsunami came through there,' said Hisako, pointing to a road that led into the next bay between a row of houses and a rocky outcrop not dissimilar to Futatsushima.
'Did it break the windows downstairs?' I asked.
'The putty around the frames split and the window panes came loose, but thankfully they didn't break.'
'It must have been terrifying,' said Okah-san.
'I don't know, actually. We had already evacuated to the elementary school when the tsunami hit. When we came back later in the day there was water gushing from the broken pipes - the meter was whirring around at a rate of knots.'
'They didn't charge you, did they?'
'Yes, they did! Even though we blocked off the pipes the same day, the bill was really expensive. We stayed in the gym at the elementary school for twenty-five days, I think. There were some temporary baths, but people were coming from miles around to use them, so we were only allowed twenty minutes at a time, once every three days.'

This video shows what Hirakata looked like in the aftermath: Mori-moa is visible on the right as the camera pans round in the first few seconds, and the people interviewed about halfway through describe how the tsunami was almost seven metres high.

(NB. If you click on this link you may have to sit through a commercial before the video itself starts.)
Mori-moa - which didn't re-open until July - looked like an old-style coffee shop, with patterned tiles on the walls and wooden panelling on the ceiling, and on Hisako's recommendation I ordered the sashimi set meal, which consisted of rice, miso soup, Japanese-style pickled onions (in a mixture of soy sauce and vinegar), boiled squid and three varieties of raw fish I had never heard of before. As we were eating, a fleet of boats arrived in the harbour, and we had a grandstand view as several of their passengers - not professionals but tourists out for some deep-sea fishing on the bank holiday - immediately rushed to the edge of the car park to have a pee.

'I should think the tourist boats go out pretty early, don't they?' said Otoh-san.
'The men who work on them get up at 2am,' said Hisako. 'They come down to the harbour to prepare and set off at five, then they're back at about two in the afternoon.'
'I don't think they caught much today,' said Onii-san. 'Those cool boxes don't look very heavy at all.'

Despite Hisako saying the food was on the house and Mrs M saying it was our birthday treat, Otoh-san insisted on paying the bill himself, and as he did so I peeked into the kitchen to thank the chef, realising as I did so that she was in fact Hisako's mother, who is getting on for eighty years old.
The sashimi she prepared had come straight from Hirakata fish market, where Yoshihiro oji-san works with one of his sons, and when we popped in to say hello, Yoshihiro greeted us with a present of two large polystyrene boxes full of fish and seafood.
'These are aji (鯵 / horse mackerel),' he said, as a flurry of ash floated down from the cigarette balanced on his bottom lip. 'These are hoh-boh (gurnard). There are some prawns, some flat fish and some mé-hikari (literally 'shining eyes', and like a slightly larger variety of whitebait) - those are both really good deep fried.'
He handed me a tuna so that I could pose for a photograph, and asked if we wanted to take that with us as well, although Okah-san politely declined, saying there wouldn't be enough room in the freezer.

'During the earthquake,' said Yoshihiro, 'you could barely stand up straight, and there was this huge crashing sound when part of the cliff behind the market collapsed. The tunnel through the headland has a big crack above it now, so that'll come down before long, I should think.'
The headland on this side of the harbour was probably half as long as in the old photograph, although the market building itself - which had been torn down and rebuilt in a different position a few years before - was comparatively undamaged.
'How long was the market closed after the tsunami?' I asked Yoshihiro's son (Otoh-san and Okah-san have so many nephews that when I asked them later, they couldn't remember his name).
'Not very long,' he said. 'Only about a month.'
'And I suppose you have to use a Geiger counter now.'
'Of course. Since last month the readings have been quite high off the coast of Ibaraki, so the boats are going further south towards Chiba.'
(Even this close to Fukushima Dai-ichi, to all intents and purposes the threat from radiation has passed, but Yoshihiro and Hisako don't want to take any chances, so they haven't had a visit from their grandchildren - who live on the other side of Tokyo -  since the earthquake.)
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I assumed they had to get up ridiculously early in the morning for work, but in fact the market doesn't open until the fishing boats are unloaded at about midday. As well as going direct to restaurants and shops, some of the fish goes to bigger markets like Tsukiji in Tokyo, and rather than a standard auction with coded hand signals and motor-mouthed auctioneers, they hold what are known as nyuu-satsu (入札), paper auctions of the kind an estate agent uses for a property with multiple prospective buyers - ie. everyone writes their price on a piece of paper and the highest bidder wins.
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Otoh-san is never one to hang around, so after barely ten minutes of chatting and taking photos of the market, we were in the car and heading home again.

