Tea break

In order to revise for – and sit – the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, I’ve had to take a quick break from blogging, so before the next instalment of the Sado diaries, I thought I’d give you the opportunity to savour a new-ish TV commercial for Choco Pie (which as many of you will know is my favourite tea-time treat).

Once you have found your way to the Lotte TV commercials page via the link below, click on the picture of a smiling child being handed a Choco Pie, which can be found both in the carousel at the top of the page and to the right of a row of ‘New!’ commercials further down.

http://www.lotte.co.jp/entertainment/tvcm/index.html

The ad is short and sweet, so to speak, and the titles and voiceover go something like this:

Choco Pie – today’s good points:
Made it one step further
Helped out with the shopping
Managed to ride by myself

You did your best, didn’t you?
A treat for every day
Lotte Choco Pie

(Lotte’s motto, incidentally is o-kuchi no koibito (お口の恋人), which means ‘a sweetheart for your mouth’.)

Earthquake pt.2

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Everyone knew The Big One would arrive sooner or later, it was just a matter of when and where, and like many people, I had assumed it would hit slap bang in the middle of Tokyo and cause maximum disruption and damage. In the event, The Big One happened up north, in a relatively far-flung and unheralded corner of the country, although it has been no less disruptive or damaging for all that.

The numbers, in fact – of deaths and disppearances – have become so large as to be rather hard to contemplate, and every day I hear yet more heartbreaking stories: of the soon-to-be-married safety officer who continued to broadcast a tsunami warning over the town’s radio system until her studio was inundated (everyone here has a radio in their front room for just such an emergency that is permanently tuned in); of the father who was survived by his son, and by a letter he had written to be read on the day of the son’s graduation from junior high school; of the workman whose newly purchased machinery had gone, and with it his livelihood; of the boss who lined his employees up in front of their devastated workplace and told them he was sorry, but he was no longer able to pay them; of the brother searching for his siblings where they used to live, on streets that are now little more than rows of bare concrete foundations; of the survivor who, as he clung to his house for dear life, watched helplessly as a child was swept away out to sea; of the old man who has taken it upon himself to collect the precious satchels of disappeared schoolchildren (known as randoseru, these cost upwards of a hundred pounds each, and accompany a student for all six years of their elementary education); of the thirty-nine firefighters from a single district who lost their battle to close a flood gate whose mechanism had failed. I could go on, but ultimately, there is a case for not watching the news any more, as all it will succeed in doing is to upset you.

And yet, to live in Japan is to know at the back of your mind that one day, you may succumb to a similar fate. While I am loath to generalise about the Japanese character, particularly when my first-hand experience of the place is comparatively limited, I will go so far as to say that the ever-present possibility of disaster gives day-to-day life here a subtly different character from elsewhere in the world. There is, I think, an undercurrent of fatalism, although rather than making people believe they should live every day as if it was their last, or turn to drink in order to forget, what it has engendered in the Japanese is almost the opposite, namely a desire for order and stability, since that order and stability could be snatched away from them at any time.

As for me, I wasn’t here when The Big One hit, and while this was clearly a blessing, part of me is ever-so-slightly disappointed that I did not get to experience the unique sensation that must come with knowing that the whole country is literally moving beneath your feet (or rather stretching: the east coast is now somewhere between two and five metres closer to the opposite side of the Pacific than it used to be). Because the fact is, so long as they’re only minor, earthquakes can be perversely enjoyable – in the manner of a rollercoaster, for example – and if you happen to be foreign, add to the novelty of living here. Not only that, but even allowing for recent events, you are still more likely to die in a car crash (or commit suicide, even) than in an earthquake, a tsunami or an invisible cloud of nuclear radiation, and leaving the media barrage aside, the lives of the vast majority of Japanese have been comparatively unaffected by what has happened.

Not that one should take these things lightly, and to return to the subject of where the earthquake hit hardest, depending on where people happen to be from, there does seem to have been a certain amount of snobbery involved in their reactions. A friend of Mrs M’s who lives in London but hails from Iwaté was aghast at the response of her Japaense classmates, when their English teacher asked how they felt in the days following 11th March.

‘Everything’s fine,’ one of them said. ‘In fact, we’re inviting our friends over for a dinner party at the weekend.’ The students in question were from Kansai, and to put it bluntly, probably look upon those from Tohoku as bumpkin-ish at best – either that, or they were secretly relieved to have come through unscathed on this occasion, given that the previous Big One occurred in Kobé.

Ibaraki lies somewhere between these two extremes of both physical proximity and psychological effects, so that here you will find sympathy for those who have suffered, and at the same time relief that there is now a plentiful supply of food, water, gas and electricity, and a small enough amount of radiation that you do not have to worry about growing an extra head or an extra tumor.

One thing that is still in short supply – due to factories not functioning, apparently – is tobacco, as we found out last Tuesday when we visited Tsuneko-bah-chan (Mrs M’s great aunt) in Hitachi-ohmiya, who is now in her eighties.

‘Fortunately I wasn’t inside at the time,’ she told us. ‘I had a friend visiting and we’d just come out into the garden. Everything started shaking and pretty soon we couldn’t stand up – we had to sit on the grass and hold on to each other for support. I’m so glad I wasn’t inside – all of the crockery was flying off the shelves in the kitchen, and the house shook so much that in Ken and Rika’s bedroom, the wardrobe doors came open and everything slid to the other end of the room.’

Tsuneko-bah-chan runs a small cigarette shop next to Ken and Rika’s – her son and daughter-in-law’s – house, and the shelves were practically empty when we visited. Ken and Rika, meanwhile, were in Tokyo on the 11th: Rika with one of their two daughters in their ninth-floor town house, and Ken at work in the city centre.

We were holding on to the walls like this’ – Rika mimed heroically trying to stop a wall from collapsing – ‘and as we looked, the wallpaper was moving from side to side – you could see straight through the gaps to the concrete pillars behind it.’

