Muzuhashi

‘This morning,’ K-sensei told me the other day, ‘when I looked at the thermometer it was minus eight degrees.’
‘At 4.30, you mean?’ (K-sensei’s sleep patterns make Margaret Thatcher look  like a lazy teenager, and 4.30am is when he usually gets up.)
‘No, at 4,’ he said.
‘You woke up at 4am?’
‘No, no. I woke up at 3.30. I got up at 4, and by 4.30, the temperature was minus ten. It is the first time in my life this has happened.’

Statistically speaking, this winter has in fact been marginally warmer than average, but around here at least, the reality doesn’t quite tally with the statistics. For example, the other week we went on a day trip to the Fukuroda Waterfall (Fukuroda-no-taki / 袋田の滝), which had frozen up several weeks earlier than usual – it won’t be long before the more adventurous sightseers are strapping on the crampons and climbing their way up.

In actual fact, winter temperatures in Ibaraki tend to be similar to those in the UK, but it’s the quality of the cold here that’s different. In the summer, warm, humid air arrives in Japan from the tropics – often in the form of typhoons – but in the winter, cold, dry air sweeps in from the continent. Until about a fortnight ago, more than a month had passed without a single drop of rain, and most people’s front lawns now look like old-style brown bristle doormats. The school playground turned into a dustbowl, and when the first year boys sat down for their English class after a lunchtime kickabout, they looked as if they’d just walked off the set of The Hurt Locker. (Parenthetically, one of my Japanese teachers holidayed to the US last year, and said that Salt Lake City is even drier – her rheumatism, she said, almost completely cleared up.)

While the brief interlude of grey skies and drizzle may have given me a pang of nostalgia, for the most part, the almost constant sunshine makes a pleasant change from those damp, grey days of a British winter. Apart from giving your skin the approximate texture and appearance of a fine-grade sandpaper, the main problem with the lack of moisture is that you are more likely to fall ill. Almost half the school came down with a cold last October, one of the first years caught whooping cough, and according to the latest circular to land on my desk, a student at the elementary school now has type-B influenza (when the humidity level is at 50% the flu virus perishes almost immediately, but at 35% it can survive for up to 24 hours – or so one of the experts on Honma Dekka?! said last week). While some people gargle with salt water, the primary method for flu prevention is still the surgical mask (which I still can’t quite bring myself to wear, no matter how much I would like to fit in with the locals), although my immune system would function a lot more efficiently if only I could keep warm at home.

There are three very important features that almost every building in Japan lacks, and those are double glazing (ni-juu-mado / 二重窓), insulation (dan-netsu-zai / 断熱材) and central heating (er, sentoraru hiitingu). During a trip to Tokyo before Christmas, friends of mine were kind enough to let me spend the night in their spare room, and even though the building itself was less than ten years old, with underfloor heating in the living rooms and earthquake-proof foundations, the windows were only single-glazed, and misted with condensation by morning. There are several hundred apartments in the block, so despite the lack of heating in the spare bedroom, being surrounded on all sides kept it tolerably warm. There are, however, just four apartments in the block where Mrs M and I live, which makes them oven-like when the temperature outside is in the thirties, and freezer-like even before it dips below zero.

In the bathroom you can defrost beneath a hot shower, and after a summer of saving electricity, I did eventually relent and let Mrs M switch on our heated toilet seat. With the help of an electric blanket and some extremely fluffy duvets, keeping cosy while we’re in bed (or in futon, so to speak) isn’t much of a problem, although one’s pocket of warmth only extends so far, and many is the time I have rolled over in bed, only to roll straight back when my head hits the exposed, ice-rink-like edge of the pillow. For the past couple of months the condensation has been freezing to the inside of our bedroom and living room windows, and unless you light one of the gas rings and leave it running, there’s no way of thawing out the kitchen at all. A fluffy cloud of breath hovers in front of my face as I potter about making breakfast – at which point our fridge magnet thermometer is normally at about the five degree mark – there is a pause of several seconds before half-frozen water splutters out of the tap, and it isn’t until long after I have left for work that the kitchen becomes fit for human habitation.

While the air conditioner in the living room doubles up as a heater, our secret weapon against the cold is a kotatsu. In the old days, most homes had an irori, an open hearth in the middle of the living room that acted as both cooker and heater. The kotatsu was presumably invented as a replacement for the irori, and consists of a floating tabletop, a frame with four short legs and a downward-pointing heating element at its centre, and two fireproof quilts (well, I assume they’re fireproof…), one of which is laid on the floor beneath the kotatsu, and one of which is sandwiched between the frame and the tabletop. Kotatsu would be a big hit abroad if it wasn’t for the fact they force you to sit on the floor the whole time. For example, it’s very difficult to wedge your feet beneath a coffee table when you’re on a sofa or in an armchair, and customising the average dining table wouldn’t work either, as most of the heat would escape between the legs of the average dining chair.

Mrs M suffers from poor circulation, and the kotatsu was probably the home comfort that she missed the most when we were in the UK. While our living room in London was warmed by a radiator, the floor remained resolutely cold, and just draping a blanket over her legs didn’t seem to help matters, so that we developed a rather eccentric routine whereby I would roll up my shirt and she would warm her feet on my stomach as we settled down to watch TV on winter evenings.