'I didn't realise your dad was 67,' I said to Mrs M when we arrived back at our apartment later in the evening.
'67?' she said.
'Yes - well, that's what he told me.'
'But he was 40 when I was born, so today was his 68th.'
Which means that in actual fact, Otoh-san looks about 58, which isn't bad going for a 67 year old.
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The roads to Sado - Day 5

11/10/2011

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I had my morning carton of coffee, microwaved hotto cakey and fruit-cocktail-suspended-in-jelly on a bench overlooking the bay, and was soon joined by a man out walking his dog. He looked to be about sixty, and wore large-framed spectacles, a floppy hat and a fishing vest, while his labrador had a pronounced limp and the biggest, dangliest pair of dog's bollocks I had ever seen. I was disappointed to find out that the dog was called Park (as in, er, 'park'), and not something more befitting of his prize assets, although despite being twelve years old, Park was no slouch.
'We walk along the beach for about four hours every morning,' said his owner, 'and this is where we normally take a break.'
As the man reached into his rucksack and fished out a newspaper, a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of water with a special fold-out, bowl-like fitment on it so that Park could have a drink, I wondered if a dog's bollocks become bigger and danglier with age, or if Park's acted as a kind of counterweight to balance out his limp.
'Where are you from,' asked the man.
'England, although I live in Ibaraki.'
'I went to England a couple of times. The first time, there was a bus that took us into London from Heathrow, and I was really impressed with the suburbs - each house on its own separate plot of land with a garden.'
'Are you from Sado?'
'I'm from here but I lived in Tokyo for a long time. Then a few years ago I made a "u-turn", as they say, and moved back. Best thing I ever did.'
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Back at the campsite, the kitchen-stroke-barbecue area looked like a bomb had hit it, and a couple of young lads were packing up ready for the drive back to Tokyo, which they told me would take about seven hours from Niigata. Apparently they had cooked themselves a meal in the middle of the night, and because they made only a cursory attempt to clear up, once they had left I instigated a one-man souji-jikan (掃除時間 / cleaning time).
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With the barbecue area looking a little less like an episode of How Clean Is Your House? and my washing hung up to dry, I also took the time to give the Rock Spring a service (Rock Spring, I should say here, is by no means a famous brand name in mountain-biking circles - in fact, it's probably just a couple of words plucked at random from a dictionary by some Chinese factory workers). I pumped up the tyres, oiled the chain, tweaked the gears, re-secured the saddlebags, cleaned the paintwork and adjusted the brakes - the brake pads themselves had worn down to about half the thickness they had been when I set off from Ibaraki, due at least in part to an emergency stop that just prevented me from hurtling into some bushes on a hairpin bend near Aizu-wakamatsu.

After lunch I caught the bus to Aikawa on the north coast, where the backstreets were lined with temples, shrines and attractive old buildings with white plasterwork and wooden façades, and where even the vending machines were done up in the heritage style.
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This one was beside the rather wonderful Sado-hangamura-bijutsukan (佐渡版画村美術館 / Sado Woodcut Village Art Gallery), which was founded by a man called Shinichi Takahashi. After retiring from his job as a high school art teacher, Takahashi took it upon himself to teach printmaking to local people, and alongside woodcuts by more renowned artists, this gallery is where their works are displayed. Having studied printmaking in my teens, the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshigé were one of the reasons I came to Japan in the first place, and if I had the means to carry them home I might have invested in a couple of originals. The most impressive exhibit, though, wasn't for sale, and came in a limited print run of just one.

Earlier this year, around two hundred members of the Sado Woodcut Village Association created a wall-sized print to mark the 25th anniversary of Takahashi's death. Made using fifteen or so separate wood blocks, it's called Shimabito-no-yorokobi (島人の歓び / Joy of the Islanders), and depicts life on Sado, its landmarks, history, culture and traditions. While this blog about the making of the print is in Japanese, the photos give a pretty good idea of how the project evolved.

The population of Sado has amost halved in recent decades, one of the main reasons being that after more than four hundred years as its primary industry, gold and silver mining finally ceased in 1951. The remains of the Sado-kinzan (佐渡金山 / Sado Gold Mine) are just down the road from the Village Gallery, in a valley that winds its way into the hills from Aikawa, and which used to be one long production line. Somewhere beneath my feet were around 400km of tunnels, and at its busiest, the mine produced 400kg of gold and 40 tons of silver a year.
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Alongside great concrete constructions that looked like something from a Siberian labour camp, the brick building in the foreground of this picture - which used to be a coal-fired power station - houses photographs of the mine in its heyday: of the railway tracks, the heavy machinery, the workers, their families and their festivals.

