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Hitorizumo by Momoko Sakura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fridge 冷蔵庫

When our family of two became a family of three, Mrs M persuaded me that a fridge-freezer upgrade was essential if we were to cope with the enormous quantity of baby food M Jr would soon be consuming. A quick visit to the local second-hand shop and 45,000 yen later (52,000 if you include the price of delivery and of having the old one taken away for recycling), we were in possession a Sharp fridge-freezer so enormous that it made it through the hallway of our apartment with just millimetres to spare.

You can of course cram enough food in it to feed all forty-eight members of AKB48, and as well as the fridge part and the freezer part, there is a large bottom drawer for keeping your fruit and veg cool (known as a yasai-shitsu – 野菜室 / vegetable room – and a standard feature on many Japanese fridges).

The really clever thing about it, though, is the door. As you can see, there are handles on both sides, meaning you can open it like this:

And like that:

Normally, the only way of choosing how your fridge door opens is by ordering a bespoke one, but this design enables easy access whichever direction you approach it from, and even in the most cramped of kitchens (that is assuming you can fit it into a cramped kitchen in the first place), you’ll never find yourself squeezed between the wall and the door, or trying not to elbow your sous chef in the face as you extract a shallot from between the gnocchi and the truffle oil. Dare I say it, it’s a fridge that swings both ways.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, it isn’t possible to pull on both handles at the same time and remove the door completely – I know this because I’ve tried.)

Exchange

For the past twenty years or so, the city in which I work has been running an exchange programme with its twin town (or ‘sister city’, as they prefer to say here) in the States, so for much of last week I had the chance to act as interpreter, when a group of ten students and two teachers came for a whirlwind tour of Ibaraki.

Not that they were short of interpreters: at the first-night welcome party there were four of us, most of the Japanese speeches had already been translated into English, and the Americans – K-sensei and her student, er, K-san – did an admirable job of reading out the phonetic Japanese versions of theirs, leaving me with more time to relax and eat pizza (the organisers of the exchange had decided not to inflict anything too culinarily outlandish on their guests when they had only just arrived in the country).

The following day T-kun – who back home in the States is in even more sports clubs than his Japanese counterparts: basketball, athletics and American football – was guest of honour at the school where I am currently working, and we immediately put him to work in some first-grade (seventh grade if you count the American way) English classes. After a few minutes of conferring, each of the students asked him a question – Do you like Japanese food? How tall are you? Do you have a girlfriend? etc – although even with everyone speaking English, I still needed to do some interpreting, this time from beginner’s English into British English, and from American English back into beginner’s English.

In the afternoon the exchange students were treated to a bunka-taiken (文化体験 / cultural experience), and first up was origami, for which they didn’t just learn how to make the usual birds and planes, but also a so-called kami-teppoh (紙鉄砲 / paper gun), an ingenious triangular contraption that you hold at one corner and snap open with a whipping motion to produce an impressively loud banging noise (so impressive that the boys never tired of creeping up on people and firing it off directly behind them).

Next was shodoh (書道 / calligraphy), for which they wrote the character for friend (友) over and over, until it was legible enough to be committed to posterity on a square of gold-edged card. T-kun is left-handed, and I asked the sensei if this might present him with any difficulties.
‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘left-handed children used to be made to write with their right hand instead. These days you can use pens and pencils, so it isn’t so much of a problem, but kanji were originally conceived to be written right-handed, with a brush.’ (Possibly for the same reasons, Mrs M’s father, who was born left-handed, taught himself to be right-handed when he was still at school.)

Last of all we donned kimono and hakama (袴 / essentially a man’s kimono) for chadoh (茶道 / the tea ceremony). This was my fourth or fifth encounter with chadoh, and while I don’t pretend to know anything more than the absolute basics, I did at last find out about the whole bowl-turning thing: the chawan (茶碗 / tea bowl) has a decorative front and a plainer reverse, and the server presents the more appealing decorative side to the customer (the drinker?). The customer then rotates the chawan clockwise through 180 degrees, so that the decorative side is facing away from him or her. He or she then drinks from the plain side of the chawan – thereby keeping the decorative side pristine – before rotating it anti-clockwise though 180 degrees to its original position and handing it back to the server.

‘All we need now is some kertarner,’ said the boys as they struck samurai-style poses for the camera after the ceremony. ‘Don’t they have any kertarner we can use?’
‘What’s a kertarner?’ I asked them.
‘You know, a samurai sword!’
‘Oh, you mean a katana!’
‘Is there anywhere we can buy one?’
It was at this point that K-sensei intervened to try and persuade them that maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to try and smuggle samurai swords onto the return flight.

After another day at school, on the Friday we took a trip to the Aquaworld aquarium in Oh-arai Town, where as the first customers of the day we were granted a glimpse behind the scenes. Our guide wore a Britney mic and carried a portable loudspeaker, but even with the volume turned up, his voice was drowned out by the sound of the many pumps and water treatment gizmos above the fish tanks (whose perspex walls, incidentally, are a reassuringly sturdy 55cm thick), which made the experience rather less educational than it might have been.

After watching the dolphin show we headed for the food court, where I sat down to have lunch with a couple of the Japanese boys.
‘So, do you want an American girlfriend?’ I asked them.
‘Yes!’ came the enthusiastic reply, and I assume the Americans would have returned the compliment: after several days in each other’s company, the students finally seemed to be getting over the double-whammy of a language barrier and teenage shyness, and had more fun skimming stones and paddling in the Pacific after lunch than the penguins did at feeding time.

