Author: muzuhashi

Alan Booth Part 2 – This Great Stage of Fools

Way back in January 2011, one of the very first posts on this blog was about the writer Alan Booth, who lived here for more than two decades, produced two of the most well known and well liked travel books about Japan, and sadly passed away at the age of just 46. Little did I know at the time, but that post would become by far the most popular that I ever wrote – on a very small scale indeed, you might almost describe it as ‘buzzy’.

Comments on it became, in a quite spontaneous way, a kind of unofficial noticeboard for fans – and even acquaintances – of Booth, in large part because the post’s popularity happened to coincide with the creation of This Great Stage of Fools, a book of his hitherto uncollected and unpublished writing. This Great Stage of Fools was compiled and edited – lovingly, painstakingly and over the course of several years – by Booth’s friend Timothy Harris, who himself was one of the commenters, and who was considerate enough to keep us up to date regarding progress on the book, from his trawling through the archives all the way to the publication party in May of last year (of which more later).

It took me a while to get round to buying a copy of This Great Stage of Fools, it took a while to get round to reading it, and it has taken another long while to get round to writing this review, and partly because I realised that I had so much to say on the subject, partly because this is the first post on Muzuhashi for the best part of three years, please forgive me if I ramble on for an unnecessarily long time, and wander down one or two side roads along the way. I use the quite selfish and thoroughly presumptuous excuse that Booth himself would have approved.

I first saw Alan Booth’s name mentioned in Will Ferguson’s Hokkaido Highway Blues, which despite – or perhaps even because of – its unexpectedly gloomy ending, and along with Booth’s own books, Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea and Leslie Downer’s On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, is one of my favourite about Japan.

As Ferguson is travelling through Hokkaido on the final stage of his hitchhiking odyssey, he stays in a guest house whose proprietors suggest to a star-struck Ferguson that Booth, too, may have stayed there while he was walking in the opposite direction, a decade or two previously, and having just embarked on his own top-to-tail journey through Japan.

Thanks to this I discovered Booth, and had soon read both of his books, before eventually writing a review of the second – Looking for the Lost, which is also, I should mention here, the result of the efforts and editing prowess of Timothy Harris – that became the aforementioned Alan Booth blog entry.

Slowly but surely, as I was blogging about Japan, settling into life here (for the second time – I lived in Tokyo and then Ibaraki for two years in the mid-noughties) and becoming a father to Muzuhashi Juniors I and II, readers began to respond to the post, and in reply to a comment along the lines of, ‘I wish there was another collection of Booth’s writing out there,’ Harris himself appeared to say that yes, there was, and that he was the editor.

Along with Harris, his publisher Ry Beville, and even friends of Booth’s from his university days, all sorts of other fans chipped in to the discussion. I learned of Fexluz’s epic plan to re-walk the entire journey described in The Roads to Sata – including, wherever possible, staying in the same lodgings and sticking to the same schedule – and was fortunate enough to become acquainted with the very nice people behind the Alan Booth Appreciation Facebook page. Then, at long last, came This Great Stage of Fools.

Speaking of which – and before I continue – a quick commercial break: if you’re a fan of Booth’s, or of this blog, or if you’re a Japanophile who just happened to drop by, you can purchase a copy of This Great Stage of Fools direct from the Bright Wave Media website for 3000 yen including delivery (3500 if you live outside Japan). As Timothy explained to me, dealing with Amazon can be a financially disadvantageous experience for small-scale publishers of non-best sellers, because they are obliged to charge less than is necessary to turn a profit. So think of the slightly-above-average price tag – along with the mild inconvenience of not being able to use Amazon Prime etc. – as your contribution to keeping writers like Booth in the spotlight, and editors like Harris and publishers like Bright Wave in an honest living.

But anyway, when I finally sat down (or rather, lay down beneath the kotatsu in our front room) to read This Great Stage of Fools, I have to confess that my first thoughts were somewhat equivocal.

The collection starts with more than a hundred pages of Booth’s film reviews for the Asahi Newspaper, ranging from those poking fun at creatively bankrupt box office hits, to those heaping praise on what would nowadays be described as ‘art house’ films. Booth’s reviews are, as you might expect, insightful, well written and at times very amusing, and he was clearly knowledgeable about Japanese film history. Of the films he reviews, however, I have seen just four (Ran, Grave of the Fireflies, Akira and Kiki’s Delivery Service), heard of just three more, and even if I was inspired by his reviews to see more, the majority would not be easy to track down, even here in Japan.

So much as I admired the film reviews, to me they were rather abstract, and as I read my way through them, I couldn’t help but think that Harris had compiled This Great Stage of Fools in the wrong order, for as any music fan knows, the basic principle when deciding the running order of an album is to put the hits at the beginning, while here he seemed to be starting with the obscurities, B-sides and bonus tracks.

The second, third and fourth sections of the book are much more the kind of thing we have come to expect from Booth, being a combination of eyewitness accounts of Japanese festivals, essays about folk songs which aren’t a million miles away from being travel pieces themselves, a biography of the shamisen player Chikuzan Takahashi – whose birthplace, the Tsugaru Peninsula in Aomori Prefecture, might reasonably be described as Booth’s spiritual home – and an account of a walk across Shikoku.

The latter was commissioned by the Japan Airlines magazine Winds, and makes for a satisfying addition to The Roads to Sata, being nothing more pretentious than a day-by-day diary, with descriptions of the people he meets, the places he stays and the toenails he loses along the way. I wonder if he had planned to flesh it out at some point with some historical, cultural and geographical detail, although it also made me feel sad that Booth never walked the Henro Pilgrimage around 88 of Shikoku’s shrines, which would have been the ideal subject for one of his travel books.

(Parenthetically, I have myself crossed the Minokoshi Pass below Mt. Tsurugi in Shikoku  – where Booth gets into a drunken karaoke battle with a fellow diner – and by that point the village just below it was home to an art installation that makes a very telling point about the decrease in number and increase in average age of the Japanese, and about their seemingly inexorable movement from rural to urban centres of population.)

So with its sketches of local people and unusual goings on, its dancing, devils, myths and legends, the middle section of This Great Stage of Fools is reassuringly familiar, but it is in section five – entitled Going Hence – that Harris’s reasons for ordering the book as he did become apparent.

For the end of This Great Stage of Fools is about Booth’s end – in both senses of the word, in fact, as his terminal illness originated in his colon, and probably the funniest passage in the book is his account of two visits to Tokyo Medical and Dental University Hospital, the first of which involves a nurse taking a stool sample with only a curtained screen separating them from a hundred or so other people in the waiting room, and the second a doctor questioning him about his bowel movements as a similarly inquisitive queue of patients sits within earshot.

Indeed, Booth’s humour here is as dry as a half-litre bottle of Asahi, and while for the most part Going Hence is either played for laughs or avoids sentimentality and self-pity, one can only imagine the pain – both physical and psychological – that Booth was going through at the time.

So the writing in This Great Stage of Fools becomes more personal as it progresses, and therefore better and better, and the more I read, the more I realised that the only possible place for an account of Booth’s final days would be in the final pages of the collection. And for that reason, to put the film reviews after this, or to shuffle them with the travel and cultural pieces, would never work.

In any case, an insight into Booth’s illness was what I had wanted to read more than anything else, ever since his brief reference to it on the final page of Looking for the Lost. But why should that be so? Well, I suppose to myself and many other Japanophiles, Booth is a hero of sorts, and because of his untimely death – the details of which most of us were until now entirely ignorant – he has the allure of a kind of gaijin James Dean: someone who lived fast, died young and left a good-looking corpse. Well, OK, so it was more like living within the speed limit, dying in middle-age and leaving a ruddily-complexioned, British-looking corpse, but whereas Booth’s death was in no way glamorous, the very fact that it happened lent him an air of mystery that writers like Will Ferguson, Donald Richie or Leslie Downer, for example (and with apologies to all three), do not have.

And more than that, while I abhor the whole concept of celebrity culture – or as it’s referred to here in Japan, geinohkai (芸能界 / げいのうかい) – I can’t help but be curious about the personal life of the people I admire. So while Booth doesn’t appear to have been someone who made any particular effort to keep his private life hidden, there is something rather thrilling, and at the same time cathartic, about reading the final section of This Great Stage of Fools, because we have at long last been granted a glimpse of the human being behind the books that we love. (Again parenthetically: it is interesting to note that even in an era that pre-dated the instant communication of the internet, Booth received his fair share of hate mail in the form of handwritten letters.)

But for me at least, it is not just these things that make This Great Stage of Fools so important, and by way of explanation, you will have to allow me to wander off along one of those side roads I was talking about at the beginning of this post.

My father was born into a wealthy family and went to a reputable public school (Charterhouse, no less – the Alma Mater of people like Robert Baden Powell, David Dimbleby, Peter Gabriel and, er, Jeremy Hunt), but essentially dropped out of the system at eighteen, finding employment in a succession of part-time and temporary jobs. When he met my mother he was running secondhand bookshop in Bristol, and after they separated he instead travelled the country as a member of the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association. He was also – like his father before him, and as I would subsequently become – an aspiring (i.e. failed) writer, and while I have yet to find the time to decipher his practically illegible handwriting, at one point wrote a full-length autobiography, as well as a good deal of romantic poetry (that is in the romantic tradition, as opposed to the lovey-dovey one). In the late eighties he decided to quit the bookselling and go back to school, securing a place at the now defunct Coleg Harlech in west Wales, and while he did, as far as I can remember, complete the course and have ambitions of becoming a university lecturer, this coincided with his diagnosis with skin cancer.

Although he didn’t fill me in on many of the details, it would seem that he contracted the disease while on a walking holiday in the south of France, and by the time he went to have a mole which had appeared on face looked at by a doctor, the cancer had already spread too far for there to be any hope of a cure. After an operation to remove tumours in his neck and shoulder, a round or two of chemotherapy (which he described as ‘like having malaria’), and a rather desperate (desperate for him because it was so out of character) attempt at a kind of detox diet cancer treatment, he passed away in the summer of 1990.

Because my parents separated when I was about four years old, I didn’t see much of my father. He travelled around a lot and even when he was nearby, sometimes preferred not to visit because his relationship with my mother could be rather strained. At the end of his life, too, he was living a long way away, and by that point I was a miserable teenager who rarely left the house and wanted to have as little to do with my parents as possible. So while I was upset when I learned of his death and did of course go to the funeral, I’m not sure that I ever properly grieved for him.

Cut to about twenty-five years later, and I was given a batch of mp3 files by my brother, digitised from some dictaphone tapes which had been languishing in the attic at our mother’s house. The tapes were recorded by my father on the aforementioned walking tour (actually tours – as it turns out he went on two, in successive summers in the late eighties), and my brother recommended that I listen to them.

I had been aware of the tapes’ existence from the time my father died, but even once the recordings were in my iTunes library, was hesitant to listen to them. There were various reasons for this, the main one being that the experience could turn into a kind of morbid pantomime, with myself as the audience urging him – in vain and unheard – to use some sunblock or buy a bigger hat, as he – oblivious to his fate – mentioned how hot and sunny it was.

Then, about two and a half years ago, I fell ill myself. This was no terminal illness, and unlike Alan Booth, for example, I wasn’t given a 30% chance of five years to live. I didn’t even necessarily need to see a doctor (although I did consult several), let alone have chemotherapy, an operation, or a rectal examination within earshot of a room full of fellow patients. But it did count as a kind of mid-life crisis, and for a while at least, turned my entire life upside down, cause me to re-examine what that life really meant, and to quite fundamentally change me as a human being.

So while this is my first post to muzuhashi.com since 2016, the not-so-gory details of my illness can be found here, here, here and here, in a series of guest posts that James at the ALT Insider blog was kind enough to carry – probably the most I have written on any subject in that entire time.

But anyway, one of many new things I began doing in order to recover from my illness was to take a walk every evening after the children had gone to bed, and after a year of doing so with just my own thoughts for company, I dug out my headphones and started listening to music, podcasts and audio books. This eventually led me to my father’s recordings, and what I found in them was, in its own rather understated way, a revelation.

During the two walking holidays, whenever my father had something interesting to say, and sometimes when he was simply making his way along a footpath or a road, he would press the record button on his dictaphone. He talked about the scenery, the weather, the food he had eaten, where he had been and where he was going, and he also talked about himself. About how motivated, lazy, positive, negative, wide awake or worn out he was, and about his life: his work, his plans to go back into education, and his relationship with my brother and I.

So not only was this a voice I had not heard for nearly thirty years, it was also expounding on topics that even at the time I didn’t hear him talk about. At various points in the recordings he wonders how my brother and I are doing, reminisces about things that happened when we were growing up, and confesses that he would like to see us more. He also describes his regret at having wasted so much time worrying about his relationships, both with my mother and with subsequent girlfriends (apart from the woman he was living with when he died, these were women I had absolutely no idea existed during his lifetime, and while I believe I may have met one or two, they were never introduced to me as such).

Occasionally my father also recorded himself in conversation, and while he doesn’t appear to have been a fluent French speaker, he knew enough, as the saying goes, to get by. This was another aspect of his life that I had no real knowledge of, and particularly fascinating because it made me realise how I must sound when I speak – and struggle – with Japanese, both literally in the sense that our voices are similar, and conceptually in the sense that we both put ourselves in a position where we had to use a foreign language on the natives.