‘My boss rushed round the office telling everyone to stay put,’ said Ken. ‘He told us it was more dangerous outside with all the breaking glass and falling masonry. It went on for ages, and sure enough, there was a big aftershock too, and we all got back under our desks. I’ve got loads of paperwork stuffed beneath mine, so there wasn’t really enough room. When my boss came past again he said, “Which is more important, your head or your backside?” My head wasn’t under the desk at all, and after all that, when we finally got up and looked outside, he’d done a runner and was outside on the sreet.’

Here in Ibaraki, otoh-san and onii-san were also working, and otoh-san’s first thought was to save the antique clock that hangs on the wall at one end of the barber shop.

‘The earthquake was so bad that eventually I just told him to take it down and get out,’ said onii-san, although none of the mirrors in the shop were damaged, the only broken window in the house was caused by a falling bookcase, and the building as a whole stood firm, with only a few cracked tiles in the bathroom and upended shelves and chests of drawers.

(Onii-san pointed out that in the same way otoh-san grabbed hold of his treasured timepiece, there were probably thousands of people all over the country trying to protect their new TVs: last year, the signal moved over from analogue to digital, and rather than digi-boxes or VCR re-tuning, most people splashed out on brand new flat-screen and wide-screen models.)

‘We were standing outside assessing the damage,’ onii-san continued, ‘when all of a sudden this guy came along wanting a haircut. He’s a young guy who’s always playing pachinko [pachinko is a form of pinball on which the Japanese gamble large amounts of money], and once the electricity went off in the pachinko shop, he had nothing to do. Stupid idiot!’

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Mrs M and I went for a cycle ride around town a few days after arriving, and what houses that had collapsed were mostly either old, abandoned or both. The various road bridges shut to traffic had not been rendered so because of complete collapse, rather because engineers had deemed them structurally unsound or necessary to examine further before they could be re-opened. One of the more bizarre sights was the emerging manhole covers, which by some quirk of tectonics and engineering had been thrust out of the ground, some to a height of more than a metre, although the most obvious evidence of the earthquake has been its aftershocks.

At least when we arrived, these came along about once an hour, and while they have lessened in frequency and intensity, everyone is on edge, and instinctively stands up in readiness to head for the door when the tremors start. No doubt this will go on for some time, until the memory of what has happened begins to fade, or until, geologically speaking, the country finally settles into its new place in the world.

Summer holidays

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I’m sure some of you have been wondering where I’ve been for the past couple of weeks (at least I hope some of you have been wondering where I’ve been for the past couple of weeks), so just to let you know, I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth, I’ve merely disappeared off the face of Ibaraki.

For the final week and a half of my summer holidays, I decided to cycle to Sadogashima (佐渡島 / Sado Island) on my cut-price Joyful Yamashin mountain bike, and the plan at present is to transform the scrawled diary entries I kept into eloquent and evocative blog posts. While I’m working on the first of these, here’s a pretty photo of the prettiest place I saw: Futatsugamé on the northern tip of the island.

(Nb. The producers of this blog would like to point out that the weather conditions depicted in the above photograph are in no way representative of those encountered at other times during the holiday.)

Soccer club サッカー部

It was pouring with rain until about 10 o’clock last Thursday morning, so instead of doing three and a half hours of soccer club, I did an hour and a half. In that hour and a half, though, I sweated off at least a couple of kilos, pulled a muscle in my leg, felt like I was about to have a heart attack, did a spot of gardening and didn’t kick a single football.

We started off, as the soccer club does almost every day, with what I was assured were ten laps of the pitch, but which felt like several more, alternating between a sprint along the sidelines and a jog along the goal lines. I pulled my left quad within seconds of setting off because, oddly, we hadn’t done any stretching beforehand: the students had been stuck indoors studying since 8.30, so perhaps they were eager to get going, and just to make things that little bit more challenging, we all carried a half-litre bottle of water in each hand. By about the third or fourth lap, I was seriously considering giving up, as quite apart from the veritable waterfall of sweat cascading from my brow, I had begun to get a tight feeling in my chest. As the sun poked through the clouds for the first time that morning, I also wondered whether I might be in the early stages of heatstroke.

When I was going through a jogging phase a few years ago, I read that interval training – ie. alternating between jogging and sprinting – is one of the best ways to increase your stamina over long distances. Sadly I was far too lazy to try interval training for myself, and having finally experienced it first hand, my advice to any budding jogger would be to start off with a very small amount of sprinting and build up from there, rather than going straight in with a half-and-half mix of the two.

After a ten-minute drinks break I thought we might get to play some football, but no such luck. (‘When it’s raining heavily,’ explained H-kun, who is the team captain, ‘we do stuff like this. If you play soccer in the rain people end up catching cold.’) The next exercise involved jogging round the pitch in a line as before – still carrying water bottles in our hands – with the last person in the line sprinting to the front and shouting ‘Hai!’ (‘Yes!’), then the new last person doing the same, and so on and so forth. With about fifteen or twenty people in the line, this meant that I was only sprinting for about ten seconds every couple of minutes, but the accumulated physical exertion was beginning to take its toll, and when Y-sensei looked up at the clock on the side of the school building and said, ‘Another seven minutes!’ I couldn’t face any more and stopped for another drinks break – or rather, keeled over at the side of the pitch and wheezed like a forty-a-day smoker for a few minutes, before gulping down another litre of water and waiting for the dizziness to stop.

I managed to re-join the line for the last couple of laps, but by the time we had completed those, even if we had been given the chance to start practicing our dribbling skills or free kick technique, I’m not sure I would have had the energy to join in, so was quite relieved when Y-sensei told us to jog down to the other end of the pitch and round off the training session with some kusa-tori.

As we squatted down, kama in hand, and began pulling up weeds near the goal line, Y-sensei asked each student in turn what they thought the purpose of kusa-tori was, and gave marks out of a hundred depending on their replies.

