[Yet another post about work. But then again, work is a big part of my life.]
In the documentary Surviving Everest, Pete Athens, six-time veteran of Everest and leader of the National Geographic 50th Anniversary Expedition to the great mountain that famously included the sons of both Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, said this about the legendary Sherpa Norgay: "He approached the mountain as a child going into the lap of his mother. He never tried to impose his will on the mountain."
Since hearing these wise remarks, I've been asking myself if I try to impose my will on things too much, both personally and professionally. They say that damaged people need to exert control over situations and other people.
Professionally, a perfect situation for assessing that question came up this week.
I've been translating a white paper for a government ministry. The material, despite containing the usual mix of unabashed nihonjinron self-congratulation and pathological bureaucratic vagueness, was very interesting, and I really enjoyed working on it.
Until it was sent for the first revision on the government side, that is.
When it came back, they had made many changes, as is normal and natural. Translation and editing is a process, after all.
Some of the changes concerned the nuances of the original Japanese text. Not a problem.
Some of them were possibly legitimate issues of prefering certain English phrases over others. No problem there either.
But (and you knew a but was coming, didn't you?) there were also the infuriating English grammar changes. Ask yourself a question. Who knows more about English grammar (and writing style), a native-speaking English-language professional with years of experience reading, writing and editing English, or a Japanese mid-level government official with a high-intermediate grasp of the English language?
Now ask yourself another question. Who does the government official think knows more? Yes, you've got it. The government official's money is on the government official.
And therein lies the dilemma.
Do you fight these stupid changes? If you do, you might manage to make the work read better than the usual pitiful official English in Japan. But to do that, you're going to need to spend a lot of time trying to move mountains of stubbornness and take on a lot of extra stress in the process.
Or do you quietly laugh at the foolishness of their arrogance and let them believe they are right? If you take this option, you get some kind of trivial, vengeful satisfaction and much less stress, but you also have watch the quality of your work going down the toilet.
This is my professional dilemma. Do I impose my will on the monumental arrogance of Japan's elite, or do I accept that "This is Japan" and shrug it off with a shou ga nai, allowing my work to be defaced?
Not an easy choice when you actually care about your work. One thing's for sure though: I certainly don't approach working with the Japanese government as a child going into the lap of its mother.
Safety in numbers doesn't necessarily work in mountains. A group of 43 (!) elderly snowshoers managed to go missing in Japan's Tohoku region this week. They were found today.
Koizumi has a story he loves to tell called the Spirit of the 100 Sacks of Rice. A head of a town in Edo-era Japan whose people were starving asked the government for help. They sent 100 sacks of rice. Instead of distributing the rice to the people to eat, the head of the town sold it and used the money to build a school. The school later churned out lots of valuable human resources and the town prospered again.
Intended moral of the story? Education is the most important thing in life, more important even than food.
Alternative reading? People have no intrinsic value per se. They are only valuable in how they can be used. Thus, feeding starving useless people is much less important than creating useful ones.
Hence the use of one of last century's most dehumanizing terms: "human resources." I don't know about you, but I have a hard time seeing myself as a resource who happens to be human.
"You can take all the tea in china
Put it in a big brown bag for me
Sail right around the seven oceans
Drop it straight into the deep blue sea
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like honey from the bee"
Some days the song in your head is beautiful.
Trouble in the Japan camp ahead of tonight's World Cup Qualifier against Iran. Zico has decided to revert to 4-4-2 and is playing Nakata as Captain, despite Nakata having been out with injury for a year. The players don't like it, thinking they should stick with their familiar 3-5-2 system.
For me, tactically-inept, Kashima-Antlers-favoring, JFA "yes man" Zico is delaying the development of Japanese football and the sooner he's out, the faster Japan can build on the great work of former manager Philippe Troussier. In that sense, this rare open criticism by Japan's players is a positive thing.
On the other hand, teams that are infighting in the media on the eve of big games almost never win them. The great but bickering Dutch teams of recent decades proved that so many times.
I hope I'm wrong, but it's not looking good for Japan in the cauldron of Tehran tonight.
How Paradise Yamamoto, Japan's "top mambo musician," broadened the stunted horizons of bonsai.
