Commuting 通勤

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obon お盆

The obon festival happens in mid-August, when most people take two or three days off work to return to their hometown and – more importantly – to pay homage to their ancestors at the family grave. Practically speaking, this usually means many hours stuck in an expressway traffic jam, followed by a day or two of over-eating and allowing the grandparents to spoil the grandchildren rotten, followed by many more hours stuck in an expressway traffic jam (some of this year’s were up to 70km long). Fortunately, Mrs M’s parents live just 12km away along a quiet country road, and they don’t as yet have any grandchildren to spoil rotten, so our obon was a pretty relaxed affair.

On Saturday evening we went to the local obon festival, which included food, drink and amusement stalls (hoopla, catch the goldfish and so on), a music stage, a taiko (太鼓 / Japanese drumming) contest and a procession of omikoshi (お神輿), which are the sometimes large and sometimes heavy portable shrines that groups of people in traditional costume carry through the streets, chanting as they go.

‘Occasionally,’ otoh-san told me, ‘the omikoshi get dropped. A few years ago one of them landed on that shop over there.’
‘I suppose it must be difficult to keep it upright if you’ve been carrying it for a long time,’ I said.
‘Ah, but that wasn’t an accident. The guy who owned the shop wasn’t very popular. He was always complaining about his neighbours, so they got together before the festival and planned the whole thing!’

When I asked if otoh-san had ever done any omikoshi carrying himself, he said that no, he wasn’t really interested in that kind of thing – in fact, this was his first visit to the festival since Mrs M was in kindergarten, and once we had jostled our way through the crowds for half an hour, he was keen to get away. With no fireworks either – many local councils have been trying to save money after the earthquake – this meant that much to Mrs M’s disappointment, instead of sticking around for some festival food (the whale meat shish kebabs were sold out, I noticed), we had a sit-down meal in a nearby restaurant, before rounding off the evening with a spot of karaoké.

The local karaoké box is under new management, and otoh-san complained that on their newly installed machines, the enka (演歌 / traditional ballad) recordings were all slightly flat, although you can of course adjust the key and speed of any song, and the volume and reverb of both the vocal and music tracks. There is also a new feature – or rather, a souped-up version of an old feature – that monitors your voice and gives a percentage score based on factors like timing, vibrato and whether or not you’ve managed to stay in tune: the aim while you’re singing is to keep the undulating line of your voice as close as possible to a scrolling graphic of the song, which looks like a cross between Wii Guitar Hero and proper musical notation. Okah-san was either too shy or too tired to join in, so I had the chance to murder several Beatles and Sinatra numbers, and when I attempted to sing my favourite stirring Japanese rock ballad, to realise that my ability to read Japanese subtitles is still a little too slow to enable an error-free karaoké performance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mrs M – who used to be the lead singer in her high school chorus club – got the highest score of the evening for her rendition of Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth.

The next morning we headed over to the local temple, whose earthquake-damaged ceramic tiles are in the process of being replaced with a less fragile – although probably even more expensive – copper-clad roof, which is still gleaming now, but which after a few years of oxidisation will apparently turn a dull dark green. A black granite tablet about two metres wide by one metre high, on which the names of everyone who contributed money to the building of the temple are carved (including otoh-san), had toppled over in the quake and smashed into pieces, and in the cemetery behind the temple, many of the gravestones have yet to be re-erected.

‘The one next door fell over and hit ours,’ said otoh-san, pointing to a large chip in the pedestal of the family grave.
‘The top part didn’t fall over, though,’ said onii-san. ‘It just rotated slightly until it was pointing north instead of east.’
This black granite obelisk, which is about a metre high and must weigh several hundred kilos, shifted even further during the aftershocks, although it has now been repaired to supposedly more earthquake-resistant standards.

The grave used to be a lot more basic, but when his barber shop was at its busiest in the early nineties, otoh-san shelled out a large sum of money to have it upgraded. There are now three or four steps leading up to the obelisk, which is flanked by two stone lanterns, and surrounded by a bed of gravel and a low stone wall. To the right is a black granite tablet that lists the names of those whose ashes have been interned there: in this case, otoh-san’s mother and father, the baby that okah-san lost to a miscarriage between giving birth to onii-san and Mrs M, and the beloved family pet Nana-chan, a fluffy-haired shitsu who died about four years ago. On the top step is an ornamental stone box in which to place incense sticks, although a small family of bees had recently taken up residence there, so we had to chase them off and prise their nest from the box before we could put our hands together in prayer.

On the way out, and before pausing to lay the remainder of our incense sticks in front of what is effectively a pauper’s grave – a corner of the cemetery for those people with no relatives to pay for a permanent memorial – otoh-san pointed out an inscription on one of the more ostentatious gravestones that read kuinashi (悔い無し).
‘No regrets,’ I translated.
‘Me too! No regrets!’ said otoh-san, and chuckled to himself as we made our way back to the car.

As they do every obon and new year, the following evening a car-full of relatives stopped off for dinner, which for okah-san’s sake consisted of several large platters of takeaway sushi and agémono (揚げ物 / deep fried chicken, prawns and the like). Noriko oba-san is otoh-san’s younger sister, Nobuaki oji-san is his younger brother, Nobuaki’s wife is Yoko oba-san, and Gen-chan is Noriko’s grandson, who is now eight years old, but was the only guest under the age of about eighteen at our wedding, where he sported a particularly endearing combination of jacket, shirt and tie, shorts and Mohican haircut.

The four of them had driven from Tokyo that morning, all the way to Iwaki in the north of Ibaraki, where another of otoh-san’s brothers owns a fish restaurant and sandwich shop on the coast road. The first floor of the restaurant was inundated in the tsunami, and while it has now re-opened, the road itself is still under repair.
‘The customers have to use a car park nearby and walk all the way round to the front of the shop,’ said Yoko as she passed round a box of sandwiches freshly made that morning.

While Genji watched TV and played his Nintendo DS, we worked our way through most of the food, several large cans of Asahi and a couple of bottles of saké, and once otoh-san and Noriko set about putting the world to rights, it was pretty hard to stop them. Noriko became particularly passionate about the merits of British English over American English, although this was, I suspect, mostly for my benefit, and while I tried to join in with the conversation as much as possible, Nobuaki played the role of diplomat, and Yoko chatted to okah-san about less controversial topics than the economy and race relations.

Gen-chan, who had been too shy to talk to anyone for most of the evening, suddenly came to life when they were about to leave, wolfing down some leftovers, shaking my hand and saying ‘Goodbye!’ before he ran outside to get in the car. As the only adult left sober, it was Yoko’s turn to take the wheel for the drive back to Tokyo, and the four of them headed off into the night with two large watermelons from okah-san’s allotment as a parting gift.