‘Three or four years ago,’ said Y-sensei, ‘this pitch was covered in weeds. They were all over the penalty area, which got in the way of us playing properly. Since then we’ve been paying more attention to doing the weeding, and the soccer team has started winning.’

‘The team with the tidiest pitch,’ he continued, ‘is the team that wins.’

Making your school football team do the weeding may seem like a slightly ridiculous thing to do, but it made me think of another point that Malcolm Gladwell makes in The Tipping Point. His theory – based in part on studies of a reduction in New York crime rates in the early nineties – is that a person’s environment has just as big an influence on the likelihood of them committing a crime as their background or their personality. The people running the New York subway system turned around crime levels at least in part by cleaning up graffiti. They also clamped down on fare dodging, which because it was so prevalent and so visible, was influencing normally law-abiding citizens to join in.

On a recent episode of Honma Dekka?! (ホンマでっか?!/ Is That Really True?!) – a TV show that has a panel of academics and experts reveal a variety of interesting new trends, discoveries and inventions to a panel of celebrities – one of the experts cited a study which showed that around the time of large firework displays, just as levels of discarded rubbish increase, so do levels of petty crime. In other words, people’s behaviour degenerates in direct correlation with the cleanliness of the environment in which they find themselves. Surely it is no coincidence that Japanese children, who grow up cleaning their schools and weeding their playing fields, and whose parents and grandparents place such importance on keeping their homes spic and span (and their toilets in particular), turn into adults who are less likely to commit crimes.

A lot of westerners criticise the Japanese education system for being too regimented – militaristic, even – and more like national service than school. While I am not necessarily in favour of national service, I am beginning to see the benefits of a system that keeps its students fit, healthy and active, gives them regular and multiple goals to work towards (not to mention properly commemorating the reaching of those goals with ceremonies, prizegivings and so on), and teaches them the benefits of using every spare moment to practice what they do until they master it, all without having to fire a gun or drive a tank.

Perhaps things have changed, but when I was a child, unless you happened to go to private school or have parents who could afford to pay for private tuition, the scope for taking part in extra-curricular activities was woefully small. Admittedly there was a teachers’ strike when I was at middle school, but even allowing for that, with the exception of rehearsals for the annual school play, I hardly ever stayed later than 4 o’clock, and certainly never went to school during the holidays. More to the point, I can’t imagine that any member of the current England football team has ever got down on his hands and knees and tended to a football pitch (do they even clean the senior players’ boots any more, as apprentices did in the old days?). If they had, perhaps they might be able to display a little more humility, and devote themselves a little more selflessly to their team.

The rellies

Once Mrs M and I had recovered from our jet lag sufficiently that we weren’t liable to have a narcoleptic attack and fall asleep while driving, eating or having a chat, we went to visit some of the in-laws. Mrs M’s mother is one of seven siblings and her father is one of six, so there are plenty to choose from, and today we headed for the coast, where our first stop was Ajigaura, a small town with a sandy beach which in the summer is packed with daytrippers.

Particularly with relatives, but also with superiors at work, tradesmen and so on, it is customary to address people by their title, so Mrs M genuinely doesn’t know the Christian names of some of her aunts and uncles, and where I would say ‘Uncle Dave’ or ‘Auntie Dave-ette’, for example, her family have attached names to their relatives based on where they live, or other seemingly random criteria. So instead of saying ‘Uncle Ken’ and ‘Auntie Rika’, Mrs M talks about Yui-chan-papa and Yui-chan-mama (Yui being Ken and Rika’s eldest daughter), and when I asked what her mother’s older brother was called, Mrs M couldn’t remember. ‘He’s just Oji-chan (uncle),’ she said, although more importantly, he is the choh-nan (eldest son / 長男), and as well as being responsible for looking after his ninety-year-old mother – Mrs M’s maternal grandmother – the ownership of her house in Ajigaura will one day automatically revert to him (a system that rather neatly bypasses any family squabbles about who will inherit what when their parents have passed away).

The Ajigaura clan has its fingers in plenty of pies, including a car park opposite the beach, a kiosk for refreshments, a shower block for those customers who need to wash the seawater out of their hair after going for a swim, a camp site, and a business making kansoh-imo (dried potatoes / 乾燥芋), which believe it or not are quite a delicacy in Japan. Their house is at the end of a long driveway among an assortment of greenhouses, garages and outbuildings, and when we turned up, there were still large cracks in the steps leading up to the front porch. Having sat down around the kotatsu – which as well as giving off its own heat was positioned on an electric floor blanket, no less – talk soon turned to the earthquake.

‘The front door wouldn’t open at all until I repaired it,’ said Oji-chan ‘and the whole house moved about thirty centimetres, so all of the water pipes had sheared off. I managed to repair them as well, although it took a while to get hold of the parts. They were all sold out at Joyful Honda [for some reason, DIY superstores in Japan are often prefixed with the word ‘joyful’], and at the ironmonger’s down the road, he had the parts but he couldn’t get at them straight away because everything had been turned upside down in the earthquake.’

When the radio began broadcasting a tsunami warning, Masao-oji-chan – Oji-chan’s younger brother, who also lives in Ajigaura – began chauffeuring everyone to higher ground, taking one vehicle at a time.
‘We’ve got seven or eight cars and vans, so I was going back and forth, back and forth… From where I parked them at the top of the hill, I noticed the tide going right out. You could see the sea bed in the harbour, which has never happened before. There were a couple of ships further off the coast, and once the warning sounded, they headed north.’ (I’m pretty sure this is what Masao said, and I suppose it makes sense to head towards a high wave rather than to have it hit you side-on or from behind – there was some eye-opening footage of a ship in the tsunami that illustrated this point, although it doesn’t seem to be available any more on the BBC homepage.)