In last Sunday's Merseyside derby, Rob Styles went for the tolerant, "we're all adults here" approach to refereeing, choosing to have quiet words with transgressing players instead of enforcing the letter of the law. Until he produced a straight red for Milan Baros, that is.
That Baros deserved a straight red is not in doubt, and to argue that he didn't would take away from valid criticisms that need to be made about the refereeing of the game. In light of Styles' policy of leniency until that point, it is hardly surprising (and very pleasing) that Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez refused to isolate the Baros incident from the wider context of the game and heavily criticize the player, deciding instead to point to the double standards he saw in operation in how Styles refereed the game. Baros rightly should have walked, but so too should Tony Hibbert, who, as a result of Styles' policy of selective leniency, received a quiet word instead of a yellow card for one of his barkingly bookable offences. And Duncan Ferguson walking off that pitch without a yellow card should be baffling to everyone who saw his usual display of vicious elbows and simian verbal abuse. Treating a monkey as a diplomat won't make that monkey a diplomat. And being nice to Duncan Ferguson won't make Duncan Ferguson a nice man.
I know from personal experience that refereeing is a thankless task, but on Sunday the only point both sets of fans could agree on was that the referee didn't do his job. And that's poor for a professional referee. David Moyes of Everton complained his players were not protected (which is laughable considering those said players spent most of the match trying to maim the Liverpool team). More justifiably, he questioned the mere three minutes of stoppage time the referee allowed in the second half. Of course, Liverpool could just as easily decry the lack of stoppage time in the first half when Everton looked like a bemused and baffled park football team who'd stayed up drinking until the early hours of the morning before.
The lesson to be learned is not complicated. The softly-softly approach to refereeing cannot be applied in the frenzied, volatile atmosphere of a local derby with 15 million pounds at stake. It may be nice to be nice, but if you're going to be nice, you have to be so consistently. And being consistently nice is almost never practical, especially in local derbies.
Forget the obvious consequence: four Liverpool injuries. I'd even argue that the well-meaning but incompetent refereeing was a contributing factor in the post-game unrest, and the 54 arrests.
The one thing that annoys me more than the assumption of a racial hierarchy in Japan (the one with white people and Japanese at the top and Indians and Pakistanis at the bottom), is the widely-held belief that English teachers are automatically not worthy of respect, and even untrustworthy, lazy, alcoholic, freeloading, promiscuous, incapable of understanding Japan and so on.
What a load of nonsense.
Some of the most creative and industrious people I've met in my time in Japan have been English teachers, and some of the people who've taught me most about how to live in Japan and how to live in general have been English teachers too.
The proportion of nice people to assholes among English teachers is, at worst, no different to the proportions in other professions. At best, it is higher, because English teachers are often young and interested in interacting with other people and cultures.
The belief that a profession can be worthless per se says a lot about the believer's mindset.
The belief that the profession of language teaching, with all its opportunities for creativity, self-expression, and communication, is worthless says more still.
And the belief that a person working in that profession is automatically unworthy of respect too...well, I don't think I even have to imply what that tells us about the believer.
Just as beauty can be found in all things, the same applies of job satisfaction.
All you need is to know where to look. Not that difficult, of course, but I think most of the people writing off English teachers (including among such critics ex-English teachers and English teachers themselves) wouldn't even know where to start.
To criticize a person because they are an English teacher is to criticize creativity, self-expression and communication. It's to criticize the desire to learn about other cultures. It's to champion a value system where perceived status in society and financial worth is more important than any possible benefits of professional satisfaction.
And last but certainly not least contradictory, it's to rubbish the importance of professional satisfaction but at the same time to state categorically that a person's worth is connected only to his/her profession.
Now that's a good philosophy.
The BBC's Horizon program recently investigated homeopathy and found no evidence it is not a sham. Modern science continues to have no reason to believe claims that water has a memory.
Tried fugu last night, bought in the local supermarket for 350 yen. Bland to mildly unpleasant taste. Not nearly as good as Sanma, Aji, Tara, Hokke, Saba, Salmon, Tuna or Karei.
But then again, fugu isn't about the taste.
