Some pictures of Kurayoshi

Kurayoshi has an old town, shirakabe ("white walls") which is quite pretty to wander through and happens to contain a quite cool South East Asian hippy store and restaurant, which we visited after the Taiko. Here are a few pictures from that town (these pictures were taken by the Delightful Miss E).

The rhythm of the seasons

The shift of the seasons is a concept so important in Japan that the appreciation of the change even has its own word, which of course currently I have forgotten. My labmate, Gosuke, tells me that he does not believe people born outside of Japan can properly appreciate the change of seasons, and this particular sensibility is born of more than merely understanding the language (though to me understanding every aspect of the change of seasons, right down to its non-linear dynamics, seems easy compared to his language!)

This change can be appreciated in many ways, the most famous of which are the April and Autumn cherry blossom and maple leaf viewing ceremonies. Some festivals, like setsubun in winter, anticipate the coming change, and in late summer all across Japan a series of such festivals occur, differing in every town in which they occur. The common feature of most such festivals is their dependence upon drumming, whose beat (hibiki) is perhaps meant to reflect the changing of the times. This drumming is called Taiko, and it just so happens that Mr. Hiroki's charming and pretty girlfriend Miss K is in a Taiko troupe. It being near the end of summer, the Delightful Miss E and myself travelled with my Tottori friends - Mr. Hiroki and the ever amusing Misses K and H - to nearby, atmospheric Kurayoshi to watch her performance. I didn't capture any of the sounds, but here I post a few pictures of the Taiko ceremony we attended. As you can see, the festival took place in a concert hall - in fact, anticipating the change of seasons in Kurayoshi requires the town's largest concert hall, which is packed to the rafters with Tottori Prefecture residents here to feel the pulse of nature.

Sadly this year the change of seasons seems to be coming late, and this abominable heat will not end. But I am waiting patiently for the next turn of the seasons to come. The days are shortening and as the drumming of the locals grows in intensity the throb of insects is fading, so soon that intangible something will happen, and the whole of Shimane will lurch from a seemingly endless summer to a sudden Autumn of warm, clear days and cool, lazy evenings.

Japanese rugby

Rugby has been in the news recently due to that little festival of booty doom going on in France. Our cousins in the commonwealth are consumed with envy and anger at present, since once again all the Northern Hemisphere teams have made a poor showing - all the Northern Hemisphere teams, that is, except Japan, which has conducted itself exceptionally well in its World Cup matches so far. To wit, the Japanese team (the Brave Blossoms) have lost 3 matches:

• Australia 91-3
• Fiji 35-31
• Wales 72-18

These are, believe it or not, good results by Japanese standards. For example, the team which lost to Australia was really "Japan B", and yet they lost by a smaller margin than against Australia A in the Pacific Nations Cup. The team which played Fiji received a standing ovation from the crowd, and apparently was cheered for several minutes. If Japan beat Canada they may leave the contest with more points than ever before. The dizzying heights of modern Japanese rugby!

So why is Japanese rugby so bad, in a country of 120 million quite sports mad people? Some people say that it is because the Japanese are so small, but I don't believe this - out of 120 million people you can find 15 men big enough to play rugby and good enough to do so internationally. I think you don't have to look any further than the picture at the top of the page for the reason. I took it in Tottori but I think it reflects the condition of rugby across Japan - gravel pitches and very old fashioned training methods. No-one who learns rugby on a gravel pitch will ever amount to anything, especially when their scrum machine could double as a railway buffer. But there is hope yet! In order to combat the urban heat island of Tokyo, every school in Tokyo is going to cover its playing fields with grass in the next 2 years. So 10 years from now maybe some players with real rugby experience will filter through to the national team...