The harbour faces south-east, with a long concrete wall stretching around its northern perimeter, and it was probably this that saved Ajigaura from more serious damage.
‘There were three or four big swells,’ said Masao, ‘and the tsunami reached right up to the coast road. It stopped there, though, so we didn’t have to evacuate completely.’
‘We used the stream that runs behind the house when the mains water was cut off,’ said Oji-chan, ‘and once word got around, people were coming from all over to stock up. We’ve got a petrol generator as well, so we managed to get the bath going.’
‘One of the bathrooms is out of action because all the tiles are broken,’ continued Masao, ‘but the other one is OK. The bath is on a bit of a slant, mind you – probably about two centimeters off, I should think.’

‘How about the aftershock last night?’ said Kikue-oba-chan, Oji-chan’s wife. ‘Were you OK?’
‘That was scary enough for me,’ I said – whilst it was probably only a four or a five on the Japanese version of the Richter Scale, it was still the biggest I had ever experienced.
‘He was straight up out of bed and standing by the front door ready to leave!’ said Mrs M.
As our futon began to shake from side to side and the sliding doors and windows began to rattle, Mrs M had stayed put, contemplating whether or not to dessert the warmth of the duvet, but I wasn’t going to take any risks.
‘That’s what they say, though, isn’t it?’ said Masao, laughing. ‘Don’t worry about anyone else, just save yourself!’

A couple of kilometres inland at Hara, we found the usual scene of Yaeko asleep beneath the kotatsu (Yaeko often does night shifts at an old people’s home, and the last time we visited, she had worked from 3pm the previous day until 9am) and her dad (Shuhzoh-oji-chan) watching their enormous flat-screen TV, which is permanently switched on, and at probably forty-eight inches across completely dominates their modest front room. Yaeko’s mother, Taka-oba-chan (aka. Hara-oba-chan – it took Mrs M several minutes to remember her Christian name when I asked later on) had her leg in plaster from falling off her bicycle, but still insisted on hobbling through to the kitchen on crutches to make us a cup of tea. This being Japan, there was no chance of her husband offering to help, so Mrs M went instead, which left me and Shuhzoh on our own together.

Shuhzoh looks permanently dishevelled, with his baggy clothes, ruffled grey hair and one or two missing teeth, and while he never drinks alcohol, over the years he has apparently gambled away ‘enough money to buy a house’ on pachinko. Possibly because he used to work as a fisherman – seafaring types often seem to have developed the strongest dialects – his Japanese is extremely difficult to understand, and without Mrs M to chip in as interpreter, I tried my best to nod in the right places as he rattled on about the earthquake and its aftermath. He said something about Fukushima in relation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, something else about politicians (derogatory, as far as I could make out), and something about what happened when the earthquake struck as he was working in the factory next door.

‘I was standing at my machine and this big chunk of metal came shooting past me from behind. It only missed me by this much.’ He pinched his thumb and forefinger until they were almost touching. ‘Must have weighed about thirty kilos – I’m lucky to be alive, you know!’

I understood this last bit a little better, because Shuhzoh repeated it for Mrs M’s benefit when she and Taka returned with the tea. Shuhzoh and Taka’s other daughter Yumiko then appeared with several children in tow – both her own and Yaeko’s. As the chohjo (eldest daughter / 長女), Yumiko – like Oji-chan in Ajigarura – is responsible for keeping an eye on her parents, and although they don’t live under the same roof, Yumiko and her husband have built a house directly next door, while Yaeko and her family will soon move to another house down the road, where we had all congregated for the tatémaé ceremony before Christmas.

At this point Yaeko finally stirred, and was soon urging me to give her children English lessons. ‘Go on,’ she always says to them when I am there, ‘say hello!’ At which point they invariably run from the room in fear, and on this occasion, with the house now full of people, Mrs M and I soon followed suit, although not before Mrs M remembered what she had been meaning to ask Shuhzoh all along.

‘Was the TV OK in the earthquake?’ she said.
‘Oh yes, it was fine,’ said Shuhzoh, and pointed to its base, which was firmly fixed to a glass-fronted unit with four large screws.

ER 緊急救命室

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I was feeling a bit depressed last week, and at first I thought it was a post-holiday slump or a bout of homesickness. After a while, though, I realised that my depression was caused by the gaping void which had opened up in my life since Mrs M and I finished watching the final season of ER.

I was addicted to ER way back in the mid-nineties, and Mrs M caught the bug when a friend of hers lent us a huge pile of DVDs last year. Once she had reached season 5 or 6, I picked up where I had left off, and we both became more and more obsessed, until we practically sprinted through the last few episodes.

Bizarrely, the Japanese DVDs use Roman numerals, so it wasn’t until I accompanied Mrs M to the local video shop that we realised season XV was in stock, although the show’s secondary title in Japan is a helpfully literal translation of the phrase ’emergency room’: 緊急救命室 / Kinkyu-kyumei-shitsu. Mrs M watched some of the early episodes dubbed into Japanese, but this always felt a bit odd, particularly as the voice actors performed as if they were working on a more, as it were, ‘grown up’ production. So for the most part we chose the original soundtrack with Japanese subtitles, which gave Mrs M her English listening practice and me my Japanese reading practice (not that I’m ever going to use words like ten-teki – 点滴 / intravenous drip – hin-myaku – 頻脈 / tachycardia – and hohwa – 飽和 / saturation – in real life, but anyway).

To be honest, the glory days of ER were its first few seasons, when the show was fast-paced, technically superb and genuinely gritty (in a way that I assume Hill Street Blues used to be, although I never saw it). Somewhere around series 11 or 12, the makers seemed to lose their mojo, and we nearly gave up on it altogether, as the pace slowed to a crawl and it all began to look a bit daytime-y. But while the budgets had clearly been cut, with noticeably fewer set pieces and special effects than before, there was enough good acting and good writing that, by the two-hour finalé, we almost didn’t want it to end at all.