Still, however tough things get in Ibaraki, I should be thankful that I’m not living in Hokkaido, on the Japan Sea coast, or in the mountains, where most houses have rows of planks nailed to the windows to keep them from caving in beneath the weight of huge snow drifts. To give you an example, back in 2008 I went for a weekend of snowboarding in Nagano – where that particular year they had more than ten metres of snowfall – and spent two nights in what I can say without hesitation is the coldest place I have ever stayed. The owners were living elsewhere at the time and renting it to a friend of mine for next to nothing. It was a decent sized, two-storey detached house, and in order to save money my friend restricted himself to using just one room. Once we had turned off the heater and turned out the lights, the temperature plummeted, and by the early hours I was fully clothed beneath my sleeping bag, duvet and blankets: as well as a woolly hat and gloves, if my memory serves me correctly I think I even put my shoes on. An already fitful night’s sleep was interrupted at about 4am when an elderly neighbour began screaming for help after falling on the icy pavement outside (I can only assume that, like K-sensei, he had popped out to check the thermometer), and when I ventured into the bathroom in the morning, a large icicle was protruding from the bath tap. It took several minutes of massaging the shower hose before any hot water emerged, and to be honest, snowboarding through a blizzard for the rest of the day came as a blessed relief. The following night I insisted that we leave the heater on, but by then I was already in the early stages of a cold, and my resistance to winter weather has never been quite the same since.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with another photo – taken on Mount Takao near Tokyo – of what are known as shimo-bashira (霜柱 / literally ‘frost columns’). Shimo-bashira are formed when the temperature below ground level is above freezing and the temperature at ground level is below freezing, which draws moisture from the ground and sculpts it into these attractively regular geometrical shapes.

Mrs M and I listened to our (pirated) copy of Back To Black in the car the other day, and as always, I was reminded of how great an album it is. First and foremost, at barely thirty minutes long, Back To Black doesn’t outstay its welcome in the slightest: Winehouse’s desire to pay tribute to sixties girl groups extended not just to the retro-style production and instrumentation, but also to the number of songs and their duration, and makes a mockery of artists who cram seventy or more minutes of music onto a CD, of which a lot less than thirty are good enough to be released publicly.

Much has been said of Winehouse’s vocal style, which at times resembles that of a black American soul singer almost to the point of parody, but whatever you think about her voice, Winehouse’s songs are superlative. Janis Joplin, for example, was another white woman with a ‘black’ voice – and another tortured soul who died young – but she wrote very few of her own songs, and certainly none to match Back To Black, Love Is A Losing Game or Tears Dry On Their Own.

Part of the brilliance of Winehouse’s lyrics lies in their use of everyday, North London lingo, much of which is bracingly foul-mouthed: the first few lines of Back To Black, for example, which I shan’t quote for fear of offending my more sensitive readers, or the verse in You Know I’m No Good where she describes spending the night with one man while thinking about another. On the face of it, this youthful, conversational style puts her in the same mould as Lily Allen or The Streets, but where those two artists have a kind of defiant cockiness about them, Winehouse’s lyrics are more likely to expose her vulnerability – you can’t get much more vulnerable, for example, than ‘I died a hundred times / You go back to her / And I go back to black’. Also, I doubt that anyone will pull off a better version of a Winehouse song than she managed with the originals, simply because they are sung from her own personal experience, much of it bitter.

In the musical sense, I think the key to such great songwriting lies in her debut album Frank, which is more parts jazz than it is soul or R&B. As a chin-stroking jazz muso myself, I listened to Frank over and over again, and not just because it’s awash with jazz guitar lines, many of them played by Winehouse herself (as far as I can tell she stopped playing guitar in her live shows quite early on, which is a shame). The thing about jazz songwriting – of which other artists would do well to take note – is that it utilises more than just the standard three chords. In the wrong hands, this can lead to tuneless nonsense – the kind of thing The Fast Show used to parody so hilariously in Jazz Club – but when harnessed to create a three-minute pop song, the results can be much more complex and rewarding than, say, Kylie singing ‘Na na na, na na na-na na / Na na na, na na na-na na’ or Queen singing ‘We will, we will rock you’.

Not that I’ve got anything against Kylie or Queen, and the simplest pop and rock songs are often the greatest ones, but if you listen to Love Is A Losing Game, which many consider to be Winehouse’s crowning achievement, the chord change that comes part way through the verse – between ‘self-professed, profound’ and ‘till the chips were down’ – is achingly beautiful, and it’s achingly beautiful because it isn’t just about majors and minors, but something much more subtle and transitive: a seventh, a ninth or a thirteenth, perhaps, or something diminished or augmented. Back To Black is another example of Winehouse’s expertise: on the face of it, it’s a simple, Motown-style pop song, but the middle eight (or to be strictly accurate, the middle twenty) re-jigs the same four chords that make up the verse, a device that subtly changes the mood of the song, and introduces the spooky, mantra-like repetition of the word ‘black’. (This, I should point out, isn’t something that I worked out for myself, but was explained by a music boffin on a TV programme about songwriting.)

Apart from Help Yourself, which comes across as a kind of Duke-Ellington-with-break-beats, my favourite track from Frank is Take The Box, which I’m convinced was ripped off by Beyoncé for her song Irreplaceable: both are written from the point of view of a girlfriend telling her ex-boyfriend to put his stuff in boxes before he moves out, although apparently Back To Black bears an uncanny resemblance to an old Diana Ross / Supremes track, so I suppose plagiarism is a two-way street. Like Me & Mr Jones from Back To Black, Help Yourself contains some wonderful harmonies (dare I say it, Winehouse was almost better as a backing singer than she was as a front-woman) and like the album’s title, refers, I assume, not just to Winehouse’s lyrical honesty, but to Frank Sinatra – I have no idea what he’s really like, but I can imagine Winehouse’s dad singing her Sinatra songs when she was growing up and fancying himself as a bit of a crooner. Much of Sinatra’s best work was recorded when his relationships were on the rocks, and where Take The Box is a great break-up song, Back To Black is a whole album of great break-up songs, which brings me on, inevitably, to Winehouse’s personal life.

Jaques Perretti of The Guardian made a documentary for Channel 4 a couple of years ago called Amy Winehouse: What Really Happened? in which Blake Fielder-Civil – Winehouse’s on-off boyfriend / husband of several years’ standing – came across as a particularly poor excuse for a human being, and someone who had pushed her into using drugs seemingly as a way of controlling her. Having watched the documentary, I remember thinking that if Winehouse were to die young – something that, sad to say, already seemed likely – Fielder-Civil would be the person to blame, but while she clearly had an addictive personality, Winehouse was, I believe, as much a victim of fame and fortune as she was of booze, drugs or bad taste in boyfriends.