The popularity of fugu in Japan is an interesting phenomenon. Fugu is a very expensive fish, has some potentially lethal side effects, and is by most people considered to have a very weak taste (although many Japanese gourmets would disagree). The combination of these factors would normally give humans a low preference for its consumption. However, it seems one of the attractions of the low-flavored fish is the risk of potential death, regardless of how low that actual likelihood stands in a commercial restaurant. It can be assumed that the fish would be much less popular if it were not so poisonous.
First we heard that Vitamin C supplements do not prevent the common cold. Next was the news that Vitamin A supplements could cause osteoporosis. Now, it seems the last bastion of the vitamin supplement revolution, Vitamin E, may increase the risk of heart failure .
With each new study that emerges, Linus Pauling, the multi-talented Nobel Prize winner who championed the cause of vitamin supplements, is looking ever more like a quack.
Happy St. Patrick's Day folks. I'm stuck in a bottomless snake-pit of work at the moment, so I'm going to be lazy and repost my thoughts from this time last year on the man with the golden sheep crook. This year, I'm not having the free trout and Guinness, but aside from that, very little has changed.
If he existed at all—and it's far from certain—he was the guy who rid the snakes from Ireland in about the fifth century. The snakes, of course, are not really the big brown poisonous ones you find on your doorstep in Queensland, but rather they represent the wily druids of Celtic paganism. St. Patrick, you see, was the original Christian superhero—one man, armed only with humility, mercy, and non-violence, who singlehandedly converted the fighting, drinking, carousing Celtic warriors into a pious nation of farmers who dressed up in their best clothes every Sunday to go to mass. An unbelievable achievement, I think you'll agree.
St. Patrick had a way of explaining things: you might have heard that he used the shamrock, the symbol or Irishness, to explain the Holy Trinity. Which is why some of us will be wearing it today. You may well know his connection with Station Island, Lough Derg, also known as St. Patrick's Purgatory, and of course the Lough Derg Pilgrimage, with its bare feet and black toast, where the cynical ones say young farmers went to find a woman.
I wonder, though, if you know of St. Patrick's dealings with Oisin, son of Fionn McCumhaill, the leader of that famous band of Irish warriors known as the Fianna. It's a legendary story, told for you wonderfully by a fellow called Michael Stephens here (you'll need to read this for the rest of my post to make any sense).
Today we'll celebrate St. Patrick, torchbearer of Christian values in Ireland, the man who embodies Ireland's conversion to Christianity from the paganism of men like Oisin—from the feisty, generous, warrior code of the land to what some would say is a mean-spirited, abstinent, hypocritical set of imposed beliefs.
We'll celebrate him by having what is called in Irish pubs all over the world, "the craic," which to me is an essentially Pagan form of celebration. We'll eat, drink, tell tales and be merry, and before the night is out sure we'll have completely forgotten that we're all good Christians, or the sons and daughters of good Christians, as is more applicable to my generation.
What the world likes about the Irish has nothing to do with our blow-in, Christian tradition and everything to do with when we were Celtic, pagan kings. The gargle, the dance, carousing, a bit of Quiet Man buffoonery, bringing the British Empire to its knees despite the odds being stacked against us, and telling the best of stories about it all over more drink for many a long day afterwards.
When we celebrate St. Patrick's Day today, I'd say that—ironically—we'll be using the day of St. Patrick, the poster boy of Irish Christianity, to celebrate our idealized Celtic paganism. And not only will we celebrate our idealized pagan nature, we'll celebrate it pagan-style. Over a millenium on, Christianity is still an imposed belief system in the ideal Irish psyche. We don't really buy the virtues of mercy and humility, we're far from non-violent, and every Klingon and his dog knows you can't celebrate mercy, humility, and non-violence in song.
Put another way, if all Americans have a little bit of Irish in them, all Irish have a little bit of pagan in them.
I don't see this as schizophrenia or hypocrisy. In fact, I'll be toasting both Oisin and Patrick tonight, while eating the finest imported smoked salmon in the company of 400 of the 1,000-strong Irish community of Tokyo. The Ambassador has a free gaffe, you see. The IT contingent and the missionary nuns probably won't be joining me in a toast to Oisin, but I suspect, as De Valera said of Collins, that in the long term, history is going to see Oisin in a better light.