At one point in the recordings, he leaves the dictaphone running while using a hotel pay phone, and as I listened it took me a minute or two to realise that the person on the other end of the line was me. At the time I was sixteen, and had just arrived back from a school exchange visit to Hungary (which as it happened was emotionally tumultuous, and my first real brush with the depression that reappeared during my more recent illness). The conversation is fairly mundane, as we share travellers’ tales and he tells me when he expects to be back in the UK, and towards the end of the call he refers to me by a nickname that I had no memory of him using (no, not Muzuhashi, in case you were wondering).

In the background of the recordings, too, you can hear the sounds my father heard as he made his way through the south of France: tractors, passing cars, church bells, birdsong, buskers, and a group of customers singing what appears to be a rousing rugby song in a bar in Marseille. You can also hear his breathing and his footsteps, and as I walked the backstreets of small-town Ibaraki at nine or ten in the evening, these synchronised with my own, and this recording of the past was overlaid with the present moment of my own experience, my father’s words and my own thoughts about them overlapping, intermingling, and reverberating back and forth across the decades.

My father does indeed refer to the heat – to the sunshine, his sensitive skin, and how there is a patch of sunburn on his forehead that won’t heal up – and part of me wanted to call out to him, to warn him of the dangers, and to urge him to see a doctor sooner than he did, so that his life might instead be saved, and our relationship able to grow and develop; that he might still be with us today, and interested in my own adventure abroad.

But more than anything else, listening to the tapes was miraculous, because apart from one or two home videos, they are the only place in which his voice is preserved, and even though the mp3 files had been sitting in my iTunes library for the best part of a decade, hearing his voice again so unexpectedly was joyful, fascinating, moving, mysterious, and so many other things all at the same time.

At the time I listened to the recordings I was seeing (well, having video chats with on Skype) a psychotherapist, and relating to her the experience of hearing my father’s voice again, and of finding out so much that was new to me about his life and the way that he felt, brought my sessions with her to a natural and satisfying conclusion. It gave me the motivation I needed to move on with my life: not quite cured, but with a sense that the illness I had been dealing with for so long was fading into the background. And while it is somewhat of an exaggeration, reading This Great Stage of Fools – and in particular its final section – was a similar experience: revelatory because it was one that I never thought I would be granted.

Both Booth and my father died in their late forties from cancer that was diagnosed too late, and while their journeys through life were very different, both shared a passion for walking and a passion for words, so that for me, and if only in a small way, Booth is a father figure, and I realise now that one of the reasons I like his writing – and one of the reasons, no doubt, that my review of one of his books resonated so much with readers of this blog – is precisely because of this, so that when I wrote about Booth, I was also writing about my father, and about myself.

Booth’s words in the final section of This Great Stage of Fools are both personal and emotional, and as well as mentioning his family for the first time, he recounts a visit to India during which he spent time volunteering for Mother Theresa and the Missionaries of Charity.

Here Booth washes blankets in the appalling conditions of the Nirmal Hriday Hospice for terminally ill destitutes, and becomes a kind of surrogate father to patients at the Shishu Bhavan children’s hospital. What he describes is quite unlike the boozy, breezy bar chats of The Roads to Sata or Looking for the Lost, and in doing so, he reveals himself to be both compassionate and selfless. In the context of what was to come, one might also suggest that the experience prepared him for the suffering that was about to intrude into his life, and bestowed on him the humility he would need to confront his own mortality.

I recently read a manga by Yoko Takahashi called Gaikokujin no Daigimon (外国人の大疑問 / The Big Questions for Foreigners), which among other things contains the results of a questionnaire given to expats. In answer to the question, ‘What do you dislike about Japan?’ as well as such responses as, ‘Rush hour trains full of people’ and ‘The rent is expensive’, some people said, ‘Japan is very convenient, but for some reason I feel lonely.’ This is a sentiment to which I am sure a lot of expats can relate, and while in Going Hence Booth navigates his way through terminal cancer with the usual articulacy and good humour, for the first time in his writing, I sensed that he, too, may have been lonely living in Japan.

I wonder if Booth’s prodigious drinking was one way in which he dealt with this, and another reason I am drawn to his writing is because my father, too, was a drinker. But while my father was an alcoholic – in the sense that his personality changed for the worse when he drank – Booth really did appear to be a social drinker, and rather than alcohol being something that held him back, it enabled him to meet a huge variety of people, to communicate with them (often in Japanese, of course), and to pass on what he learned from them to his readers.

This Great Stage of Fools will almost certainly be the final published work by Booth, although there would appear to be even more writing of his that is yet to be collected. For example, one of the comments on my first Alan Booth post mentioned a travel piece for which Booth ‘went “undercover” on a Hato Tour Bus, seeing the sights of Tokyo with a group of other foreigners,’ which I for one would love to read, and his wife Su-Chzeng has an archive of his papers that will hopefully find a home in a university library or similar.

Both Su-Chzeng and Mirai – her daughter with Booth – spoke at the launch party for This Great Stage of Fools, and while I was unable to attend in person, I listened to Fexluz’s audio recording of the party on one of my evening walks. Alongside many wonderful tributes to and recollections of Booth, Mirai brings an unexpected new perspective to her reading of a passage from This Great Stage of Fools, investing her father’s words with drama, vivacity, and a quite different sense of humour from that which comes across on the page. Listening to this made me see Booth’s writing in a new light, and it heartens me to think that while Booth is no longer with us, his spirit lives on in his books, which will surely be read, enjoyed and reinterpreted for many years to come.

Alan Booth

Alan Booth moved to Japan in his twenties and lived here for more than half his life, until his untimely demise from cancer at the age of 46. On the face of it he would appear to have written just two books, and one of them was published posthumously, so there must be scope for a further collection of his journalism and travel writing, of which there was sufficient for him to earn a living (he doesn’t appear to have worked in any other capacity in Japan, apart from a brief stint as an English teacher when he first arrived here).

The Roads To Sata is Booth’s most well known book, but while the task he undertook in order to write it – namely, walking the entire length of Japan from its northernmost to southernmost points – is impressive, in my humble opinion, Looking For The Lost is a finer literary achievement. Most importantly, when he went on his first, epic trek, Booth had only been in the country for seven years, and while his Japanese was already very good and his grasp of the country’s culture wide-ranging, by the time he went on the three shorter walks on which Looking For The Lost is based, he had at least another fifteen years of linguistic expertise and cultural knowledge to draw upon. So while The Roads To Sata is an account of his travels from A to B, and largely concerns itself with the people he meets and the places he visits along the way, in Looking For The Lost he follows in the footsteps of three historical figures.

The first is Osamu Dazai, who was born into a rich family, became a famous writer and ended up committing suicide. The second is Saigo Takamori, who was a military and political luminary in Meiji times, but made a few enemies along the way and ended up dying in heroic and / or tragic (depending on how you look at it) samurai-style circumstances. And the third are the Heike, not so much a figure as a group of figures: a military clan who wielded power the best part of a thousand years ago, and who having been defeated were hounded from their homes, never to be seen again.

Dazai is a particularly interesting figure in relation to Booth, as both were prodigious drinkers. Booth is very much aware of this, and refers to a review of The Roads To Sata in which his journey was described as ‘a 2000-mile pub crawl’. Indeed, he appears to spend almost the entire time drunk, to the extent that you wonder a) how he managed to remember what happened while he was on his travels and b) how he managed to stay sober for long enough to write an entire book about them. The summer of his north-to-south walk appears to have been particularly hot – even in Hokkaido and by Japanese standards – so one has to assume that quite apart from being sunburned, bug-bitten and with blisters on his blisters, he must have been completely dehydrated from dawn until dusk, and for the entire six months the walk took him to complete. For Booth, drinking is as matter-a-fact a part of everyday life as breathing and eating, and in Looking For The Lost is referred to entirely casually: a few bottles of beer for lunch here, several flasks of saké for dinner there. Goodness knows, if he had managed to survive the cancer, liver failure would surely have picked him off before too long.

But anyway, while Dazai’s pub crawl took him round the northern tip of Honshu, through a bleak and remote region called Tsugaru that Booth makes no attempt at all to glamourise, Takamori’s journey was around Kyushu, which is a particularly attractive part of Japan. Perhaps the most interesting point raised by Booth’s account is that while Kyushu is by no means bleak, due to the inexorable shift in the Japanese population from the rural to the urban, it too is becoming remote – on one day of walking in particular, he sees an average of approximately one other human being per hour, most of whom are old enough to be retired. This was something I came across when I travelled around Hokkaido, where the population demographic is getting older and older, and whatever children there are disappear to live in Sapporo or Tokyo as soon as they get the chance.

While Takamori was no alcoholic, he makes an excellent starting point for Booth’s reflections on the Japanese psyche. Takamori was one of the last of the old-style samurai, and his character encapsulates many ironies and contradictions, the most amusing of which is the fact that he almost certainly suffered from a medical condition that made his testicles swell to an enormous size, to the extent that he had to be carried around by his minions on a sedan chair. Again, Booth’s writing here is greatly enhanced by the insight he has into the subtleties of Japanese history and culture.

I was reading an internet forum the other day in which Booth was criticised for a Theroux-esque tendency to complain about things and make bitchy comments about Japan and its people, and while it’s true that he does succumb at times to what one assumes was the fashionable travel writing style of the time, he of all people – rather than an ignorant first-timer with nothing but a Rough Guide and a beginner’s phrasebook in their backpack – has earned the right to be critical. Before following in Takamori’s footsteps, for example, he has read – in the original Japanese – pretty much every piece of biographical writing there is on his subject, to the extent that he is confident enough to suggest his own theories about exactly where Takamori went, how he went there and why. (Again, this is something that cannot be said of The Roads To Sata, and Booth backs up numerous theories that contradict the accepted Japanese view with hard evidence: for example, his etymological take on the word ‘kokeshi’ – the wooden dolls of Japanese children with pudding-bowl haircuts – is particularly fascinating, not to mention rather spooky, and by the by, draws on an excellent Japanese book that has been translated into English, Memories Of Silk And Straw by Junichi Saga.)

The Heike, though, are more elusive than either Dazai or Takamori, as there is little documentation about them, and in any case, their story is so old that it has long since begun to blur at the edges and to move into the realms of myth and legend (after less than a century, Booth notes that Takamori is already well on his way to being perceived as a myth – even a deity – rather than a real historical figure). What Booth teases out of this is a meditation on the relative transience of Japanese culture and its artifacts. While it is true to say there are very few old buildings in the country as a whole, Booth manages to track some down that date back hundreds of years, and whose thatched roofs and snake-ridden rooms serve as vital proof of Japan’s history, and as a bridge to its mythical past, which may or may not have been peopled by clans such as the Heike. (His questioning of the modern Japanese assertion that as a race they are somehow purer than those of most other nations is also worthy of examination, particularly for an outsider. I for one was unaware that besides the Ainu of Hokkaido, several other indigenous tribes pre-existed the Japanese race as we know it today.)

Oddly, one of the only jarring moments in Looking For The Lost is its reference on the final page to Booth’s fatal illness. I would be intrigued to read an account of his battle with cancer (although perhaps the confessional style didn’t suit his writing – Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea, for example, is much more personal than either of Booth’s books), but the way in which he suddenly shoe-horns it into his conclusion rather detracts from what has come before.

It is of course ironic that Booth should have lived in a country with the longest life expectancy in the world, and whose excellent medical system is renowned for picking up serious illness early enough to enable successful treatment, when his own illness went undetected until it was too late. What a shame that he did not live to produce more great travel writing about the country that became his home.

Mount Yamizo 八溝山

A couple of weeks ago I had a moment of enlightenment, or satori (悟り), as they say in Japanese. At the time I was sitting on a mossy rock, next to a pool of water, in a forest, on a mountaintop, on a cold, damp night, in the pitch dark, and with a plastic bottle in my hand. If you’re wondering how such an unlikely set of circumstances led to a transcendental experience, allow me to explain.

Ask most of its residents what is the highest mountain in Ibaraki Prefecture and they are likely to say Tsukuba, when in fact the correct answer is Mount Yamizo (八溝山 / literally ‘eight ditches mountain’). Yamizo straddles the border with neighbouring Fukushima in the far north of the prefecture, and while it may lack the attractively pointy profile of Tsukuba – not to mention its cable car – it is 145 metres higher and boasts a paved road all the way to its summit.

Noticing this on my dog-eared old Mapple road map one day, I worked out that it would be possible to cycle to Yamizo from our apartment, camp out for a night, get up early to see the sunrise and then cycle back the following morning.

My cycle tours in Japan have been getting progressively shorter over the years – six weeks in 2005, five weeks in 2008 and ten days in 2011 – and with a one-year-old daughter and a son on the way (apologies if this is the first you’ve heard – I was going to write a ‘Mrs M is pregnant again!’ blog post but never got round to it), this seemed like a good idea for a final tour before I become so busy changing nappies and mixing formula that I never have time to leave the house again.

So having negotiated with Mrs M for permission to abandon her and M Jr for the weekend, I set off at 8.30am Saturday 2nd November, when the weather was warm, the autumn colours were just starting to show, and Route 118 between Mito and Daigo Town was busy with sightseers.

As well as the Fukuroda waterfall (袋田の滝), Daigo is famous for its apples, and in the orchards that lined the way the trees were weighed down with large, ripe, red and green ones (in order to make the apples as large, ripe, red and green as possible, silver sheets are placed on the ground to reflect extra sunlight from beneath them).