Hay fever 花粉症

It may seem a little strange given the fact that it was snowing the other day, but a lot of people are already suffering from hay fever, a condition that until a few decades ago was practically unheard of in Japan. Rather than summer grass pollen – which turns my nose into the physical equivalent of a bath tap with a broken washer when I’m in the UK – the problem here is spring tree pollen, specifically sugi (杉 / cedar) and hinoki (檜 / cypress), although until I read this centre-page spread from the Tokyo Newspaper, I hadn’t realised exactly why.
Thanks to an abundance of diagrams, graphs, pie charts and so on, and a writing style that is more Newsround than Newsnight, these encyclopaedia-like articles – which appear ever Sunday, and cover such esoteric topics as the history of coal mining and the Japanese space programme – have become essential reading, and okah-san makes a point of saving them for me. I haven’t bothered to translate the entire hay fever piece (published on 5th February), but hopefully those sufferers amongst you will find some of the information useful and / or interesting, and those non-sufferers amongst you will be able to sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that the next few months of your life will be both sneeze- and snot-free:

The number of people concerned about hay fever is on the increase. The season for hay fever caused by cedar pollen – a condition that is often referred to as the “citizens’ illness” – is drawing near. Here we describe the hay fever mechanism and how to deal with it – measures which may be difficult to find out about at crowded ear, nose and throat clinics.

The reasons for hay fever manifesting itself are threefold: ‘genetic predisposition’, ‘environmental factors’ and ‘pollen’. Most hay fever sufferers are sensitive to cedar pollen and the number of those sufferers is on the increase. Cedar was planted all over the country as a national policy in the years after WWII, and once a cedar tree exceeds 30 years of age, it is likely to produce large amounts of pollen.

(The fact that there was an enormous increase in the number of cedar trees being planted after the war – the original intention was to use the timber to help rebuild Japan’s devastated urban areas – is common knowledge, but the ‘thirty-year rule’ explains why the hay fever epidemic occurred more recently.)

If genetic predisposition and environmental factors are both present, symptoms become apparent in the sufferer once a certain amount of pollen is released. Not only do environmental factors make it more likely for the allergy to occur, they also exacerbate it. For example:

Eating habits – high-protein and high-fat diet
Living environment – airtight living spaces
Movement towards urban living – asphalt roads and pavements (pollen tends not to settle on road surfaces and is re-dispersed)
Atmospheric pollution – exhaust fumes

In this sense, hay fever is also called an ‘illness of civillisation’. The first public warning about pollen levels – relating to ragweed – was issued in 1961, and changes in the environment brought about by modernisation cannot be overlooked as a reason for this.

Pie chart – proportion of natural to man-made forestation in Japan:

Total forested area – 25,100,000 hectares
Natural forestation – 53% (13,380,000 hectares)
Man-made forestation – 41% (10,350,000 hectares)
Of which: 18% cedar (4,500,000 hectares), 10% cypress (2,600,000 hectares) and 13% other tree varieties (3,250,000 hectares)
Others – 6% (1,370,000 hectares)

The area covered by artificial cedar and cypress forests takes up around 19% of the total Japanese land mass – approximately 7,100,000 hectares. Six prefectures in Kanto (Tokyo, Saitama, Kanagawa, Chiba, Gunma, Tochigi and Ibaraki) and four prefectures in central Japan (Aichi, Gifu, Shizuoka and Nagano) have particularly extensive cedar and cypress forestation.

(Japan’s population is highly concentrated in urban areas, and it’s estimated that between 80 and 90% of the total land mass is mountainous, with most of that being forested. That more than 40% of that area was replaced with man-made forestation in the space of a few decades is an extraordinary statistic.)

Graph – Age of trees in artificial forests

Between 700,000 and 800,000 hectares of man-made forests are occupied by cedar between 41 and 45 years old, while fewer than 100,000 hectares of cedar are between 76 and 80 years old, and fewer than 50,000 hectares of cedar are between 1 and 5 years old.
Between 3 and 400,000 hectares of cypress are between 36 and 40 years old, with similar proportions to cedar for 76-80 and 1-to-5-year-old cypress.

(In other words, there’s a big spike in the graph for trees that hit their pollen-releasing prime in the past couple of decades.)

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a large increase in cedar pollen in years when the previous summer was extremely hot. In metropolitan Tokyo, the longest sunshine hours during that period – 300-plus in 2004 – were followed by the highest pollen count – 10,000 parts per cm² in 2005. Because of this, indications show that global warming is also influencing pollen levels, and therefore hay fever.

(These are statistics that I can vouch for through personal experience – ie. summer 2004 in Tokyo was stiflingly hot, and my hay fever in the spring of 2005 was even worse than usual.)

According to the results of a survey carried out with patients at ear, nose and throat clinics, the estimated number of sufferers countrywide stood at 29.8% in 2008. Of those, 26.5% were allergic to cedar pollen – around one in four people.
The estimated number of hay fever sufferers among Tokyo residents is currently at 28.2%, or around one in every 3.5 people. This is about three times greater than it was 20 years ago, and 1.5 times greater than it was 10 years ago
Depending on the influence of wind direction and topography, in areas where pollen is easily dispersed there is a tendency for the number of suffers to increase.
The rate is highest in Kanto (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma prefectures) and Tokai (Aichi, Gifu, Mie and Shizuoka prefectures)

Highest percentage of sufferers – Yamanashi 48.7%
Lowest percentage of sufferers – Kagoshima 12.7%
Percentage of sufferers in Ibaraki – 28.2%

Spreading from east to west, the hay fever season starts at the beginning of February in the west of Kyushu, in the middle of February in Tokyo, and at the end of March in Hokkaido.
It is currently popular to go on ‘pollen avoidance tours’ to places like Hokkaido and Okinawa.

(This isn’t as ludicrous an idea as it might sound – when my hay fever was at its worst in my mid-twenties, I spent a couple of summers in North America for the same reason.)

Regarding radioactive cesium in cedar pollen after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, in January this year, university researchers began a factual investigation at 11 locations in Kanto and Tohoku, and the Forestry Agency has said, ‘there is no effect on the human body’.

(In Ibaraki at least, fallen leaves have registered the highest levels of radioactivity, although as yet I haven’t seen any statistics for radiation levels in pollen – presumably because the season has only just started. Make of the Agency’s statement what you will!)

Cedar registers the largest amounts of pollen, from mid-February until mid-April, with the cedar pollen season in Hokkaido having the shortest duration.
Cypress has a shorter season with smaller amounts of pollen – mostly between mid-March and the end of April.
Pollen from alder, hazelnut and birch trees is negligible by comparison.
Grass pollen is prevalent from the beginning of April until the beginning of September, mainly in Kanto, although in comparatively small amounts.

