light vessel automatic

Japanese has a special passive voice reserved for talking about bad things that happen to you. It’s sometimes called the ‘suffering passive’, and this weekend gave me an excellent opportunity to use it…

We had another taiko concert on Saturday, and because it was a less important one none of the real ninja members (who mostly live in Naha City on the mainland) played, which meant that I got the opportunity to play the O-daiko – the big drum, which sits on a big stand, and which you play at head-height. So that was exciting and good, and something new, and afterwards, as we loaded the taikos into the van, I was feeling quite pleased that I’d managed not to mess up. I reached up to take a drum that was being passed down to me by one of the Junior High School kids who plays in the group. I was leaning out slightly over the waist-high concrete platform she was standing on, and I realised as I grasped the drum that it was too far back for me to get any leverage on it, and I’d just about had time to say “forwards a bit, forwards a bit…”, when she let go and I experienced the blindingly painful sensation of a 25 kilo drum crushing the ring finger of my left hand against concrete from a height of several centimetres.

The immediate consequence of this was that everyone in the near vicinity received a spontaneous lesson in Advanced English Swearing – directed at my hand and the world in general: I do have enough self-control not to swear at my pupils, even when they drop large heavy objects onto my soft, fragile fingers. Now I think about it, I probably did some sort of hopping dance as well.

My finger immediately swelled to very strange shape and took on a steadily-deepening purple colour. Once I’d sat down and waited for the pain to subside from ‘agonising’ to merely ‘really bad’, I decided that it probably, despite its strange shape, wasn’t broken. The reason I decided this was that although it hurt a lot, whenever I’ve seen someone break a bone they turn a horrible grey colour and look like they’re about to be sick, and although I’ve never broken a bone, I suspect that to produce that effect it would need to hurt an almost unimaginable amount – a lot more than the merely large amount of pain I was experiencing. Which was lucky, because when my neighbour (who runs the taiko group) drove me to the clinic to get it checked, the doctor was neither there nor answering his phone.

Anyway, determined to get something positive out of this experience, I realised that this was the ideal opportunity to practice using the ‘suffering passive’, which I’ve previously never used. So now, five days later, my finger is almost back to its normal colour and only hurts very slightly, and in the process I’ve mastered a new grammar point.

In case you’re interested, the way it works, grammatically, is this: a sentence that could otherwise be expressed actively (for example, “A drum fell on my finger”) is expressed as a passive sentence, but instead of making it passive by turning (in this case) ‘my finger’ into the subject – ie. “My finger was fallen on by a drum” – you leave it as an object, which gives you a subjectless passive sentence, the implication of which is that you, the speaker, are the subject, and that the sentence as a whole is something that happened or was done to you, and which you couldn’t do anything about. You can do this in Japanese because the object is explicitly marked (you say ‘o’ after it), whereas in English you can’t because the whole subject / object thing is specified by word order. Is any of this interesting? I have no idea. Oh well, I’ll leave it in, if only to remind myself how it works in a week’s time, when I’ve forgotten again.

Remember: Only 4 days left till National Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day. (yeah, it’s a silly link, ok…)

New feature for your convenient enjoy: whenever I use a Japanese word – either in Japanese script, like those characters on the left there, or in italicised roman script, you can get a translation by hovering your mouse over it. Ooh, the joys of hypertext…

Recently, the typhoons have been coming unusually frequently. One a week, virtually. And the one that I’m currently sitting out the tail end of – typhoon 18 – has been the most violent one I’ve yet seen, by quite a long way. It didn’t quite manage the tipping-cars-over and pulling-down-trees-and-pylons that the very worst ones like to engage in, but it did show that it meant business right off by taking out the whole island’s electricity pretty much straight off, first thing yesterday morning.

As a result, yesterday was one of those boring stay-in-the-house-in-order-to-avoid-being-killed-or-injured-by-flying-debris sorts of day. And after about seven in the evening, without electricity it was too dark to even read, or do anything but heat up some red thai curry and sit in the darkness listening to the screaming wind outside and talking to Kim on the phone in between mouthfuls.