The woman behind the counter at Daigo tourist information centre said that a campsite marked on the Mapple as being close to the summit of Yamizo had long since closed for business, and I told her that I would probably nojuku (野宿 / sleep rough) instead. While she was a little surprised by this, I reasoned that, in the same way mountaineers do before they set off on a climbing expedition, it would be a good idea to tell someone where I was going in case I got into trouble.

At a crossroads on Route 118 not far north of Daigo there is a road sign showing the way to Yamizo, along with a family-run convenience store the woman at the information centre had said would be my last chance to stock up on supplies for the night ahead. Among other things I purchased their last three onigiri (rice balls), and had a steaming hot bowl of soba at the very small – and very cheap – noodle restaurant next door.

Route 28 winds its way through a succession of small villages in the Yamizo River valley, and past farms whose main crop – where precious little land is level enough to accommodate rice fields – is green tea. A dog out for a walk with its owner barked suddenly as I cycled past, straining on the end of its lead to try and take a bite out of my tyres, and a stooped old lady in Wellington boots, a bonnet and a pinny stopped me for a chat, telling me to ‘Ganbarina’ (頑張りな / ‘Do your best’) about five times before she let me carry on up the road.

There were, as it turned out, a couple more places to buy emergency rations, but they were old-style village shops that sold very little in the way of fresh produce. Again I thought it best to let some of the locals know that a strange foreigner would be camping out on the mountain that night, so engaged the shopkeepers in conversation, and came away with two over-ripe bananas, a tomato and a tube of Smarties for my troubles.

Just as one of the shopkeepers had described it, the road up the mountainside was marked by a large wooden torii (鳥居 / shrine gateway).

Along with this little fellow dispensing free spring water.

Knowing that I would have a long time to spend on the summit with nothing to do, I had made a point of dallying on the way, and reached the torii at three in the afternoon. In theory this left me with just about the right amount of time to get to the top before darkness fell, although in practice it is much, much easier to cycle uphill first thing in the morning when one’s legs are fresh, and the shape of this two-day tour gave me no alternative but to tackle its most arduous stretch in late afternoon.

From being on the gentle slope of Route 28, I suddenly found myself on a 13.5% incline (that’s about 1 in 7 in old money), which aside from a couple of brief interludes where the road levelled off, barely let up for the entire 8km to the top, and around what felt like several hundred hairpin bends.

Actually there were more like twenty-five, but I was constantly weaving back and forth in an effort to find the line of least resistance – ie. the line of least steepness – and to say that my lungs felt as if they were bursting out of my chest would be an understatement: rather, it felt as if all of my major organs were about to explode and splatter themselves across the road in the manner of a zombie film fight scene.

Often on a climb there comes a point where you find a rhythm and forget about the physical exertion, and if that had happened I would have had my moment of satori right there and then. As it was, though, rather than enduring pain and suffering in order to achieve Zen enlightenment, here I never got beyond the pain and suffering part.

I stopped to catch my breath, eat my Smarties and mutter to myself, ‘Jesus fecking Christ this is steep!’ approximately fifteen times on the way up, and the only thing that prevented me from walking instead of riding was the fact that the last of the day’s hikers and sightseers were simultaneously on their way back down the mountain. The indignity of being seen pushing my bike along by its handlebars would have been too much to bear, so I gritted my teeth, fixed my gaze on the road ahead and strained to turn the pedals, in the hope that the procession of passersby would be impressed with my true-grit, true-Brit, never-say-die spirit of empire-building excellence.

Finally, after the best part of an hour and a half of torture, and just as I had switched on my lights to combat the encroaching gloom, first one car park and then another materialised – both now empty – and the road reached a dead end just below two radio transmitters, the Yamizo-miné shrine and this impressively castle-like observation tower.

By now the skies had clouded over and there wasn’t much to observe, although at one point a canvas-covered army truck drove up and three members of the jiéitai (自衛隊 / Japan’s self-defence force) dressed in full camouflage gear jumped out. They appeared to be looking for something – or perhaps someone – but after couple of minutes of running around and shouting orders at each other, gave up, got back in the truck and drove off again.

There was a patch of grass in the lee of the observation tower where I could have pitched my tent, but after a little more investigating I found that one of the sliding doors to this outbuilding had been left unlocked.

Inside there was a cubby hole at one end stocked with chairs, mattresses and even a heater, although I resolved not to use them as I didn’t want to make a nuisance of myself, and in any case, had made a point of bringing as much clothing and bedding as I could stuff into my panniers.

I parked my bike beneath the eaves before unloading it (I made sure to take off my shoes at the door, of course), and soon it was time to settle down for my evening meal – such as it was – of three rice balls, two bananas, a jam-filled bread roll, a bag of peanuts and a tomato.

One rather important thing was missing, though, and that was fluids.

As well as boasting one of the Bando-sanjusan-kasho (板東三十三カ所), thirty-three shrines in the Kanto area that form part of a 1300km pilgrimage, Yamizo is listed among the Meisui-hyakusen (名水百選), one hundred of the most attractive and well-preserved springs in the country. Assuming water would be plentiful, I therefore hadn’t bothered to bring any drinks with me, and set off with my water bottle to find Ginshohsui (銀性水 – literally ‘silver gender water’), the highest of Yamizo’s five springs.

Onii-san had lent me a miner’s helmet-style headlight, which illuminated a cone-shaped shaft of misty air before me as I walked, and a wooden sign told me that ginshohsui was just seventy metres away, although having expected to hear the sound of water gushing forth from the ground, I was greeted instead with silence.

There at a bend in the path was a shallow pool of water with a grey plastic drainpipe poking out from the hillside above it. It wasn’t so much a mountain spring as a murky puddle, and by the headlight I could see a beetle-like insect scuttle its way through the carpet of rotting leaves at the bottom – in other words, the water in the pool was just that little bit too stagnant to be trusted as drinkable.

Perhaps, I thought, the other four springs would be more gushing and geyser-like, but I didn’t fancy hiking even further downhill only to be similarly underwhelmed. More to the point, I didn’t fancy hiking all the way back up again on legs already fragile from the climb.

Looking and listening more closely, it became apparent that there was indeed a tiny amount of water trickling from the drainpipe, so if I was to avoid death by dehydration – well, OK, maybe not death, but certainly a further dose of pain and suffering – my only option was to sit here and wait as my water bottle filled.

Having positioned myself on a moss-covered rock at the edge of the pool, I realised that the water was flowing so slowly that rather than fall directly downwards, it was first of all snaking its way around the rim and back along the outside of the pipe, and that the sweet spot – that is to say the ideal position beneath which to hold my water bottle – wasn’t fixed, but moved ever so slightly depending on the subtlest variations in the flow of water. This meant that I had to keep as still and as quiet as possible, all the while listening for the dripping sound in the bottle: if the sound stopped I moved the bottle a smidgen one way or the other until it became audible again.

I was still thirsty from the climb, so at the first couple of attempts waited just a few minutes before gulping down whatever water had accumulated. Eventually, though, I decided that one full bottle – about 750ml – ought to be enough to see me through the night. I found a more comfortable position on a different but equally mossy rock, held out my right arm (it was at this point that I was thankful for my over-developed triceps, the result of years spent holding a boom pole with a microphone on the end of it for film and TV shoots), and since I didn’t want to waste the batteries, turned off my headlight.

The trees’ swaying silhouettes were visible against the night sky, and their leaves rustled in the wind or crackled like crisp packets as they were blown along the forest floor. I listened for any sound that might be regular – the footsteps of a wild boar, for example, or even a domesticated hiker – but there was none. At one point I felt the tiniest movement of air as a bat flew past my face and circled the pool, its wings a blurred flash in the semi-darkness, but to all intents and purposes I was alone, and it occurred to me this was the most isolated I had been in my entire life, with no other human being within a radius of several kilometres.

So why am I here? I thought to myself. Why am I sitting on a rock in the freezing cold with my arm about to fall off from the strain of holding a water bottle beneath the trickle of water from a plastic drainpipe? Why am I about to spend the night on a lonely mountaintop, when I could be spending it in my living room, in front of the telly, before climbing into a hot bath and going to sleep on a fluffy futon beneath a warm duvet?

Why, for a holiday, of course!

OK, so this might not be most people’s idea of a holiday, and I had no luxuries to speak of: no bath, no shower, no TV, no heated toilet seat with bidet facility (although there was a small, basic toilet block next to the radio transmitters that despite the isolated location had been stocked with a fresh supply of toilet paper), no hot food, no hot water, and as it turned out, not much in the way of cold water, either.

I was here for the challenge, I suppose, and for the view: as well as the sunrise and the surrounding countryside, with any luck I would get to see Mount Fuji – more than 200km distant – the following morning.

Then as the trees continued to sway in the breeze, the leaves continued to dance around the forest floor and the dripping sound changed in pitch as my water bottle gradually filled, I once more thought to myself, why am I here? Except this time it was in the larger, philosophical,  Capital Letters, Why Am I Here and What Is The Meaning Of Life? sense.

In my previous capacity as someone who held a boom pole with a microphone on the end of it for a living, I spent many happy hours driving around the UK in vans full of camera equipment, usually with a fellow technician or two to keep me company, and one particular conversation – which took place, if my memory serves me correctly, on the A13 just outside Southend – stuck in my mind.

Myself and the camera assistant were somewhere in our late twenties, while the cameraman was somewhere in his early forties, and after listening to us talking about our lives for a while, he chipped in.
‘I know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘You’re working in showbiz, you go to some pretty nice places and meet some pretty glamorous people. You’re earning a bit of money, you’ve got your flat in London, your Ikea furniture, a big TV and a nice stereo system. You go to the pub with your mates and you go to the cinema to watch a movie. You think you’re pretty happy, don’t you? I mean, you think you’ve got it sorted.’
The assistant and I looked at each other with smiles of recognition.
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘As it happens you’ve just described my life.’
‘How did you know?’ said the camera assistant.
‘Because I was like that myself once. But eventually I decided that I needed to settle down. I found someone nice, got married and had kids. And kids,’ said the cameraman, ‘are the missing piece of the puzzle.’

In actual fact I had always suspected this to be the case, and even when I was young and found the prospect of having children utterly terrifying, deep down I somehow instinctively knew that one day I would change my mind, or perhaps just accidentally start a family and realise that it wasn’t such a hideous ordeal after all. It wasn’t until I became a father, though, that I truly understood what my colleague was talking about, although this, too, was as much to do with finding someone who was willing to be the mother of my children, rather than with deciding that I wanted to have them in the first place.

Bringing up M Jr is by turns miraculous, and inspiring, and uplifting, not to mention exhausting (a couple of weeks ago all three of us came down with the norovirus, and one particular night turned into a kind of three-person toilet relay of vomiting and diarrhea).

Witnessing one human being’s journey practically from conception onwards is akin to witnessing the evolution of the entire human race in microcosm. You see them in the womb when they are barely more than a pixel on a computer screen, and, like some pre-historic sea creature, yet to set foot on dry land (this, incidentally, is one of the most infinitely mysterious things about babies, in that they are first of all amphibious, inhaling amniotic fluid as if through a set of gills, and only transform into air-breathing mammals when they are halfway out of the womb). You hear their heartbeat and watch as their limbs and features develop, and then once they emerge you feel the grip of their hand on your finger, and watch them sleep and eat and pee and poo and cry and smile for the very first time.

In evolutionary terms, M Jr is currently at the caveman stage – or should I say cavegirl – in the sense that she is standing on her hind legs, using rudimentary language, gestures and tools. She hasn’t yet started a fire, invented the wheel or written the complete works of Shakespeare, but that will all happen in due course. In the meantime she can already listen, learn, watch, copy, remember, emote, give and receive affection, accept or refuse requests, ask and answer questions. All human life and all of human history has somehow been distilled into this one, tiny being with a wobbly walk and a voice like a slightly less robotic version of R2D2’s, and in this sense just one of its members embodies the hopes and fears of the human race as a whole.

All of which contemplation brought me back round to my original, literal, lower-case question, namely, why am I here? If my wife, daughter and unborn son are so important to me, why am I sitting on a mossy rock, on a cold mountaintop, in near darkness, waiting for a water bottle to fill very, very slowly, before sleeping on my own in a bare outbuilding, with not another living soul for miles around? And asking the question like that made it a little more difficult to answer.

I suppose everyone, to coin a phrase, needs a break from time to time, and even though I love being with my family, I also happen to enjoy being on my own. Cycle tours, however long or short, are my way of doing this, what is referred to in Japanese as kibuntenkan (気分転換), a change of scene. Recently, for example, Mrs M has been putting M Jr in a nursery a couple of times a week, not just because she is tired from being pregnant and looking after a one year old, but because she wants to have some time in her life when she is something other than ‘just’ a mother.

OK, so maybe this is just my excuse for being a good-for-nothing, layabout husband; maybe all of that Meaning Of Life stuff is a bit over the top, and maybe I really was just sitting on a rock waiting for a water bottle to fill, nothing deeper or more meaningful than that. But regardless, there was something meditative about the experience, and by that point any anxiety I had at the prospect of spending the night cold and alone had dissipated.

I couldn’t tell you exactly how long I had been there – probably no more than thirty or forty minutes – but eventually I realised that the dripping noise had stopped, and when I poked a finger into the mouth of my water bottle, that it had filled to overflowing.