(Not only is there less grass – and therefore less grass pollen – in Japan than there is in the UK, but according to the article, ‘the scope of grass pollen is much narrower’ – ie. it isn’t carried as far on the wind as tree pollen.)

Hay fever occurs when the immune system tries to eliminate germs or viruses from the body. Essentially, the body recognises harmless pollen for an allergen and tries to expel it.

1 – Pollen enters the body
2 – Pollen allergen dissolves and attaches itself to the membrane of the nose and eyes
3 – Allergen is recognised as a ‘foreign body’ and antibodies are produced
4 – Antibodies merge with mast cells (sensitisation)

(NB: for some reason the Japanese word for ‘mast cells’ is himan-saiboh – 肥満細胞 / obese cells – and there is a note in the article explaining that there ‘is no connection between mast cells and bodily obsesity’.)

5 – When pollen is inhaled again, chemicals are emitted to combat the allergen
6 – When sensory nerves stimulate sensory nerves and blood vessels, symptoms appear: itchy nose and eyes, runny nose, teary eyes, sneezing, blocked nose, bloodshot eyes

By sneezing and therefore cleaning out the nose, the body expels the allergen, and by blocking the nose, it makes it difficult for the allergen to enter the body.

The middle of the day and early evening are the peak times for dispersal of pollen. Wear a surgical mask when you go out. It is important to find a mask that feels comfortable and matches the size of our face.

(As the nice people at Quirky Japan pointed out in out this blog post, surgical masks have been popular here for the best part of a century, although frankly, I’m dubious as to their effectiveness in keeping out pollen. Blowing your nose is considered to be bad manners in Japan, and if you absolutely have to, it’s customary to use a paper hankie and dispose of it straight away. As I discovered from years of trial and error, however, paper hankies make your hay fever worse, as their abrasiveness irritates the skin and the fibres act like sneezing powder, thus making your nose even runnier. So while it may not do a lot for me in terms of cultural integration, I stick to cotton hankies and try to blow my nose as discreetly as possible.)

The most important thing is to prevent pollen from entering the body. Understand the dispersal pattern and the pollen count information, and as much as possible refrain from going outside.
On average, pollen levels peak at over 80 parts per cm²  at midday, with a second peak at over 60 parts per cm² at 6pm.
The symptoms begin directly after waking up, a phenomenon that is known as ‘morning attack’. When the temperature drops in the evening, pollen which has been suspended in the air descends.

The most appropriate treatment differs depending on one’s lifestyle and the severity of the condition. You should choose a treatment that fits you after discussing the matter with your doctor.
Medicine – Preventative treatment is effective. If you begin taking medicine before symptoms appear, they can be reduced.
Operation – An operation to scorch the nasal membrane can be completed as an out-patient. But its effectiveness is limited and symptoms may reappear. Recommended for pregnant women and students taking exams.
Immunotherapy – A treatment by which an antigen extract is injected into the body at fixed intervals. Injections take place over the course of about 3 years, and in 70 to 80% of cases are effective on sufferers. Medicine that can be taken orally is currently being clinically tested.

It is hoped that [allergen immunotherapy] could provide a complete cure. Symptoms can be abated by repeatedly injecting pollen extract in gradually increasing doses. The treatment requires patience but symptoms are fundamentally reduced, and to a great extent the use of medicine becomes unnecessary. However, as very rare side effects include breathing difficulties and low blood pressure leading to anaphylactic shock, caution is necessary.

At present, instead of being administered hypodermically, a new technique of administering immunotherapy as a medicine is under scrutiny. Since 2000, at the Japan University Of Medicine, with clinical research as a starting point, more than 400 cases have already been investigated, and serious side effects have not arisen. Apart from going to hospital about once a month, the medicine method can for the most part be carried out at home.

(An even newer treatment – called phototherapy – made an appearance on a recent TV show, and involves shining ultraviolet light into the nose. The machine that administers this is currently prohibitively expensive, but the boffin who introduced it said that a cheaper and more portable version should be available soon. Another TV programme introduced the fascinating possibility that asthma triggered by allergies – and presumably allergies of all kinds – can be cured by spending time 250m below ground in a salt mine: a quick Google search unearthed these two articles from The Telegraph – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/7527907/Asthma-treatment-in-Pakistani-salt-mine.html – and The Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/dec/03/ukraine.tomparfitt. For the moment, though, it looks as if I’ll have to stick to anti-histamines, nasal spray and my trusty cotton hankies…)

Heat

It’s been seven years since I sweated my way through one of the hottest summers on record in a tiny Tokyo apartment. The summer after that was relatively cool, and when Mrs M and I flew over for the Japanese leg of our wedding celebrations in the summer of 2008, I disappeared for five weeks to cycle around Hokkaido, where the weather was positively British – ie. wet, windy and cold enough that on at least one occasion I went to bed wearing a hat, jacket and long trousers. 2010 was by all accounts unfeasibly hot, to the extent that more than a hundred people died from heatstroke (熱中症 / necchuhshoh), so taking the law of averages into account, I assumed this year would be bearable. Thus far, however, both my assumptions and the law of averages have been proved wrong, and among other records to be broken, a town in the Tokyo suburbs has recorded the hottest ever June temperature – over 39˚c.

Since global warming began to kick in, temperatures in the UK haven’t been far behind, but even at 37˚c I quite happily played a round of golf with my friend B-san a few years ago (B-san was, incredibly, wearing jeans at the time). Even Spain in June (honeymoon / 30˚c+) and Saudi Arabia in May (work / 40˚c+) never felt as oppressive as this, and the only difference between them and Japan, as far as I can tell, is the humidity. High humidity makes it feel as if you’re wrapped in a radiator, the sweat squeezed out of you like water from a flannel, and I can’t even begin to imagine how people cope in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where your shirt will be sodden within approximately five seconds of stepping outside.

The solution, of course, is air conditioning, but quite apart from the amount of electricity it uses, air con can’t be very good for your health. Sure, it’s nice to go to the supermarket on a summer’s day and loiter in the freezer section, but even after a few hours in an air-conditioned office, I can feel my throat dry up and my temples start to throb. More importantly – and particularly in places like Tokyo, where every office block, restaurant and shopping centre, every bus, train and taxi is artificially cooled – the downside of pumping cold air into a building or a vehicle is that you are simultaneously pumping hot air out of it. Rumour has it that if everyone switched off their air conditioners in a city like Tokyo, the temperature would drop by three or four degrees, which kind of defeats the object of using them in the first place, although of course, if I a) ruled the world and b) managed to have air conditioning banned, I would be prepared to make one or two exceptions: supermarket freezer sections, for example, and hospitals.