What the early shows in particular did well was to keep several story strands going at the same time, balancing action, romance, comedy and tragedy, against a backdrop of (so far as I could tell) realistic and well-researched medical-type stuff, and all wrapped up in a smooth, stylish, studio-based package. (Geeky technical note: as a former sound engineer, I was particularly impressed with how they managed to avoid post-synching dialogue when such liberal use was made of the steadicam, and with so many of the actors wearing radio mics.)

At the peak of its success, the show’s stars were getting paid seven-figure sums per episode, which is pretty mind-boggling when you consider they were making 22 a year. The sequences set in the Congo in seasons 9 and 10 really did look more like a feature film than a TV show, and I suppose from that point onwards, they only way they could go was down.

While the female characters remained strong until the end – Angela Bassett acts the rest of the cast off the screen as Doctor Banfield in season 15 (where on earth had she been since What’s Love Got To Do With It?), and Parminder Nagra (of Bend It Like Beckham fame) got better the more seasons she starred in – once Anthony Edwards and George Clooney had left, no one ever quite managed to fill their surgical gowns. Doctor Kovac, Doctor Gates, Ray what’s-his-name: they were all a little too pretty and a little too shallow. Mekhi Phifer as Doctor Pratt was the pick of the bunch, although Mrs M’s vote for studliest doc went to Noah Wyle as Carter.

Carter was in many ways the heart and soul of the show: he started pretty much when it started and the two grew up together, and you could almost say we saw the world of the ER through his eyes. Carter also starred in what was probably my favourite episode, in which he and a medical student are stabbed by a psychopathic patient, although the way he left the show, by being dragged off to Africa by his frankly annoying wife (sorry, Thandie Newton – it wasn’t you, it was the role), was a little anti-climactic.

Conversely, if I had to choose my least favourite episode, it would probably be the one in which Ewan McGregor adopts one of the thoroughly unconvincing accents for which he has become so renowned, playing a ‘Chicago’-ite who holds up a convenience store (McGregor is so rubbish at accents that on occasion I even find myself doubting his Scots, although I should probably leave it to someone better qualified for the job to trash the likes of The Phantom Menace).

Another stand-out episode (a double- or possibly even triple-bill, if I remember rightly), was the one in which Doctor Romano gets his arm chopped off by a helicopter rotor blade, which leads me on to one of the few gripes I have with the normally excellent scriptwriting.

Because there is more time in a TV series than a movie in which to create realistically complex characters, it’s very satisfying to watch those characters develop as time passes, but for whatever reason, Romano was never allowed to do so. He was bullying and insensitive from the very first minute he appeared on screen until the very last, and particularly after the arm / rotor blade incident, you felt there was a chance he might redeem himself. In one of the more bizarre curtain calls the show has seen, however, he died just as he had lived: as the guy everyone loved to hate.

In contrast, there are characters like Frank: on the surface, Frank is a doughnut-eating, old-school conservative, racially insensitive male chauvanist. While his main function is to provide comic relief to contrast with the blood-and-guts being spilled around him, in a couple of key episodes we are given insights into his life that cast him in a completely new light. In one we meet the daughter to whom he is devoted, and who happens to have Downs Syndrome, and in another, when he finds himself on the wrong side of the reception desk as a patient, he delivers an anaesthetic-induced monologue about the African-American soldiers he fought with and came to admire in the Vietnam war.

In the old days, when the writers had run out of ideas and the film crew needed some time off, sitcoms used to do a flashback episode: scenes from previous series would be interspersed with ‘Hey, do you remember when so-and-so did that hilarious thing?’ dialogue and wiggly screen special effects straight from an episode of Scooby Doo. Apart from one very short sequence just before Doctor Rasgotra jumps ship, mercifully, the makers of ER didn’t stoop to such nonsense. While a lot of the actors who had left the show returned for cameos in season 15, it was all done with a reasonable amount of subtlety, so that rather than a big, back-slapping party scene in the final episode, characters pop up in relatively credible circumstances – or in Doctors Greene and Romano’s case, a rather ingenious and newly filmed flashback that fills in some of Doctor Banfield’s back story.

Sure, there are a few more loose ends in the plotlines than before, the way in which characters are introduced and retired from the show is sometimes perfunctory, and the camerawork isn’t quite as easy on the eye as it used to be, but even season 15 is gripping, and funny, and moving, and stomach churning, and all kinds of other things that make you want to keep watching, and for those many reasons, I shall continue to feel a bit depressed for at least another couple of weeks – or until Mrs M and I start watching seasons I to VIII of XXIV, whichever comes first.

Japanese TV – a beginner’s guide

I had a TV when I first moved to Japan, but apart from the first half of England v Switzerland in Euro 2004, I never watched it. This was simply because I didn’t understand a word that was being said, and in the intervening seven years, to be honest, not a huge amount has changed. TV is the same wherever you go – quick-fire, fast-paced, and with as much information and entertainment packed into as short a time as possible – so I still have trouble keeping up, but I have realised that while a lot of foreigners label the programming here as ‘mad!’ ‘weird!’ or ‘bonkers!, that’s because they’re consuming it on a purely aesthetic level, with no real idea of the content. Admittedly, Japanese TV tends to be fairly noisy, in both the audio and visual senses of the word, but it has also been influenced by – and come to have its own influence on – TV from abroad.

The archetypal Japanese TV programme goes something like this:

A panel of celebrities sits in a studio and discusses things – often food, sometimes bizarre happenings from around the country / world which they have watched along with the punters at home, and sometimes gossip or other celebrities. There may well be a quiz and / or challenge element to the show, often involving the Japanese language or general knowledge, sometimes a more physical or craft-based activity like cooking, skipping rope or limbo dancing, and sometimes getting out and about and visiting a fish farm, dressing up in a silly costume and accosting members of the public, or going to New Zealand and bungee jumping off a rope bridge.