In exactly the same way that it is possible, on a long climb, to get into such a rhythm that you zone out and forget you are turning the pedals at all, so I had ceased to be concerned about how long it was going to take for the bottle to fill, and ceased to listen for the change in pitch in the sound of the dripping water as it did so. Rested, enlightened and saved from dehydration, I screwed the cap back on my water bottle, switched on my headlight and walked back to the summit of Mount Yamizo to have dinner.

I had planned to call Mrs M and tell her how I was getting on, but there was no signal on my mobile phone and even an email I tried to send didn’t make it through the ether, so once I had eaten, all I had to keep me company was a single comic book.

Upon discovering that I was a fan of Japanese manga, a deputy headmaster at one of the schools where I teach suggested that I read one of the classics, namely Hi-no-tori (火の鳥 / The Phoenix) by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka is described in Wikipedia as the ‘god of manga’, and Hi-no-tori as his ‘life’s work’, and it tells the story of a phoenix which is said to grant eternal life to anyone who can capture it and drink its blood.

Having read the first of its twelve volumes, I cannot recommend it highly enough, and what follows is my translation of a scene I read that night. In it, the young huntsman Nagi has tracked the Phoenix to the volcano where it nests, and just as he is about to begin firing arrows at it, hears the firebird’s voice in his head.

Nagi: Why is it you’re the only one that gets to live forever, while all of us humans have to die? That’s so unfair!

Phoenix: Unfair, you say? What are you hoping for? The power to avoid death? Or would you rather have good fortune while you’re still alive?

Nagi: I don’t give a damn about good fortune! But if I can live forever like you, that’s good fortune, isn’t it?

Phoenix: Look down at your feet, Nagi. Can you see the ants? They’re alive, aren’t they? And they live for just six months. The life of a mayfly is shorter still. Even if a mayfly reproduces, it lives for just three days. Nobody calls that bad fortune, though.

Nagi: So what does a stupid little insect know that we don’t?

Phoenix: The lifetime of an insect may be ordained by nature, but they are brought up properly, they eat, they love each other, they give birth to their young, they are fulfilled, and then they die. Human beings live longer than the insects, longer than the fish in the sea, longer than dogs and cats and monkeys. In the course of a lifetime, if you can find happiness, isn’t that good fortune enough?

Nagi: You’re not making any sense! And anyway, I’m going to shoot you down.

Phoenix: Whether or not you understand, Nagi, you will still die one day.

Nagi: Before I do, I’ll be sure to drink your blood!

I’m not ashamed to say that I went to sleep that night with tears in my eyes, because as I read Hi-no-tori, I realised that I have found happiness in my life, and this is as much as I can ask for. My alarm woke me at five-thirty the next morning, and I packed up my belongings as quickly as I could – the sun was due to rise at six – before stepping outside.

I had been alone for almost exactly twelve hours when an early-morning sightseer joined me in the observation tower, and we lamented the fact that even on such a fine day, this was as close as we would get to seeing Mount Fuji.

Then at about seven-thirty I threw a coin in the collection box at Yamizo-miné shrine and prayed that my children will grow up happy and healthy, before drinking the remainder of my precious spring water and freewheeling my way back down the mountain.

A walk in the woods

Before embarking on my cycling-tour-stroke-endurance-test to Sado Island last summer, I decided to build up my stamina with a spot of hiking. On a typically sweltering August afternoon, I parked the car at a michi-no-eki (道の駅 / roadside services), took a precautionary photo of the route – as displayed on a nearby information board – and headed west along a narrow valley road. The footpath I wanted was so well hidden that I walked straight past it the first time, and having doubled back, found it to be overgrown and strewn with fallen branches. Fortunately, a local hiking group had been considerate enough to tie lengths of day-glo pink ribbon to trees along the way, so the main obstacle to my progress was the enormous number of spider’s webs, seemingly all of them at head height. To be honest, apart from swatting away at these with a makeshift walking stick, there wasn’t much to keep me distracted, and in well over an hour of yomping the only thing I found worthy of a photograph was this mushroom – quite an impressive mushroom, it has to be said, but a mushroom nonetheless.

I passed the highest point on the trail – the 275-metre peak of Mount Shirazawa-fuji – almost without realising, and soon arrived at the Shirayama Jinja (白山神社 / White Mountain Shrine), which was as shrouded in foliage as everything else in the vicinity.

While its surrounding stone walls – well, they were more like battlements – had tumbled over in the earthquake, the shrine itself was perfectly intact: originally erected in 1515, Shirayama was burned down in a forest fire in 1862 before being rebuilt in 1880, and there appeared to be at least 132 years’ worth of dust on the floors and furniture inside.

The front steps were the first place I had found that offered enough space to sit down, so I dug out the carton of tea and peanuts choco I had brought with me and took a break. And that would have been it, had I not discovered another, much smaller shrine a few hundred metres further along the trail, tucked away in the mossy recesses of a rocky outcrop.

Konsei-shin (金精神) is a Shinto god of fertility, safe childbirth and happy marriage, and making an offering at a konsei-jinja (金精神社 / konsei shrine) reputedly works as a miracle cure for STDs (thank you, Wikepedia Japan). The kon of konsei means ‘gold’ or ‘shining’, and the sei means, among other things, ‘sperm’ or ‘sexual stamina’. So in the same way that the kintama are one’s ‘golden balls’,  the konsei are, so to speak, one’s ‘golden tadpoles’. Not that you need to know any of this to identify a konsei shrine, as its centrepiece is normally a large phallus – or phalli – made of wood (no laughing at the back there, please), stone or metal.

This tiny shrine had three of them, and while I hadn’t thrown any money into the collection box at Shirayama, I felt that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and tossed a hundred-yen coin into the cave-like cubby hole before saying a prayer.

At the time, Mrs M and I were just about to embark on our first attempt at IUI, and whether or not this unplanned pilgrimage helped things along, I don’t know. Still, the coincidence had a karmic feel to it, and as if to emphasise my good fortune, not long before rejoining the main road to the michi-no-eki, I was finally rewarded with a view.

As a footnote to this story, a couple of weeks later I came within a few hundred metres of a much more renowned konsei shrine, which is apparently a short walk from the Konsei Pass between Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures. While I didn’t realise this at the time, the road from the pass did take me through the Konsei Tunnel – or if you prefer, the Golden Tadpole Tunnel – an act that for its sheer Freudian symbolism must surely have done Mrs M and I some favours.

The Japlish-to-Engrish dictionary

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every J-blogger must one day post a series of photographs depicting hapless, hopeless, surreal and / or otherwise amusing uses of the English language by the Japanese. And after two years as Muzuhashi, so this day has come to pass.

Some of the photos here were taken several years ago, some are of subjects that must surely have been spotted by other J-bloggers, some depict bizarre uses of the Japanese language by the Japanese, and others are merely of oddball stuff that I’ve seen and snapped. So sit back, enjoy the ride and if you are offended by bad grammar, bad punctuation or bad language – or at least, good language that inadvertently sounds bad – look away now.

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(If you liked these, there are many more at the original and best Japlish-based website, engrish.com.)

My Encounters With Alaska by Michio Hoshino

Back in 2004 when I was working for a conversation school in Tokyo, a student of mine had an important business meeting coming up with some foreign clients, and signed up for extra lessons so that he might better understand what was going on without having to be completely reliant on an interpreter. The meeting went well, and by way of thanks, he presented myself and another teacher at the school with gifts. Mine was a book called My Encounters With Alaska (「僕の出会ったアラスカ」) by Michio Hoshino (星野道夫), although it took me another six years of studying Japanese to be able to read it.

Fortunately, it’s a book with plenty of pictures, as Hoshino was a photographer who lived in Alaska for many years, before his untimely demise in 1996 at the hands (or rather, at the paws) of a brown bear, while on an assignment for Japanese TV in Siberia .

Perhaps because in some small way it reminded me of my own experiences of living abroad, I found the first chapter of Hoshino’s book particularly moving, and decided to have a go at translating it into English. Having done so, I now realise how little of it I understood on first reading, so if you have any suggestions for improvements or spot any errors in the translation, feel free to let me know (although this is all on a strictly unofficial basis, as I don’t have any kind of permission to reproduce the text!).

(Hoshino’s homepage, incidentally, can be found here.)

A picture of Shishmaref Village

There was a phone call from Don Ross, the bush pilot.

‘A cameraman from the National Geographic magazine is on his way here. Apparently he’s going to photograph the Caribou migration in the Arctic Circle, so there are a few things he wants to ask you about. Do you think you could go to the hotel for me…? His name is George Mobley.’

The National Geographic deals with nature, geography, indigenous people and history, and it’s the most influential magazine in America. It’s probably the place where photographers want to get published more than any other.

So, a staff photographer from the National Geographic. I bet he’s been all over the world… As I was thinking about this on my way to the hotel downtown, suddenly the name George Mobley began to ring a bell in my mind. Surely not…but it was definitely the same name.

I did a u-turn, went back to my house and took a photography book off the shelf. It didn’t take long to find the page. Next to a photograph that brought back so many memories was written the name ‘George Mobley’. Fancy meeting him in a situation like this…

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated by the nature of Hokkaido, and at the time there were various different books that influenced me. I longed to head north, and before I knew it my thoughts had turned to to Alaska. But I had no clue of the reality – it was only a feeling that grew inside me. More than twenty years ago, there were hardly any books about Alaska in Japan.

One day in the second-hand book district of Kanda, Tokyo, at a shop that specialised in books from the West, I found a photography book about Alaska. On a shelf among many such books, why was my gaze drawn to that one in particular, I wonder? It was as if the book right in front of my eyes was the one that had been waiting for me, and from then on, whether I was on my way to school or going out, that photography book was always in my bag. I read it so much there were finger marks all over it, although in my case, all I did was look at the photographs.

In the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about one page in particular. It was a photograph taken from the air of an Eskimo village in the Arctic Circle. The grey Bering Sea, the leaden skies, the sun shining through a break in the clouds as if through a bamboo screen, the Eskimo settlement like an isolated dot… At first I suppose I was fascinated by the mysterious light in that photograph. Then I gradually started to become interested in the village itself.

Why did people have to live in a place like that, I wondered, at the end of the Earth? The scenery really was desolate. There were no people in the photograph, but you just about make out the shape of what looked like houses. What kind of people could they be, and what were they thinking as they lived there?

A long time ago, while I was absentmindedly gazing out of a train window at a town in the twilight, through the window of a house, I suddenly caught sight of a family sitting around the dinner table. I carried on looking until the light from the window had passed. Then an overpowering feeling welled up inside me. What could that feeling have been? Perhaps that group of strangers was conveying to me the mystery of a life I knew nothing about. Because we were living our lives in the same time and place, there was a sadness about the fact that I would never meet them.

It was a similar feeling to the one I had looking at the photograph of the Eskimo settlement. Somehow or other I wanted to meet those people.

In the caption beneath the photograph was the name of the village. Shishmaref… I decided to write a letter to the village. But who should I address it to? In the dictionary, I found the English word for ‘head of the village’. For an address, all I could do was write Shishmaref, Alaska, America.

‘I saw a photograph of your village in a book. I would like to come and visit. I wonder if there is someone there who will look after me…’

Of course, there was no reply. With no name and no address, how would anyone know who to deliver it to? And even if it had been delivered, there was no reason for someone I had never even met to offer to look after me. I forgot that I had even sent the letter. Then, when more than six months had passed, I got home from school one day to find a letter delivered from abroad. It was from a family in Shishmaref.

‘…We received your letter. I talked to my wife about you coming to our house…summer is the reindeer hunting season. We need a helping hand. …come any time…’

After six more months of preparation, I set off for Alaska. I flew in several small planes and saw animal colonies floating on the ice in the Baring Sea, before the photograph from the book that I had looked at for so long began to overlap with reality, and I pressed my face to the window.

Spending those three months in the village was an intense experience. It was the first time I had seen bears, seal hunting and reindeer hunting, and Arctic nights when the sun never set. Now I was standing in the village from the aerial photograph. I met many people in the course of the trip, and I was fascinated by the variety of ways in which we can live. That summer I was nineteen years old.

After that, I chose to become a photographer, and fulfilled many of my dreams. Then, for the first time in seven years, I went back to Alaska. This time wasn’t to be a short holiday. Three years…no, maybe it would be five years, I thought. The time began to fly by so quickly.

I walked the untrodden peaks and valleys of the Brooks mountain range that traverses Alaska. While kayaking in Glacier Bay, I heard the creaking sound a glacier makes as it moves. I rowed with the Eskimo in their umiak boats as they followed the Pacific whale in the Arctic Circle. I was fascinated by the migration of the caribou, and the trip continued. I recorded the lives of bears through the course of an entire year. I looked up to see the aurora borealis countless times. I encountered wolves. I learned about the lifestyles of many different people… Before I knew it, fourteen years had passed. I had built a house and put down roots in this place.

If that book hadn’t found its way into my hands in the second-hand bookshop in Kanda, I may never have come to Alaska. No, that’s a crazy thought. But if our lives progress through a series of moments, like looking at one’s own reflection in a bell that rings, then life is a limitless series of coincidences.

But of course, I really did look at that photograph, and I really did go to a village called Shishmaref. From then on, as if a new map had been drawn, this different life became a reality. And the person who took that photograph was George Mobley.

