light vessel automatic

Hello. Look – everything’s changed. This is just temporary – this incarnation is like the white underlay paper and bare floorboards of a house that’s about to be redecorated. The redecoration, when it happens, will probably return things to roughly what they looked like before, but in the meantime, while the floorboards are visible, you might notice that this site is now made from WordPress. The main practical upshot of this is that you can now write comments!

Up until now, I’ve been making everything by hand, partly because that was a good way of learning web-programming, partly because when I started I had plenty of time on my hands, and partly because it was kind-of fun, in a perverse sort of way.

But anyway, things have changed. For one thing, without any opportunity for people to leave comments, it feels a bit like talking into space, which I don’t much like (after all, what LVA is really for is staying in touch with friends who are far from Okinawa, but without comments it’s not very social) … but hand-making the sort of site that allows people to post comments would take a lot of time – time which would be better spent making the most of being in Japan. And the end result would always be a bit held-together-with-sellotape compared to WordPress’s smooth, purring engines. Also, when I do finally leave Japan, I will be travelling around China (and from there, who knows where else…) without a computer of my own, and a nice, comfortingly smooth interface like WordPress, full of bells and whistles, and which I can log into wherever I can find an internet connection will be just the thing.

Anyway: for the time being, a few links might be broken, but I will be repairing them. In the mean time, you can start leaving comments! Please do!

Yesterday night I got home from my last ever evening class, to find my neighbour Mr. K and a couple of others having a mini-party in the cafe next door. They were celebrating some amazing news that Mr. K had just received that afternoon: the taiko-group — which Mr. K runs — has been accepted to participate in the 4th Tokyo International Taiko Contest, in October. They are one of only twelve taiko-drumming groups that will take part, which means that they will be competing against (and consequently, are one of) the best taiko groups in the world!

As well as being fantastic news, it has also made the decision for me that I won’t be leaving Japan before late October. Not that I’ll be playing or anything (there’s a one million yen prize at stake here!), but it would be crazy not to go along. Also, when they go to Tokyo, there’s a fair chance they’ll do another concert somewhere else, and then I probably would get to play. Either way, it should be an excellent end to my time on this island — to go to Tokyo with the band that I first saw by chance in a London street four years ago, before I’d ever heard of this island, and which made me want to learn taiko in the first place.

Last weekend I went snorkelling, partly to collect edible sazae shells (I got three!), and partly because with only a month left on my island, it’s about time I actually made some use of the underwater casing I bought for my camera the year before last. So for a couple of hours I swam around, happily collecting shells and taking pictures — of fish, reef, and sunken concrete tetrapods which unfortunately seem to be a feature of Japan’s coastline pretty much wherever you go, even places in Okinawa, like my island, which — if it weren’t for the horizon-obscuring concrete structures — would be places of great natural beauty. These things are nominally to protect the coastline from typhoons, but are so enormous and exist in such profusion compared to the coastline of any other country that I’ve ever been to, that I suspect there must be a political explanation — probably something along the lines of civil servants with vested interests siphoning public money into the concrete industry.

The reef still has plenty of brightly-coloured fish and interesting shells, but living coral is few and far between, and I can’t help wondering if the disturbance caused by years of sea-defence construction isn’t partly to blame.

Taking underwater pictures is pretty difficult, because everything (including you) is moving all the time. I have some ideas for how to take better pictures next time (using one hand to hold onto something while I take the picture, for one thing), but I don’t know when the next time will be, because in the couple of hours I was in the water (in a half-length wetsuit), I managed to burn my legs well beyond normal sunburn, and into the realms of radiation burn. For two days afterwards I couldn’t walk properly, and even now, nine days later, it’s still not entirely comfortable. And that was using SPF 50 sunscreen! It must have washed off, I suppose. I think next time I might play it safe and snorkel at night, with a torch. Mind you, that is when the sharks come out…

I have nothing to say about June. At the beginning of the month someone I knew was killed in an accident on the island. And while this isn’t the place to talk about that, neither can I fill the month of June with pictures of other things, as if nothing had happened. So: I have nothing to say about June, but will be back in July.

On my last trip to the mainland I bought a wide-angle lens for my new camera. The frustration I had in Tokyo after I bought the camera was that the lens I bought with it is perfect for taking pictures of people and their faces and the like, but when it comes to temples, waterfalls and skyscrapers I just couldn’t stand far enough away to get more than a corner in. Hence the need for a new lens. I think between the two, I’m probably quite well sorted for lenses.