During these VT sections, the reactions of various members of the panel will pop up in a little window in the corner of the screen, and in this sense, Japanese TV is good example of post-modernism in action – ie. the viewers’ experience of a real or filmed event is mediated because they see and hear it through the eyes and ears of said celebrities, who in turn cannot ‘switch off’ their performance during a VT, since at any moment the vision mixer could cut to a shot of them looking surprised / amused / horrified etc.

While plenty of celebrities appear in this kind of context several times a week, there are three colossi of the format, all of whom have been nationally famous for many years. The first is Sanma (not his real name – sanma / 秋刀魚 is a variety of oily fish which in English is called Pacific saury), who has an all-year-round tan, glowing white false teeth, and is in the habit of literally rolling around on the floor if he finds something funny. The second is Shinsuké, who somehow reminds me of Jimmy Carr, although more in hairstyle than personality, and who teases his guests almost to the point of bullying. The third is Beat Takeshi, who Westerners will know as a brilliant film director, but who is much more famous in Japan as a comedian / presenter. Partly because he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident a few years ago, causing his face to be partially paralysed, I can honestly say that I do not understand a single word Takeshi says, which is a shame, because I get the feeling he is the most satirical voice on TV – one of the programmes in which he currently appears is a discussion of the week’s news, and covers everything from politics to sport.

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Separated at birth? Shinsuke and Jimmy Carr.
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Elsewhere, Takeshi can often be seen dressed in a shell suit, comedy glasses and a bad wig and bashing his co-hosts over the head with a squeaky toy hammer, a habit that betrays his roots in what was known as the manzai boom. Manzai (漫才 / stand-up comedy involving double acts) became hugely popular in the early eighties, to the extent that even today, almost all comedians start out as one half of a double act. In the series Turning Japanese, which was shown on Channel 5 earlier this year, Justin Lee Collins very bravely tried his hand at manzai, and realised in the process that as the stooge in a double act, you have to be prepared to get hit over the head approximately once every five seconds for the entire course of your performance (although not necessarily with a squeaky toy hammer).

Believe it or not, this doesn’t mean that manzai is unsophisticated, a fact that is exemplified by probably my favourite member of a double act currently doing the TV rounds. Nezuchi is an unbecoming bloke with prominent front teeth, a centre parting and a tartan jacket, and has an incredible talent for coming up with ingenious puns and plays on words, some of which are pre-written, but many of which are clearly improvised. Nezuchi’s manzai buddy is almost completely superfluous, but without each other, the two of them may never have made it into the public eye in the first place.

Anyone on a panel show who is not a comedian is either a model, a singer or a serious actor or actress, and the most ubiquitous of these at the moment are members of the girl group AKB48. AKB48 are ubiquitous partly because there are, I think, forty-eight of them to choose from, so that at any one time, AKB48 are appearing on several different TV shows, in numerous commercials, and gigging at one or more music venues. Like many girl and boy bands, their members are essentially interchangeable, and for every one of them who outgrows the group and moves into acting / presenting / appearing on panel shows, another has already passed the auditions and is poised to replace her.

No celebrity, incidentally, has the slightest qualms about doing advertising: Takeshi is currently starring in a commercial for ECC English school in which he speaks very poor English indeed, Sanma is doing one for Sedes painkillers, Shinsuké is doing one for Miura water softeners, and it is not unusual to spot the occasional Hollywood star earning some extra cash. Tommy Lee Jones has been the face of Boss coffee for the past five years, and whenever I watch the ads in which he appears, I can’t help thinking that for him, Lost In Translation must seem very much like a home movie.

The other main varieties of panellist that are worth mentioning are foreigners and homosexuals. One or two of the former have lived in Japan for many years and become fluent in the language – Dave Spector and Daniel Kahl being the most notable – but the majority are mixed race and were born and raised here. When Mrs M and I have kids, we are seriously considering pushing them into showbiz, since so long as one of your parents is foreign, even if you have no discernable talent whatsoever, you can make a very decent living indeed on the panel show circuit. One haafu (ハーフ / half-Japanese, half-foreign) in particular, who I shall not name for fear of litigation, barely has two brain cells to rub together, but has long, flowing blonde hair, looks good in a mini-dress, and probably earns more for a single TV appearance than I do in a year.

While there is an element of tokenism about foreigners on TV, homosexuals, transsexuals and transvestites do seem to have gained genuine acceptance, even if they are more likely to get hired if they are outrageously camp. About five years ago, a straight comedian came up with a character called Hard Gay, who appeared on TV dressed in a studded leather cap, aviator shades, black leather waistcoat and black leather hot pants, and was fond of doing pelvic thrusts in the faces of his fellow panelists and / or members of the studio audience. At the height of his fame, and in an act that in retrospect speaks of quite overwhelming hubris, Hard Gay actually held a press conference to unveil his latest catchphrase. Onii-san tells me that soon afterwards, Hard Gay’s popularity began to wane, and that having fallen on hard times, he – or rather, the comedian who created him – was forced to get a proper job.

Now, though, there are enough authentically gay celebrities that the panel on one recent show was exclusively gay and transgender. The show’s format was to find a suitable partner for Tanoshingo, who is probably the most seen face on television at the moment, and who for sheer camp-ness makes Alan Carr look like Chuck Norris. As with Ai-chan – a transsexual who is attractive enough that he / she must have had men all over the country beginning to question their sexuality – Tanoshingo’s funniest lines are often delivered when he reverts to his ‘male’ voice, and while his fame may, I suspect, be as short-lived as Hard Gay’s, it must surely be a sign that homosexuality is a more accepted part of Japanese society when several other members of the panel were straight-acting celebrities who happened to be gay.