Whatever the case, there's beauty in the way our oral and literary traditions have personified the change in our little island's value systems through these figures, how we continue to rewrite their tales, and how we draw upon parts of all the traditions to define ourselves.
Take the pilgrimage to St. Patrick's Purgatory at Station Island, Lough Derg, for example, which has been a favored topic of some of our finest modern poets. If I wasn't going celebrating my paganism tonight, I think I'd re-read Lough Derg or Station Island. Here's to retelling the old stories.
On the eve of Liverpool's vital game away to Blackburn, the rumor is Rafael Benitez is second on Real Madrid's shortlist for choosing a new manager.
If Real were to lure Benitez away (and I for one think he will stay), it would only be symptomatic, and further unneeded proof, of the rift in loyalty to one club opening up in free-market, "highest bidder" modern corporate football between the fans of the game and the mercenaries who thrive within it. (This is also the very reason why the current fans' hero of Liverpool football club is not Michael Owen or Stephen Gerrard but rather Jamie Carragher.)
Mere symptom or not, on a gut level, I wish Real Madrid, their ruthless, instant-result hungry chairman, their primadonna team of whinging galacticos, their racist supporters, their Spanish government money, the whole beautiful lot, a very pleasant future involving a large hole and disappearance.
Dominic Fifield (The Guardian): Lure of Real Set to Test Resolve of Benitez
The sun setting over Kawaguchiko.
This old lady was very curious.
A Zen master attempts to move Mount Fuji "a little to the right."
I'm done, as the Americans say, with the God Logic. The same for any other prefabricated conceptual frameworks for making sense of the events that occur in life.
Using logic, moral codes, nationalism, group identity, perceived sense of individual character, or whatever you use, to make sense of the things that happen in your life is always limiting. Yes, they're ways to understand and make sense of life, but in the end they all restrict understanding of experience and provide safe but over-simplified escape routes for responding to it. By attempting to "comprehend" your experience they end up pigeonholing it instead.
They are impositions, barriers, ways that stop you "feeling" your life.
Yesterday evening on a really crowded Yamanote Line train a guy in his sixties suddenly hurtled down the middle of the car making loud quacking sounds and shouting that he was an old man, the sea of people parting miraculously on either side as he passed. When he reached the end of the car he sat down on the floor and was silent.
It reminded me of another Yamanote Line legend I once saw in action: the Bag Lady. She was so called because she used to hit random women in the face with her bag. I saw her do it once in Akihabara station about six years ago. After suddenly clobbering some completely unsuspecting young girl, she calmly left the car she was in and got into the next one. The train moved off and nobody did a thing.
Sudden, violent puncturing of the surface, a ripple of shock and then rapid return to normality.
The Bag Lady probably had issues with other women looking better than her, but it's harder to guess the motivations of Moses the Duck.
Today I went to a meeting to take the blame for someone else's cock-up. I'm something of a specialist at this. In fact, you could call me the Winston Wolf of my company.
For over two hours, I was lectured in bad English by a jumped-up middle level official of the Japanese government about a piece of translation that was—unquestionably—badly done.
I agreed to go the meeting and take the blame. My company said they told the clients (the Japanese government) I hadn't translated or edited the document and was going in place of the actual translator and editor to take over and fix the situation (which I will do).
In a perfect world, my company would have sent the translator and editor who worked on the project.
Anyway, I went to the meeting to discover that the client thought it was my translation. Then, for over two hours, this guy proudly and with some glee pointed out repeated errors with the job. Two hours is a long time when you're being ridiculed for something you didn't do, but for over two hours I remained calm, smiling, nodding in agreement, offering suggestions if he so required, and generally fighting an urge to damage government property or officials.
Then his mate came in, and started going over exactly the same material again (and again and again), this time in rapid-fire but highly indirect Japanese (you know the kind, where the point is never actually made but implied, which is hardly the right style for talking about specific problems with a written document), the two of them guffawing about how bad the translation was, occasionally stopping to reassure me that it was understandable the job was so crap because, as everyone knows, Japanese is too difficult for foreigners to understand.
Thing is, the translation was actually done by a Japanese.