There was a time about three or four years ago when you literally couldn’t open a newspaper or a magazine without reading a ‘story’ about Winehouse, and when she literally couldn’t go to the shops for a pint of milk without having to barge her way through several dozen paparazzi. Paparazzi are in a very close race with tabloid journalists to see who can have the most morally corrupt profession on the planet, and in the sense that she was hounded by both, Winehouse is a kind of Diana for our times: someone for whom fame simultaneously made her and broke her. I can’t help thinking of an early television appearance – possibly on Later With Jools Holland, although I haven’t managed to track it down on YouTube – when she was a fresh-faced girl in a polka-dot dress, still with some puppy fat and as yet without tattoos. Reading the tributes to Winehouse after her death (if you could bear to wade through the appalling English, that is – apparently Kelly Osbourne ‘couldn’t breath’ when she heard the news, and Salaam Remi put More Capital Letters In One Tweet than you Will Normally Find in an Entire Week Of Sun Headlines), a lot of people spoke of how she was just an ordinary girl who didn’t really fit into the world of showbiz, and while this may be a cliché, there has to be some truth in it – after all, we are all born ordinary, and it is a strong personality indeed that can cope with what stardom thrusts upon them.

I first read Catch-22 as a sixteen year old, and it tapped right in to my teenager’s sense of injustice and paranoia about pretty much everything in the entire world. A couple of my more bookish male friends read the book at around the same time, and we would often sit around discussing whatever new Catch-22-style situation we believed ourselves to be trapped in against our will.

Apart from this central theme – or perhaps running gag would be a better phrase – of the world being beyond one’s control and there being no way out of an all-encompassing Matrix of Irony, I don’t remember much about Catch-22 at all, and while I rarely if ever read a book twice, in this case, something told me that it would be worth giving this one another try, if only to remind myself of why it had such a big effect on me in the first place.

So, from a week or so before we left for Japan until a couple of weeks after we arrived, I became engrossed once more in the world of Yossarian: of his ever-increasing allocation of bombing missions, his ever decreasing circle of friends and his wildly eccentric air force colleagues and comrades.

The front cover of the Vintage paperback edition that I was reading calls it ‘one of the great novels of the century’, and I would be inclined to agree, although I have a feeling serious literary critics might look down on it as being rather cultish (instead of Pulp Fiction or Scarface, did students in the sixties have posters of Catch-22 on their dormitory walls, I wonder?). The writing style takes some getting used to, but after a while I managed to satisfy myself that Heller’s excessive use of adjectives and adverbs was a stylistic choice and not a literary shortcoming. In fact, his long, ornate and elaborate descriptions of almost every character in the book (each chapter bears the name of a character as its heading) are one of its most impressive aspects, even if they do, for some reason, leave very little impression – in the mind of this reader, at least – of the physical appearance of those characters. The other thing that made me appreciate how much craft had gone into its writing – and something that went straight over my head as a teenager – is the way in which the narrative jumps back and forth in time without making this into an overt formal device: Catch-22 may be about six hundred pages long – albeit in fairly large print – but I have a feeling it was the structure behind those pages that was one of the main reasons Heller took such a long time in writing it.

There is an introduction by Heller to the Vintage edition that talks about this process, and about the subsequent critical reception and staggering success of Catch-22 (incidentally, why the hyphen, I wonder, and not just ‘Catch 22’?), although I have to say that Heller in his non-fictional guise impressed me much less than in his fictional one. For one thing, the introduction not only manages to spoil the ending of Catch-22, but also of its sequel (Closing Time, published in 1994), which must be some kind of spoiler world record, and justifies my policy of avoiding the introductions to classic books until I have finished reading them. For another, he comes across as rather self-satisfied, in an ‘imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning to find out that I had sold three million copies of the book and was therefore fabulously wealthy!’-kind of way.

I had assumed that Heller wrote Catch-22 directly after returning from his wartime service, its absurdities gleaned from bitter personal experience and transcribed straight from his diaries in an heroic effort to purge himself of post traumatic stress (cf. Primo Levi’s masterful autobiography of the holocaust, If This Is A Man), but Catch-22 was in fact written from the mid-fifties onwards, while Heller was working as an ad man in New York.

Still, much of the writing is so vivid that it can only have been drawn from reality – the description of a mid-air collision that causes a plane to crash into the sea, for example, or of exactly how claustrophobic and terrifying it feels to be cooped up in the back end of a plane that is flying through a storm of enemy flak – and however comfortable Heller’s post-war life became, however little he conforms to my romantic image of the suffering artist, fighting in a war is not something I ever wish to experience first-hand.

Oddly enough, reading the book made me want to see the Mike Nichols film again: a film that I watched just once about twenty years ago and that is by no means regarded as a classic (something tells me that Orson Welles puts in a cameo appearance, although my memory for movie trivia could be deceiving me), but which, looking back on it, contained some very powerful images, not least that of poor Kid Sampson’s top half being vapourised by the propellers of a small plane.