In recent years, the Japanese in particular have been trying to solve the problem of inefficient air con, either by designing air conditioners that use less electricity, or by utilising the hot air that would otherwise be wasted to produce hot water (not that they really need to – when I get home from work on a summer’s day and turn on the cold tap in the kitchen, water that has been sitting in the pipes for the previous few hours will be hot enough to have a shower in). There are now sprinklers in some public places that spray a fine mist of cold water over passers by, and the most outlandish scheme I have heard of for combating electricity shortages this summer – a scheme that thankfully got no further than the planning stage – would have involved shipping thousands of tons of snow from Hokkaido to Tokyo, to be stored underground and used as the main ingredient in some new-fangled cooling system.

I wonder to what extent productivity suffers during the summer months, as it’s as much as I can do to turn on the computer and type this blog entry (when it’s 35˚c with sixty per cent humidity, fingertips act like tubes of Pritt Stick on a computer keyboard), and most of the time I’d rather be lying in a darkened room next to a large glass of ice water than working or even sitting up straight. Teaching an English lesson is more a matter of endurance than enjoyment, and I’ve learnt from my colleagues that it’s a good idea to have at least a couple of spare shirts on hand for when those sweat stains start to become too obvious or too, er, fragrant. Also, the hot weather puts people on edge, and after the row our neighbours on the second floor had recently, the couple downstairs followed suit last week, prompting much discussion between Mrs M and I about exactly which items of furniture they had thrown at each other, and where they had landed (nowhere near the baby, we’re assuming).

The sensible and natural way of avoiding the heat is to get up early and do whatever you have to do while the temperature is still manageable, so when I arrived for work at 7am the other day (I was accompanying some of the students to an English debating contest), kocho-sensei had been cutting the grass since six, and one of my Japanese teachers does the gardening at a similarly early hour. Most Japanese won’t go so far as to have a proper siesta (because people travel further to work these days, the siesta is a dying art even in Spain) but one or two teachers can often be seen nodding off at their desks if they have a free period after lunch, so yes, that rumour you’ve heard about people falling asleep in meetings really is true, although I can’t say that I’ve been brave enough to try it myself…

Hirakata 平潟

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(NB. If you click on this link you may have to sit through a commercial before the video itself starts.)

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

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

Despite Hisako saying the food was on the house and Mrs M saying it was our birthday treat, Otoh-san insisted on paying the bill himself, and as he did so I peeked into the kitchen to thank the chef, realising as I did so that she was in fact Hisako’s mother, who is getting on for eighty years old.

The sashimi she prepared had come straight from Hirakata fish market, where Yoshihiro oji-san works with one of his sons, and when we popped in to say hello, Yoshihiro greeted us with a present of two large polystyrene boxes full of fish and seafood.
‘These are aji (鯵 / horse mackerel),’ he said, as a flurry of ash floated down from the cigarette balanced on his bottom lip. ‘These are hoh-boh (gurnard). There are some prawns, some flat fish and some mé-hikari (literally ‘shining eyes’, and like a slightly larger variety of whitebait) – those are both really good deep fried.’
He handed me a tuna so that I could pose for a photograph, and asked if we wanted to take that with us as well, although Okah-san politely declined, saying there wouldn’t be enough room in the freezer.

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

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

JLPT 日本語能力試験

I hereby wish to announce my retirement from studying Japanese. Or perhaps ‘semi-retirement’ would be a better way of putting it: what I want to semi-retire from is the student-y part of studying, so from now on there will be no more weekday evenings at the Adult Learning Centre, no more Saturday mornings at the Centre For International Communication, and no more poring over endless photocopies of convoluted explanations of the incredibly subtle difference between equally obscure grammatical constructions.

My excu…er, I mean reason for quitting is that on 1st July I sat – for the second and possibly final time – Level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (aka nihongo noh-ryoku shiken / 日本語能力試験), and with any luck, this time I’ll get the 100 points out of 180 required for a pass (last December I managed a close-but-no-cigar 98). As you might expect, Level 1 is mind-bogglingly difficult, although passing it – particularly passing it by the skin of one’s teeth, which is what I’m aiming for – can in no way, shape or form be regarded as evidence that one is fluent in Japanese.

You can, for instance, get full marks in Level 1 of the JLPT without so much as being able to say ‘konichiwa’, as there is no spoken element to the exam. It helps a lot if you can understand what someone is talking about when they say ‘konichiwa’ to you, but if you live in Japan and have a reasonable grasp of the language, the listening section is comparatively easy (and by ‘comparatively easy’, I mean, ‘infinitesimally less fiendishly tough than the reading section’).

When I sat Level 1 in December 2011, I can honestly say that there wasn’t a single occasion as I was doing the latter when I thought to myself, ‘Aha! That’s definitely the right answer!’ For about a third of the time I thought, ‘Well, that’s probably the right answer, but I’m not 100% sure,’ for about another third of the time I thought, ‘Well, that’s not obviously the wrong answer, and I’m not even 50% sure,’ and for the rest of the time I simply crossed my fingers, picked a number between one and four and hoped for the best.

This time round, I was pleased to discover that my reading speed had improved, so that I was left with five minutes at the end of the test to hastily reassess some of the more utterly baffling questions. The trouble is that ‘reading’ and ‘understanding‘ are two entirely different things, and I’m not sure that I had improved at all in the latter.

The comprehension question that had me completely stumped last year was a page-and-a-half-long essay about (I think) the relationship between philosophy and science, and my strategy then was to look at my answer sheet, find the number I had plumped for the fewest number of times – two, if memory serves me correctly – and answer all four questions about the passage with a two. This time round there was an essay about a Japanese writer and his attitude to the concepts of fantasy and imagination, which would have been impenetrable enough if it wasn’t for the fact that these were expressed as ‘fantasy-fantasy’ and ‘imagination-imagination’, so that instead of, say, ‘So-and-so uses the concept of fantasy to deal with the indirect expression of ideas, whereas he uses the concept of imagination to deal with the direct expression of ideas,’ the essay went something like, ‘So-and-so uses the concept of fantasy-fantasy to deal with the indirect expression of ideas, whereas he uses the concept of imagination-imagination to deal with the direct expression of ideas.’ Pardon the net-ism, but WTF?!