In the afternoon we went to a shopping cen…sorry, I mean ‘outlet mall’, which on a dull weekday was almost completely devoid of customers. Still, some of the girls managed to spot a slightly scary looking transvestite (is there any other kind of transvestite than a slightly scary looking one, I wonder?), and the boys – egged on by me, it has to be said – dared each other to go into the Triumph lingerie shop, ask one of the assistants for help, and hold up a bra-and-panties set in front of the mirror as if they wanted to try it on.

After a very long flight, several days of looking after a group of rowdy kids and several evenings spent with a teetotal host family, the other American teacher, S-sensei, was in dire need of beer, so we booked a table at a nearby izakaya for a child-free evening meal. By about 10pm, S-sensei was finishing off his sixth dai-jokki (大ジョッキ / large glass of beer), and insisted on ordering ‘One more!’ before calling it a night – much to the surprise of his hosts, he was still able to walk and talk as we made our way out to the car park.

The following evening, Mrs M and I were invited to a barbecue by T-kun’s host family, and when we arrived, the boys were having a BB gun shooting contest. T-kun managed to knock down a row of three bottles and cans in twelve seconds (it was the kind of gun you have to reload between each ‘bullet’), and just as I was remarking how only an American could handle a gun so expertly, one of the Japanese boys achieved the same feat in just seven seconds.

After dinner we grabbed some torches and headed for a nearby valley, where along a gravel track at the edge of the rice fields, a few points of greenish light were flitting back and forth in the long grass. These were hotaru (蛍 / fireflies), which for a first-timer like me were an enchanting sight, and which even Mrs M confessed to not having seen for the best part of twenty years (in a nice example of linguistic logic, the kanji for hotaru forms part of the Japanese word keikoh – 蛍光 – meaning ‘fluorescence’).

After a farewell party on the Sunday evening, the exchange students and their teachers began the long journey back to America, although not before expressing their continuing amazement at the fact that I don’t have a middle name (‘You don’t have a middle name?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘My parents didn’t give me one.’ ‘But you have to have a middle name!’ ‘What’s your middle name, then?’ ‘I’m not telling you!’ etc). As well as allowing me some time away from teaching English, it had been nice to be able to see the country through the eyes of those who are experiencing it for the first time, and reminded me of how I felt on the occasion of my first visit nearly a decade ago, when – as S-sensei described it – Japan seemed like ‘a magical place’.

Naoki Matsuda 松田直樹

My passion for football has been on the wane in recent years, something that may or may not be due to the fact that in my humble opinion, most players in the UK are overpaid, overprotected, ignorant, racist, womanising, alcoholic thugs with barely enough social skills to buy a pint of milk and barely enough footballing skills to play their way out of a paper bag. Taking this into consideration, and seeing as England are currently battling it out in Euro 2012 (no doubt doomed to be knocked out on penalties in the quarter-finals), I thought that now might be a good time to tell you the story of Naoki Matsuda.

At fifteen years old, Matsuda was playing as a striker for the junior high school team in his home town of Kiryu City, Gunma Prefecture, when his coach had a request from Ikuéi High School in nearby Maébashi, asking if they had any decent defenders. The coach suggested that Matsuda try a change of position, and it soon became clear that this was where he had been destined to play all along. Having progressed to the Ikuéi High School team, he became the subject of a bidding war between no less than ten professional clubs, and was eventually signed by Yokohama F Marinos. (For no discernable reason whatsoever, the ‘F’ of Yokohama F Marinos is short for flügel, which among other things means ‘wing’ in German, and marinos is Spanish for ‘mariner’.) Matsuda was named in the J-League team of the season in 2000 and 2002, and won the title with Yokohama in 2003 and 2004. He represented his country at every level from under-15 onwards, and boasted the rare accolade of having played at two Olympic Games, including a match at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that became known as the ‘miracle of Miami’, when the under-23 side beat Brazil one-nil. He was in the Japan team that made it through the group stages of the 2002 World Cup, and ended up with a total of 40 caps, scoring a goal in his final match in 2005.

It is with Yokohama, though, that Matsuda will forever be associated, and where he made 385 appearances, scoring 27 goals and earning the nickname ‘Mr Marinos’. He is also third on the J-League all-time list for red cards, and was by all accounts quite a prickly character, not to say downright scary (his autobiography, published in 2009, is called Toh-soh-nin (闘争人 / Conflict Man). In order to induce the proper fighting spirit before matches, Matsuda would often ask his teammates to slap him, a habit that once backfired when he was diagnosed with concussion. During a Nabisco Cup match in 2003, he became incensed by what he saw as foul play by a member of the opposition, and was heard to shout ‘Yaru yo! Yacchau yo!’ at the referee. Roughly translated, this means ‘I’ll do you! I’ll fucking do you!’ and was subsequently adopted by the Yokohama supporters as a terrace chant. Matsuda didn’t always get on with his superiors, either, and during another Nabisco Cup match, this time in 2007, he apparently ‘glared’ at the manager as he was giving orders from the sidelines, and then refused to shake his hand after being substituted.

But such incidents merely served to endear Matsuda to his fans, and to demonstrate how passionate he was about the game. In a match in 2000 when Avispa Fukuoka opted to sit back and defend the lead they held over Yokohama, he stopped in the middle of the pitch, sat down on the ball and started hurling abuse at the opposition players. At a tearful post-match press conference, he said, ‘Those guys aren’t professionals. They don’t seem to understand how their supporters feel, how desperately they’re fighting for them.’