I arrived at the hotel, found the room and knocked on the door. Without knowing what I had been thinking about as I made my way there, George smiled through his grey whiskers as he met me.

After a while, when we had talked about the caribou migration, I took out the old photography book and began to tell him the story I have just recounted here. George looked intently at me and leaned in close to hear what I was saying, which made me feel at ease.

‘Well, well… So my photograph changed your life…’

‘Oh no, it wasn’t quite like that, but…it gave me a great opportunity.’

‘So, do you have any regrets?’

Deep in the eyes of this wise old man, I could see that he was smiling kindly.

Life is full of tricks and mechanisms. In our day-to-day lives, despite crossing the paths of countless different people, most of us never even exchange glances. That fundamental sadness, put another way, is the endless mystery of how people come to encounter each other.

And this is the chapter in the original Japanese:

シシュマレフ村の写真

ブッシュパイロットのドン・ロスから電話が入った。

「今、ナショナル・ジオグラフィック・マガジンからカメラマンが来ているんだ。これから北極圏にカリブーの季節移動を撮りにいくらしい。おまえに情報を聞きたがっているんだ。ちょっとホテルに会いにいってくれないか……名前はジョージ・モーブリイだ」

ナ ショナル・ジオグラフィックマガジンは、自然、地理、民族、歴史を扱う、アメリカで最も権威のある雑誌である。カメラマンなら、誰もが憧れる雑誌かもし れない。そこのスタッフ・フォトグラファーか。きっと、世界を駆け回っているんだろうな……そんなことを考えながら、車でダウンタウンのホテルへ向かう途 中、ジョージ・モーブリイという名前が、突然、記憶の鐘を小さくたたき始めた。まさか……でも、たしかにそんな名前だった。

車をUターンさせ、家に戻り、本棚から一冊の写真集を引き出した。そのページを見つけるのに時間かからなかった。懐かしい写真のわきに、小さくジョージ・モーブリイと書かれている。まさかこんなかたちで会うことになろうとは……。

十 代の頃、北海道の自然に強く魅かれていた。その当時読んださまざまな本の影響があったのだろう。北方への憧れは、いつしか遠いアラスカへと移っていた。 だが、現実には何の手がかりもなく、気持ちがつのるだけであった。二十年以上も前、アラスカに関する本など日本では皆無だったのだ。

ある 日、東京、神田の古本屋街の洋書専門店で、一冊のアラスカの写真集を見つけた。たくさんの洋書が並ぶ棚で、どうしてその本に目が止められたのだろう。 まるでぼくがやってくるのを待っていたかのように、目の前にあったのである。それからは、学校へ行く時も、どこへ出かける時も、カバンの中にその写真集が 入っていた。手垢にまみえるほど本を読むとはああいうことをいうのだろう。もっともぼくの場合は、ひたすら写真を見ていただけなのだが。

そ の中に、どうしても気になるたび、どうしてもそのページを聞かないと気がすまないのだ。それは、北極圏のあるエスキモーの村を空から撮った写真だった。 灰色のベーリング海、どんよりと沈む空、雲間からすだれのように射し込む太陽、ポツンと点のようにたたずむエスキモーの集落……はじめは、その写真のもつ 光の不思議さにひきつけられたのだろう。そのうちに、ぼくはだんだんその村が気にかかり始めていった。

なぜ、こんな地の果てのような場所に人が暮らさなければならないのだろう。それは、実に荒涼とした風景だった。人影はないが、ひとつひとつの家の形がはっきりと見える。いったいどんな人々が、何を考えて生きているのだろう。

昔、 電車から夕暮れの町をぼんやり眺めているとき、聞けなたれた家の窓から、夕食の時間なのか、ふっと家族の団欒が目に入ることがあった。そんなとき、窓 の明かりが過ぎ去ってゆくまで見つめたものだった。そして胸が締めつけられるような思いがこみ上げてくるのである。あれはいったい何だったのだろう。見知 らぬ人々が、ぼくの知らない人生を送っている不思議さだったのかもしれない。同じ時代を生きながら、その人々と決して出会えない悲しさだったのかもしれな い。

その集落の写真を見たときの気持ちは、それに似ていた。が、ぼくはどうしても、その人々と出会いたいと思ったのである。

写真のキャプションに、村の名前が書かれていた。シシュマレフ村……この村に手紙を出してみよう。でも誰に？住所は？辞書を聞くと村長にあたる英語が見つかった。住所は、村の名前にアラスカとアメリカを付け加えるしか方法がない。

“あなたの村の写真を本で見ました。たずねてみたいと思っています。何でもしますので、誰かぼくを世話してくれる人はいないでしょうか……”

返 事は来なかった。当然だった。名も住所も不確かなのだから。たとえ届いたとしても、会ったこともない人間を世話してくれる者 などいるはずがない。ぼくは、手紙を出したことも忘れていった。どころが、半年もたったある日、学校から帰ると、一通の外国郵便が届いていた。シシュマレ フ村のある家族からの手紙だった。

“……手紙を受け取りました。あなたが家に来ること、妻と相談しました……夏はトナカイ狩りの季節です。人手も必要です。……いつでも来なさい……”

約半年の準備をへて、ぼくはアラスカに向かった。いくつもの小さな飛行機を乗り換え、ベーリング海に浮かぶ集落が見えてくると、本で見続けた写真と現実がオーバーラップし、ぼくはどうしていいかわからない思いで窓ガラスに顔を押しつけていた。

この村で過ごした三ヶ月は、強烈な体験としてぼくの中に沈殿していった。はじめてのクマ、アザラシ猟、トナカイ狩り、太陽が沈まぬ白夜、さまざまな村人と の出会い……そして、空撮の写真から見おろしていた村に、今自分が立っていること。この旅を通し、ぼくは、人の暮らしの多様性に魅かれていった。十九歳の 夏だった。

その後、写真という仕事を選び、さまざまな夢を抱いて、七年ぶりにアラスカに戻ってきた。今度は短い旅ではない。三年、いや、五年ぐらいの旅になるだろうと思った。時間は矢のように過ぎていった。

アラスカ山脈を横切るブルックス山脈の、未踏の山や谷を歩いた。グレイシャーベイをカヤックで旅しながら、氷河のきしむ音を聞 いた。エスキモーの人々とウ ミアックを漕ぎ、北極海にセミクジラを追った。カリブーの季節移動に魅かれ、その旅を追い続けた。クマの一年の生活を記録した。数えきれないほどのオーロ ラを見上げた。オオカミに出合った。さまざまな人の暮らしを知った……いつのまにか十四年が過ぎていた。それどころか、ぼくは家を建て、この土地に根おろ そうとしている。

あの時、神田の古本屋であの本を手にしていなかったら、ぼくはアラスカに来なかっただろうか。いや、そんなことはない。それに、もし人生を、あの時、あの時……とたどっていったなら、合わせ鐘に映った自分の姿を見るように、限りなく無数の偶然が続いてゆくだけである。

しかし、たしかにぼくはあの写真を見て、シシュマレフという村に行った。それからは、まるで新しい地図が描かれるように、自分の人生が動いていったのも事実である。つまり、その写真を撮ったのが、ジョージ・モーブリイだった。

ホテルに着き、部屋を見つけ、ドアをノックした。どんな気持ちでぼくが会いにきたのかも知らず、彼は白い髭の中に笑みをたたえて出迎えてくれた。

しばらくカリブーの話をした後、ぼくは古い写真集をとりだし、これまでのいきさつ 彼に話し始めていた。ジョージはじっとぼくを見つめながら、耳を傾けちくれた。それがうれしかった。

「そうか……私の写真が君の人生を変えてしまったんだね……」

「いや、そういうわけではないんですが……大きなきっかけとなりました」

「で、後悔しているかい？」

初老に入ろうとするジョージの目の奥が、優しく笑っていた。

人生はからくりに満ちている。日々の暮らしの中で、無数の人々とすれ違いながら、私たちは出会うことがない。その根源的な悲しみは、言いかえれば、人と人とが出会う限りない不思議さに通じている。

The deep-fried diaries

Before you go on holiday in – or rather, from – Japan, your friends and relatives will typically ask you these two questions:

1) What do you want to eat in England / North Korea / Swaziland?
2) What Japanese food will do you think you’ll miss when you’re in England / North Korea / Swaziland?

And when you get back from your holiday, they will ask you these two questions:

1) What did you eat in England / North Korea / Swaziland?
2) What Japanese food did you miss when you were in England / North Korea / Swaziland?

Not only that, but rather than taking photos of the people you met or the places you saw while on holiday, you will instead take photos of the food you ate, and when you get back, rather than asking you about the photos you took of people and places, your friends and relatives will ask you about the photos you took of food. For example, when I showed my holiday snaps to my conversation class students last week, they were only mildly diverted by the fact that I had stayed in a house that was built five hundred years ago, or by the fact that I had driven past the Olympic Park, or by my charming five-year-old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed niece. Instead, we had an extended discussion about Yorkshire pudding: how to cook it, what the ingredients are and what it tastes like.

So in the interests of cultural integration, there follows a detailed analysis of pretty much everything Mrs M and I consumed while we were in the UK over Christmas and the New Year, and to give you an idea of what we will miss the most between now and our next visit, I have marked those foodstuffs which are unavailable in Japan with an asterisk.

Saturday 22nd December

Breakfast: French toast, canned coffee
Location: convenience store en route to Narita Airport

Hot coffee and tea in bottles and / or cans is available from shops and vending machines all over the country, and surprisingly drinkable, particularly when you consider the fact that it may have been kept warm for weeks on end. French toast from a convenience store, on the other hand, is an insult both to the French and indeed to the very concept of toast itself. ‘French sugar’ would be more appropriate, or just ‘Japanese stodge’.

Lunch: sour cream and chive flavour pretzels, pasta and vegetables, chicken and rice, chocolate pudding
Location: Virgin Atlantic flight VS901

Being the Saturday before Christmas, our flight was fully booked, and many of us were taking our children home for the holidays. One unlucky couple had to hold their baby in their laps for thirteen hours straight, but we were lucky enough to land bulkhead seats and what is referred to as a ‘basnet’, ie. a cot-type thing in which to plonk M Jr when she was sleepy, or when our arms felt like they were about to drop off from holding her in our laps. While the service was excellent, the food was disappointing (on the outward journey, that is. On the return journey it was completely inedible – see below), and only partially salvaged by the rather nifty idea of serving dessert separately from the main course, in the form of a chocolate pudding that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the refrigerated section of a branch of M&S.

Dinner: vegetable chow mein, prawn toast*, rice crackers*
Location: hotel room, Kew

We were also served sandwiches, rice balls, some kind of evening meal that I can’t quite remember, and Love Hearts* – yes, those sweets inscribed with romantic epithets like ‘Be mine’ and ‘For ever’. When flying east to west, though, your day is elongated, so that when you finally arrive at your destination, despite your body clock telling you that you ought to have gone to bed, slept for several hours and got up again, you are still awake, and force down an ‘evening’ meal in a vain attempt at adjusting to the new time zone – in this case a Chinese takeaway with Thai prawn toast thrown in for good measure.

Sunday 23rd December

Breakfast: omelette, Weetabix*, yoghurt, wholemeal toast*
Location: pub downstairs from hotel room, Kew

Next to our table at breakfast was an industrial-size toaster that hummed away like an idling Land Rover with the choke on full. Often to be found in staff cafeterias, these are the kind of machines in which your sliced bread is slowly transported along a conveyor belt flanked with heating elements, before popping out at the bottom via a stainless steel slide, at which point it will be slightly under-done. Having been replaced on the conveyor belt, it will then emerge a few seconds later slightly over-done.

Lunch: fish and chips, roast dinner* (pork), venison casserole*, chocolate brownie and ice cream, sticky toffee pudding*, mulled cider*
Location: as above

Fish and chips was the obvious choice for my first pescetarian pub lunch, and while it was just as scrumptious as I could have hoped, my dining experience was spoiled somewhat by the chef’s insistence on serving it not on a plate but on a chopping board. Serving pub food on chopping boards (as opposed to in baskets, Eighties-style) seems to be all the rage at the moment, and the blame, I think, can be laid squarely at the door of Jamie Oliver, who I have been reliably informed favours it at his own restaurants. Much as I admire Jamie’s heroic crusade to save the planet’s schoolchildren from certain obesity, someone really needs to sit him down and tell him that if you are served fish and chips on a chopping board, the fish will probably fall off, the chips will probably fall off, and the peas will definitely fall off.

OK, so I was joking about the peas, but anyway, barely a week has gone by over the past couple of years when Mrs M has not turned to me and said wistfully how much she longs to eat sticky toffee pudding, so dessert managed to be even more memorable than the main course (over the past couple of years, she has turned to me and said wistfully how much she longs to eat Yorkshire pudding more like once a fortnight).

Incidentally, I can highly recommend staying in hotels above pubs when jet-lagged, as the period of time between stuffing oneself with Sunday lunch and falling fast asleep in front of the telly can be reduced to little more than five minutes.

Dinner: pork pie*, Pringles
Location: friends’ house, Kew

Come the evening we were still stuffed, so made do with a light snack – in this case Mrs M had a pork pie and Pringles were the veggie option.

Monday 24th December

Breakfast: kipper*, selection of pastries
Location: pub downstairs from hotel, Kew

While the Japanese often dry their fish and seafood in the sun, they tend not to smoke it, and obscurities like the kipper are unheard of.