Anyway, since buying the new lens the weather has been relentlessly grey and nondescript — until Sunday, when it (temporarily) brightened up & I took the opportunity to drive round the island with Y and a sixpack of cold beers, taking photos from beaches and hilltops. This photography lark is going to take a bit of practice — I did used to have an old SLR, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had anything much to do with all this f-stop and aperture priority jiggery-pokerey. Still, some of the pictures came out ok, and I’d recommend spending a sunny afternoon wandering around taking photos to anyone.

The weekend before last was a special event in which an artist who is my island’s most famous living child (he’s moderately famous throughout Japan) came and gave a group of about a hundred people a guided tour of the island’s secret places and history. In the evening was a big party at which the taiko group (including me) played. These pictures are from the rehearsal.

The artist mentioned above is most famous living person from this island, but only the second most famous person the island has produced. The most famous was born here about six hundred years ago, and became one of the most important kings of the Ryukyu Kingdom — as Okinawa still was back then, before it had been conquered by Japan. Next week there will be another, very special taiko performance to mark the transferral of the bones of one of his descendants into a special royal tombs on the side of one of the island’s hills. We start practicing (two new pieces!) tonight.

I met Andrew in a café in JR Ueno station, and we proceeded from there to wander around Tokyo for three days or so. We stayed in the Hotel New Koyo, which is almost certainly the cheapest hotel in Tokyo, at about 2700 Yen a night (about £13). It’s ok, too — it does the job. From that base, we spent several days wandering through Shinjuku, Shibuya, Asakusa and Ginza. Although we did manage a day-trip north to see Nikko’s waterfall and temples, for the most part the touristy stuff we tried to do (going to museums, kabuki, etc) ended up falling through for obscure reasons. One afternoon, in an attempt to see at least one museum, we decided to seek out the Tobacco and Salt Museum in Shibuya — partly because it was the nearest museum to the café we were sitting in, partly because it sounded so far off the beaten track that we thought the Tourism God might overlook it and let us through. No luck: we found it to be apparently non-existent, or at least not where our map claimed it was.

But to be honest, the tourist stuff is never the bit that I enjoy the most anyway. We did a good job of the more important business of wandering around the streets and tunnels and walkways of Tokyo, and sitting in cafés and eating foods. We also visited one of my favourite places in the city (a place I now find is called “Piss Alley”): a couple of alleys of old ramshackle buildings tucked in the armpit of a railway bridge behind Shinjuku station, a pocket of the Tokyo of about five decades ago among the skyscrapers of Shinjuku, full of noodle shops and little bars, steam and smoke and the smell of things barbecuing, and so narrow and with so much cabling overhead that it almost feels as if you’re underground until you look up through the cables to huge and distant neon.

The photos were taking walking around the grounds of Asakusa Temple after an almost-perfect meal of okonomiyaki — savoury pancakes which you fry yourself on a hotplate set into the table, and then cover with lots of mayonaise, dried fish flakes and salty preserved ginger — and cold beer in a little restaurant nearby.

The first week of May in Japan contains four bank holidays, and is consequently known as ‘Golden Week’. I spent the week wandering around Tokyo and Okinawa with Andrew. I also bought a rather ass-kicking new digital SLR camera, so hopefully there should be more and better photos from now on…

Anyway, I’ll dig out some pictures from Golden Week soon, but the purpose of this post is to draw your attention to Andrew’s new website, seatunes.org. It contains a number of freely downloadable musics, including Four Songs by me! They were recorded in Edinburgh just before I left for Japan, and feature the excellent George G on djembe and (on one song) the awesome vocal harmonies of Jess B. I only had a single afternoon to record a slightly unfeasible number of songs, and so it’s not a flawless, studio-produced album. But I think they came out ok, especially with George & Jess’s splendid backing, and so rather than have them moulder forever on the cold dark surface of my hard-disk, I thought I would release them into the warm breezes of the superhighway. Of course, if anyone, having listened to them, were to have an opinion, I would love it if you were to open your mouth and spit it my way…

Also on seatunes is Other People’s Music, by The Unrecorded. It is unclassifiable, weapon-sharp electronic music that was made by Andrew and then honed in places with Jess’s vocal lasers. It’s a proper, well-crafted record as well, unlike my scratchy offerings. You should try it even if you hate my songs: it’s an entirely different type of helicopter altogether.

Before the incident with the marine, the same evening, I went to an underground 1950s theme bar — a bar which avoided being tacky by being so pixel-perfect that I felt weirdly out of place in my bland 21^st century civilian clothing. The house band played flawless old school rock and roll tunes — even getting the voices uncannily close to the original performers’. The ghost of Bill Haley, singing with a strong Japanese accent. It would have been very David Lynch if the joint hadn’t also been jumping.

Incidentally, Opera 8 came out a couple of days ago, which is very exciting. Opera is my favourite browser, see. If you’re using Internet Explorer to read this, you should almost certainly try it…