With ten minutes still to play in a match in the 2007 season, Matsuda volunteered to play in goal when Yokohama’s keeper was sent off and their quota of substitutions had already been used up. Perhaps most incredibly of all (money-grabbing Premiership players, take note), he accepted a 40% pay cut when the club were encountering financial difficulties in 2007.

Yokohama finally decided to let Matsuda go in 2010, and after sixteen years of loyal service, he signed for Matsumoto Yamaga, who at the time were a semi-professional team in the third tier of the Japanese league. During a training session for Matsumoto on 2nd August 2011, Matsuda collapsed with heatstroke and was rushed to hospital. He had suffered a heart attack, and while for a time doctors managed to restore a faint heartbeat, Matsuda never regained consciousness, and passed away two days later, on 4th August 2011. He was just thirty-four years old.

As well as his wife and three children, Matsuda’s funeral was attended by numerous members of the Japanese footballing fraternity, including the entire playing staff of Yokohama F Marinos, and among others, FIFA president Sepp Blatter sent a personal message of condolence. More importantly, Matsuda’s death highlighted the importance of AEDs – automated external defibrillators – which are designed to be used in just such an emergency, when someone suffers a heart attack and professional medical help has yet to arrive. It is believed that Matsuda’s life might have been saved had there been an AED on hand at the training ground where he fell ill, and there has since been a concerted effort to raise awareness of AEDs, and to equip a greater number of sports facilities, workplaces and public buildings with them.

Both literally and figuratively, Matsuda gave his life to football, and nowhere was this exhibited more clearly than in a speech he made on 4th December 2010, after his final game for Yokohama at the Nissan Stadium.

Speeches by the manager and club president were all but drowned out by chants of ‘NA-O-KI! NA-O-KI! NA-O-KI!’ and even after the players had performed a lap of honour and left the field, the chants continued. Eventually, Matsuda re-emerged from the changing room and took up the microphone, and this is what he said:

‘Thank you very much for supporting me over the past sixteen years, even though I’m so selfish and impertinent. I’ve always been a bit crazy, but everyone has cheered me on, so…

‘I like to think that I’ve fought hard and put my heart into every match for the Marinos. Of course I’ve pissed a few people off as well, but your support has given me strength.

‘The Marinos’ supporters are fantastic. At a time like this I can’t quite put across how I feel about you, but anyway, all I can say is that you’re the best. And I just feel thankful.

‘I don’t really know what I’m saying any more but… It’s just that, I fucking love football, and I really want to carry on playing.

‘Football really is the greatest. I suppose there are still some people out there who don’t know anything about it, but I just want to appeal to them through who I am…

‘I really want to show everyone what’s great about football, so please let me carry on doing what I’m doing.’

I can’t imagine Wayne Rooney ever making a speech like that (actually, I can’t imagine Wayne Rooney ever making a speech), let alone one as heartfelt or as eloquent, and apart from the poignancy Matsuda’s words have acquired in retrospect, they resonate because they express what so many football fans feel – what I felt when I was a boy, and what I still feel occasionally when I watch a football match – and embody the kind of qualities that are so often lacking from the modern game.

(In case you’re interested, here’s a transcription of Matsuda’s speech in Japanese, as borrowed from this website:

「16年間、本当に生意気で、わがままな自分を応援してくれて、本当にありがとうございました。バカでずっと生きてきましたけど、みんなが応援してくれたから…

自分のマリノスの1試合1試合は気持ちを込めて戦ったと思うし、もちろん俺にキレた人もいると思うし、でも、みんなの声援が自分の力になりました。

マリノスのサポーターはマジで、最高です。こんな時間でみんなに対しての気持ちは伝えられないんですけど、とにかく、みんなが最高としか言えないんで。あとは、本当に感謝の気持ちしかないです。

ただ、もう何言ってるかわかんないけど… ただ、オレ、マジでサッカー好きなんすよ。マジで、もっとサッカーやりたいっす。

ほんとサッカーって最高だし、まだサッカー知らない人もいると思うけど、オレみたいな存在っていうのもアピールしたいし…

ほんとサッカーって最高なところを見せたいので、これからも続けさせてください。」)

Driving in Japan

Mrs M and I live in the countryside, where it is pretty much impossible to lead a normal life unless you have a car, and while I do manage to cycle to work most days, when we go out shopping, sightseeing or to visit friends and family, it is almost always in our still prized and resolutely unglamorous Toyota Platz.

The most convenient thing about driving here – if you’re British, at least – is that they do so on the left-hand side of the road. This means that to obtain a Japanese driving licence, all I had to do was take an eye test and fill out some forms (similarly, Mrs M got her British driving licence in double-quick time), whereas if you hail from a country that drives on the right, you’ll need to pass a practical driving test first.

The vast majority of cars are automatics, which often leads to the kind of accidents where confused OAPs mistake the accelerator for the brake pedal, and for someone who was born and raised on the manual gearbox, makes for a rather dull driving experience. For variety’s sake I keep my left hand busy by shifting into neutral and ‘coasting’ to a halt at the traffic lights, but even allowing for such eco-friendly driving techniques, you can still get more miles to the gallon – or rather, kilometres to the litre – out of a manual. Speaking of which, at the time of writing a litre of unleaded costs 145 yen (about £1), and a litre of diesel (aka kei-yu / 経由) 125 yen. Hybrids, incidentally – the Toyota Prius is still the second-best-selling car in Japan, and recently passed worldwide sales of five million – aren’t necessarily any more economical, and if you buy an all-electric car – like, say, the Nissan Leaf – there are still precious few places to plug it in.