While I wasn’t at quite so much of a loss for some of the other comprehension questions, time and again I was only able to narrow down the possible number of correct answers to two: even if you essentially ‘get’ what’s being discussed in the relevant passage of Japanese, you will often be confronted with a choice of answers along the lines of:

1) In this passage, the writer is saying that he agrees with the policy of protecting as many species of whale as possible
2) In this passage, the writer is saying that he disagrees with the policy of not protecting any species of whale at all.
3) In this passage, the writer is saying that he disagrees with the policy of protecting as many species of whale as possible.
4) In this passage, the writer is saying that he agrees with the policy of not protecting any species of whale at all.

Obviously that’s not a direct quote, but you get the idea.

The exam rooms themselves – in the romantically named Building 3B and Building 3C at Tsukuba University – were large-ish lecture theatres, and while it was possible to go in and sit down half an hour before the official start time, I have learned from experience that it is best to loiter outside until the last possible moment, as this enables you to go for as many last-minute pees as you want (I managed three) and to engage in panicked small-talk with your fellow examinees.

Even once you have entered the lecture theatre, there is still an interminable wait before you are finally allowed to pick up your retractable pencil and open the exam paper. The invigilators – who wore yellow arm bands, and as far as I could tell were students earning some extra cash – first read out the rules and regulations (no food or drink in the exam room, switch off your mobile phones, put your bag on the floor, items permitted to be placed on desk: pencils – HB or B – spare pencil leads, erasers, wristwatch), then went around the room making sure the photographs on our application forms matched our faces. They also explained the two-strikes-and-you’re-out, yellow card / red card warning system, although the JLPT is not the kind of exam that changes lives or launches careers, so I can’t imagine this is put into practice very often.

With so much to read and so little time in which to read it (two hours and five minutes, to be precise), the sheer levels of concentration required to sit Level 1 would be enough to turn the most laid-back of Japanophiles into something more reminiscent of that bloke from the David Cronenberg film Scanners whose head literally explodes in mid-press conference, and to be honest, there’s not much you can do to counteract this. My main relaxation strategy was to take off my shoes in the manner of a long-haul air passenger, and while no one in the surrounding seats complained about my smelly socks, none of them followed suit, either.

After the reading section there was a forty-minute break, during which everyone rushed outside and gulped down as much caffeine as their bodies would tolerate, and when we re-entered the lecture theatre, I was interested to note that several people – their brains no doubt completely frazzled by the onslaught of obscure vocabulary and literary grammar – had given up and gone home. Partly because thousands of others are sitting the same exam at various locations around the world – on the same day but in different time zones – you are not allowed to take the exam paper home with you, so I have spent the past few days trying to recall what the questions were and where exactly I went wrong; I will have to wait another two months before the result arrives in the post, and to find out if – like, er, David Beckham at the 2006 World Cup – my retirement has been premature.

Sunday drive

We have recently taken possession of a second-hand car, thanks to a very nice friend of onii-san’s who works at a Toyota dealership. After one careful gentleman owner, the Platz – or Pratz, as the Japanese pronunciation would have it – came with new tyres, a new battery, an MOT, less than 30,000km on the clock, and some kind of special coating for the windscreen that supposedly disperses rainwater to the extent that you don’t need to use the wipers. When he found out that I was an addict, onii-san’s pal even threw in a couple of packets of Choco Pie for good measure, and the car is such a smooth ride that like proper grown ups, Mrs M and I have been going for Sunday drives.

One of these was to Ooarai, where that post-quake footage of a small boat caught in a very large whirlpool was shot. Admittedly, by the time the tsunami reached Ooarai it had shrunk somewhat from its twenty-nine-metre maximum, but as we drove along the sea front, several shops were still closed, their windows either boarded up or with chest-high mud marks on them. The furniture from other businesses and households had been left outside to dry in the sun, and at least one fishing boat was still stranded on the quayside, while the ferry terminal I once passed through on my way to Hokkaido looks as if it will be closed for some time to come.

Picture

As with a lot of tourist attractions these past few weeks, the entrance fee for Ooarai Marine Tower had been temporarily waived, and we shared the glass-fronted lift to the top with a local family.
‘There must have been people up here when the earthquake happened,’ said one of them.
‘Scary, isn’t it?’
‘The elevator would have stopped as well.’
‘Do you think there were people stuck in here the whole time?’
‘I don’t know. I guess they might’ve been able to use the stairs.’
‘I wouldn’t have wanted to watch the tsunami coming in, that’s for sure.’

At the bottom of the tower the regular flea market – which Mrs M and I first went to on one of our first dates nearly six years ago (never let it be said that I don’t know how to show a girl a good time) – was also making a comeback, and some of the more publicly spirited stallholders were donating their proceeds for the day to the earthquake appeal. While a fair proportion of the stuff on show was new, it was a novelty to be able to browse through boxes of old LPs, rusty garden tools and faded piles of clothes, as the demand for second-hand goods in Japan is nowhere near as healthy as it is in the UK, where I have long been a devotee of car boot sales, charity shops and the like.

The shopping mall next door, where we had eaten lunch with friends of Mrs M’s just a couple of months ago, was now completely deserted, its car park strewn with uprooted shrubs and its entrance blocked by a huge pile of fixtures, fittings and water-damaged goods (mostly clothing – rumour has it some opportunistic Chinese thieves ransacked the place for anything sell-able in the days after it was inundated).

A couple of blocks north, the Mentai Park had survived largely intact, mainly because its foundations are raised about four feet above ground level (see below – the bits of yellow gaffer tape show how high the water came). Mentaiko – marinated pollack roe – are one of those obscure seafood dishes only the Japanese could be obsessed with, and this place has every conceivable variation on the theme, from mentaiko on its own (it is manufactured in little sausages with a membrane-like casing), to deep fried mentaiko, mentaiko stuffed in sardines and mentaiko dumplings.

Picture

There’s even a mentaiko exhibition, from one corridor of which you can watch the adjoining mentaiko production line in action, although my favourite thing about the Mentai Park – apart perhaps from the free coffee, tea and tasters – is its theme song.

All sorts of foodstuffs here have theme songs: walk around a supermarket and you will come across at least one or two tape recorders playing upbeat pop tunes with lyrics about seaweed or hamburgers, and they are often voiced by children to give them that added touch of cuteness. The Mentai Park song is maddeningly catchy in a way that would make even Kylie suffer a bout of covetousness, so you’ll be glad to know that you can listen to it on the Kanéfuku website (Kanéfuku is the company that runs the Mentai Park – scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the mp3 player-type thing). Alternatively, you could become an employee of Kanéfuku, and be obliged to listen to it over and over and over again, all day long, every day of the week, 365 days a year. Or perhaps not.

But anyway, given that the lyrics are displayed on the aforementioned website, I couldn’t resist a spot of translating, so here they are in all their approximated English language glory:

Everyone loves them! Kanéfuku pollack roe!