Lunch: baked salmon, baked potatoes, mince pies*
Location: aunt and uncle’s house, Wiltshire

If you go to a festival in Japan you will often find a stall selling yaki-jaga (焼きジャガ / baked potatoes), but they never quite match up to the British version. This may well be down to the variety of potato, but as any connoisseur will tell you, a proper baked potato should be hard enough on the outside that when you tap it with a knife it makes a kind of crinkly knocking sound, and fluffy enough on the inside that you need a spoon to scoop it rather than a knife to cut it. For that extra touch of authenticity, today’s tatties were baked in my Auntie J’s prize possession, an Aga.

Dinner: pasta, pesto, vegetable sauce with Quorn* pieces
Location: brother’s house, Somerset

My brother used to be a vegan, and while he did eventually join me in succumbing to the twin temptations of dairy products and seafood, still stocks his kitchen with plenty of Linda McCartney-style delicacies. One or two restaurants in Tokyo now have ‘fake meat’ on their menus, but Quorn – which fanatical vegetarians refuse to eat because it is a fungus and therefore, in effect, a living organism – has yet to be imported.

Tuesday 25th December

Breakfast: Jordan’s muesli*, Grape Nuts, Shreddies*
Location: as above

I keep on telling myself that I should quit eating cereal, which while it does have more nutritional value than the box it comes in (as demonstrated by Mythbusters), it doesn’t have as much nutrutional value as, say, a couple of slices of toast. The trouble is, cereal is inextricably linked in the minds of British adults with their British childhoods, and ADHD-inducing concoctions like Golden Nuggets, with their multi-coloured boxes, games or cartoons on the back and free gifts inside.

Lunch: cream tea (scones, homemade jam and marmalade, clotted cream)
Location: as above

The cream tea is one British tradition that has made it as far as East Asia, but if you happen to have a cream tea in Japan, the biggest let-down will be the paltry amount of clotted cream it comes with. Clotted cream can be bought over the counter in Tokyo, but because it has, quite literally, been imported from Cornwall, it will be prohibitively expensive and come in a very small tub indeed. In contrast, at the Co-op near my brother’s house a 227g tub of Rodda’s will set you back just £2.15 (for anyone planning a truly epic cream tea, Rodda’s even sell a 907g version).

And therein lies a dilemma: when you have a cream tea, which do you spread on your scone first, the cream or the jam? Most people treat the cream as a kind of butter substitute, spreading it on the scone first, with jam as the topping, whereas my brother insists on cream first / jam second, and as it turns out, his theory is backed up by Rodda’s themselves, on the packaging for whose clotted cream is printed a short explanation detailing the superiority of that very method.

Dinner: lentil bake*, Yorkshire pudding*, roast potatoes, sprouts, parsnips*, smoked haddock*, sparkling wine, Christmas cake*
Location: as above

A few weeks after M Jr was born, Otoh-san sat me down for a man-to-man chat.
‘Muzuhashi,’ he said, with a serious expression on his face. ‘I just want to talk to you about M Jr.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, wondering if he was going to ask whether or not we planned to continue living in Japan, or warn me of the difficulty of keeping one’s daughter from falling in with the wrong crowd.
‘You see, there’s something I’m quite worried about.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re not going to bring up M Jr as a vegetarian, are you? We wouldn’t want to think she was being deprived of a proper, balanced diet.’

Meat and dairy products are a comparatively recent addition to the Japanese diet – for a period of time prior to the Meiji Restoration, eating meat was actually illegal – but since the war they have taken to them with gusto. As a consequence, the average Japanese is now several inches taller than their ancestors, and I am forever separating the meat from the fish and vegetables in my school lunch. So while I reassured Otoh-san that we will allow M Jr to decide for herself whether or not to be a vegetarian, whenever Mrs M spends Christmas in Somerset, she is in a minority of one, and instead of tucking in to a roast turkey, has to make do with a lentil bake with all the trimmings.

Dessert was Christmas cake, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would, simply because you will find nothing as rich, fruity or frankly dense as this in Japan.

Wednesday 26th December

Breakfast: toast, peanut butter, Marmite*
Location: as above

If you ever find yourself in a Japanese supermarket, there is one particular item that I would urge you to avoid, namely a concoction called Peanuts Cream. Peanuts Cream purports to be a variety of – or at least a viable substitute for – peanut butter, and in reality is nothing of the sort. As well as having a sugar content several times higher than the average jar of Sun Pat, it has the annoying habit of liquifying when spread on toast. As a card-carrying peanut butter addict since about the age of ten, I prefer Skippy imported from America, although what I really crave is the nothing added / nothing taken away, Whole Earth-style variety, which has a layer of oil on top when you open it, and congeals to a consistency like half-dried tile grouting the closer to the bottom of the jar you get.

Lunch: panini (mozzarella and tomato, chorizo), cakes (incl. mincemeat slice*, tiffin)
Location: Butternut café, Exeter

Incredibly, I have had tea and tiffin in Japan on several occasions, hence the lack of an asterisk.

Thursday 27th December

Lunch: Caribbean veg pasty*, cheese & onion pasty*, bread (various), goat’s cheese, cheddar cheese, salad (incl. beetroot*), Kalamata olives*
Location: brother’s house

Whenever my mother made lunch, she would put on a kind of help yourself buffet of bread, cheese, salad, pickles and so on, a tradition that my brother – who lives in the same house that we inherited from her – has continued, so with one or two minor variations, this was what we ate pretty much every day we were staying there.

As I’m sure I have mentioned before, two food items the Japanese haven’t yet mastered are cheese and bread, so I had been looking forward to stilton, cheddar, goat’s cheese, smoked cheese, brie etc etc, and to elaborately complex breads with various combinations of white, wholemeal, rye, cornflour, sourdough, seeds and nuts. As well as a Co-op selling cheap clotted cream and 400g of cheddar for three quid (the same amount would cost the equivalent of more like £20 in Japan), the town where my brother lives has a truly extraordinary bakery, which sells a selection of everything from bread to scones to pasties to cakes, all in satisfyingly Western-style sizes.

‘What’s that you’re eating?’ our niece asked Mrs M at one point during the week. ‘That’s meat, isn’t it?’
Forced to curb her carnivorous instincts for several days on the trot, Mrs M had bought some cured ham from the aforementioned Co-op, and was extracting slices of it from an open packet on her lap before disguising them with mayonnaise.
‘I don’t want to see you eating meat!’ ordered our niece, and my brother had to tell her that actually, Mrs M wasn’t a vegetarian like the rest of us and it was OK for her to bring cured ham into the house.

Friday 28th December

Lunch: scampi* and chips, slow-roasted lamb shank*
Location: Blue Ball Inn, Sidford

This was Mrs M’s chance to eat meat like, as she put it, a genshi-jin (原始人 / caveman).

Afternoon tea: white chocolate caramel slice*, lemon and redcurrant slice
Location: sea-front café, Sidmouth

The weather while we were in the UK, it has to be said, was atrocious, and with just three sunny days in three weeks – not to mention flooding and almost constant rain – it’s a wonder more people weren’t suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. This was the scene on Sidmouth sea front…

…so after battling against the elements for little more than ten minutes, we ducked into a café for tea and cake, which included a variation on the aptly named millionaire’s shortbread.

Dinner: baked potatoes, butter, grated cheese
Location: brother’s house, Somerset

Saturday 29th December

Elevensies: gingerbread house*
Location: as above

For some reason I had never come across a gingerbread house until this Christmas, and they seem to be all the rage, partly, it would seem, because Ikea have been selling a flat-pack version, which if it’s anything like their furniture probably requires several hours of hard graft, a degree in engineering and an Allen key to assemble. My brother had bought a handmade one for Mrs M as a Christmas present (a gingerbread house, that is, not an Allen key), and after putting it on display for a few days, I suggested that our niece might like to ceremonially demolish it.

Afternoon tea: rice crackers*, raisins, fruit juice (carton), tea (vending machine)
Location: Minehead Community Hospital

A good friend of ours – who is still going strong at 92 years old – fell down and broke her hip late last year, and we went to visit her in hospital, where after just one month of rehabilitation, she was already up, about and walking around the ward. When the time came for refreshments, the vending machine tea I bought in reception was utterly foul, and while styrofoam cups are the main cause of a crap cuppa – my theory is that the polystyrene itself begins to melt into the tea as you are drinking it – despite being in a paper cup, this tea still had that indeterminate chemical-y taste, combined with an extra, gag-reflex-inducing hint of UHT.

For snackage, we made do with what our friend J had lying around her hospital room, which included a packet of so-called rice crackers. Rice crackers in Japan – aka senbei (煎餅) – are a many, varied and often delicious snack item, my own favourites being kuro-mamé senbei (黒豆煎餅 / black bean rice crackers). Rice crackers in the UK, however, are a flavourless and indeed joyless thing, with the texture of polystyrene and the flavour of cardboard, and only popular for two reasons: firstly because they are healthy, and secondly because they are gluten-free. It just so happens that three very good friends of ours – including J – have a gluten allergy, thus making their food choices rather difficult, but fobbing them off with food barely fit for a pet rabbit is frankly unfair.

Dinner: Thai takeaway (incl. prawn crackers*, spring rolls, jasmine rice*, red curry, sweet and sour deep-fried red snapper)
Location: brother’s house, Somerset

Thai food is surprisingly hard to come by in Japan, whereas the town in which my brother lives (population approx. 1500) is blessed with a very good Thai restaurant. When you order a takeaway, they even throw in a free bag of ‘posh’ prawn crackers – ie. thinner and less oily than the standard variety, and light brown instead of the usual white.

Monday 31st December

Afternoon tea: speciality hot chocolate, tea
Location: Starbucks, Sedgemoor Services

At Sedgemoor Services on the M5, it is possible to avoid the over-priced cafeteria in favour of an over-priced Starbucks, although when the girl behind the counte…sorry, I mean the barista told me they were running short on mugs, I did manage to blag a large (ie. bucket-sized) hot chocolate for the same price as a medium.

Dinner – king prawn korma, vegetable bhuna, popadoms*, pilau rice*, peshwari nan*, onion bhaji* (delivery), Snickers bar (vending machine)
Location: Premier Inn, Gloucester

Our lodgings were at the Premier Inn, Gloucester: a snip at fifty quid a night and with enough space in our double room to sleep a family of ten (one of the double rooms down the corridor really was sleeping a family of ten, although that’s another story). Instead of going out on the town for New Year’s Eve, we ordered a takeaway curry, ate it while watching The Best Of Come Dine With Me and were fast asleep by 10pm. A word of warning: although the nice man behind the reception desk was kind enough to provide us with plastic cutlery and paper plates, a single one of the latter was, as I discovered, not quite up to the task of supporting a popadom, an onion bhaji, half a nan bread, a large dollop each of korma and bhuna, and half a tub of pilau rice.

Tuesday 1st January

Breakfast: buffet (incl. crumpets* prepared on industrial-sized toaster)
Location: pub next door to Premier Inn, Gloucester

Breakfast was served – or rather, left on a table for us to help ourselves – in the pub next door, where the staff hadn’t quite finished cleaning up after a the previous night’s revelries, and from the look of the vomit-encrusted men’s toilet cubicle, I surmised that one of the party-goers had also eaten curry for his final meal of 2012.

Lunch: soup, salad, bread, cheese
Afternoon tea: lardy cake*, chocolate biscuit selection box*
Location: friends’ house, Forest of Dean

If I was a proper vegetarian, I wouldn’t eat cheese, as much of it contains rennet, or to be more precise, cow’s stomach. I also wouldn’t eat lardy cake, which contains, er, lard.

Dinner: veggie delight sub, turkey and ham sub
Location: Subway, Gloucester

There are now more branches of Subway in the world than there are branches of McDonald’s, which I have to say is a good thing, as I’d much rather eat a veggie delight (ie. cheese sandwich) than a filet o’fish. Also, the young lad behind the counter at this particular branch was very friendly. He asked us what we had done on New Year’s Eve, and having returned the question, I expected a reply along the lines of, ‘Oh yeah, man. I was larging it with my mates. We went to this club, right, and I was so pissed I can’t even remember what I was doing when it turned midnight. Still got a hangover now, bruv!’ Instead, he confessed that he had been safely tucked up in bed after spending the evening with his two children. If you’re wondering whether this made me feel old, you’d be right.

Wednesday 2nd January

Elevensies: ham and cheese slice
Location: Malmesbury

A brief rant: vending machines in Japan – and in other countries, I assume – a) work, b) accept bank notes and c) give change. Vending machines in the UK a) don’t work, b) don’t accept bank notes and c) don’t give change. Vending machines at car parks in the UK, moreover, a) do sometimes work, but b) don’t accept bank notes, c) don’t give change and d) don’t reflect incremental payments in the tickets they dispense. So for example, in Malmesbury town square, one hour of parking will set you back 40p and two hours will set you back £1.20. But even if you put in a pound coin (because naturally, you do not have enough change to put in exactly 40p or £1.20), YOU STILL ONLY GET A TICKET FOR ONE HOUR’S WORTH OF PARKING, EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE PAID MORE THAN DOUBLE THE AMOUNT FOR AN HOUR. End of rant.

This, by the way, is M Jr window shopping at the bakery from which Mrs M purchased her ham & cheese slice.