Speaking of which, Japanese celebrities have no qualms about discussing the most intimate details of their private lives on national television: Shinsuké made one of his female panellists (Kiriko Isono) cry when he joked about her divorce – a divorce that was precipitated by her husband being unfaithful to her with a younger woman – and a couple of weeks ago procured Isono’s mobile phone from her PA and sent a text message to her new boyfriend, before reading the reply out to the studio audience. In a programme about unbalanced boyfriends and girlfriends, Nezuchi talked about a previous relationship in which he was hen-pecked by a woman who lived the high life on his hard-earned cash, and Satoshi Ishii, a judo gold medallist at the Beijing Olympics, openly discussed his marriage to a girl who wrecked the house or threw crockery at him when she suspected he was having an affair (hey presto, they have since divorced).

Another recent show devoted a good half-hour to the character assassination of one of its comedian panellists. Other members of the panel related incidents where they felt he had been insensitive or deceiving, before a series of dramatic reconstructions, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with friends and colleagues were shown to back up the accusations. On the evidence presented, he was prone to ignoring people when they talked to him, to bouts of obvious insincerity, to breaking promises to his friends in order to get a laugh, to deliberately putting people in awkward situations, and to horsing around on location to the point where it was no longer funny but embarrassing. While the comedian was given the chance to defend himself – and to make light of the accusations – the programme ultimately portrayed him as a sociopath, and whether or not the incidents depicted really were true (was it all an elaborate, Andy Kaufman-esque stunt, and was everyone, in fact, in on the joke?), I wonder how his career may suffer as a result.

Even for someone who has grown accustomed to British celebrities baring their souls in public, stuff like this makes me feel a little uneasy, and sure enough, it’s not unheard of for matters to take a more sinister turn. Mrs M and onii-san filled me in on the details of another incident involving a woman called Ai Iijima, who started out as a hostess, found her way into the world of TV, and subsequently became a best-selling author. As part of a show broadcast in 2007, she was given an on-screen consultation by a fortune teller, who made various portentous statements about her future, including the assertion that she would ‘no longer be around in two or three years’ time’. A year and a half later, Iijima died as a result of what was officially diagnosed as pneumonia, but which may well have been suicide, and while she may have been mentally unstable in the first place, the incident exemplifies the pitfalls of exploiting celebrities for the sake of higher ratings.

Perhaps because of this, the programmes I like best on Japanese TV tend to exploit ordinary members of the public instead: Big Daddy is a fly-on-the-wall documentary that follows the fortunes of several families with large numbers of children, and is all the more interesting because such families are even more of a rarity in Japan than in the UK. Contrary to what you might think, Darts Holiday doesn’t involve Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor, but Johji Tokoro (whose trademark is to balance his glasses on his forehead rather than over his eyes – you will quite literally never see Tokoro in public without his glasses balanced on his forehead) throwing a dart into a map of Japan and sending a camera crew to wherever it lands. The crew will then drive around and find local people going about their business: a farmer taking his prize cow for a walk next to a busy A-road, for example, or a woman foraging for wild vegetables, or a group of singing skateboarders practicing in their front yard. Similarly, Nihon Hikkyou-dé-Hakken (日本秘境で発見 / Discoveries in Japan Off the Beaten Track) seeks out eccentric characters from around the country and follows them around with a camera, and while there is some research involved, large parts of the programme appear to be genuinely off-the-cuff.

The more informative brand of Japanese documentary is rather different from our soberly presented, David Attenborough-style fare, and treats its subject in more of a comic book style, through an information overload of voiceover, music*, graphics, charts, animation, video footage, stills and subtitles. In fact – and for no apparent reason – almost all Japanese TV programmes now have subtitles, which is a godsend for people like me, as it gives us a better chance of understanding what’s going on.

Anyone who grew up in the UK in the eighties will remember Endurance – aka. ザ・我慢 / Za Gaman – which was made famous by Clive James on Television, and the Japanese still have a fondness for ridiculous challenges: every 2nd and 3rd January, an event called Hakoné Eki-Den sees teams of university students run a total of 217km in relay from Tokyo to Hakoné and back, and every summer, one lucky celebrity gets the chance to jog around Tokyo for twenty-four hours as part of the Children In Need-style charity telethon 24-Hour TV (I could have sworn the woman who did it in 2008 hopped in a taxi at one point so she wouldn’t be late arriving in the studio, but anyway). Also in 2008, a team of celebrities attempted to swim the Sugaru Straits between Aomori and Hokkaido, which are like a much tougher version of the English Channel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they failed, an outcome that led to much on-screen crying. In fact, and in a way that belies their reputation for stoicism, the Japanese are quite an emotional bunch, particularly when there’s a television camera around to capture the moment for posterity, and there is nothing the networks and the viewers seem to like more than an emotional reunion, a teary confession or a televised memorial service.

As you might expect, daytime TV is a mixture of Richard and Judy-style chat shows, teleshopping infomercials and cheesy dramas, many of which originate in Korea. Japan, too, has its own soap operas, one of which changes its location, scenario and characters every six months or so, and the most recent of these was about a teppanyaki shop, which brings me back to that most essential ingredient (if you’ll pardon the pun) of Japanese TV: food. It’s probably best to save this topic for a future blog post, but for now, I feel obliged to mention the signature shot of Japanese TV, a shot that cameramen and women must spend years of their working lives perfecting.

This shot – let’s call it the CCU or Chopsticks Close-Up – is of a morsel of food held between chopsticks or on a fork and poised above plate or bowl, ready to eat and filmed in as mouth-watering a way as possible. Imagine, if you will, a slice of sashimi drizzled with soy sauce, the fingerprint-like whorls on its surface glistening in an atmospheric backlight; or a tumbling tangle of noodles, steaming hot and drenched in ramen stock or rich miso, with a few delicate slices of spring onion balanced on top; or a wafer-thin slice of Kobé beef, drenched in its own aromatic juices and…well, I’m sure you get the idea, although it’s a shot that I can’t recall ever having seen on British TV, which tends to go in for hand-held, quick-cut shots of the food being prepared, followed by formal portraits of the finished dish on a table-top, or of Jamie Oliver / Nigel Slater / Nigella Lawson tucking in and telling us how great it tastes. The CCU is lingering, loving and so extreme that you can see the chopsticks quiver slightly as whoever is holding them – probably the production assistant – struggles to keep perfectly still.