As for road safety, Japan is statistically similar to the UK, with 4,663 road deaths in 2011 compared to 1,901 in the UK: in other words, nearly 4 deaths per 100,000 people, or 7 deaths per 100,000 cars owned. This compares favourably with many developed countries, including the US, where you are approximately twice as likely to kick the bucket in a car crash. Within Japan itself, while Ibaraki accounted for the eleventh highest number of road deaths by prefecture in 2012 (142), relatively speaking, and as of 2010, it was only the 27th most dangerous prefecture in which to drive, with around 50 accidents per 10,000 people. Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku was ranked as the most dangerous in both 2010 and 2011, with 112 accidents per 10,000 people, and Shimané Prefecture in western Honshu as the safest.

While seatbelts and child seats are compulsory, the latter are a recent development, and many people still neglect to strap their children in, or only resort to doing so to avoid being stopped, rather than with the more noble intention of protecting their child in the event of an accident. When M Jr was born, Mrs M’s mother wondered why we didn’t just hold her in our arms for the drive home, and the two-year-old daughter of a friend of Mrs M’s is regularly taken to the family rice field by her grandmother: the grandmother rides a scooter, the granddaughter sits between her legs in the footwell, and neither of them wears a helmet.

The speed limit on most roads is a conservative 60kph (around 40mph) and even on expressways rises to just 100kph (around 65mph), although as in the UK, the majority of road users routinely exceed the limit by 10 or 20kph. You are, therefore, unlikely to be pulled over by the rozzers unless you’re really putting your foot down.

Drink driving, on the other hand, is very much frowned upon, and while the limit in the UK is 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, in Japan it is just 0.15mg. Not only that, but depending on the circumstances, the owner of the car, the passengers and whoever supplied the alcohol in the first place can all potentially be found liable should a drunk driver get into a prang. Civil servants caught drink driving automatically lose their jobs – I know of several teachers who have been sacked in and around Mito, and who will never be able to work in the school system again – and as a consequence are no longer permitted to hold staff parties on the evening before a work day. (My one brush with the Japanese police came way back in 2005, when I was stopped for failing to obey a stop sign. It was the middle of the night on a deserted side street – or at least that was what I pleaded as an excuse – and having had a beer earlier in the evening, I could have received a lot more than just a ticking off had they decided to breathalise me.)

Similar to the UK, accumulating a certain number of points on your driving licence can cause it to be suspended or revoked, and the licences themselves come in three different flavours. New drivers get a green licence, which is replaced after two or three years with a blue one – at this point you are required to sit through a two-hour lecture on road safety, during which the boredom is only partially relieved by a video of real-life fender-benders and near-misses. Provided you don’t get into trouble within the following three years, you are then rewarded with a gold licence, which only has to be renewed once every five years, although the renewal time starts to come down again once you reach seventy years old.

Perhaps more important than this in practical terms is the MOT – aka sha-ken / 車検 – which is both stricter and more expensive than in many other countries. Putting my clapped-out old Vauxhall Astra through its UK MOT often cost no more than the basic cost of the test – currently £54.85 – whereas the two-yearly sha-ken on our Platz recently set us back 100,000 yen (about £750), despite the fact that it was in perfect working order. For this reason, you will hardly ever see a clapped-out old Vauxhall Astra in Japan, and if their car needs some work, people tend to get it done properly (Mrs M couldn’t believe it when I replaced a broken wing mirror on the Astra with a new one in a different colour, simply because a matching one would have been more expensive).

So Japan is, by and large, a relatively safe and relatively peaceful place to drive, although there are some habits, customs, rules and regulations that are worth bearing in mind for the foreign first-timer:

– Most drivers on a dual carriageway will opt for the right-hand lane, meaning that a lot of overtaking is done on the inside lane. The Japanese equivalent of the Highway Code says that you should keep to the left and overtake on the right, so like the speed limit, this is another case where theory and practice differ.

– When approaching an open level crossing, one is expected to stop one’s car and check for trains before proceeding, and as is the case with stop signs (see above), a police car will often be lurking to catch anyone who fails to do so. For someone who has absolute faith in the reliability of Japanese technology, up to and including the automatic barriers at level crossings, this seems unnecessary, but the law was brought in to prevent accidents like the one that occurred in 2000 in Saitama Prefecture, when a car was hit by a train after a lightning strike cut the electrical supply to the barriers.

– If they overtake at all, motorcyclists and scooter-ists tend to do so on the inside, and you will often see bikers patiently waiting in line in traffic jams, which as far as I’m concerned defeats the whole object of riding a bike in the first place. But anyway, while helmets are compulsory (unless you happen to be a great-grandmother giving a lift to her great-granddaughter, that is), one or two youngsters will deliberately flout the rules for the purposes of ‘looking’ ‘cool’. Just the other week we saw one such rebel-without-a-skid-lid being chased by a police motorcycle, and Ibaraki, it should be noted, is a magnet for boh-sohzoku (暴走族 / motorcycle gangs), who ride their souped-up machines (actually, perhaps souped-down would be a better phrase) at maximum revs for maximum disturbance, but are almost certainly polite young lads with proper jobs who still live with their mums.