About three long hours into the tag-team lecture, I flipped. I stopped one of them in mid-stream and suggested in my politest Japanese that the normal unbroken concentration span for a human being is scientifically considered to be less than one hour. I then wondered, in light of that, if it might not be optimal for ensuring the quality of the important task we were cooperating on for all members to pause for a short break.
When I came back I hadn't calmed down as much as I should have, so I decided to repay dishonesty with honesty. I explained to the two government guys—for the benefit of the sales representative of my company who was also present—that I hadn't actually done the translation, and asked if they had been given this information. Of course they hadn't.
What a pile of piss, you might say.
And then, despite being given that information, they continue to treat the situation as if it were I who had done the—admittedly awful—translation. For nearly an hour more.
The next time my company asks me to be Winston Wolf, I should tell them to find a new "cleaner."
I won't though, because I understand their reasons for sending me. And they treat me very well in general, so I owe them some dirty work every now and again in return. I don't mind doing it. In fact, I'd do it unconditionally. I just wish they wouldn't be so duplicitous about how they present the task at hand.
Not to be outdone by the recent antics of a Japanese skier in Roppongi, one of Japan's up and coming young political lights does his bit to improve the image of Tokyo's premier entertainment district.
"Japan is to end a ban on women working in mines and tunnels, based on an ancient superstition that their presence could make a mountain goddess jealous."
(English note: What a badly written sentence.)
The Telegraph: Japan to Let Women Work in Mines
This one is specially dedicated to all the people in my office who, heaven forbid, might have a little bit of extra time on their hands.
Wikipedia: Best of Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense
via Nutgroist
If the atmosphere on my sofa for the first leg against Leverkusen was mostly as tense as a bad day in a traditional Japanese office, the feeling for the second leg was more like a lounging on the deck of your own yacht on a calm, sunny day, breezing into Rio to see the carnival.
Liverpool now need to avoid the Italians in the Quarter Finals.
I wrote before about the bus I took to Tomuraushi Onsen last summer, but never about the climb itself. I've always meant to describe it, because Tomuraushi was by far the most memorable mountain I've ever climbed. The memories are a little hazy now, but it's worth getting the story down before they're gone completely. Warning: This is a very long piece.
There's a campsite in a clearing about 10 minutes from Tomuraushi Onsen. Getting off the bus that evening, I bought myself a spot for the night and went to put up the tent. Unlike the typhoon two days before when climbing Tokachidake, the weather was perfect. I was hoping the next day would be more of the same. A couple of other tents dotted the campsite, a motorbike parked outside one. Having put mine up, I headed back down to the Onsen for a relaxing bath and to scout out the local knowledge.
The waters of Tomuraushi Onsen are special, among the best I've sampled in Japan. All I remember about the restaurant was that it sold deer burgers and the waiter was very camp. On a wall near the door was an interactive map of the trail to Tomuraushi, which lit up and talked to you in true Japanese-style when you pressed certain buttons. It was long dark now, but some hikers were still returning, hosing down their boots outside. They looked knackered.
The flashing map said 14 hours return to Tomuraushi, which was a little surprising but not something I really stopped to consider. After all, Tokachidake was supposed to take eight hours but I'd done in it just over four. At that rate, it would only take me seven hours or so to climb Tomuraushi.
All the same, I headed back to the tent for an early night, and planned to set out with the dawn the next morning.
I must have been tired that night, because I didn't wake until 6am the next day. Cooking breakfast would have taken too long, so I improvised with chocolate. After organizing my pack, I headed back down to the Onsen again to see if there were any taxis going to the start of the trailhead proper (I forget its name). If I could grab one, it would take three of those 14 hours off the trip, making things a bit more manageable. Hardly surprisingly, though, there was no sign of a taxi.
I'd come this far, so I was always going to go, despite the late start. The forest had a short-cut trail to the start of the trailhead proper. By road it would have been eight kilometers, but in the woods it was only three.
Early morning is bear time, and in Hokkaido that means higuma, the Japanese brown bear. The night before, on my way back from the onsen, a family of deer had suddenly leaped out of the woods right in front of me, sprinted across the road and crashed back into the woods on the other side. It brought back to me that I was a guest in these parts, sharing the woods and mountains with many other creatures. I wasn't thinking snakes at that time--just bears.