As with almost everything in the book – apart from one particularly bleak and depressing passage towards the end in which Yossarian goes AWOL in Rome – even Kid Sampson’s death is ultimately played for laughs (because he was on the passenger list of the plane in question, which is subsequently flown into the side of a mountain, Doc Daneeka is deemed to have been lost in action, even though he is perfectly fine and walking around the air base as normal), and it is this blackest of black comedy that is the book’s finest achievement, and what makes Heller’s central premise – not so much that war is a futile undertaking as that it is an absurd one – so powerful. Another device that Heller uses here is repetition, so a typical exchange might go something like this:

‘There’s a dead man in my tent,’ said Yossarian.
‘There’s a dead man in your tent?’ replied Dunbar.
‘There’s a dead man in my tent.’
‘But if there’s a dead man in your tent, why haven’t they taken him away?’
‘They can’t take him away because he’s not there.’
‘I thought you said there was a dead man in your tent?’
‘Oh no, his plane was shot down before he moved in.’
‘But if the dead man in your tent has never been in your tent, what’s the problem?’
‘He was in my tent once. He just left his things.’
‘If he just left his things, why don’t you throw them out?’
‘Because he never officially joined the squadron. I can’t throw out his things because if I did then the air force would have to acknowledge that he existed, and they don’t want me to do that because up till now he didn’t. The paperwork would be a nightmare.’
And so on and so forth.

In the hands of a less skilled writer this could come across as a sub-standard comedy routine or a ruse to fill out the book’s word count, but here it is used ingeniously, and no matter how many variations on the Catch-22 theme the narrative throws up, they always manage to torture Yossarian and his more self-aware friends in new and ingenious ways: Major Major Major Major’s decision to only accept visitors to his office when he is not there; the patient who is admitted to hospital encased from head to toe in plaster, and who is drip-fed the same liquid that emerges from his catheter in a continual recycling process; the Chaplain whose sociopathic assistant is constantly trying to undermine him and doesn’t even believe in God; Milo Minderbinder’s contrivance to bomb his own air base for economic reasons. The brilliant thing about all of this is that with one or two exceptions (some of Milo’s followers getting trampled to death as he parades through one of the many towns where he has been voted in as mayor; Nately’s girlfriend managing, like Jaws in the Bond films, to come back from the dead again and again), Heller keeps matters just the right side of credible, so that despite all of the absurdity, one imagines that most of the events depicted really could have taken place – hence my original belief that Catch-22 was, as the saying goes, based on a true story.

The distorted lens through which Yossarian views the world is so expertly conceived that once you are caught up in his story, you start to see the real world in the same way, and like chaos theory or the golden ratio, its patterns begin to crop up all over the place. So for now – or at least until I decide to re-read The Catcher in the Rye or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – I shall be lying awake at night trying to stop myself from believing that Japan is in fact a Matrix of Irony in which I am trapped against my will.

Last week I bought a new bicycle – a sort of road / mountain hybrid – for the bargain bucket price of 18000 yen (about a hundred quid) at the Joyful Yamashin home / DIY / anything-else-you-happen-to-need shop, so when fellow blogger Tokidoki Tokyo said that he would be in Ibaraki during the Golden Week bank holiday season, we decided to head off into the wilds for a day’s cycling.

I went on my first cycle tour of Japan back in 2005 on an equally cheap and cheerful mountain bike, which Tokidoki (let’s call him Mr T for short) then used for his first tour. For his second, he bought a more upmarket model, and returned the favour by passing it on to me for my own second tour (stick with me here – I’ll get to the point in a minute). I then gave this bike to onii-san, who spent a lot of money and time upgrading it, before he lent it back to me last month for my ride to work. Since I haven’t got round to returning this bike to onii-san, for a limited period only, I am in possession of one decent and one half-decent bicycle, and this was the perfect opportunity for Mr T and I to relive our past touring glories.

Mrs M set the alarm for 7am and – bless her – got up to make us a packed lunch, while I showered, breakfasted and faffed around doing last-minute tweaks: fixing panniers to the cheapo bike, pumping up the tyres on the fancy one, and realising that should I get a puncture there would be no easy way of fixing it, since despite being in possession of a whole cupboard-full of tools and spare parts, the one thing I don’t have is a 15mm spanner (the wheels on the older bike are quick-release, whereas all four wheel nuts on the new bike are 15mm).

After meeting Mr T at the station we set off at around nine, by which time it was warm enough that we both wore shorts and t-shirts, and instead of taking cold- or wet-weather gear, our first stop was at the chemist’s to buy some sunblock. We also stopped to adjust our respective seat posts – Mr T is more like average height for a Brit, so needed to raise his, and I’m still trying to find the most conducive riding position after less than a week on the new bike – and to have our ‘French’ bread sandwiches by the Okuji River, where some fishermen and fisherkids were catching ayu: small, freshwater trout that are delicious salted, speared with a bamboo skewer and roasted over hot coals.

The last time I saw Mr T was on a rainy day in Brighton about three years ago, so we had plenty to talk about, and because, in the Japanese style, we were mostly riding on the pavement, our progress along Route 118 was fairly sedate. The road itself was busy with bank holiday traffic, and after consulting my trusty 100-yen map, we decided to head west at Daigo Town along Route 461, which took us through a beautiful, wide, flat-bottomed valley where the ta-ué (田植え / rice planting) was well under way. Having ploughed the dormant paddy field and filled it with water, most farmers will plant neat rows of rice shoots – already grown to about 15cm high – by machine. There are some, though, who still do this by hand, just like in the old days, and as a consequence, elderly men and women whose backs are bent almost at right angles, and who walk with such a stoop that if they weren’t pushing a shopping trolley or a bicycle they might immediately topple over, are a regular sight in the Japanese countryside.

A rather wonderful side-effect of filling the fields with water is the sudden influx of tiny green frogs it attracts, and the chorus of croaks they emit as you cycle past: I’m pretty sure I could see frog spawn floating between the slender green shoots, so I assume these are their mating calls, and that while we humans are busy growing rice, the frogs are busy making tadpoles. Tonbi (鳶 / kites) with a wingspan of more than a metre circled up above, uguisu (鶯 / Japanese nightingales) whistled their looping, lyrical song from the trees, little snowflakes of cherry blossom came floating through the air, and many of the front gardens we passed were a carpet of shocking pink shibazakura (芝桜 / literally ‘grass cherry blossom’), although by now our thoughts had turned to more pressing matters.