– Many minor and indeed major roads have no pavements (that’s sidewalks if you’re of the North American persuasion), which can render pedestrians unnecessarily vulnerable: in April 2012, a teenage driver fell asleep at the wheel and ploughed into a line of parents and children on their way to school. Two people were killed, including a pregnant mother, and their lives might have been saved had there been either a pavement or the concrete dividers – known as enseki / 縁石 – that are often used in place of one.

– You are expected to give way to pedestrians when turning either left or right into a side road, so if you try to nip through a gap in the oncoming traffic while turning right, you may find yourself confronted with a walking stick-wielding grandad and no choice but to wait until he finishes crossing. Conversely, Japanese motorists are addicted to what bikers refer to as the ‘crafty right’ – ie. turning right the very millisecond the lights change, and before anyone coming from the opposite direction has had time to react.

– A much more risky addiction than the crafty right is what is known in Japanese as shingoh-mushi (信号無視 / ignoring a red light). It is not unusual for as many as three or four cars to carry on through a junction after the lights have changed, and the practice is so prevalent that I can only assume the traffic lights here are timed to take it into account.

One final piece of good news: despite being included in the driving test, parallel parking (juu-retsu chuu-sha / 縦列駐車) is practically unheard of, and you will never encounter the kind of street one so often sees in the UK, with a line of parked cars on either side and barely enough room down the middle to ride a Fiat 500. Instead, the typical Japanese driver will take great pains to use an ordinary car parking space correctly: for example, I have never seen Mrs M’s father park his car without going in and out of the space at least three times, until the wheels are perfectly aligned and precisely equidistant between the markings on either side.

The Apprentice

Recently Mrs M went to stay at her parents’ house for a week or so, which gave me the chance to watch some proper English telly for the first time in well over two years. After Adam Curtis’ excellent The Power Of Nightmares, I moved on to something a little more frivolous, namely Series 7 of The Apprentice (that’s the UK version with Alan Sugar, as opposed to the US version with, er, Ozzy Osbourne), which I happened to have worked on during my previous incarnation as a sound recordist.

The call time for my first day’s work on the show was at the ludicrously early hour of 2.30am, and the place a rather swanky house in which the contestants were to be staying for the duration of the shoot – or at least until they got fired, anyway. With fifteen or so technicians, twenty or so production crew and four or five chauffeurs milling around outside their front doors in the early hours, I can’t imagine the neighbours were particularly pleased with the arrangement, and given the contestants’ relentless schedule – that morning we barged into their bedrooms at 3am to film them getting dressed, putting on their makeup and basically looking dazed and confused – I’m amazed that more of them don’t quit the show due to nervous exhaustion.

Having reconvened in the dining room, the contestants were shown a DVD of ‘Lord’ Sugar telling them what today’s task was to entail: in this case, making some kind of food and / or drink item for sale to hungry and / or thirsty office workers. We then fitted them with radio mics (tiny personal microphones with transmitters that enable a sound recordist to pick up what someone is saying even when they’re out of earshot), and filmed them being driven off in a mini-fleet of people carriers, at which point you could almost hear the sound of twitching net curtains from the surrounding bedroom windows.

Particularly in the early stages of the series, these people carriers get very crowded, as four contestants, a production assistant, a camera person and a soundie all pile into the back of each one, although because everyone is sitting down in confined and relatively quiet surroundings, technically speaking this is the easiest part of the day. It is the point at which everyone piles out of the people carriers that things get more hectic.

Today this happened at New Covent Garden Market – hence the early start – where the contestants were supposed to shop for ingredients for whatever snack-like fayre they had decided to concoct, and we were soon haring around after them in an effort to capture a) roughly what was going on and b) any televisual magic that might happen to materialise along the way.

The basic principle of filming The Apprentice (OK, so when I say ‘filming’, what I really mean is ‘videoing’, or more recently, ‘recording onto hard disk’) is to leave as many cameras rolling for as long as possible, on the assumption that sooner or later the contestants will make fools of themselves or get into an argument. So as opposed to a conventional film or TV shoot, rather than filming something a certain number of times until your director is satisfied with the result, on reality shows like The Apprentice, more often than not the cameras are rolling almost continuously, and the crew has no time to rest or recuperate between takes – in this case, our few precious moments of relief came at about 8am, in the form of a breakfast break for bacon and egg sarnies.

By this point we had relocated to a nearby industrial-sized catering facility, where it was time to capture the undignified spectacle of a group of youngsters – who between them had barely enough catering know-how to make a Pot Noodle – attempt to produce something edible for sale to the masses. Once the girls (Team Venture, no less) had made a job-lot of fruit salad (their so-called ‘healthy’ pasta dish was eventually cobbled together using no-brand tomato sauce from the Sainsbury’s next door), our next destination was Canary Wharf, where the sales part of the task began, and where my cameraman and I were relieved at the end of our shift by a replacement crew.

So while I was heading home on the Jubilee Line for a well-earned siesta, the contestants simply carried on, as did the production assistants, whose responsibility it is to take a note of when something interesting happens, thus making the editor’s job easier. (An assistant later explained to me how The Apprentice is so gruelling that once you have those two magic words on your CV, further employment is a lot easier to come by, the assumption being that if you can survive this, you can survive anything.)

I went on to work on two further episodes (2 and 11 – the phone app and restaurant tasks), and because Mrs M and I moved to Japan before the series was broadcast, eventually tracked it down on YouTube, which leads me on to my second – and secondary – reason for wanting to watch the show, namely that it makes for fantastic television.