It was a beautiful morning and nobody else seemed to be on the trail. I tried to put the worries of bears to the back of my mind, and pushed hard up the steep skirt of the mountain, making it to the start of the trailhead proper in half the allotted time. Things were going well. From the trailhead proper to Kamui Tenjyo was the next stage. Like the early part of the hike, it was steep climbing through forests until finally I reached the ridge. A sign warned of a diversion. Checking it closely, it seemed to put another two or three kilometers onto the total distance. From Kamui Tenjyo it was flat walking on a wide trail for an hour or so, until suddenly it became open ridge. As the sun rose to take its rightful position in the morning sky, the view of the Daisetsuzan range was amazing. Pushed for time though I was, I couldn’t stop taking photos. I was walking on a trail cut out of head-high reeds, below which valleys and mountains were visible in all directions. It was stunning. I remember laughing with happiness to be in such a beautiful place.
In the distance was the noise of motors, which made me feel comfortable. The noise would surely work better than my timid little bell when it came to warning off any local bears. As I continued, the noise became closer, until turning a corner, I spotted two young workmen, uniformed, heads covered with white head-towels, bandanas around their faces. They were standing about 100 meters from each other, both holding chainsaw-like motorized reed-cutters, carving out the new trail. They must have been as surprised to see me as I was to see them. This was a remote, highland area well beyond roads. Unless they were dropped by helicopter, which seems unlikely, they would have had to hike at least two hours to get there, probably much longer if they were carrying all the equipment. I said hello to the first one but didn't get much of a response, so I continued on my way.
After an hour or so, the scenery changed again. I don't know how many times my world changed that day. The reeds disappeared, the forests returned, and the trail started to descend. I was going back down the mountain. The storm from the other day had been here too, and some of the ground was fairly slippery underfoot. Still worried about time, I hurtled down the mountain, probably faster than was safe. My next goal was a ford in the river that had appeared at the bottom of the trail.
When I reached the ford, I finally saw other hikers. A group of Japanese, clearly in good spirits, were sitting around eating chocolate, laughing with each other, generally having a good time. I imagine they had done the sensible thing, treated Tomuraushi as a two-day hike, and were on their way back on Day 2. Crossing the river, I saw the famous rocks of Tomuraushi for the first time. A friend of a friend, an experienced climber, had broken her leg on these rocks a couple of months before in a nothing accident. Just a minor lapse of concentration and then the feeling of broken bone. She'd been helicoptered out and was lucky. She didn't have to pay a yen.
I followed the rocky trail up the side of this other mountain, which may or may not have been Tomuraushi. I'd made another stupid mistake you see, leaving the map in the tent. I made so many basic mistakes in Hokkaido last summer, most of them on Tomuraushi.
After another hour or so, I was seriously hungry and slowing down. The trail changed again, from rocky trail to rocks-only trail. It veered off to the right, marked out by yellow paint-markers. I've never seen anything like it before or since. It was river of rocks in the middle of a mountain. The going was steady to slow. After twenty minutes of rock hopping the ground became a bit safer again. Up ahead was the ridge line, a clear and visible target. I pushed on, upping the pace a bit. After the ridge line, there couldn't be too much more to this mountain.
Like any ridge, reaching it was a minor triumph. It always means a lot of the hard work has been done.
There was a mountain to the left and one to the right. I was hoping the one to the left was my man, as it seemed closer. Turns out neither of them were.
Next was more scuttling across rocks. I'd long forgotten bears by this stage. After making it across them, the trail started to descend again. Suddenly there were people in sight on their way back from where I was going. I'd reached Mae-Tomu Daira, the valley before Tomuraushi. A strange rock structure lies in the center of this beautiful valley. It's a very idyllic place, Mae-Tomu Daira. It doesn't seem either high or remote.
I was beginning to understand the nature of this climb. It wasn't a climb. It was a journey into a center. And I don't think you'll know what I mean by that until you try it yourself.
Time was against me now, and I had a decision to make. At the pace I was going, I didn't have enough daylight hours to make it to the peak and get all the way back before the sun sets. I don't need to tell you why it wasn't a good idea to be in these mountains after dark.