Because we had scoffed our packed lunches so early in the day, we were now pining for more food, and having veered away from the tourist trail, there wasn’t a restaurant in sight. Mr T thought he had spotted one on a side road, but it turned out to be a barbershop – in fact, there was another barbershop in the same village, but no restaurant, and not even a general store. Then we saw some advertising flags (hung vertically on poles that rest in a plastic base filled with sand or water – as with the umbrella for a picnic table – these flags line the highways and byways of Japan) saying ‘Restaurant’ and ‘Daigo Beer’, and stopped in front of a low, modern building with smoked glass windows and discreet signage. We had been hoping to find a cheap, local soba shop, but this place was air conditioned, expensive and as well as having its own brewery, served pizza and pasta. With less cycling time left than we had thought (we needed to get back by six at the latest, so that Mr T could return to Tokyo that night), I made the executive decision to save time and money by purchasing snack food at the next available opportunity.

So about ten minutes later we were standing in front of an old-style village shop, using upturned beer crates for a table and eating a crab stick, chikuwa (a tube of rubbery, reconstituted fish product that in this case was filled with cheese), two packets of seaweed flavour crisps, and four rectangles of indeterminate cheese, individually wrapped like the little butter pats you get with your toast at a motorway services, all washed down with a bottle of Aquarius ‘sports’ drink.

By now we had crossed the state line into Tochigi Prefecture, and having turned south, a more minor road provided us with our best riding of the day: a gentle climb along smooth tarmac (there was hardly any earthquake damage here, I noticed, so perhaps the rocky ground in the mountains had been more resilient than the plains nearer the coast), with no more than a single passing car every five or ten minutes, in a steep-sided valley that trapped the sun’s warmth and sheltered us from the wind.

Mr T regaled me with a story of two members of the same family falling off their rented bicycles twice in the same day, and translated a Japanese joke that involves a dose of eye medicine, a sweet potato diet and a fortuitous bout of flatulence. We talked of our respective experiences learning Japanese, of how you have to be careful not to rely too heavily on the ‘pub’ version of a foreign language if you don’t want to offend people, and were so busy chatting that we missed or mis-read several signs along the way and kept on having to backtrack to check that we were still heading the right direction. We also passed a factory which for no apparent reason had a total of four clapped-out old helicopters on the roof.

The road narrowed to a single lane and came to a pass at the border, so we coasted our way back downhill into Ibaraki, and reeled off the final stretch to civilisation in little more than an hour. It didn’t feel as if we had travelled particularly far, but our stats – based on the trip computer that is attached to onii-san’s bike – were as follows:

Time: 5h 39mins 41secs
Distance: 84.73km
Average speed: 14.9km/h
Top speed: 44.3km/h

Despite the factor 30, our faces had a very healthy glow to them as we walked to the station for Mr T to catch the 6.29 train: at about the same time the previous day it had been pelting it down with rain, and the following morning was overcast and chilly, so our timing had been impeccable, and we had learned that so long as you’re not in a hurry, having someone to keep you company makes the miles pass more quickly.

Some of you may not be aware that I once wrote a book about Japan, and that for a short while, a publisher was sufficiently interested in it to give me some editorial notes and ask for a re-write. In the end they didn’t feel they could sell enough copies to justify the investment of printing and promotion, but I may still self-publish as an e-book for the Kindle / iPad market, and the notes themselves made a very telling point about my first draft, one that I want to take into account as much as possible when writing this blog. I can’t remember the exact phrase, but their verdict on the overall tone of the book was that it was dangerously close to being that of a ‘whining’, ‘complaining’ foreigner, and on reflection, not only do I believe they were correct in saying this, but I can also see that it is an easy trap to fall into for any expat, and one that is very much in evidence on the internet.

But why would anyone who has chosen to move to a foreign country – quite possibly because they loved what they saw of it from afar and had a romantic view of what it was like to live there – be so quick to criticise?

Well, first and foremost there is culture shock, which affects everyone to a greater or lesser extent. Once the honeymoon period of wide-eyed awe is over, the expat begins to miss his home comforts and the cultural security blanket that most people have wrapped around them at all times. He becomes overly sensitive to inconvenience or difficulty of any kind, and frankly, at that point almost everything seems alien and annoying.

Secondly, it is in our nature to compare, and while many Japan / UK comparisons come out in favour of the former – the trains run on time, the vending machines work, the streets are crime free etc. – there will always be some that come out against: the almost complete absence of workers’ and women’s rights, for example, the over reliance on bureaucracy, or the still smoky atmosphere in most bars and restaurants.

Thirdly and most importantly, there is the language gap: one is always more likely to criticise or find fault with something one does not understand, or into which one does not have a proper insight. When you’re living in your own country, not only do you have the advantage of being a native speaker, but you have a lifetime of knowledge and experience with which to back that up: cultural reference points, customs and manners, education and upbringing, and so on and so forth. If you arrive in a foreign country with just a few basic phrases at your disposal – ‘Hello’, ‘Pleased to meet you’, ‘Can I have a beer, please?’ – you are completely helpless. It’s like being a baby all over again: you can’t understand what people are saying, nor can you read something as simple as a road sign, and to compound the problem, you cannot express even your most basic needs. What to do when you need to catch a bus, buy a plane ticket, or turn on your air conditioner? The trouble is, no matter how amenable or empathetic you might be, there is an innate human tendency to view everything as someone else’s fault, so even if the problem arises from the inability of two people to speak each other’s languages (and let’s face it, when a foreigner comes to the UK, it is much more likely to be the former who can make him or herself understood by the latter, and not vice versa), in the opinion of the expat, it is the native speaker who is being awkward, or ignorant, or obstructive.

