野業と空

この野業は家の近くにある。すずむし歌のリコードをするために行ったが、むしがいなかった。かわりに、雲、月、かがみの写真をとった。

秋の空

松江山陰合同銀行本館からとられた秋の空である。

Rubbish day

Here we see the Delightful Miss E posing with our rubbish before rubbish day. Matsue is famous for having the strictest rubbish rules in Japan, where you have to sort everything into its component parts. As a foreign student commencing at Shimane University I was taken to the rubbish processing plant, and I am therefore the proud bearer of all information one can know about Matsue rubbish. I am therefore qualified to inform my readers of all the contents of our rubbish separation system:

1. nearest the camera, magazines, which go out twice a month as "resource refuse"
2. just above the magazines to the right, cardboard cartons. These go out with the magazines, but in truth we haven't thrown these out in a while, so they have been piling up. Ultimately we will wipe our arses on these
   
3. Just above the cardboard cartons in line with the camera, a bag of tins and a bag of bottles (clear plastic bags). These don't go out in our rubbish area; instead we have to dispose of them at the nearest disposal area, fortunately for us across the road
4. left of the bottles, just under our dinky little oven, 2 piles of newspapers, which also go out twice a month as resource refuse (there are more behind the Delightful Miss E - we discovered these buried on the balcony)
   
5. at Miss E's feet, between her and the tins, are PET bottles, which need to be taken to a disposal centre. We don't use many of these, keeping most as reusable water bottles, so these go out very rarely. They become clothes and twine
   
6. To the right of the PET bottles, cardboard boxes, which go out as resource refuse twice a month
7. to the right of the Delightful Miss E and just past her daintily extended leg is a rubbish bin full of cardboard containers. These go out twice a month, at a different time to resource refuse for some reason. I don't know what they become
8. In the Delightful Miss E's right hand, a bag of polystyrene containers which also have to be taken across the road. These are reused by the supermarket.
   
9. Not shown: burnable and non-burnable rubbish, which is just out of sight on the right of the camera, and the only rubbish in our kitchen which is not recycled. We throw out one bag of non-burnable rubbish every 3-6 months, and one half-empty bag of burnable rubbish every week. Burnable rubbish is food scraps; non-burnable rubbish is razors, CDs, broken glass and wierd stuff. We also have a little box of batteries under the sink, which we can hand in at the camera shop.

In total I would say probably 5-10% of the volume of rubbish we create is not recycled. Of that, a good 90% is just food scraps and loose paper, and is burnt. That could probably be further divided into compost and non-compost; but I should not say that in case the city office get ideas. Proper recycling is an extremely painful and annoying task, but I can safely say that having done it I think that it is very feasible. I also think that any city waste disposal system which doesn't make you separate your rubbish is probably not actually recycling. Food for thought for Sydneysiders reading this...

Amusing food discoveries

The other day, walking around Happy Mountain, the Delightful Miss E and I had our Autumn tranquility shattered by one of these bastards : the suzumebachi, "sparrow bee", or in English, hornet. This picture doesn't do justice to the size of the thing - it was huge. When we returned home (thankfully unscathed), the Delightful Miss E immediately googled this creature, and discovered many horrid things about it. Particularly, about 70 people a year die from its sting (apparently the poison is nasty, but I think it is because the sting is bigger than a small sword); the hornet lives by eating bees, which it does not by stinging them and digesting them but just by ripping them apart with its jaws; one hornet can kill thousands of bees; and it is not vulnerable to bee poison. When it has rampaged through the nest slaughtering the bees, it eats their honey and then takes their larvae back to its nest to feed its young.

What a bastard.

The bees do have a typically beeish response to hornets. When the scout hornet approaches a beehive, the bees smell its pheromones as it approaches and a gang of several hundred hold open the hive entry. When the hornet enters, a "bee ball" of several hundred bees swarm it but, instead of stinging it, they vibrate very fast and raise the bee ball temperature to 47 degrees C. This kills the hornet.

What bastards.