Lunch: pumpkin and sweet potato soup, tuna melt panini
Location: CJ’s café, Chippenham

On the way into Chippenham from the A350, we passed a large and very busy tattoo parlour, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the town.

Dinner: filo pastry, pesto and goat’s cheese ‘pizza’, baked potatoes
Location: uncle and aunt’s house, Wiltshire

Thursday 3rd January

Lunch: smoked salmon, wholemeal toast*, oatcakes*, brocolli soup
Afternoon tea: lemon cake
Dinner: roast lamb, cheese and broccoli bake

With so many vegetarian relatives – including one of her sons – Auntie J had assumed that Mrs M was a veggie too, and was so pleased when she found out otherwise that she immediately sent Uncle C to the butchers to buy a cut of lamb, which she Aga-ed just enough to turn it brown on the outside and keep it pink in the middle. (My cheese and broccoli bake was of course green in the middle.)

Friday 4th January

Breakfast: crumpets* (square), bran flakes (Waitrose own)
Location: as above

Lunch: sandwiches (with crusts cut off and incl. smoked salmon, roast beef), scones, jam
Location: friends’ house, Berkshire

It was a close thing, but the best scones we ate all holiday were, ironically enough, probably the ones made for us by a Japanese friend of Mrs M’s – in fact, what with the crust-less sarnies, cups, saucers and teapot, the only thing missing from this authentic afternoon tea was a fancy cake stand.

Dinner: bread rolls, crab paste, cured ham (all Waitrose)
Location: Premier Inn, Richmond

Saturday 5th January

Breakfast: eggs Benedict*, eggs Florentine*, 1 x smooth cappuccino, 1 x rich cappuccino
Location: Carluccio’s, Richmond

Maybe it’s because we are accustomed  to Starbucks-style frappa-cappa-macha-latte-ccino chocolatey-caramel-y-whipped-creamy milkshake-style caffeine-based beverages, but even the supposedly smooth version of  Carluccio’s coffee was strong enough to have an Olympic athlete test positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

Oh, and another mini-rant: as a self-confessed skinflint, I feel so much happier living in a country where there is no tipping. Tipping in the US is a matter of course, but the rules regarding tipping in the UK are irritatingly vague. On this occasion, I might have left a tip but didn’t have any cash, and was presented with neither a ‘Would you like to leave a tip?’ option on the credit card machine, nor a conveniently obvious receptacle for leaving one in cash. I also didn’t want to place two quid (too obviously stingy) or a fiver (too ostentatious and frankly too much) directly into the hand of the waiter at the till, who in any case was a different waiter from the one who had served us. To be honest, the whole experience can be enough to spoil a perfectly decent meal, as you are liable to leave a restaurant paranoid that the staff there hate you, and either guilty for or uncertain about whether or not you have remunerated them sufficiently. Whilst I do take great satisfaction in not leaving a tip at a restaurant whose food and / or service I have deemed to be rubbish, the most agreeable method , I think, is to have an ‘Optional service charge of 12.5%’-type thing at the bottom of one’s bill, and just as importantly, on the credit card machine, thus allowing one to discreetly give as much or as little as one wishes. End of second rant.

Lunch: fish and chips, Adnams ‘Cheer Beer’*
Location: Anchor Bankside, Southwark

This was one of only two opportunities I gave myself to abandon my family and get raucously drunk. Well, OK, have a couple of pints of bitter and a quiet chat before sobering up with a coffee and heading back to the hotel.

Dinner: Sainsbury’s sandwiches (tuna and sweetcorn, egg and cress), Jaffa Cakes*
Location: Premier Inn, Richmond

I have often been heard to mock the Japanese version, but nothing can be quite as awful as a pre-packed British supermarket sandwich.

Sunday 6th January

Breakfast: croissant, pain au chocolat, 2 x cappuccinos
Location: as above

As you can see, my Carluccio’s croissant was, quite literally, as big as M Jr’s head.

Lunch: trout, grated apple and celeriac* salad, fried salmon, olive mashed potato, cress salad
Location: friend’s house, Clapham

Our friend T has eaten at several Michelin-starred restaurants in his time, and owns a selection of fancy-looking cookbooks, so the lunch he prepared for us was, as expected, excellent – he even laid on a proper starter containing an obscure vegetable we had probably never eaten before.

Dessert: mince pies, brandy sauce
Location: friend’s house, Richmond

Another warning: shop-bought brandy sauce may cause the consumer to exceed the legal drink-drive limit.

Dinner: falafel* wrap, fattoush salad
Location: Premier Inn, Richmond

The kebab shop we found near Richmond station was living proof of the old adage that the best way of judging the quality of a restaurant selling foreign food is whether or not its customers are foreign – in this case, a whole family of Turkish folk, children included, were eating dinner at a table in the corner. The falafel kebab in particular was delicious, so that rather than a half-open pillow case of pitta stuffed with salad and kebab meat, it was cylindrical and rolled up in wrapping paper, like a kind of edible Camberwell Carrot. The one thing that let the place down was the guy behind the counter, who in most respects was perfectly normal. Make the mistake of looking into his eyes, however, and you would be overcome with a feeling of abject terror. They were so bloodshot it gave the impression he had been awake non-stop for at least a week, probably as a result of taking part in something deeply sinister, like human organ trafficking or an armed jewel heist. Either that or he was a real-life vampire who would literally syphon off our baby daughter’s blood and drink it with lemon juice and Tabasco if we took our eyes off her anything for more than five seconds.

Monday 7th January

Breakfast: cinnamon roll, croissant
Location: Sainsbury’s, Chingford

The café at Chingford Sainsbury’s is on the first floor, and while we were eating our breakfast, most of the customers made their way to and from it via the lift rather than the stairs, which tells you pretty much everything need to know about the town.

Lunch: ciabatta sandwiches
Dinner: tamarind-based starter, curry (various incl. cheese, peas, spinach, aubergine, peppers), basmati rice* cooked with onions and spices, apple pie and cream
Location: friend’s house, near Cambridge

Our good friend S is second-generation British-Indian, and we asked – actually, begged would be a better word – her to make us a curry when we came to visit. She duly obliged, and also made a delicious starter of tamarind sauce, crispy semolina egg-shaped cracker-type things and what she described as black chick peas, all of which you have to down in one before the tamarind mixture melts its way through the crispy semolina egg-shaped cracker-type thing.

Mrs M was intrigued to discover that S even gives her two-year-old daughter spiced warm milk before bedtime – a little like chai without the caffeine – which as well as tasting good is supposed to ward off colds.

Tuesday 8th January

Breakfast: cereal (granola, Grape Nuts, Shreddies*)
Lunch: pasta, salad
Dinner: fajitas (incl. vegetarian sausage-based filling for herbivores)
Location: as above

Wednesday 9th January

Elevensies: sushi (M&S)
Location: platform at Richmond Station

After gorging herself on English fare for over a fortnight, Mrs M was finally starting to miss Japanese food (see above), so today we had two helpings of sushi, one from M&S and the other from Wasabi. Not up to much when compared with the real thing, but it was a relief to eat something that hadn’t been anywhere near a deep-fat fryer.

Lunch: smoked haddock fish cakes*, salad nicoise*, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs
Location: Patisserie Valerie, Old Compton St.

Patisserie Valerie, incidentally, was another restaurant where I failed to leave a tip.

Dinner: sushi, chirashi-zushi (Wasabi)
Location: Premier Inn, Richmond

Thursday 10th January

Breakfast: full English breakfast*, vegetarian breakfast
Location: café, Clapham Junction

Despite being the same price, the full English came with bacon, sausages, fried egg, baked beans, hash browns (or rather, a hash brown), half a fried tomato and fried mushrooms, while the veggie came with just scrambled egg, baked beans, a hash brown and half a fried tomato. Surely this amounts to discrimination?

Dinner: scampi* and chips, crisps, chilli nuts*
Location: Cittie of Yorke, High Holborn

My second helping of beer-fuelled hell-raising (ie. quiet chat over a couple of pints of bitter) was at this fine old pub near Chancery Lane tube. The Cittie of Yorke is owned by Samuel Smith, so the drinks are ludicrously cheap by today’s standards, and it used to serve a perfectly edible plate of nachos. Despite retaining the name, brewery and décor, however, under new-ish management the food has taken a nosedive, and while my friends toyed with a meagre portion of sub-standard nachos (served on a plate so hot that it almost scorched its way through the table and landed on the floor), my scampi and chips had the unmistakeable taste and texture of a meal which has been microwaved from frozen, as per the instructions on the packet. The evening was rounded off with one of those snack products you can only find in an English pub, namely chilli peanuts, which tipped me over from feeling merely bloated into a state of full-blown indigestion.

Friday 11th January

Lunch: fish and chips, vegetarian larder board
Location: The Anchor, Wisley

At last it was time for Mrs M to sample Great Britain’s great British dish, which on this occasion came with a traditional – indeed, some might say great – slice of bread and butter, and mercifully was not served on a chopping board. As I should have guessed from its name, the vegetarian larder board, on the other hand, was served on a chopping board, from which several of its constituent parts lost their balance and fell onto the table.

Dinner: homemade ciabatta, cheese and cucumber sandwiches
Location: Premier Inn, Richmond

In his time, Uncle H – with whom we ate our pub lunch – has run various restaurants, fish and chip vans and food stalls, and his current craze is for baking his own bread (apparently, the old-style method involves mixing the flour with water and leaving it to stand, which releases the natural sugars in the flour, meaning there is no need to add sugar to the dough). So for our final night in the hotel we were given a goody bag containing still-warm, hand-made ciabatta. The only mistake I made was to refuse Uncle H’s offer of a knife (I had assumed there was one among the plastic cutlery given to us at the Premier Inn, Gloucester), and was obliged to spread the butter on our sandwiches using a spoon, which is just as tricky as it sounds.

Saturday 12th January

Breakfast: coffee, tea, fruit juice, croissant, mozzarella & tomato panini
Location: Eat, Heathrow Terminal 3 departure lounge

Even more than fish and chips, the items that we ate and drank the most during our three-week trip were probably good, old-fashioned English breakfast tea (milk no sugar and strong enough to stand your teaspoon in) and the good, old-fashioned, er, French croissant (ideally flaky, buttery, fresh from the oven and as big as a baby’s head).

Lunch: sweet and sour chicken and rice, pasta with cheese and vegetables, Gü Black Forest pudding
Location: Virgin Atlantic flight VS900

Our flight home was half-empty, which made looking after M Jr easier than it had been on the way out, but while the service was as good as ever, I can say without hesitation that the food was quite the most revolting of the entire holiday – yes, even worse than pre-packed Sainsbury’s sarnies.

Mrs M’s sweet and sour chicken came with what purported to be rice, but may well have been something else entirely. Upon initial examination, it was dry and hard, but once you put a fork-full of it in your mouth, it underwent a mysterious transformation, so that after an initial hint of something at least faintly rice-like, it turned to a kind of heavy, starchy powder, like un-mixed Polyfilla or an unmade Pot Noodle.

Live in Japan for a year or two and you will come to appreciate the joy of eating rice on its own: fluffy, light, ever-so-slightly transluscent, just sticky enough to eat using chopsticks and with little specks of yellow among the grains, this is what Japanese farmers spend so much time cultivating, and what Japanese people eat as many as three times a day. Virgin Atlantic rice, however, was an abomination, and probably had most of the passengers on the plane wondering how it was possible to take something so simple, so pure, and turn it into a substance that was barely fit for repairing the cracks in a patio.

Afternoon tea: cheese Danish
Breakfast: ‘omelette’, boiled potatoes
Location: as above

Actually, the breakfast ‘omelette’ was very nearly as bad as the rice.


Over and above the stuff we stuffed ourselves with, we also brought back a whole suitcase of goodies to hand out to as presents, including Jaffa Cakes*, Bakewell tarts*, Mini-rolls*, Mini Eggs*, fruit cake*, Viennese whirls* and twenty packets of tea, because even though M Jr didn’t have a seat to herself, she was still entitled to 23kg worth of check-in baggage. Taking a baby on a plane and then halfway round the UK was less arduous than we had been expecting, and after spending so much time staring at us as we ate, just a day or two after we arrived back in Japan, M Jr took her first taste of solid food – rice, naturally, cooked, mashed and mixed with warm water.

Looky-likey

By some freak of genetics that I don’t pretend to understand, I have been blessed with everyman-like features, and over the years a disproportionately large number of people have told me that I look like someone they know, or someone famous. For example, a friend of mine once went up to someone on the tube and, convinced that it was me, said, ‘Hi, Muzuhashi!’ only to be treated with a blank look and a ‘Who’s Muzuhashi?’ in reply, and in my days as a sound recordist, there was supposedly a doppelganger doing the same job, even though, like Superman and Clark Kent, we were never seen in the same room together.

In the interests of national security and for the safety of my family and friends, I have yet to post a photograph of myself on this blog. But while my true identity shall remain a closely guarded secret, I thought that now might be a good time to give you at least an inkling of the face behind the enigma.

For example, when I was much younger and still had hair, Ronan Keating was a prime suspect.

As I got older and my hair got thinner, it was Keifer Sutherland.

And then Kevin Costner.

Of course, the irony is that now I’m in Japan, rather than being an everyman, I stick out like a left-winger in the Labour Party, and the only Japanese name ever to have been mentioned in the same breath is that of TV presenter Tokoro George.