They tingle on your tongue, Kanéfuku pollack roe, lively and full of zest
Tiny Kanéfuku pollack roe
Delicious Kanéfuku pollack roe

[Verse 1]

I love pollack roe
I’m eating them today
I always love pollack roe
I eat loads of them
Pollack roe with squid, pollack roe with chicken wings, pollack roe with pasta – delicious, aren’t they?
Like little bubbles popping in your mouth, you can hear them say, ‘Hello!’ [harmony vocals: ‘Let’s eat!’]
They tingle on your tongue, Kanéfuku pollack roe, lively and full of zest
Tiny Kanéfuku pollack roe
It’s almost time for dinner – pollack roe!

[Verse 2]

Everyone loves pollack roe
We eat them every day
We love pollack roe any time
They make a happy meal
Pollack roe with mackerel, pollack roe with pilchards – lots of ways to eat them, delicious, aren’t they?
They tingle on your tongue, Kanéfuku pollack roe, lively and full of zest
Gulp them down, Kanéfuku pollack roe
Let’s eat some more pollack roe

They tingle on your tongue, Kanéfuku pollack roe, lively and full of zest
Tiny Kanéfuku pollack roe
Pollack roe make a delicious meal
Delicious Kanéfuku pollack roe

And in the original Japanese:

みんな大好き！かねふくの明太子！

ピリッと　かねふく明太子　元気モリモリ
ビビット　かねふく明太子
おいしい　かねふく明太子

１．     ボクの大好きな　明太子
今日も　たべるよ
いつも大好きな　めんたいこ
いっぱい　たべちゃうよ
イカめんたい　手弱めんたい　パスタめんたい　おいしいね
ぷちぷちと　はじけてる　お口の中から「こんにちはー！」（掛け声で「いただきまーす！」）
ピリッと　かねふく明太子　元気モリモリ
ビビット　かねふく明太子
もうすぐごはんだ　めんたいこ！

２．     みんな大好きな　めんたいこ
毎日　たべるよ
いつも大好きな　めんたいこ
うれしい　ごはんだ
サバめんたい　いわしめんたい　いろんな食べかた　おいしいね
ぷちぷちと　はじけてる　お口の中から　「こんにちはー！」（「掛け声で「こんにちはー！」）
ピリッと　かねふく明太子　ごはんモリモリ
ペロッと　かねふく明太子　
まだまだ食べちゃお（う）　めんたいこ

ピリッと　かねふく明太子　元気モリモリ
ビビット　かねふく明太子
おいしい　ごはんだ　めんたいこ
おいしい　かねふく明太子

After a prawn burger lunch further up the coast at the Joyful Honda food court, we popped over the road to Hitachi Seaside Park, another tourist attraction that was opening its gates for free. While the amusements were still closed for repairs, the gardens were in full bloom, with daffodils in an English country garden setting, replete with gazeboes, trellises and wrought iron patio furniture, and tulips in a Dutch canal-side setting, replete with a windmill and a drawbridge. A middle-aged man was taking photographs of his poodle, which appeared to have modelled for him before, as it sat obediently in front of the more colourful flowerbeds while its master found the right framing and pressed the shutter. Some people were napping in the shade and others were eating packed lunches on blue tarpaulins on the grass, while their children dutifully took off their shoes before playing on a sort of landscaped climbing hillock which had been concreted over and painted bright yellow.

Further into the park, at the end of an avenue of trees, people appeared to be walking into the sky, as they climbed a zig-zagging path up a hillside covered with powder blue nemophila (aka baby blue eyes – or so it says in Wikipedia). Only the tips of the nemophila’s petals are blue, as the colour fades to white towards their centres, so it was only when you stood back that the colour matched perfectly with the sky’s blue near the horizon, and the whole effect was quite magical: almost hyper-real, or like a stage set from The Wizard of Oz.

Picture

When we talked to okah-san later that evening, she said that she had tried to cultivate nemophila at the allotment, but without success. They need quite a lot of attention, apparently, which makes what the gardeners at the Seaside Park have achieved all the more impressive
Picture

Anyone for mushy peas?

Obviously I have been breaking into spontaneous renditions of God Save The Queen at least three times a day since the Olympics kicked off, and cheering on our rowers, runners, riders and, er, beach volleyball players to make the most of their home advantage and win a hatful of medals. But in amongst all the Brit-related hoo-ha on television of late, the most amusing – and accurate – story had nothing whatsoever to do with sport.

Sekai Banzuké (世界番付 / World Ranking) is part of a sub-genre of Japanese programming that for want of a better phrase, I shall categorise as ‘Foreigners do the craziest things!’ and in common with its predecessors, pits a panel of comedians and celebrities against a panel of foreigners (a colleague of mine told me that he once spotted an ALT he used to work with on a ‘Foreigners do the craziest things!’ programme hosted by Takeshi Kitano). Sekai Banzuké presents a series of rankings – each week’s episode is based around a theme such as romance, money or manners – as the basis for multi-cultural debate and mutual Mickey-taking, and occasionally conducts its own hidden camera ‘research’ in several different countries simultaneously. One such experiment involved a tearful child pretending to be lost in order to see how many people would stop to help her, another involved a glamorous woman sashaying down the street and recording how many times she was wolf-whistled or chatted up, and for another, an actor ‘accidentally’ dropped an armful of oranges to see if anyone would help him pick them up (the Japanese proved to be the most helpful in this particular experiment).

The panel of foreigners on Sekai Banzuké is known as the G20, and its members speak Japanese with varying degrees of proficiency. One or two of them can be seen glancing down at their notes as they tell an anecdote, and Mrs M practically swoons over the ones who are the most ryuu-choh (流暢 / fluent), but for the most part, they have become regulars on the programme because they possess a recognisable comic persona: Ian from the UK is curmudgeonly and sarcastic; Simone from Brazil is big and brash; Christine likes to demonstrate how even children’s songs from her native Switzerland sound like terrifying Nazi rallying cries; Richard is constantly apologising for how boring life in the Netherlands is; the South African Prisca is an intimidating combination of soul singer and man-eater; and Gregory from New Zealand is a greasy-haired back-packer type with only a passing interest in personal hygiene.

Recent rankings have included: which country has the biggest homes (America), which country is the most linguistically able (Malaysia – the average Malaysian speaks more than three languages, while the Japanese were bottom of the list with an average of just 1.2), which country’s women are the most desirable (Brazil), which country has the most wedding guests (India), which country drinks the most alcohol (Latvia), and so on and so forth. Some of the statistics on which the rankings are based are more reliable than others, but despite the programme being played mainly for laughs, it does manage to be at least moderately informative.