About five minutes after putting down the phone, a strange thing happened: the typhoon stopped dead. It just cut out, literally as if someone had flicked a switch. A couple of minutes later, the electricity all came back on. I went outside, and it was a completely still, quiet, warm night. “That’s funny,” I thought, “all the previous typhoons just sort-of petered out…”

I walked around for a little bit to stretch my legs, get some air, and have a look around at what the typhoon had done. There were no shops open, but I thought I’d stock up on some drinks from the vending machine round the corner. I took a carrier bag to the machine, got some change out of my wallet, dropped a couple of coins into the machine, and then – WHUMPH! – the eye finished passing over and the typhoon came back. The carrier bag I was carrying inflated like a balloon and I was pelted with horizontal rain and battered by howling winds. I managed, by a special combined process of hunching and swearing, to buy a few more bottles and cans from the machine before running, doubled-over against the wind, back to my house to sit out the rest of the storm – about another sixteen hours or so.

By the way, sorry if I owe you an email. Things have been unusually hectic lately, and what with these typhoons, I’ve had less access to email than usual anyway… (this was written on my laptop, during the typhoon) Hopefully next week things will be back to normal. Only, having said that, my satellites are suggesting that typhoon 19 is already on its way, so we’ll see…

Several times recently I’ve wondered where you draw the line between value-neutral anthropological observance of cultural differences and just going “No, no, no, no, no. That’s wrong. You’re doing it wrong. Here, give that here. Let me do it…”

I’ve often looked out at the school’s football pitch, at the scrubby loose earth that they play on, and thought it’s a shame that they can’t seem to get the grass to grow on it. The grass round the edge is really quite nice, healthy turf, but anywhere where sports are actually played, the ground is just bare, dusty earth. The topsoil must be loose, or something, I’d thought. The grass can’t get a firm hold, maybe, and just gets ripped straight up whenever anyone runs over it. I was wrong, though. Oho, I was wrong!

The first day of term, the first thing we do — everyone, pupils and teachers — is to go outside with bin bags and pull up all the grass that’s just beginning to sprout on the pitch. By the roots, just to make dead sure. I did this half-heartedly for a few minutes and then I turned to the school nurse and asked, trying and failing to keep the plaintiveness out of my voice, “Why? Why are we doing this?” The answer: “Sports day is coming up, and the team need to practice”.

Now perhaps I’m wrong. I mean, I’m no great sportsman, but is there anywhere in the world other than Japan where people choose loose dusty earth over turf for a pitch? Maybe athletics tracks go for something dusty over grass, I suppose… but the school keeps the entire field clear of grass, not just the strip round the outside.

I had a somewhat similar experience a few days ago when I went to a small party. They had red wine, which is unusual, because it’s much less common in Japan than the UK. So when I was offered a glass I said “yes! nice!” and the bloke who was sitting next to me reached for the bottle with one hand and plunged the other into the ice bucket, which caused me to let out out an involuntary “WOWOWOwowo wo wo! No ice! Um, just wine. Thanks.” Then, because I felt the need to explain my slightly violent reaction, I added something along the lines of “It’s just that… I’ve never seen that before, ice in red wine.” Which I suppose was intended as a tactful way of saying “No-one, no-one, no-one ever puts ice in red wine. It’s meant to be drunk at room temperature, damnit! That’s like, virtually a law.”

So, OK, you might say. So red wine isn’t that popular in Japan, and so unsurprisingly, people don’t necessarily know how you’re meant to drink it. Get off your high horse already, why don’t you Mister? It’s not the end of the world if an ice cube melts, cooling and diluting [‘ruining‘, you might also say] a glass of red wine. And I would agree with you. The reason I’m telling you about this is not to sneer like an arrogant chef at anyone’s culinary faux-pas, but because what happened next was interesting. Instead of taking on board the foreigner’s involuntary startle-reaction — in the way that I’d pause for thought if my way of drinking saké caused a Japanese person to involuntarily let out a shriek — everyone just sat back, sipping their iced wine, and said things like “oh, he’s a very strong drinker – he drinks it neat”, “he drinks everything neat”, “yeah, he doesn’t even drink his Scotch on the rocks!” I wanted to shout “No no no no noooo! That’s an aesthetic decision, that’s just because I prefer whisky without ice. Other people drink it with ice. But wine… wine… nobody, nobody ever – anywhere – drinks red wine with ice in it.” I wanted to point at the whole rest of the world and say “look, they don’t do that. They’re not doing it. None of them are. Only you. I’m not the funny one here. You are. You lot. Not me.”

Final and, in fact, far and away the least trivial anecdote in this trilogy… I walk into the Board of Education, and a young woman I’ve never seen before is sitting there sipping a cup of tea. “I saw you walking up here”, she says. “I nearly stopped and offered you a lift. Has your car broken down?”

“Oh don’t worry. I don’t have a car, but it’s so close it’s not even worth cycling – I usually just walk.”