Closer to the mark is Arjen Robben, a Dutch international who plays his club football for Bayern Munich, and whom countless junior high school students have ‘mistaken’ me for.

Facial features, it has to be said, don’t necessarily come into the comparison, so what these students are really thinking as they pass me in the corridor and shout ‘Robben!’ is ‘You’re a balding white man!’

In much the same way, balding white men – myself included – are often likened to Bruce Willis.

Despite the shining pate, however, Willis is facially even less reminiscent of me than Robben, so for a more likely lookalike, we need to consult some non-Japanese.

A good friend of mine insists that I’m a dead spit for Gary Barlow, which is very nice of him, so long as I choose to overlook the fact that what he’s basically saying is ‘You look like the ugly one out of Take That’.

Someone once came up to me in a pub and said that I looked like Tim Roth, which is fairly credible.

While a different person once came up to me in a different pub and told me that I looked like Ben Stiller, which is frankly tenuous.

Both witnesses may well have been drunk at the time, and where Roth looks a bit too mean and moody, Stiller looks a bit too sarky and smirky. Ben Miller, on the other hand, is in the right ballpark.

Another friend suggested Rob Brydon, who I like to think is a little on the craggy side for comparisons, although I have to admit that I’m veering into craggy territory myself these days (and by that I don’t mean Snowdonia).

You can imagine my confusion, then, when Miller and Brydon appeared together on QI, and even went so far as to kiss each other on screen, a moment that for me was reminiscent of the bit in Being John Malcovich where John Malcovich enters the portal into his own brain.

While the face may be similar, though, the body is a dead giveaway: I do of course look much better than this with my shirt off.

The best suggestion so far – so good, in fact, that it’s genuinely spooky – is Christopher Timothy, who apart from a slightly different nose could quite easily be my long-lost identical twin brother.

Although rather like the Superman / Clark Kent combination, I have yet to be filmed sticking my hand up a cow’s backside – not that I’m aware of, anyway.

A final disclaimer: while I do in some aspects resemble many of the gentlemen depicted here, I should of course emphasise the fact that I’m not even remotely as handsome or debonair as any of them. The closest I’ve ever come to that is by having my voice likened – by Japanese as well as Brits – to Hugh Grant’s.

But let’s face it, if  I looked like Hugh Grant as well as sounding like him, I wouldn’t be an English teaching assistant, I’d be…well, I’d be at least a deputy headmaster.

The ALT Insider guest post!

In the space of little more than a year, ALT Insider has become the one-stop-shop for those of us who ply our trade as token gaiji…er, I mean English teaching assistants in Japanese schools, and seeing as James – the man who rules over the ALT Insider kingdom – was kind enough to let me write a guest post for his site, in the spirit of reciprocity, here’s his contribution to the United Kingdom of Muzuhashi. Read, enjoy, and if you’re an ALT in Japan, I strongly recommend that you check out ALT Insider (for example, probably my favourite post is this one about how to skive off work without incurring the wrath of either your vice-principal or your dispatch company).

Friday 13th September 2015 – My home to the 7-11 (自宅 – コンビニ)
Presents received – receipt, smile, several hundred pictures of college students

On a random Friday in a September like any other, I took a break from the endless hilarity that is Japanese TV and walked to the fridge to grab a drink. Upon opening it, I realized my only thirst-quenching options were the remnants of a slightly expired quart of milk, and a large bottle of Sirachi hot sauce.

I considered my options. I could take a chance on the milk being okay to drink, but the potential downside would leave me hunched over and unwell. I could sip on the hot sauce, but aside from that not being very thirst quenching, a mistake could force me chug the milk, adding another monkey wrench to the equation.

Without an appealing option, I decided that I was going to take action to improve my situation. I was going to make the trek to a convenience store. I knew the path well. I wouldn’t need any supplies other than a bike and the clothes on my back. I took a quick shower, gave myself a pre-biking massage, and began to squeeze into my biking shorts.

A mere 45 minutes later, I bid farewell to the cat and locked the door behind me as I left. As I heard the twist of the lock, I felt that familiar feeling when any great quest begins.

What awaited me on my journey? What characters would play a part in this tale? How did that cat get into my house? What treasure was awaiting me at my destination? Seriously, though, whose cat was that?

As I pondered those questions, I arrived at my bike garage. Okay, it’s not actually “mine,” but rather more of a community garage over which I claim ownership to feel better about myself.

Anyhow, in my glorious garage, I was presented with a pair of options:

The first was a pink beauty I nicknamed The Stallion. No gears, no basket, no rules.

The second was an orangey yellow stunner upon which I bestowed the name Puddle Dancer. It boasted a basket, a semi-flat tire, and a locking system that isn’t functional.

Since I felt like living dangerously, I hopped on Puddle Dancer and prepared to depart. I input the address into my iPhone, and I was ready to roll.

Departure time: 3:15

If everything went well, I was scheduled to arrive at the convenience store at 3:17, but I’ve been on enough of these bike trips to know that you should always expect the unexpected. I pressed on.

After I pushed the pedals a few times and breathed in that smooth Japan air, my jitters quickly disappeared. I was officially on my way. Sometimes on these epic quests, that feeling of, “Wow, this is really happening,” doesn’t show up until the middle, and sometimes even later than that. On this trip, however, it came nice and early, which is a great feeling. I took a selfie to commemorate the rush of adrenaline.

About half a minute later, now that I was within viewing distance of my destination, I picked up the pace. Was it excitement about being so close to my goal? No, it was something deeper than that. There is this really huge dog that scares me, so I speed when I go through his domain.

With Cujo in my rear-view mirror, I foolishly sighed in relief. The feeling wouldn’t last.

As I turned onto the road with the 7-11, a huge herd of college students appeared, blocking my path! I could have probably cleared them out through my usual tactic of acting like a lost foreigner asking for directions in English, but these quests are defined by their uniqueness, so I chose to wait it out.

After waiting countless minutes for them to pass, I pulled into the 7-11 with a feeling of sincere satisfaction. Not because most of the students were wearing skirts and it was a windy day (or at least not exclusively because of that), but because I had made the effort and took the risks to get what I wanted and to grow as a person.

There are too many people out there who don’t go after what they want. I’ve met so many people who, if put into the same situation as I was, would have just settled for that two-day-old milk or the hot sauce. Probably more people would have just settled for tap water. It takes a bit more to be someone who leaves the safety of home and treks to the great unknown to satisfy a thirst.

I set the bar higher. And I know you can, too.

The next time you need something, don’t settle for tap water (or your situation’s equivalent). Go for it. Make the effort. Take that selfie. Wait for those students. Go to that conbini.

I’m James Winovich.

Picture

James Winovich is the creator of ALTInsider.com, a website all about helping people have more fun in Japan. Lesson plans, a podcast, and a huge archive of articles are waiting for you there. Have more fun during your time in Japan.

The roads to Sado – Day 1

When you go on a cycle tour, your shoes are the weakest link. I realised this while making my way around Hokkaido three years ago, where the weather was, to say the least, changeable. If a t-shirt or a pair of shorts get wet, you can hang them up and they’ll be dry by the next morning, but if it’s a pair of shoes, you’ll be stuck with damp feet for the next couple of days, and quite possibly a chronic case of athlete’s foot into the bargain. As a consequence, a lot of touring cyclists in Japan wear sandals or even flip-flops, but this summer I compromised on one pair of ordinary shoes and one pair of fake Crocs (500 yen at Shimamura – which is a kind of Japanese version of Peacocks – as opposed to 1500 for the genuine article). Because they’re made of plastic, Crocs don’t soak up any water, and because they’re so light, they also come in handy when you’re trying to keep your baggage to an absolute minimum.

There was no doubt about it when I woke up on the morning of Sunday 21st: the Crocs would be my footwear for the day, and the proper shoes would stay safely tucked away in my panniers. It didn’t exactly chuck it down from dawn till dusk, but then again, there wasn’t exactly anything that you could call a dry spell either, so rather than sailing along and admiring the scenery, today was very much a case of putting my hood up, getting my head down and grinding out the kilometres.

By midday I had made it into Fukushima Prefecture – still a fair distance from the nuclear evacuation zone, but as Tokidoki Tokyo pointed out, almost completely devoid of tourists – and stopped for lunch at a michi-no-eki (道の駅 / literally ‘road station’). Whereas a motorway services in the UK will be massively overpriced, and present the motorist with a depressingly generic selection of junk food and stodgy snacks, at a michi-no-eki, you can choose from cheap and delicious cafeteria food (noodles, tempura etc.), cheap and delicious off-the-back-of-a-van food (octopus balls, rice dumplings etc.) or a large selection local specialities (gift-wrapped cakes and sweets, seasonal fruit and veg etc.). As it happened, I had been given a leftover bento box at a festival the previous evening, which I ate in the cafeteria while gazing out at the rain, and before getting back on the bike, I decided to ask this guy what he was up to.

 ‘I’m dressed as Teranishi Jujiroh,’ he said, and proceeded to tell me about Teranishi’s life and achievements. Fortunately, he also gave me a leaflet about Teranishi, so what follows is a mixture of what I can remember from our conversation, and what I’ve managed to translate from the leaflet.

Teranishi was born in Hiroshima in 1749, and grew up in poverty. By his mid-twenties he had been employed by the shogun, and in 1792 was sent to Hanawa Town to act as governor. Such governors were posted to the far reaches of the country not just to enforce shogun rule, but also to act as lookouts, sending word back to Edo (now Tokyo) if any kind of trouble was in the offing. Because of his background, Teranishi was unusually sympathetic to the suffering of his subjects, and rather than being transferred to another outpost after three or four years – a rule that was devised as a way of preventing corruption – he remained in Hanawa for more than two decades, and while he was there, created what you could argue was a template for modern Japanese society – for societies all over the world, even.

When Teranishi arrived in Hanawa, its people were just getting over a famine, and in order to aid the town’s recovery, he exempted farmers from land taxes and lent them money (the interest generated was used to help orphaned children); he created farming infrastructure, including irrigation and dykes; he turned the town into a centre for the horse trade, opening a regular market and giving subsidies to help people buy their own horses; and he built a public warehouse to store food in case of future famines. Teranishi even built Japan’s first public park, and based on Confucian principles, drew up a kind of constitution for the town. Known as ‘The Eight Articles Of Teranishi’ (寺西八ヵ条), here is a rough translation:

1 – Heaven is tremendous – Heaven is visible from the Earth, it rewards good and punishes evil
2 – Land is important – Arable land must be managed
3 – Parents are important – One must devote oneself to one’s parents
4 – Children must be treated with compassion and tolerance – Children are precious and must be brought up with equality
5 – Couples must get along with and support each other for their whole lives
6 – Siblings must get along – Siblings must be friendly and help each other
7 – One must be industrious in one’s vocation – One must work hard and live frugally
8 – Everyone must love their hometown – People must be amiable and patient with each other

Not only that, but families were central to the town’s new philosophy, so that under Teranishi’s rule, money was lent to cover the expense of getting married, financial incentives were offered to encourage people to have children, along with financial assistance once the children were born, a record was kept of pregnancies and births, the health of mothers and their children was protected by law, mothers and children from outside the district were encouraged to come and live there, and nannies were employed to help with child rearing.

What all this progressive thinking engendered was a successful frontier town, which went from being poor and neglected to being an important stop on the road to and from what is now Tohoku. Teranishi was so popular and so successful that he was even allowed to hand over control of the area to his sons – another act that was normally frowned upon by his superiors – and the people thanked him by building the Teranishi Shrine in his honour.

‘Instead of being selfish or covetous,’ said Teranishi’s modern-day representative, ‘the people of Hanawa helped each other out and shared what they had. He’s become a symbol of the town – that’s him over there as well.’ He pointed to a cloth and wire sculpture on the other side of the car park.

The costumed man – whose real name I forgot to write down – went off on all kinds of tangents as he was telling me about Teranishi (for example, how in ancient times, people walked on the left to enable them to defend themselves more effectively with their swords, hence Japan being one of the few countries that still drives on that side of the road) and in the end, I realised that unless I drew the conversation to a close myself, he would quite happily talk all day. I had initially assumed that he was with a group of fundraisers for 24-Hour Television (Japan’s version of Children In Need, for which celebrities don’t necessarily donate their appearance fees to charity – or so onii-san had told me), but apparently not.

‘Tomorrow I have to go back to work,’ he said. ‘But I come here whenever I am free and tell people about Teranishi.’ The fundraisers had mysteriously dispersed while we were chatting, so I said goodbye and left him in front of the michi-no-eki, ready to buttonhole another unsuspecting tourist with an impromptu history lecture.

Having struggled on for another couple of hours I reached a place called Kitsuné-uchi in Higashi-mura (東村 / East Village). Kitsuné-uchi (きつねうち / Home of the Fox) is a complex of sports facilities, a junior high school, an onsen (温泉 / hot springs) and a campsite, whose receptionist told me that since I lived outside the town, he was obliged to charge me 1200 yen for the privilege of pitching my tent. After some concerted haggling, I managed to get the price down to 300, a fact that I later came to feel rather guilty about when I realised that 1200 yen (5 or 6 quid) is the going rate for a campsite pretty much everywhere in Tohoku.

I watched the closing stages of 24-Hour Television in the onsen relaxation room, before making another new friend as I was cleaning my teeth in the campsite toilets – it was raining so hard that even the frogs had come inside to seek shelter.