Be it on paper or on the internet, what these three things give rise to is a lot of writing that instead of celebrating what’s cool, interesting or great about Japan, focuses on what’s regressive, inconvenient or unfair. My favourite J-Blog of all, Tokyo Damage Report, has often been often guilty of this, and along with the book Dogs And Demons, whose author Alex Kerr is an expat of sorts, it served as possibly my biggest influence when I made my bid for travel literature immortality. I’m certainly not saying that foreigners should refrain from criticising Japan, but I do believe they should think twice before doing so, and ponder whether they are in fact contributing to an overall atmosphere of what the current jargon calls snark – ie. a bitchy, critical writing style that has become all too prevalent in today’s Facebook / Twitter / blog-heavy virtual world.

On my current visit to Japan, I have tried as much as I can not only to look for the positive in what I encounter, but also to look for its negative equivalent in my own culture, or at least to balance out one negative with another. For example, while Japan isn’t exactly a world leader when it comes to protecting the environment, neither is the UK. Where Japan’s landscape is blighted with concrete, the UK too has become a homogeneous suburban wasteland, in which out-of-town superstores and four-lane bypasses are rapidly replacing rolling hills and village greens. In the same way that everything in Japan claims to be eco, green or energy saving when it is often nothing of the sort, so everyone British with an ad budget and a product to sell has been jumping on the environmental bandwagon, whether they have the credentials to back it up or not – in fact, given Japan’s record for innovation, if a solution to global warming can be found, it is more likely to come from the East than the West.

So if you, dear reader, ever find the balance of this blog tipping too far into the realm of the snark, please encourage me to restrain myself, as my aim – my manifesto, even – is to avoid such negativity.

A couple of weeks after I moved to Ibaraki nearly six years ago (I stayed for just over a year, although I’ll be back for a lot longer as of this March), I went with some friends to climb Nantai-san, which at six hundred and fifty-three metres is the highest peak in this part of the prefecture. Despite there being snow on the ground at the time, I didn’t remember the ascent as being particularly arduous, so this time around decided to combine it with a sixty-kilometre round trip by bicycle, from the in-laws’ house in Hitachi-ohta.

Having spent the greater part of this year’s visit to Japan sleeping for an average of nine or ten hours a night, it wasn’t too much of a wrench to get up at seven am for once, although since Mrs M’s parents tend to monopolise the bathroom in the morning, I was obliged to have my bath the night before. After a breakfast of cereal, toast and coffee (normally it’s just cereal and coffee or toast and coffee, but I was carbo-loading), I put on otoh-san’s shell suit top, which was better suited to cycling than either of the jackets I had brought with me from the UK, and packed a small rucksack with essentials for the day. These included two bottles of water, two nigiri handmade by Mrs M that morning, two satsumas, a banana, a madeleine, a packet of peanuts choco, otoh-san’s mobile phone, onii-san’s old digital camera, my spectacles and a hundred-yen map of Ibaraki.

As part of his programme to pimp up the bicycle on which I toured Hokkaido in 2008 (and on which, having bought it for about sixty thousand yen, my friend Tom-san toured practically the whole of Japan earlier the same year), onii-san has fitted super-slim racing wheels, and I pumped up the correspondingly super-slim tyres to the improbable pressure of more than six psi before setting off at ten to eight, to cast a long shadow on the road ahead.

The first part of the journey followed a route that Mrs M and I have taken on many occasions when visiting friends and relatives, but in order to avoid the city – well, town is probably a more accurate description – of Hitachi-ohmiya, I veered north just before the Kuji River, on a road that within minutes was almost devoid of traffic, and narrow enough that two cars traveling in opposite directions would barely have the room to pass one another. I stopped to use the toilets at a michi-no-eki (roadside services) that appeared to have gone out of business, although the infa-red detectors that sense when you have walked away from a urinal and flush it with water were working perfectly (they were apparently being kept in operation for the benefit of campers at a site next to the river, where even in late December, at least one family had stayed the night).

After another few kilometers I joined Route 118, which followed the Kuji River valley and the Suigun railway line north through a succession of sleepy towns, in one of which was a building that advertised itself as the home of washi (Japanese handmade paper – I made a mental note of the location and resolved to come back when it was open for business). After taking a detour along the main street of one such town, where approximately half the shops had gone out of business, I came to a five-way junction with no road signs and had to stop to consult my map.

No sooner had I done this than a middle-aged man parked his car on the pavement and came over to ask if I needed help. When I told him where I was from, he gestured to a girl of perhaps junior high school age who had been with him in the car, as if to say, ‘Go on, now’s your chance to speak some English!’ Having expected her to come out with a faltering hello or an enquiry as to my favourite Japanese food, she instead spoke confidently, and with a British-English accent to boot. She lived in Malaysia, she explained, and went to an English school, so I assumed the man was her grandfather, and that her parents had emigrated (she looked to be Japanese rather than mixed race or native Malaysian). The man confirmed my hunch that the road I should take entered a nearby tunnel, before saying goodbye and driving off to the hairdressers, where the girl had an appointment to get her hair cut.

Twenty minutes later I was standing outside Saigané station, where I knew there would be a more detailed map than my own of the area around Nantai-san, since I had Googled a blog entry by an anonymous fellow hiker the night before. There was no toilet at the station, so I stopped for a pee on the tiny side road that led up another, smaller valley towards the mountain, and in which the temperature dropped noticeably. Instead of towns there were now villages, or just small farms nestled on the hillside, their vegetable fields still caked with frost, and after an ever steeper succession of hairpin bends, the tarmac came to and end outside a soba restaurant, whose sign said that it would be open for business at ten thirty.