“Close?” she said, in an ‘oh come on now, you must be joking’ tone of voice.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s only about two hundred metres” (in truth, it’s probably less than that)

“No way,” she said, “it’s much further.” She said this in the tone of voice you might use to talk to a wildly but harmlessly deluded person, to try to get them to snap out of it and realise where they are and what they’re saying.

I felt the situation slipping from my grasp.

“It is. It is close. Look. It’s just across there. You can see it out of the window. It’s really near.”

She turned her head very slightly, perhaps even let the school’s image briefly brush her retina, then snorted slightly and turned back to scrutinise me intensely for a few seconds. Then she said: “Your head is very red. The sun is very strong in Okinawa.”

AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHH!

I’m sorry, but this whole ‘you need a car to travel more than a hundred metres’ thing is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. It’s also a belief that is universally held by all but one other person on the island, as far as I can make out. Teachers have been baffled that I often walk between my house and the school — a journey which can sometimes take as many as five minutes to complete. I have more than once been offered a lift when I said I was going to the post office, which is almost exactly halfway between my house and the school.

It seems to me that while there are obviously genuine vive la différence cultural differences that I would not only be an idiot to criticise, but which in fact are really what I’m here for, there are other times when I just want a referee to step in and say, “no, in fact, on this occasion, he’s right.” Deliberately ripping up grass to leave a layer of loose, pitted dusty topsoil. Putting ice in your red wine. Being baffled — utterly, incomprehendingly baffled — by someone who chooses to walk a little over a hundred metres rather than take a car. These things are (though to different extents) crazy. And, on some level, wrong (ok, the wine thing isn’t morally wrong, but it’s… it’s… just wrong). The thing is, ‘crazy’ is almost always defined by the majority. And that can leave you feeling distinctly uneasy when you look around for confirmation, and find that you’re the sole foreigner on a small island…

Last night I danced on a friend’s grave. It’s ok, though: he’s still alive. He was dancing too.

My friend Y is the manager of a small construction company, and his friend M is the manager of another construction company on the island. Although they’re probably technically rivals, they’re near neighbours and old friends (they’re in a band together), and they sometimes work together, too. Lately, M has been very busy – often working weekends – with the construction of a tomb. Okinawan tombs are pretty distinctive structures, and on my island (like elsewhere in Okinawa) they’re everywhere (Okinawan folk religion centers around ancestor worship, so tombs are pretty important). If you go for a wander into the trees by the beach, if you leave the road and walk along the edge of a sugar cane field, you’re likely to stumble on a tomb, and however old and cracked it is, there are usually signs that it’s still tended: the ground in front of it will be swept, or there will be a bowl of food or booze in front of it. Anyway, yesterday M finished work on the new tomb, and so in the evening there was a party in front of it to celebrate its completion. I went along with Y.

“Who’s this tomb M’s been building for, anyway?” I asked him on the way.

“For him,” said Y.

The party was for M and his family (and various friends) to celebrate the completion of the tomb that, presumably, they will all one day end up in. The tomb has a walled ‘yard’ area in front of it, which for the party was covered over with a marquee (from Y Construction), and the assembled parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, and friends sat out in front of the tomb eating lots of food, drinking lots of booze, playing lots of music, and dancing. Out with the sanshins and drums, and time for a good old Okinawan singalong. At first it seemed quite strange to be having such a jolly piss-up at a tomb, but after I’d drunk a bit of drink and danced a bit, I began feel that there’s a lot to be said for this attitude to death – “well, this is where we’re all going to end up, so let’s have a big old party here while we can.”

Yesterday morning I went to the beach to help out with a kids’ party. ‘Helping’ consisted primarily of participating in a kayak race with a tiny child as my team-mate (though it was me that was shouting “Again! Again!” as we crossed the finishing line…). Afterwards, I was recovering in the shade with a plastic cupful of iced tea when one of the dads suddenly dangled a blue mesh bag containing the ugliest fish I’ve ever seen in front of my face.

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded.

“No”, I said, for some unknown reason, since I actually had a pretty fair idea what it was.

“Have you never seen one? Don’t you know what it is?”

“It’s a dangerous fish, isn’t it? Poisonous?” I recognised it from photos I’ve seen of animals to avoid in Okinawan waters. It was a stonefish, which is one of the most poisonous of all the sea’s many poisonous things.

