Konohana-ku

A 60s bridge, the feeling of the 60s which ended when I was seven came back in all its cold steel starkness the minimalist stairs you could see below them the trucks zooming under you 20 feet 30 feet 40 feet below

Scenes From the Generation Gap in Osaka, 2010

Last Friday afternoon, the first teaching day of the year, I was sitting around chatting  with a few students about New Year Resolutions. I told them I’d decided to finally read War and Peace.

Student A: One Piece?

Annual Health Check, 2009

One Saturday night in November, a few of us went to Spa World, a sort of hot-spring resort in downtown Osaka.  While there, I weighed myself and realized to my shock that I weighed more than I had ever weighed in my life. That I am not slim and have not been since late in the last century is no state secret, but this was a new low in high.

I was upset. I thought I had been doing my best to eat healthfully and remain active, but since my summer holidays in Canada (not a time of moderation), I had been gradually backsliding. The result was screaming at me from the scales.

“You can never be too thin”

A Japanese acquaintance of mine, a gynaecologist in Osaka, told me something that happens at her clinic more and more often lately:

“A mother arrives with her teenage daughter, betwen 15 and 17 years old. The mother asks for a pregnancy test for the daughter, who has missed her period once or twice. I do the test, but I know just from looking at her that she’s not pregnant and couldn’t be. The test comes back negative, of course. The mother breathes a huge sigh of relief, and the girl  gets fidgety and waits to leave. Then I always ask the daughter what she eats for breakfast.

We are Pooter – He is Us

My favourite read of 2009 was Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith. I suppose few people actually read the “diary” anymore, but in its day (the turn of the last century) its “author”, one Charles Pooter, was as well-known as Adrian Mole (“Who?”), and Pooterish was an adjective used to describe a distinctly ordinary person who took himself altogether too seriously (actually, I probably first heard the term years ago in reference to Mole).

“Mount Fuji Looks At Us”

A Sunday evening on the Midosuji Line, heading south to my home in Nagai. I’m standing, listening to Quirks and Quarks on my iPod, gazing into the middle distance (I think I need glasses, finally). The train stops at Showacho and a crowd gets off, prompting a man, who was standing by the opening doors, to walk deliberately (I am aware) behind me. He is in his 60s, wearing unironically old-fahioned glasses, with grey hair slicked back, and he is dressed in a jacket and tie on a Sunday evening (a time when even most men his age dress casually). Pastor? Teacher? I brace myself for the usual Sales Pitch for Jesus and the offer of a pamphlet, which I will decline. He moves into my line of sight and has one of those confiding looks which are comforting when given by a friend but which put me on guard when they’re given by a stranger. Me of little faith. I ‘fail’ to see him – if he wants to talk, he’s going to have to start the transaction.

Eventually, he pounces.

“Do you remember me?”

The Japanese language can be very oblique. There are checks and balances throughout every conversation, subtly feeling out the social pecking order of the participants, how much can be asked of someone, a constant subtle search for common ground. Yes, I know, every language has that to some extent, but I’ve had conversations where I felt like the potato salad at the picnic and the Japanese person talking to me was the fly – hovering about, circling, but never quite lighting where I expected him to, if at all. Data is being collected, conclusions drawn, but darned if all I can see is someone going in circles. I have a kindly old neighbour, whom I meet every now and then on the elevator. Most of the time we exchange the usual pleasantries about the weather, but if she veers from that topic, I’m never really sure if she’s stating a fact or asking a question. That’s how courteously oblique she is, and for that reason, Japanese sometimes makes no sense at all if translated directly into English. But it works for them, I guess, in Japanese, and when speaking Japanese, I obey the Prime Directive.

Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri 2009

For the past several years, I have joined some friends to join in the spirit (and share in the local hospitality) of this festival, held the third weekend of every September in Kishiwada, in the south part of Osaka Prefecture. I took fewer photos than usual (the imbibing of some friends’ hospitality went on until nearly dusk this year), but here are a few samples of what we saw.

Click here to see shots from 2008, and here for photos from 2007, aaaaaand here for 2006.

Get out the Vote – Epilogue

The DPJ won a landslide, the LDP has imploded, and the Komeito were wiped out in Osaka. That included Mr Tabata, the MP my neighbour was exhorting me to vote for. He lost to a Mr Nakajima. Blood did not flow in the streets, but the neighbour was noticeably distant last evening when I met her and her bicycle in the elevator. Her whole attitude was a poorly concealed, “Happy now?”

Actually, I was.

Get out the vote (any vote)

There will be a Parliamentary election in Japan this Sunday, and the big news is that the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party,自民党, Jimintou ), the governing party for 54 years (minus 9 months in the 90s) is – to put it delicately – going out on its ass. Now the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan,民主党 Minshutou), the party who will win this election, is a cobbled-together mish-mash of LDP retreads, former members of the defunct Socialist Party and some even more blatant opportunists (viz.,Makiko Tanaka, the Power-Whore of Niigata™, whose only admirable accomplishment was presciently referring to George W. Bush as an “asshole” while she was Foreign Minister in 2001). That doesn’t sound too promising, but I don’t think the Japanese who actually bother to vote are really concerned about this: they just need a change, any change, from the social and economic inertia of the past decade. The LDP ran out of ideas years ago, the leadership loathes each other openly, so much so that they have gone through four different leaders (and, by default, prime ministers) since 2006. The current prime minister, the autocratic Taro Aso, has been been dubbed the Bush of Japan for his mangling of his native language and his cushy, out-of-touch background, and is hated and laughed at in more or less equal measure. Anyway, something big is going to happen in the next few days.