At Aikawa bus station, I wasn't sure exactly which bus to catch or which stop to catch it from, and asked the station master for some help.
'I was looking to catch a bus back to here,' I said, and pointed at what I thought was Sawata bus station on the timetable. 'But it looks as though there are only a couple a day.'
'Yes.'
'The next one isn't until 6.50, right?'
'That's right.'
'And it definitely stops here?' I pointed at the same stop again.
'Yes. At Sawata hospital.'
'Sawata Hospital? Where's that?'
'Probably about 20 minutes' walk from Sawata bus station.'
'Oh. I wonder if there's another one I could catch... Wait, this is Sawata bus station, isn't it?' This time I pointed to the stop before Sawata Hospital on the timetable.
'Yes.'
'Ah, I see! So all of the buses go to the bus station.'
'Of course.'
'And I can get on the one that leaves at 4.50.'
'Yes.' The station master was now looking slightly confused. 'So, er, what was it you needed to know exactly?'
'Well, nothing, I suppose. That was all I was worried about. Oh, hang on, what stop does it leave from?'
'Number one, just outside on the left.'
'Thank you very much!' I said, before going outside and getting on a bus at stop number two that was going in completely the wrong direction.

Fortunately a fellow passenger pointed out my mistake, and I made it back to the campsite in time to ask the substitute caretaker if I could stay another night.
'Certainly,' he said. 'That'll be 1200 yen, please.'
'Really? Your colleague wanted me to book in for three nights straight away.'
'Don't mind him. He says what he wants to say and doesn't listen to anyone else.'
'So it's not just me, then?'
'No, not at all. He's like that with everyone.'
'To be honest he was rather difficult to understand as well, which didn't help.'
'That makes two of us. I only moved to Sado six years ago, so I'm still having trouble with the dialect. It's expensive here, too. One or two companies have a monopoly on what comes in and they keep the prices high. Then again, the rest of Japan is the same - oil, food, we have to import almost everything.'

In order to keep track of my own dwindling finances, I had made a list in my diary of what I would need to last me until the end of the trip:

Izakaya - 2000 yen
Bus pass for tomorrow's sightseeing - 1500 yen
Souvenirs for Mrs M and the in-laws (incl. postage) - 5000 yen
One more night at Sawata campsite - 1200 yen
Ferry back to Niigata - 2300 yen
Extra soft gel-filled seat cover (if I can find one) - 3000 yen
Food and camping for last four days - 10,000 yen

Total - 25,000 yen
Total cash remaining - 27,500 yen
Emergency funds - 2,500 yen

Izakaya (居酒屋) are the closest thing you will find in most towns and cities to a western-style pub, and I had passed a particularly enticing looking one on my way to the convenience store the previous evening. So, after a cold shower at the campsite (a hot one would have cost 200 yen, and the weather had at last warmed up to something more befitting of a Japanese summer), I treated myself to a proper night out.

While an izakaya will normally have a few tables, the place to be is at the bar, where you are more likely to get talking to some interesting local characters. As it happened, I found myself talking to some interesting out-of-towners instead: O-san, who ran a kimono company, and S-san, who had just begun a three-year stint as manager of a shop that O-san supplied. O-san was originally from an island near Kagoshima way down in the south-west of Japan, and could have passed for a westerner, as he was tall with strong features and curly, greying hair.

'Why did you come to Sado by yourself?' he asked me.
'My wife wouldn't want to cycle through the mountains for eight hours a day,' I said.
'But you could go on holiday together - to an onsen resort or something.'
'Well, yes, I suppose I am being a bit selfish, but this is what I like doing best. Some people are obsessed with their cars, some people are obsessed with their motorbikes, I'm obsessed with my push bike. In English we call it a mid-life crisis.'
'In Japanese we say yaku-doshi (厄年). How old are you?'
'I was forty this year.'
'Ah yes. Yaku-doshi lasts for about three years. When you're thirty-nine your body starts to break down.'
'Break down?'
'Yes. But once you get to forty-two, things begin to improve again.'

O-san smoked incessantly, and supplemented my two beers with a couple of shots from his bottle of shochu (焼酎 / a cheap, vodka-like spirit made from - among other things - potatoes). His version of yaku-doshi involved taking plenty of business trips and having 'lady friends' in various parts of the country, while S-san, on the other hand, was teetotal and still single at thirty-six.

Upon hearing this the izakaya's mama-san was genuinely surprised, and sat down beside him to get the full story. She was probably in her late fifties, and managed to keep her hair, her make-up and her pinny looking immaculate for the entire evening, despite running the place by herself, serving all the drinks, cooking everything on the menu from scratch, and making sure that none of her customers was short of someone to talk to. Rather than calling last orders and kicking everyone out at eleven thirty, izakaya tend to stay open until whenever the last person at the bar gets up to leave, so she had been working until two the previous morning, although we called it a night at about ten thirty, and I left with a promise from O-san that he would treat me to dinner and drinks tomorrow night if I kept him and S-san company again.
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    About me 私について

    I suppose I must be the archetypal J-blogger - married to a native, working as an English teacher, still struggling with the language - and the main purpose of this blog is to give you an idea of what life is like for a multi-cultural couple in small-town Ibaraki.

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