“Yeah,” he said, and pointed at the array of horrible spines along its dorsal fin, “it’s really dangerous. Don’t touch these or you’ll be rushed to hospital with a drip in your arm.” He clutched at his throat and pulled a comic, goggle-eyed ‘I’m poisoned!’ face.

“It’s delicious, though,” he added.

This is something I’ve learned: in Okinawa, every living sea creature is apparently delicious, and best eaten on the spot, raw, within minutes of being plucked out of the water. It’s especially delicious if it’s revolting-looking (like a stonefish, a sea-urchin’s innards, or a shellfish the size of a tennis ball) or contains enough poison to fell a bull elephant.

I just saw an advert on tv for an insect spray called “Arse Jet”… Heh heh heh.

Well, so there goes K – the most splendidly gangster-talking, hard-drinking, sumo-wrestling, didgeree-doo-playing, wildly entertaining and excellent itinerant sometime bargirl from Osaka I’ve ever danced the rhumba on a moonlit racetrack with. Knowing her made me feel like a character in a Tom Waits song, and in my world that’s a good thing. It seems about equally likely that she’ll turn up some day in Edinburgh and stay several months as that I’ll never see her again…

You know that thing where you meet a really outstandingly excellent individual, and you soon realise that they’re going to be great friends, but at the time you’re pretty busy so you keep meaning to meet up but never quite getting round to it, but you keep thinking “next week, next week…”, and then one day you run into them and they tell you that they’re leaving town in a couple of weeks, so you really make a mental note to make sure you get a chance to properly meet up before they go, but time sort of slips past, and you run into them again and they say “I’m leaving in three days’ time”, and so you arrange to definitely meet up the next day and do something, but then the next day even though you’re looking forward to meeting up with them you keep running into people who say “Hey! Long time no see!” and offer you a beer, and you don’t see any particular hurry so you say ok, and in the end when you meet up with the person who’s leaving soon it’s quite late and they seem a little disappointed that you took so long to get there and because it’s a festival lots of other people are coming up to say their goodbyes, so you have a rather fragmented conversation in moments here and there throughout the evening between other people’s goodbyes, and then suddenly it’s late and everyone is tired and drunk and the person in question gets in a car and waves and disappears off into the night, and you sit on the grass absent-mindedly weaving straw into a hoop and quietly kicking yourself repeatedly in the head…?

Well… that happened to me yesterday.

Balls.

I’ve been meaning for weeks to get round to writing about the 36 hours I spent in Hiroshima on the way from meeting Ryoko-sensei in Kyoto to meeting Tomoko in Kyushu. First I was busy, then I was in China, but I have been meaning to write something and then retrospectively slot it back into ‘June’ (one of the nice things about electronic diaries is that you don’t have to be such a slave to chronological order as paper ones tend to demand). Today, though – August 6th – is as appropriate a date as any to write about Hiroshima. Today is the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing.

As a consequence of that event, Hiroshima is a city with a name that somehow seems too cold and weighty to be attached to a real place, let alone the buzzing, lively city that it is today. In fact, after Tokyo, Hiroshima is probably the most exciting city I’ve visited in Japan, and it’s certainly the prettiest – full of bridges and riverside parks, because it sits on a river delta (which also, for numerous reasons, is a large part of what made it an atomic bomb target 59 years ago). Standing on one of the bridges, you can look around, see the city reflected prettily in the river, and say to yourself ‘Hiroshima’, but the name just somehow doesn’t seem to attach to the thing it names in the way that names usually do. It sits in the mouth like a cold, flat stone. From time to time, walking round Hiroshima, you can’t help suddenly picturing the flash, and every time you immediately feel ghoulish for doing so, even though your brain is just trying to comprehend something incomprehensible.

Since about the time I read Slaughterhouse Five, I’ve been shocked by the ambivalent, “unfortunate-but-necessary” attitude that a lot of people in the UK still have towards certain of the Allies’ actions – Hiroshima, Dresden, Nagasaki – in the closing stages of the Second World War. Frightening what people are willing to accept if it’s done in the name of ‘fighting evil’. But though I can’t say that Hiroshima’s Peace Museum made me change my attitude towards the bombing – since I already firmly believed that there can never, under any circumstances whatsoever, be any moral justification for such an act – it did shake me by making it real. There’s something so incomprehensible about the event, that before I visited the Peace Museum – though I didn’t realise it – whenever I thought of ‘The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima’, I was always thinking mostly in abstractions: history, causes, effects, number of dead, and so on. The museum, though, forces you to see it as a real event, in all its surreal horror.