But I'd come this far and wasn't going to turn back now, sensible though it would have been. I pushed on, up the final ascent toward Tomuraushi, whose peak I could finally see in the distance all these hours later. I was among the clouds now, and the sting from their moisture cooled me down nicely. It was a straight push from there. The last 30 minutes or so was fairly rocky, but there was nothing difficult. And suddenly, after all that time, I climbed up this one big rock and arrived at the peak.
Mixed emotions again. Nice to have made it, pity the cloud cover was obscuring the view, and hunger. A quick curry later, I was on my way back down the mountain, acutely aware of my race against the setting sun.
In the distance on the rocks I saw an Ezo striped squirrel, who moved just as I tried to photograph it. For all the time pressures, I just couldn't put the camera away.
Over the next few hours, I retraced my course, back through the different stages of rocks, down the valley to the ford, across the river, along it, back up the next mountain, all the while timing myself and setting targets for each stage. I needed to be at Kamui Tenjyo by five, I told myself, to have any chance of getting back down before dark.
The workmen were long gone, but they'd certainly improved the trail. I was almost running now, and made it to Kamui Tenjyo just after five. Despite missing this target, I was still almost on course. Or at least that's what I tried to convince myself.
Another decision awaited. Soon, and about an hour before the sun set, I would be at the start of the trailhead proper, and thus the road. That gave me two choices. Three kilometers down the forest trail, the last one in the dark, or eight kilometers down an almost unused road, the last five in the dark. I'm still not sure it was the right choice, but I went with the forest route.
I mentioned already that my preparation was ropey, but how about this: I didn't even have a torch. Can you believe that? I'm ashamed to tell you that. I had one hour to make it down the last part of the trail, which was supposed to take more than two. I had myself a situation.
Though I was willing it not to, the sun began to set, and as it did, the noises of the forest seemed to became more threatening, more sinister. Did I hear rats? Or were they snakes? I'll never know, I suppose. Despite rushing, I was going to have to do the last 30 minutes in the pitch black. Under cover of forest, with no lights anywhere, this was true darkness. If I was being honest with myself, I'd known this was going to happen since hours back, since Mae-Tomu Daira on the way up. And for those of you who do a lot of hiking, you'll know that last part, the very edge of a mountain, is often the steepest. Plus, it was wet underfoot.
The danger of breaking a leg was real. And if I did, how would they find me? You could panic easily enough in situations like that. I fell more than once, at times sliding down the mountain on my ass. I thanked the mountain gods for the ankle support in my hiking boots. Tripping over branches, falling flat, cutting my hands, and keeping going, trying not to worry about bears, snakes and rats. I had to get off this mountain.
Suddenly, almost unbelievably, I put my foot forward and touched concrete. I needed a few more steps before I let myself believe it. Yes, it was true. I wasn't imagining it. I'd arrived at the road. The feeling of exhilaration that overcame me then would not wear off until after my hot-springs later that night, when I had my first beer and the exhaustion that had been put on hold for so long finally broke through and demanded to be heard. I had decided my tent could make it without me for a night and had booked into a fancy room at Tomuraushi Onsen. The situation called for a bed.
And it was a nice beer: I remember that. But I don't remember if I finished it before the sleep hit me. I know this though: I slept the sleep of the dead that night.
My advice to you is this. If you like mountains, you won't find many more beautiful than Tomuraushi. But if you're going to climb it in a day, leave before dawn. Have a good breakfast. And don't forget your torch.
You may be shocked to hear this, but the priniciples of democracy and free will don't apply to hats. They live out their lives as slaves to heads they never chose. They never had a say. Not surprisingly then, some of them have much harder existences than others.
This one may well be the only one that's been forced to journey to and then photographed possibly against its will on the summits of Tomuraushi and Tateyama, as well as atop the Great Wall of China. Some hat for one hat, as they say in Dublin. A horse of a hat, as they also say.
Seriously though, forget that nonsense about your mobile phone being an extension of your self. The best extension of the self a person can find is a good hat.
Took the camera for a walk today in Takadanobaba, which looks very rundown these days.
The face of a Japan that can say no, and anything else it likes.