One of the rankings in last week’s episode was ‘Which country has the most inedible food?’ – not an easy statistic to quantify, but anyway, Russia came in third, America second, and in a way that can’t have been entirely coincidental on the day before the Olympic opening ceremony, the UK came first. Once Ian had reacted with his most withering look, the programme cut to a pre-recorded segment in which the half-British model-stroke-celeb Joy (real name Joseph Greenwood) was packed off to London to investigate.

Joy’s first stop was Piccadilly Circus, where he asked foreign tourists if they agreed with the allegation (they did) and native Brits if they disagreed – they did, and all pointed to fish and chips as an example of British cuisine at its finest. With this in mind, Joy resolved to sample this signature dish for himself. Rather than seeking out an authentic British chippy, however, he went to one of those touristy dives in central London where the décor is cheap and nasty and the menus are an over-priced hodge-podge of fast food staples, aimed at the kind of tourists who don’t know where to find a decent eatery, and at the kind of pre- and post-pub revellers who wouldn’t know a decent eatery if they were delivered direct to their table in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

The ‘chef’ at said restaurant deep-fried everything from frozen – and for far longer than was necessary – resulting in fish that appeared to have fossilised over the course of several centuries, and chips like a mound of mini-breeze blocks. When Joy asked the waitress if she didn’t think that perhaps the dish was a little on the bland side, her advice was to add vinegar (Mrs M and I were watching the programme at the in-laws’, and onii-san made the point that particularly in the UK, customers are encouraged to add their own seasoning using the condiments provided – a kind of ‘I’ve cooked the food, you add the flavour’ philosophy). The production team then bought take-away fish and chips from four equally dubious central London establishments and delivered them to Parliament Square for Joy to conduct a taste test: perhaps unsurprisingly, he described each one as being ‘uniquely disgusting’.

Next on Joy’s itinerary was a kind of ‘ranking within a ranking’, for which he was made to sample the three most stomach-churningly foul British dishes in existence. Number three was the deep-fried Mars Bar, number two was another Scottish concoction, the haggis (to be fair, on a visit to Scotland in my pre-vegetarian days, I thought haggis was rather nice), and number one was jellied eels, which induced on-screen retching from both Joy and his manager (as you might expect, the Japanese way of preparing eel – aka unagi / 鰻 – is infinitely more palatable).

In order to find out what the average British family eats at home, Joy then headed for the suburbs and began knocking on doors, asking a succession of wary-looking strangers if they wouldn’t mind cooking him dinner. He was finally invited in by a young mum called Becky, who, almost as if she had been chosen beforehand, proceeded to ‘cook’ a stereotypically unappetising meal of instant mashed potato, instant gravy, microwaved sweetcorn, a medley of carrots, cauliflower and broccoli boiled from frozen (‘Frozen vegetables are the freshest,’ declared Becky, much to the dismay of the celebs and presenters back in the Sekai Banzuké studio) and a piece of chicken grilled to the point where it looked as if it had been caught in the epicentre of a nuclear explosion. While Becky couldn’t understand what Joy was saying as he tucked in to the dinner she had cooked for him, something in her sensed that the verdict wasn’t favourable, and he only managed to avoid being kicked out of the house by breaking into a spontaneous impression of Dobby from the Harry Potter films.

Cut to Joy’s interview with a food ‘expert’, who explained that after the onset of the industrial revolution, the British had less time to spend on preparing food, and that since lower income families found it difficult to get hold of fresh ingredients, they tended to overcook things like meat and fish to make absolutely sure they didn’t come down with food poisoning.

In the interests of – ahem – balance, Joy’s final port of call was a posh gastro pub, where he was served a dish of rare venison, accompanied by vegetables that in all likelihood not been boiled from frozen.
‘This is good!’ he exclaimed, his face a mixture of surprise and delight, and with that, the programme cut back to the studio, where Ian was looking even more withering and curmudgeonly than before.

Obviously the makers of Sekai Banzuké had directed and edited the piece with the express intention of a) making British food look revolting and b) making the viewers laugh, but while I suspect you will find equally disgusting food elsewhere in the world, they did have a point. Particularly when I was growing up, Britain was a country where it was all too easy to find oneself eating undigestible stodge, although I’m not sure this has anything to do with the industrial revolution. Most of us simply don’t care enough about food to demand anything better, and while a British housewife (or house husband) will throw together a packed lunch of sandwiches, a chocolate bar, a bag of crisps and an apple in a matter of minutes, her Japanese counterpart will get up at five in the morning to cook bento boxes from scratch for her husband and children.

As the expert pointed out, British cuisine has improved no end in recent years, and we can now boast a number of Michelin-starred restaurants. Thanks to the likes of Jamie Oliver – an episode of whose series Jamie’s Great Britain was recently broadcast on NHK – both cooking and eating are seen as a pleasure rather than a chore, and if nothing else, Sekai Banzuké would do well to invite a British celebrity to Japan and see how they get on with the likes of shio-kara (塩辛 / fermented squid guts), sazaé (栄螺 / a green and black coloured, bitter tasting shellfish), fu (麩 / cubes of wheat flour dough that are used as soggy croutons in soups), and of course natto (納豆 / sticky, stringy fermented soy beans that smell like old socks).

Elementary school / 小学校

My schedule at junior high school is fairly light, and even when I’m in a classroom, it’s merely as an assistant (I only just learnt the Japanese word for ALT, and no wonder, as it’s the rather ungainly gaikokugo-shidoh-joshu / 外国語指導助手). Every Wednesday, however, I work at a nearby elementary school, where despite my job title being the same, I effectively take on sole responsibility for planning and teaching four lessons during the course of the day.

By the time they start junior high school, children are already well on the way to becoming surly teenagers, who would rather stare at the floor in embarrassment than hold a conversation, and whose workload gets exponentially more arduous, what with after-school club activities most nights of the week and a lengthy list of exams to pass before they reach high school, where the list of exams will become even more lengthy. At elementary school, though, they still have that wide-eyed enthusiasm that makes teaching them a pleasure, even if keeping them under control can be rather hard on the vocal chords.

I get up slightly earlier than usual on a Wednesday morning, as I have to drop by the junior high school to change into my work clothes and collect my lesson plans. Having cycled five minutes down the road to the elementary school, I will then have first period to remind myself of exactly what it was I put in the lesson plans, and to say hello to the other teachers as they pop in and out of the staff room.