No matter how hard it may be to film, and no matter that so much footage ends up on the cutting room floor (yes, I know, in reality it ends up in the trash can on a PC desktop), the end result is thoroughly gripping. Long-time viewers of The Apprentice may disagree with me here, in a ‘the earlier series were great but it’s really gone downhill since then’ kind of way, but in my defence, I would like to point out that I never even watched it until Series 6, and have yet to catch up with Series 1 to 5 or 8 and 9.

The aerial shots of London used to knit the programme together are particularly stunning, but regardless of its technical qualities, the key to The Apprentice’s success lies in its combination of concept and characters. The former is pretty simple, and the kind of thing that when some development producer came up with it in a meeting room (or while he was sitting on the loo, or wherever it is that development producers come up with their ideas), no one had a clue if it was any good or not. Like any great invention, though, when something works, it makes you wish you had thought of it yourself. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Play Your Cards Right, The Crystal Maze, Blind Date, Countdown: even if you don’t actually watch shows like this, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the ingenious simplicity of the concepts behind them.

Like Dragon’s Den, which is another one of my favourite programmes from the past few years, The Apprentice has the added draw of offering its contestants the incentive of cold, hard cash, as opposed to Generation Game-style standbys like food processors or foot spas. While some of the contestants may well be more interested in fame than fortune, they do, therefore, have to demonstrate at least some aptitude for the world of work in order to make it through to the final sixteen, and it is this that raises The Apprentice above the level of certain other reality shows I could mention (Big Brother, come on down!), whose contestants merely need to demonstrate how handsome, glamorous, annoying, retarded or shamelessly self-promoting they are. (Having said that, contestants on The Apprentice frequently display an almost spectacular lack of business acumen, which if I was being charitable I would put down to fatigue, or to the deer-in-the-headlights feeling that must come with having one’s every move captured for posterity.)

Of course, characters on screen aren’t necessarily characters off it, and I have to admit that in the time between working on and watching the show, my memory of the contestants had almost completely faded. For example, I had no memory whatsoever of Tom, the eventual (spoiler alert!) winner, or of Helen, who was effectively co-winner (each of the final two ‘fakes’ a moment of victory for the cameras, and Sugar only decides which one to employ when they have worked with him for six months after filming is complete). Rather, I remembered Jim’s Northern-Irish charm, Natasha’s annoying habit of pronouncing the word ‘ultimately’ as ‘ootimately’, (a habit that to my astonishment never made it into the completed programme), and Suzie, who I have to confess I had a bit of a crush on.

The other characters on the show are of course Lord Sugar and his minions, Nick Hewer and Karren Brady. Nick tries, I think, a little too hard to cultivate his skeptical-yet-baffled persona, whereas Karren – who is, I can reveal from first-hand experience, a thoroughly nice person – tends to come up with the more perceptive nuggets of advice for her boss.

Sugar himself is a veritable production line of one-liners and ‘working class’ straight talking, and would arguably be good enough to front a prime-time show even if he didn’t happen to be a multi-millionaire. I defy anyone to watch twelve episodes of The Apprentice back-to-back and not go around for the following fortnight prefixing every single utterance with the word ‘bloody’, pronounced in a semi-Mockney market trader’s bark to sound more like ‘bladdy’ – eg. ‘That was bladdy awful!’ / ‘I should bladdy well think so too!’ / ‘Well you should have bladdy thought of that, shouldn’t you?!’ – and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that Sugar is just as curmudgeonly in person as he is on screen. On the day that I was working with him, and even after years of appearing on the show, he still couldn’t understand why it was he had to do bladdy re-takes or shots from different bladdy angles.

Conversely, the episodes in which Sugar’s opinion alone decides who should return to the boardroom for further grilling are much less effective than the ones in which Nick and Karren reveal which team made the most money on a task. It is the boardroom, in fact, and not the tasks themselves, that takes up the majority of screen time per episode: allowing for the introduction-stroke-title sequence, a re-cap of the previous episode, a preview of the next episode and the closing credits, the former gets about twenty-five minutes, while the latter gets more like twenty, so in effect – and in a post-modern kind of way – the contestants spend more time talking about what they did than they did doing it.

My conclusion after getting to the end of episode 12 is that no matter how tempting it may be to mock the ineptitude of the contestants, if by some unlikely chain of events I were to appear on the show myself, I can say with absolute conviction that I would fail miserably, for like hapless accountant Edward, fired in Episode 1 for failing at the foodie task, I have no leadership skills whatsoever, and would crumble into a gibbering heap of uselessness under pressure.

Living the dream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do-Re-Mi ドレミの歌

The other day Do-Re-Mi from The Sound Of Music was playing in the background during a TV programme about Switzerland, and Mrs M started singing along.

‘Do is the do of doughnut,’ she sang. ‘Re is the re of…’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ I interrupted. ‘Did you just say “doughnut”?’
‘Yes. “Do is the do of doughnut”. Why?’
‘Do isn’t the do of doughnut! Do is a deer, a female deer!’
‘What, you mean the English lyrics are different?’