I locked up the bike, although it seemed even less likely to be stolen here than in Hitachi-ohta, so I didn’t bother to attach it to anything with the lock, and left the lights and puncture repair kit in place. A path led between fields of green tea bushes for a hundred metres or so, at which point I had to choose between the ippan-kohsu (一般コース) and the kenkyaku-kohsu (健脚コース): the Ordinary Course and the Experienced Walker Course. The aforementioned blogger had taken the latter without complaint, so I did the same, and soon realised that the transition from an ascent by bicycle to an ascent on foot isn’t necessarily going to be a smooth one. From the gravel car park outside the soba restaurant, Nantai-san loomed almost vertically above me, with the most likely hiking route being through a gulley to one side and along a ridge to the summit. But the kenkyaku-kohsu went straight up the cliff face, which while it may not have been as close to ninety degrees as it appeared, certainly wasn’t far off.

In keeping with the Japanese fondness for giving apartment blocks trendy, western-style names, our two-floor block of four flats is called Champs Logis B (Champs Logis, I found out from an online French dictionary, means something like ‘home fields’). Its sister block next door, Champs Logis A, consists of eight smaller-scale apartments, and the rent for these must be miniscule, as we’re only paying 45,000 yen a month (about £350) for what’s called a 2LDK: two ‘living’ rooms – one Japanese-style with a tatami floor, the other western-style with a wooden floor – and a dining room / kitchen, plus a bathroom and toilet. The Japanese-style room serves as our bedroom, and because both tatami and bedding can become infested with bugs – particularly during the hot, humid summer months – rather than leaving our futons, duvets and pillows in place, Mrs M stashes them in a cupboard during the day, or whenever the weather is dry enough, hangs them out to air (not that I’m sensitive enough to notice these things, but Mrs M claims that as well as keeping them bug-free, this this also makes them lighter and fluffier). The western-style room is our sitting room, with a TV, bookcase, kotatsu, a couple of clothes rails for when Mrs M can’t hang the washing out, and two zaisu (座椅子 / floor chairs, which are a compromise between sitting on a cushion and buying a proper sofa). The kitchen / dining room has a fridge-freezer, sideboard, microwave, rice cooker, toaster, a hi-tech urn instead of a standard kettle, and a two-ring gas hob with a tiny grill for cooking fish, or if you don’t mind improvising, very small pizzas. Because people tend to shower before they get in the bath, the bathroom is a wet room with a plastic floor, plastic walls and a plastic ceiling in regulation beige, and as well as a heated toilet seat with bidet facility (which we have decided not to use in an effort to save electricity), the toilet has an ingenious design whereby there is a spout and mini-sink on top, so that you can wash your hands in the water that fills the cistern after you have pulled the flush.

The one mistake we made was to choose an apartment with no windows in the back wall, so that when the temperature starts to rise, as it has been doing since the middle of June, there is no through-draft, and particularly if you have been out all day and left the living room and bedroom windows closed, the place can feel like a sauna when you arrive home. Still, the guy who runs the estate agents is an old friend of Ken-san (Mrs M’s uncle), so we were given one or two concessions on the usual raft of deposits, and the big advantage of being on the ‘second’ (ie. first) floor is that we are much less likely to be invaded by mosquitoes, which tend to keep close to the ground (my first-floor apartment when I lived in Tokyo was impossible to leave or enter without getting bitten, and there would always be one sly mossie that somehow managed to follow me in through the front door and conceal itself in a darkened corner, ready to pounce at a later date).

Next door to us on the second floor are a middle-aged couple called Mr and Mrs Nakamura, who can often be heard having screaming rows. Mr Nakamura is in the Japanese ‘Self-Defence Force’ (ie. army), so I assume he’s been helping out in the aftermath of the tsunami, and that the shouting and door-slamming are a result of post-traumatic stress, although some of Mrs Nakamura’s more unusual housekeeping habits may not be helping matters. For a start, she leaves the extractor fan in their kitchen running twenty-four hours a day, every day (the extractor fan in our kitchen is noisy at the best of times, and if it was on all day and night, my mental state might take a turn for the worse), and even when the weather forecast is for rain, she leaves the washing out, their futons draped unsecured over the balcony, and the French windows wide open (we know this because Mrs M likes to have a sneaky peak around the balcony divider when they have left for work).

Downstairs and to one side is an empty apartment, and when we arrived at the beginning of April, the tenant directly beneath us appeared to be a young, single man with very poor taste in music. After being kept awake by his mix of techno / dance beats for several weeks, I complained to the estate agents and the problem went away almost immediately. Then something unexpected happened: the tenant in question suddenly acquired a wife / girlfriend and child, so instead of techno / dance beats, we are now being kept awake in the middle of the night by the sound of a baby crying. Mrs M’s theory is that the wife / girlfriend went home to stay with her parents for a few months around the time the baby was born – not an uncommon practice in Japan – and has now reappeared. This would explain why the husband / boyfriend was living it up, as it would have been the last chance he had to let his hair down before parental responsibility took over. Having moved (back?) in, the wife / girlfriend now spends the entire time indoors with the air conditioning on: partly, we suppose, because if this isn’t her hometown then she may not have many friends here, and partly because another Japanese custom is to keep one’s baby indoors for the first month of its life, no matter how nice the weather may be.

Parenthetically, the whole noisy neighbour incident illustrates how the Japanese deal with disputes, namely by going through an intermediary rather than confronting the object of their wrath face-to-face. I once had an unendurably noisy neighbour at the aforementioned Tokyo apartment, but rather than contacting my landlord, every time he began jumping up and down on the bed or dropping what sounded like a fire extinguisher onto the floor from head height, I would go upstairs, bang on his door and tell him to shut up, which didn’t solve the problem at all. In fact, the more times I banged on his door, the angrier I got, so that in the end, he would have been entirely justified in telling the landlord that rather than him being a noisy neighbour, I was a psychotic one.

But anyway, as well as sorting out the noise problem, our landlord has made various improvements to the apartment since we moved in, including fitting the heated toilet seat with bidet facility, getting the central TV aerial converted from analogue to digital (since we are trying to dodge our TV licence, two of the three non-commercial channels have now been cut off, which I suppose wouldn’t have been possible with an analogue signal), and paving the way for us to get high-speed, fibre-optic broadband, although because the engineers have been busy with post-earthquake repairs, we’re still waiting for them to come and install whatever socket it is you need for high-speed, fibre-optic broadband.