While office workers all over Japan will be coming to work in open-necked shirts this summer (an idea called ‘Cool Biz’, whose purpose is to save on air conditioning bills and thus combat electricity shortages), I have rarely seen the kocho-sensei at my elementary school wearing anything other than a tracksuit, and this relaxed dress code is partly because during morning break, everyone jogs around the playground to the accompaniment of a medley of pop songs. The last of these has an instrumental break at the end, which is everyone’s cue to start sprinting, and while I can appreciate the benefits of deliberately wearing out a bunch of over-excitable school kids, I can’t say that I’m particularly looking forward to Jogging Time – or indeed Sprinting Time – when the temperature starts creeping into the thirties.

Lunch break is a little less regimented, and I will often get roped in to play games with whichever kids grab me first. Football is played with a proper ball, large goals, on a large pitch, and with lots of little players running from one end to the other and back again (elementary students all have reversible red-or-white peaked caps, and the first time I joined in, I had to ask them to properly divide themselves into a red team and a white team, otherwise how was I going to know who was on my side?). Dodgeball is beloved of Japanese children, and the game I took part in a couple of weeks ago quickly degenerated into chaos, due to the fact that another group of children was trying to play basketball in the same place at the same time. I was once persuaded by some of the younger children to play oni-gokko (鬼ごっこ / the Japanese version of tag, or ‘it’ as we used to call it when I was younger), but have vowed never to do so again, as I became ‘it’ within a few seconds, and spent the rest of break time fruitlessly chasing down the other players, who were able to utilise a rule which says that even if you are caught, you will be safe so long as you have crossed your arms first.

Elsewhere in the playground, the children will be riding unicycles, spinning hula hoops and clambering around on the rather old and frankly treacherous looking climbing frames, which are a good three metres high: last week, one poor girl burst into tears at the top, and was still stuck there with a teacher trying to talk her down when the bell rang to signal the start of cleaning time.

Elementary students aren’t quite as thorough with their cleaning duties as their counterparts in junior high, but they are admirably dedicated to the task, and dutifully obey the class rota that dictates who cleans which part of the school and on what day. They also line up when they’re finished to bow to each other and say ‘gokuroh-sama-deshta’ (ご苦労様でした / ‘Good job!’). Just like at junior high school, they even serve their own lunch, which is delivered ready prepared and still warm from the town’s municipal catering company. Again, there is a rota for each class that lists who has to dress in surgical masks, elasticated bonnets and white coats and act as dinner ladies and dinner gents for the day.

One of the kocho-sensei’s right-hand men, S-sensei, is my main point of contact at the school, and as well being very patient with my rudimentary Japanese (relatively speaking, his English is significantly better), he always has my schedule mapped out well in advance, including which class I am to visit for lunch. There are only six possibilities, as due to the declining birth rate in Japan, many rural schools have been forced to close, class sizes are getting smaller, and where my junior high has two classes in each grade with up to thirty seven students in each, the elementary has just one class per grade of around twenty.

The great thing for me about working at elementary school is that the students are closer to my mental age as a Japanese speaker, and I am a lot more comfortable talking about zoo animals or Tokyo Disneyland than I am about politics, religion or radiation levels. Over lunch, your typical elementary student will ask me something like, ‘What’s your favourite mode of transport?’ or ‘Do you have any pets?’ and then, depending on my answer, will proceed to tell me all about how their dad owns a truck that he drives for the family cleaning business and he let them ride in the cab once, or how many dogs their family owns, how old they are and what breed they are. When I was introducing myself for my first lesson with each class, I had to answer many such questions – questions that for children of between six and twelve years old are of the utmost importance. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ or ‘What’s your favourite food?’ are the standard, but you do get some pretty bizarre ones now and then. ‘What’s your favourite shape?’ for example, had me completely stumped, until one of the other students called out ‘heart!’ and saved me from having to say that I liked squares or triangles.

At the end of the day, everyone lines up in the playground wearing their other hat – either a yellow baseball cap or a yellow Richie Richardson-style cricket hat – and randoseru (school bag). The children will be grouped depending on where they live so that no one has to walk home on their own, and god forbid that anyone’s parents should come to pick them up in the car: just as the junior high school students all ride bicycles to school, so the elementary students all walk, even if it’s for a very long way indeed (one of them told me yesterday that it takes her fifty minutes to walk home, which makes for a round-trip of an hour and forty minutes every day).

As one of my colleagues at junior high said, many of the students had probably never seen a white man in their entire lives before they met me (their previous ALT was Chinese), and because I only teach at the elementary school once a week, the sheer novelty of my presence means they can barely contain their enthusiasm when they see me in the playground or when I pass them on my bicycle. Before I start to feel too much like a pop star or the Pied Piper of Hamelin, though, I am back at junior high by 4pm, where the students treat me a lot more like the mere mortal that I am.

Beaujolais? No-jolais!

As we were sitting – or rather, kneeling – down for dinner at the in-law’s the other day, onii-san arrived back from the shops with a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau.
My rule of thumb for judging the quality of a wine from its label – which I first heard in a comedy routine, but which I have found to be surprisingly reliable – is:

Text only = good wine
Black & white picture + text = fair to middling wine
Colour picture + text = bad wine

And this particular label did not bode well, being a garish mish-mash of fonts and flowers.

The bouquet – if you can call it that – hit my nose like a right hook from Mike Tyson, and even once I had recovered sufficiently to drink the stuff, the taste was akin to that of neat paraffin – indeed, this may have been the first time I have ever wanted to drink red wine with ice.

Onii-san and I had to take a breather after the first couple of sips, and a little later, to be fair, the smell had subsided. The trouble was, rather than dissipating into the surrounding environment, it had become absorbed into the wine itself, giving it a kick like chip shop malt vinegar.

Drinking wine from decent glass can improve the flavour (something I learned from a friend of mine who co-writes the excellent Wine Rambler blog), so perhaps we weren’t doing the Beaujolais justice by using cheap – and not quite spotlessly clean – tumblers. The prime suspect in its lack of quaffability, though, was more likely to be the bottle.

Buying Beaujolais Nouveau at the very second it goes on sale – or within the first few days, at least – has been popular in Japan since the late seventies, with the added incentive that due to the time difference, it is legally available here eight hours earlier than in Western Europe. For this reason, much of it is imported by air rather than by sea, and partly in an effort to counteract the prohibitive costs involved, plastic bottles were introduced in 2009.

While this didn’t go down too well with the producers (who seemed to be conveniently ignoring the fact that cheap table wine in plastic bottles has been available on the continent for years), Japanese consumers appear to be perfectly happy with the arrangement; they even buy white Beaujolais and rosé Beaujolais, which I had always been under the impression were, er, not Beaujolais.

In any case, for the sake of both my taste buds and my sense of smell, from now on I’ll be sticking to text-only wine labels, whatever the bottle they’re stuck to happens to be made from.