The colour of our approaching night. One of Tokyo's mutant crows.
Something is rotten, and it isn't in the state of Denmark. When Sky Perfectv make the rational decision to show Everton-Blackburn instead of Liverpool-Newcastle (Japanese), it's time for any self-respecting Japan-based Liverpool fan to reach for the cyanide capsule.
I promised myself I'd bring up this rotten old chestnut.
Today I had empty seats on either side of me on an otherwise full train.
I'd just been to the gym and had had a shower there. I didn't stink. There was nothing unusual about my clothing. My hair was combed. I wasn't twitching, frothing or howling at the moon.
So why, if the person sitting in the next seat looks non-Japanese, do so many (the majority of?) Japanese people avoid sitting in seats they would usually rush, barge and kill for? (Note I say "looks" instead of "is" because saying "is" would perpetuate the stereotype partially behind all this that nationality is based on race.)
I've heard the "We're shy, ashamed of our English ability, and afraid you might speak to us in English" answer umpteen times, but I don't buy it and don't suppose you do either.
Do Japanese people seriously believe sitting in those seats would represent a threat to their safety?
Or is it just a matter of insular personal discomfort?
And if so, don't they have a sense that avoiding seats next to non-Japanese and then rushing to get seats next to Japanese is an act of blatant, obvious rudeness?
For such a sensitive society, don't they know how this is going to make the non-Japanese person feel? Is there no shame in being so obviously rude? Isn't there a duty to overcome whatever (unhealthy) personal discomfort so as not to ostracize the people they are supposed to be welcoming to their country?
-----------
電車内でのマナー
この話を持ち出すのは不愉快だし今更言われ尽くしたことでもあるけれど、大事なことなのでどうしてもやらなっければならない。
今日、満員電車の中だというのに両隣の席は空いていた。
ジムに行って来たばかりでシャワーも浴びたから、臭うからじゃない。妙な格好もしていない。髪もぼさぼさになっていたりしない。震えてもいないし、口から泡を吹いてもいないし、月に向かって吠えてるのでもない。
それならどうしてこんなにもたくさん (大部分の?) 日本人は、空いている席の隣に座っているのが日本人に見えない人間だとなると、普通だったらなりふり構わず突進してきたり、無理やり押し込んできたりするのも気にしなくなるほど大事な空席があるのに座ろうとしない? (注: 「日本人ではないの代わりに「日本人に見えない」としたのは、「日本人ではない」と言い切るのは見た目だけで国籍が判断できるという固定観念を保持させかねないから)
「私たち日本人は内気で、英語力に自信が無くて、英語で話しかけられるのが怖いから」という答えは数え切れないほど何度も聞いたけれど、そんな言い訳は誰も信じないと思う。
日本人は外国人 (と思われる人) の隣に座ることで自分の身の安全が脅かされることになると真剣に信じているのか?
それとも単なる了見の狭さから来る個人的な不快感?
もしそうだとしたら、外国人の隣の席を避けて日本人の隣の席に向かって突進していくのはあからさまに失礼なことだと感じていないのか?
こんなに神経質な社会で、この行動が外国人をどんな気分にさせるかを日本人が分かっていないことがありえるだろうか? こんなに露骨に失礼なことをすることを恥ずかしいとは思わないんだろうか? 自分たちの国にやって来た歓迎すべき人々を疎外しないために、(不健全で) 個人的な不快感を乗り越えようとする義務はここには存在しないんだろうか?
I'm reading The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) by Ruth Benedict. I thought it would be very heavy going, but it's actually a page-turner. And a lot of it rings very true. Take this passage. (On and chu and ko and giri are all words for different types of obligation: on is obligation in general, chu is duty to the emporer, ko is familial duty, and giri, well, giri is a range of social duties.)
"The Japanese ... define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one's obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying on means sacrificing one's personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine. Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can, but to dignify it as something by which the State and family should be judged is quite unthinkable. The fact that a man often suffers intensely in living up to his obligations of chu and ko and giri is no more than they expect. It makes life hard but they are prepared for that. They constantly give up pleasures which they consider in no way evil. That requires strength of will. But such strength is the most admired virtue in Japan.”