Over the years, several people have translated The Sound Of Music into Japanese, but the version that stuck is by a woman called Peggy Hayama. Having seen the original stage musical in the early sixties, Hayama realised that particularly in the case of Do-Re-Mi, a literal translation wouldn’t work, so not only are her mnemonics different, but because the Japanese alphabet has no ‘la’ or ‘ti’ sounds, so are her syllables for the musical notes:

‘Do’ is the ‘do’ of ‘doughnut’
‘Re’ is the ‘re’ of ‘remon’ (er, lemon)
‘Mi’ is the ‘mi’ of ‘min-na’ (everyone)
‘Fa’ is the ‘fa’ of ‘faito’ (fight)
‘So’ is the ‘so’ of ‘aoi sora’ (blue sky)
‘Ra’ is the ‘ra’ of ‘rappa’ (trumpet)
‘Shi’ is the ‘shi’ of ‘shiawasé’ (happy)
Right, let’s sing!

Another sound you don’t get in Japanese is ‘lé‘, hence a lemon becoming a remon, and just in case you think Hayama is advocating the use of violence, in Japan, using the English word ‘fight’ is a way of exhorting someone to do their best.

Hayama also added a second verse, which mixes in a couple more mnemonics for good measure:

DOnna toki demo (whatever)
REtsu wo kundé (queue)
MInna tanoshiku (everyone)
FAito wo motté (fight)
SOra wo aoidé (sky)
RAn rararararara (er, la la la)
SHIawasé no uta (happy)
Sah, utaimashoh
Do-re-mi-fa-so-ra-shi-dondo

Translated back into English, it goes like this:

Whenever you want
Link your arms
Everybody having fun
Prepare to do your best
Look up at the sky
Lan-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
A happy song
Right, let’s sing!
Do-re-mi-fa-so-ra-shi-dondo

Doughnuts? Fighting? Olanges and Remons? Rodgers and Hammerstein must be turning in their graves. But anyway, just for the sake of completeness, here is Hayama’s Japanese version in full:

ドはドーナツのド　
レはレモンのレ
ミはみんなのミ　
ファはファイトのファ
ソは青い空　
ラはラッパのラ
シは幸せよ　
さあ歌いましょう　

ドレミファソラシド　ドシラソファミレ
ドミミミソソ　レファファラシシ
ドミミミソソ　レファファラシシ……
ソドラファミドレ　ソドラシドレド

どんなときにも　
列を組んで
みんな楽しく　
ファイト持って
空を仰いで　
ランララララララー
幸せの歌　
さあ歌いましょ　
ドレミファソラシドソド

Murder! / 殺人！

Mrs M appeared on TV the other day, although anonymously and with her face pixillated out. This was because she was talking about a high school classmate of hers who, believe it or not, is a murder suspect, as reported in these two news items from the 16th June edition of the Ibaraki Newspaper:

Wife and her acquaintance arrested – Chiropractor under investigation – Murder suspect ‘worried about violence’

After an incident in which chiropractor Takayuki Sawada (37) was stabbed to death in a fifth-floor apartment in Hitachi-Naka City, police from Hitachi-Naka West Precinct have arrested Sawada’s wife Satsuki Sawada (38, also a chiropractor) and a customer at their clinic, junior nurse Akiyo Kikuchi (27) of East Ohnuma Town, Hitachi City, on suspicion of murder. According to sources close to the investigation, Mrs Sawada has said, ‘I was worried about my husband’s violence in the home’. The same police precinct is looking at whether problems within the marriage were a motive for the killing.

According to the same police precinct, both suspects have confirmed the chain of events.

The two women are suspected of conspiring to murder Mr Sawada by stabbing him with a sharp-bladed weapon at around 4am on 14th June, in an apartment in East Ishikawa, Hitachi-Naka City.

Based on a statement by Ms Kikuchi, West Precinct police have discovered a kitchen knife and bloodstained clothing in Mito City centre. The knife appears to be from the Sawadas’ apartment.

The two suspects have said that, ‘Ms Kikuchi carried out the stabbing after Mrs Sawada let her into the apartment’. West Precinct police are looking at whether Kikuchi took the more active role in committing the crime, and at whether the apartment’s living room was the crime scene. An official autopsy is being performed on Mr Sawada’s body to determine the cause of death.

According to sources close to the investigation, Mr Sawada’s upper body had been stabbed numerous times, with stab wounds to his back and chest. Based on the fact that Mr Sawada had been stabbed both from the front and from behind, West Precinct police are regarding the stabbing as being with malicious intent.

West Precinct police transferred Mrs Sawada to Mito public prosecutor’s office on 15th June.

Possibility crime was planned

What can have gone on between the couple? After an incident in which a male chiropractor was murdered, the victim’s wife and a customer at the clinic the couple ran together have been arrested, and investigations into a motive for the crime and the chain of events that led up to it are now ongoing. According to sources close to the investigation, Ms Kikuchi has admitted that she visited the Sawada’s apartment. Mrs Sawada has said that, ‘I confided in Ms Kikuchi that I was worried about my husband’s violent behaviour,’ and Hitachi-Naka West Precinct are looking into the possibility that the two suspects had been planning the murder for some time.

Mrs Sawada called the emergency services at approximately 5.40am on 14th June and said, ‘My husband has fallen over, he’s covered in blood.’

‘When I got up this morning, my husband had fallen over,’ she explained.

An unemployed man in his sixties who lives in the same apartment block as Mrs Sawada said, ‘She was considerate and seemed like a very nice woman. I’m shocked [about the arrest].’

Ms Kikuchi was employed at a hospital in central Mito, and lived with her parents and older sister in Hitachi City. According to reporters, on the morning of 15th June, Ms Kikuchi’s family said, ‘[Ms Kikuchi] really admired Mrs Sawada.’