But anyway, all this talk of food is making me hungry – I’m off to the supermarket to buy some Choco Pie.

(*An interesting point about the use of music on Japanese TV: in the same way that during British TV programmes, when someone gets on a train, Mystery Train by Elvis Presley starts playing in the background, or when they get in a car, ditto Drive by The Cars , or when they get on a bicycle, ditto Bicycle Race by Queen, so the musical cues here are almost always based on English language lyrical associations. I assume TV stations must hire researchers with a) a very good grasp of English and b) an encyclopaedic knowledge of overseas music.)

From the archives

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From an unspecified newspaper on an unspecified date – probably more than a decade ago – and found while sifting through boxes of mementos in preparation for The Big Move:

Howling Mistake

A woman had to be taken to hospital after she saw a body slowly rising from a coffin on a rubbish tip on a dark October evening, Winsford magistrates court heard yesterday.

Mrs Doreen Power, aged 43, of Middlewich, Cheshire, twice had to be given oxygen by ambulancemen after seeing unemployed William Neville Davies, aged 18, of Nixon Drive, Winsford, rise zombie-like from the coffin, howling eerily, Mr Derek Freeman, prosecuting, told the court.

Mr Davies pleaded guilty to causing a breach of the peace and was bound over for 12 months to the sum of £50.

Mrs Power had gone to Winsford tip with her husband Frederick to dump some rubbish.

Mr Quentin Querelle, defending, said that Mr Davies had intended the prank for a friend and did not realise that Mr and Mrs Power were approaching.

‘He says he is very sorry and hopes never to see the inside of a coffin for many years to come.’


From the archives II

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Hunt for video game loser who left home

Police last night stepped up a hunt for Mr John Chandler, aged 35, who stormed out of his home in Reading, Berkshire, after a Star Raiders video game beat him.

Mrs Linda Chandler said yesterday her husband had been playing the Atari video game last Tuesday. ‘He was getting soundly beaten and became very angry. He kicked over a tray of tea cups and was very ratty. Soon after, he got in the car and drove off. I have not heard from him since. I am very worried and want him to come home.’ She said at the guest house which the couple run in London Road.


From the archives III

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For the past couple of years, a good deal of my Japanese practice has consisted of reading those free newspapers that are published by the Japanese expat community in London, namely News Digest, the thrillingly titled Japan Update Weekly (formerly known as Bay Spo) and Weekly Journey.

Weekly Journey is my favourite of the three, and its most interesting feature is a page of bizarre stories  trawled from the week’s news, stories that usually involve bungled crimes or deviant behaviour of one kind or another.

Once Mrs M and I have moved to Japan, I’ll be rather disappointed not to be able to pick up Weekly Journey any more (sadly, the bizarro stories do not feature on its website), as reading a real-life Japanese newspaper is much more like hard work. So before that happens, may I be so bold as to present you with one or two gems found in translation, as it were:

‘Looking at them was exciting’ – 78 saddles are seized from a man suspected of theft, who has been re-arrested in Tochigi Prefecture.

37-year-old company employee Yuichi Fukuda was arrested on the 22nd and taken to Sakura Police Station in Takanezawa Town, Tochigi Prefecture, on suspicion of stealing a young girl’s bicycle saddle. He is already being prosecuted for a previous offence of damage to property.

‘Looking at the saddle made me excited,’ the suspect confirmed. A large number of saddles and student’s bicycle helmets were found at Mr Fukuda’s residence, and Sakura Police are investigating further offences.

According to Sakura Police, between the afternoon of the 6th March and the morning of the 7th March, Mr Fukuda is suspected of stealing a bicycle saddle (worth around 100 yen) from the residence in Takanezawa Town of a nine-year-old girl who is in the fourth grade of elementary school.

Mr Fukuda was previously arrested by Sakura Police on 29th May on suspicion of damage to property, when he was caught in the act of covering the bicycle helmet of a junior high school girl with a urine-like liquid. When officers searched Mr Fukuda’s home, they discovered 78 bicycle saddles, 10 bicycle helmets and various items of PE kit.

According to investigations, Mr Fukuda has been targeting bicycles with junior high school markings, and has testified to stealing saddles and helmets. ‘Women of my own age don’t take any notice of me,’ he is quoted as saying.

And in case you fancy reading the Japanese instead:

「見て楽しんだ」サドル78個押収 窃盗容疑で男を再逮捕 栃木
栃木県警さくら署は22日、女子児童の自転車のサドルを盗んだとして、窃盗の疑いで、同県高根沢町平田、会社員、福田裕一被告(37)=器物破損罪で起訴=を再逮捕した。
「サドルを見て楽しんでいた」と容疑を認めている。福田容疑者の自宅からは大量のサドルや通学用ヘルメットが見つかっており、同署で余罪を調べている。
同署の調べによると、福田容疑者は3月6日午後から7日午前にかけて、高根沢町内の小学4年の女子児童(9)の自宅から、自転車のサドル(1000円相当)を盗んだ疑いが持たれている。
福田容疑者は、同県さくら市内で、女子中学生のヘルメットに尿のような液体をかけたとして、5月29日に器物破損の現行犯で同署に逮捕された。同署が福田容疑者の自宅を捜索した際、自転車のサドル78個やヘルメット10個、体操着などを発見した。
同署の調べに、福田容疑者は平成18年ごろから、中学校のステッカーが張られた自転車を狙い、サドルやヘルメットを盗んでいたと供述しており、「同世代の女性に相手にされない」などと話しているという。

A picture of Mr Fukuda’s horde of stolen goods can be seen here.