The only blot on our landlord’s record so far – well, more of an eccentricity than a blot – is that he turned up with a job lot of broken plasterboard the other week and spread it along the border of a neighbouring field.

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ I said when I bumped into him outside the apartment a few days later, ‘but I’ve been wondering what all that plasterboard is for.’
‘Oh, that’s to keep the weeds from growing next to the neighbour’s field,’ he said. ‘I used the plasterboard because it would have cost a lot of money to throw it away.’

Not exactly the prettiest or most ergonomic solution to the problem, but it’s true that rubbish disposal can be something of a headache in Japan. Since March there has been an amnesty on anything that might be considered ‘earthquake damaged’ – slates and breeze blocks, for example, but also electrical goods, furniture and so on – with temporary rubbish tips springing up on vacant lots and in disused car parks. Normally, though, when you go to the municipal tip your vehicle will be weighed on the way in and on the way out, and you will be charged accordingly. Also, collections of recyclables are as hit-and-miss as they are in the UK, and so complex as to deter many people from recycling at all. While everyday rubbish is collected twice a week, paper and cardboard is collected once a month (you’re supposed to divide it up into newspaper, cardboard and so on, and then tie it up with string), cans and bottles have to be left in a special crate that you buy from the council, polystyrene is collected from a separate site about half a mile away, the location of which we only discovered by asking at the relevant department in the town hall, and plastic food trays have to be taken to the nearest supermarket.

Having said that, many aspects of domestic life are far more convenient than in the UK. Most Japanese homes now have water meters, which along with those for gas and electricity are outside rather than inside your home. This means that instead of receiving an almost certainly over-estimated bill once every three months, and instead of meter reading being sub-contracted out to a company whose employees arrive at completely random times and don’t even bother to leave a note telling you that they called when you were out, in Japan, someone from the water / gas / electricity company will come to your house and give you an up-to-the-minute and completely accurate bill every month.

Next on our list of chores is deciding whether or not to join the local residents’ association, which on the plus side would mean getting to know our other neighbours a little better, but on the minus side would mean having to join in with various volunteer activities, like clearing rubbish and delivering newsletters, which to be honest, Mrs M and I are a little too lazy to bother with…

While there tends to be some kind of prior warning that a large-scale volcanic eruption is on the cards, earthquakes are a lot more difficult to pin down, so I was interested to read this news item in the Asahi Newspaper (Saturday 28th May 2011), which suggests that prediction – of major earthquakes, at least – is now a possibility.

I assume this story has been reproduced in English language news sources, but anyway, I thought it would be an interesting one to translate – any scientific inaccuracies are entirely my responsibility:

Electrons increased 40 minutes before earthquake

Forty minutes before the magnitude 9 Great East Japan Earthquake, levels of electrons in the ionosphere about three hundred kilometres above the Tohoku region of Japan showed an abnormal increase. The data was ascertained by Hokkaido University Professor Kohsuké Heki using signals from GPS equipment, and presented at a conference of the Japan Earth Satellite Association on 27th May. The same phenomenon has been observed at other large earthquakes, and has given rise to the valuable possibility of predicting earthquakes.

GPS satellite signals are influenced by electrons in the ionosphere – the larger the number of electrons, the greater the influence – and Professor Heki has checked National Geographic Society members’ GPS records from around the time of the earthquake.

As a result of this research, Heki has found that before the 11th March earthquake, electrons in the atmosphere began to increase by as much as ten per cent, at a distance of between three and four hundred kilometres from the epicentre. As soon as the earthquake began, electron levels returned to normal, although the exact mechanism of the increase is not yet clear.

It has been confirmed that just before the Chile earthquake of 2010 (magnitude 8.8), the Sumatra earthquake of 2004 (magnitude 9.1) and the Hokkaido Eastern Sea earthquake of 1994 (magnitude 8.2), increased levels of electrons were also observed in GPS records. The bigger the earthquake, the greater the breadth of the increase, although increases have not been seen for earthquakes of a magnitude below 8.

‘We hope to be able to predict earthquakes of magnitude 9 and above,’ said Professor Heki. ‘and because GPS records can be analysed using simple software, anyone can view the data.’ It is expected to be confirmed during the coming year whether or not such increases occur on occasions other than when there is an earthquake.

朝日新聞、平成２３年５月２８日

本震４０分前に電子増加

マグニチュード（M）９．０を記録した東日本大震災の発生四十分前に、東北地方の上陸約三百キロにある「電離圏」の電子が異常に増えていたことを、日置幸介北海道大教授が衛星利用測位システム（GPS）の電波から突き止めた。日本地球惑星連合大会で二十七日に発表した。他の巨大地震でも同じ現象が見られ、地震の直前予知に役立つ可能性もあり注目されている。

GPS衛星からの電波は電離圏で電子の影響を受ける。電子の数が多いほど影響も大きい。日置教授は国土地理員のGPS記録を大震災の前後について調べた。

その結果、発生約四十分前に震源三〇〇〜四〇〇キロ内の上空で電子が増え始め、最大で一割ほど増加していた。電子は地震発生後すぐ元に戻った。増加の仕組みはまだよく分からないという。

 チリ地震（二〇一〇年、M８．８）、スマトラ沖地震（〇四年、M９．１）、北海道東方沖地震（一九九四年、M８．２）の直前にもGPS記録から電子の増加が確認された。地震規模が大きいほど増加幅も大きく、M８以下の地震では増加は見られなかった。

「M９級地震の直前予知に有望。GPS記録を使って簡単なソフトで分析できるため、誰でも検証できる」と日置教授は話す。地震以外で今回のような増加が起きないことを今後、一年かけて確認するという。