According to neighbours, Kikuchi was mild-mannered and courteous. Looking visibly shocked, a man in his forties said, ‘When you met her, she was the kind of girl who always bowed her head and said hello. That something like this has happened is unthinkable’.

Another high school classmate of Mrs M’s called to tell us what had happened as we were driving to the in-laws’, and while I was at Japanese class later in the evening, a reporter and cameraman turned up and filmed the interview, along with some footage of Mrs M looking at her high school yearbook.

Even though Mrs M was a member of the high school student council, and came in more regular contact with her contemporaries than most, she can’t remember much about Kikuchi, and hadn’t even realised they were in the same class together beyond the first year until she looked at the yearbook. Apparently Kikuchi was quiet without being obviously neurotic, although the reporter’s questions were very much of the ‘So you’re saying she didn’t have many friends?’ variety, and seemed to justify otoh-san’s suspicions about news reporters and their sensationalist tendencies.

When the interview was screened the following morning I had already left for work, but I saw an item on the evening news that filled in some of the details of the case.

As well as being a patient at the chiropractic clinic, Kikuchi helped out there in her spare time, and having befriended Kikuchi, Sawada sold her three hand-made ‘power stone’ bracelets. These have been fashionable in Japan for a few years, and allegedly possess healing powers, which must have been why Kikuchi was willing to fork out the equivalent of a hundred pounds each for them. The reason Kikuchi owned several, a friend of hers explained, was that a power stone needs to be taken off on a regular basis and left for a day or two so that its ‘power’ can be replenished.

Surprisingly, Kikuchi’s family also appeared in the report (although like Mrs M on the morning news, their faces were blurred) and said that in the weeks leading up to the murder, Kikuchi was ‘in a dark mood’, ‘unusually quiet’ and ‘worried about something’.

Another interviewee said that Sawada had suffered broken teeth and broken ribs, so one can only assume the allegations of domestic violence were true, although it was the manner in which Sawada did away with her husband that makes the story so intriguing. The word sen-noh (洗脳 / brainwashing) was used several times in the news report, and she appears to have preyed on Kikuchi’s vulnerability in order, ultimately, to use her not just as an accomplice but as a kind of hired killer. Ironically, the more you find out about the case, the more Kikuchi begins to seem like the innocent party, even though she was the one who allegedly wielded the murder weapon.

As newsreaders are fond of saying, more on this story as we get it, and in the meantime, here are the Ibarkai Newspaper items in the original Japanese:

茨城新聞２０１１年（平成２３年）６月１６日木曜日

整体師視察

妻と知人の女逮捕

殺人容疑「暴力悩んでいた」

ひたちなか市東石川のマンション５階の部屋で、整体師、澤田孝幸さん（３７）が刺殺された事件で、ひたちなか西署は１５日夜、殺人の疑いで、澤田さんの妻で整体師、さつき容疑者（３８）と夫婦が経営する整体院の客で日立市東大沼町４丁目、准看護師、菊池明代容疑者（２７）を逮捕した。捜査関係者によると、さつき容疑者は「夫の家庭内暴力に悩んでいた」と供述している。同署は夫婦間の不仲が動機とみて調べている。

同署によると、２人とも「その通り、間違いありません」と容疑を認める。

２人の逮捕容疑は共謀して１４日午前４時ごろ、ひたちなか市東石川のマンション室内で、澤田さんの体を刃物で数回突き刺し、殺害した疑い。

同署は菊池容疑者の供述に基づき、水戸市内で凶器の包丁と血がついた衣服を発見。包丁は澤田さん宅にあったものとみられる。

２人は「さつき容疑者が菊池容疑者を部屋に入れて菊池容疑者が刺した」と供述。同署は菊池容疑者が犯行の実行役、殺害場所はマンションの居間とみている。同署は澤田さんの遺体を司法解剖して死因を調べる。

捜査関係者によると、澤田さんの遺体は上半身を複数回刺され、背中以外に胸にも刺し傷があった。同署は澤田さんが前と後ろの両側から刺されていたことから、強い殺意があったとみている。

同署は１５日、さつき容疑者を水戸地検に送致した。

計画的犯行の可能性も

夫婦の間で何があったのか。整体師の男性が殺害された事件は、妻と、夫婦が経営する整体院の客の女が逮捕され、今後、犯行の経緯や動機の解明が進められることになった。捜査関係者によると、菊池容疑者は「澤田さんのマンションを訪れたことがある」と供述。さつき容疑者は「夫の暴力に悩んでいると菊池容疑者に打ち明けた」と話しており、ひたちなか西署は知り合いの２人が以前から殺害の計画を立てていた可能性があるとみている。

さつき容疑者は１４日午前５時４０分ごろ、「夫が血だらけで倒れている」と１１０番通報。「朝起きたら、夫が倒れていた」と説明していた。

さつき容疑者と同じマンションに住む無職の６０代の男性は「気配りの利く素敵な奥さんだった。（逮捕に）衝撃を受けた」と語った。

菊池容疑者は水戸市内の病院に勤務。日立市で両親、姉と暮らしていた。菊池容疑者の家族は１５日朝、取材に対し「（菊池容疑者は）さつき容疑者のことをとても尊敬していた」と話した。

近所の人によると、菊池容疑者は穏やかで礼儀正しかったという。４０代男性は「会えば頭を下げてあいさつする子だった。こんな事件を起こすとは考えられない」と驚いた表情見せた

Koyubi 小指

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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