But while certain of the museum’s exhibits are, necessarily, horrific, the installation that had the biggest impact on me was simply a scale model of the city, as it stood before the blast. Suspended over this model is a smooth, red ball, about 30cm across, and when you see this, you realise that the model is not – like other plans of cities – a timeless ‘Before’ but rather a snapshot of a single frozen grain of time – the 10,000th of a second after the bomb detonated. Looking at all the intact buildings, at the end of their final second, The Bomb suddenly loses all its abstract and historical associations, and becomes something with size, position, altitude, velocity, temperature, and so on. This – this crazy thing – is a decision that sane people made, and now here come the consequences.

Elsewhere the subsequent instant is also frozen: in a glass case, a watch, stopped at 8:15am by the blast.

As I said, I already believed that the bombing of Hiroshima was a criminal act, but the many historical details provided by the museum combined to leave the strong impression that many factors other than ‘ending the Second World War’ were behind the bombing: the bombing as ‘necessary’ to justify the astronomic cost of developing the bomb to the American public. The bombing as a horrendous scientific experiment: the Enola Gay – which dropped the bomb – was accompanied by a number of other planes whose function was to measure, photograph, and observe the explosion; Hiroshima was chosen in part because its geographical location, on a flat river delta surrounded by hills, would maximise the immediate effects of the blast, and no warning was given prior to the bombing. The bombing was also as much the start of the Cold War as the end of the World War: the Soviet Union had yet to declare war on Japan (it declared war on August 8th, two days after Hiroshima), and the US—terrified that post-war Japan could become communist—was desperate to end the war before Russia could become involved.

Another thing that impressed me about Hiroshima is the way it has turned its history into a positive force. It has been designated a ‘City of Peace’, and the local government is committed to ensuring that Hiroshima should forever be a warning and a reminder of the unacceptable cost of war: one wall of the museum is covered with letters written by the Mayor of Hiroshima to various ambassadors – of the US, UK, USSR, France, and so on – on the occasion of every nuclear test; each letter individually written, and protesting in the strongest terms that the majority of the world’s people do not wish the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Outside the museum, in the Peace Park, a flame burns, which will be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon is scrapped. As with the red ball, as with the stopped clocks, it makes its impression by the awareness of time it quietly forces on you. You look at it, and you can’t help but wonder… decades? Centuries? When?

Saturday is the biggest festival of the year – this small island’s Glastonbury – and the taiko group are the headline act. Hence, four hours’ solid practice this afternoon. I think my metabolism must have adapted to the heat, because a year ago a mildly strenuous fifteen-minute bike ride in Okinawa’s August heat was enough to almost kill me (or at least to leave me flat on my back in a pool of sweat with swirling colours drifting across my vision for ten minutes or so). We’re learning a new piece, and this one is particularly tough, because the barrel-like taiko drum is on its side, so you have to virtually do the splits to get down to its level.

I’ve been having far too much fun the last few days. On Friday night my friend Y-san and his band gave a concert of Okinawan music on the beach for a bunch of kids who were visiting the island. I went along to watch, but at the beginning of the concert Y introduced me and said I was going to play a song too, which was the first I’d heard of that. I decided to play Spencer the Rover, an old British folk song. Before playing it, I was a bit pleased with myself because I managed to explain the gist of in Japanese (“this song is about travelling, and about how when you come back home it feels good”). After the concert I camped out on the beach with Y. On Saturday night, one of the villages on the island had a festival whose highlight was a tug-of-war with a hundred-metre-long rope. Everything went a bit Wicker Man – flaming torches, drunken dancing, chanting. After the festival, I walked nearly halfway round the island back to the beach, to camp again.

On Sunday the low tide was especially low, because of the full moon, meaning that the sea was ankle-deep for the fifty or so metres out to the reef, so Y and I took our fins and snorkels and walked out there. Y was collecting shellfish, I was just swimming around looking at all the brightly-coloured fish. The edge of the reef is like a cliff: it drops off to the seabed, about twenty metres or so below. As soon as you go into the water it’s like being on another planet – flying along gullies and canyons, into wide-open spaces, with more gullies leading off in all directions, and everywhere fish of crazy colours and shapes. The best fish I saw were a big, psychedelic-patterned yellow one, and a very large poisonous Lion Fish (ミノカサゴ).

Yesterday there was another festival – this time in the village that I live in. More crazy-dancing, more tug-of-warring, and I made my ill-advised (and painfully brief) sumo debut, against a man of about twice my weight. Ouch. Still, at least I won two bags of rice.