Anyway, these amusing facts (some of which can be viewed in real time online) are all irrelevant to the story, which is that Wikipedia claims some Japanese people in the Mountains eat hornet larvae raw, like sushi. I didn't believe this, mainly on occupational health and safety grounds (who's going to try and catch one of them - I bet even their babies are bastards), but also because they're gross. But we asked Sir T when we went to the sushi bar (it seemed appropriate) and he said that yes, some Japanese people do. Or rather, more did. Old people in the mountains still do. How they manage this is beyond me, but it does suggest two important lessons:

1. Wikipedia knows all
2. Don't argue with old Japanese Mountainfolk, they eat wasps for breakfast.

A further note on the Yasukuni Jinja

While at dinner with the amusing Sir T, he gave me an insight into how the right think about the Yasukuni Jinja. The Yasukuni Jinja is a shrine in Tokyo which causes much international outrage because it holds the souls of all soldiers ever to have died defending Japan, and includes the souls of 14 class A war criminals which were put there after World War 2. Koizumi Junichiro used to visit every year, and this caused great anger in China and Korea (who rightly have a few issues with Japan's war past). It is supposed to carry the souls of all who die fighting for Japan. Most foreign thought seems to be that it is okay for the shrine to hold the souls of those who died fighting an illegal war (world war 2) but it shouldn't hold the souls of war criminals.

This line of thought obviously has 2 large flaws - one being that we as foreigners have no right to tell any country who they can and can't inter where; and the other being that before world war 2, presumably anyone interred in the shrine could have been a war criminal (the Geneva conventions being rather late on the scene). Let us put aside these two arguments for the moment, and suppose that prima facie foreigners have some right to be concerned about the souls of those from the modern era who did bad things to us.

While at Dinner with Sir T, he explained to me the history and nature of the Yasukuni Jinja a little more, and why it is so important, and what he told me helped me to understand perhaps why those 14 people really have to be there, regardless of the trouble they cause. He told me that the shrine was established after the Meiji restoration (of 1867) to pacify the nation. At that time there was a great civil war between those who restored the Emperor and the followers of the Shogun (the Samurai) who fought against the restoration. After it ended with the complete defeat of the Samurai, the nation needed calm. The shrine was established and the souls of the dead of both sides were interred therein. This was done because all soldiers of Japan were considered to be fighting for Japan, and the veneration of only one side would be an indication that Japan does not love some of her citizens as much as others.

Essentially the Japanese honoured the souls of people they would have considered, at the time, to be traitors and heretics (recall the Emperor is descended from the Sun-God, and any act against the emperor is treasonous and heretical); and many of them would have been war criminals to boot, considering how wars of that time were conducted. If they are to unconditionally inter the souls of those they consider to be traitors, criminals and heretics, it would be terribly unseemly for them to deny 14 people membership of the same shrine merely because they are war criminals. The shrine was established to pacify the nation (this is the meaning of the word "Yasukuni"), to ensure that whatever wrongs happen in war within or outside Japan, Japan itself - a concept viewed by the Japanese as almost holy in itself - will endure in peace and stability. The shrine existed for this purpose long before the second world war, and from the point of view of its purpose the second world war was neither unique nor particularly good or bad. From this point of view one cannot create exceptions to the rule that soldiers be honoured here. The shrine seems to embody the unconditional love of Japan for its people.

(I should add a little interpretive note here - I was conducting this conversation in Japanese, drunk on beer and sake, and Sir T was smashed. I tried to say "unconditional", but my limited maths training in Japanese enables me only to say "conditional" and "independent". I tried to construct a guess at the word "unconditional love" but it didn't quite work. So this part of the conclusions I draw here - which I grant is quite important - is based on at least some conjecture on my part. But the sake was damn good!)

I find this argument for the continuation of the shrine in its current state (i.e. with war criminals present) quite convincing. I am particularly impressed by the notion that a state should have unconditional love for its citizens, an idea which our western nations are rapidly forgetting in this age of expedient political victims and worthy and unworthy citizens. Sir T suggested to me a view of the shrine and its role which I think is more than defensible, possibly even noble. My mind is not yet made up, but I am considering the possibility that we could all learn a little from such a view, given the way our own countries are beginning to turn on their citizens in a most dishonourable and unloving fashion...

A note on right wing Japan

Some of the more thick-skinned of my readership may recall a post I did some time ago about the Yushukan, that museum of twisted and warped right wing war history in Tokyo. You may recall my surprise at finding a statue at the front that had been made by a Japanese sculptor who travelled to Europe to study for years in order to do his commission justice. At the time it struck me as strange that a sculptor would spend years learning foreign art in order to adequately idolize a local hero. I thought it might be one of the many convenient hypocrisies which fascists the world over find so easy to overlook.

As I gain more experience of Japan, I think that my willingness to ascribe this contradiction to idiotic hypocrisy may have been seriously misplaced. I think it may in fact be an enduring (as in 150 year long) trait of Japanese Nationalism and fascism - and of the right generally in this country - that they have a love of foreign ideas. This isn't to say that in other ways these people don't make many stupid mistakes - they're conservative, right? But I think it may be a particular trait of right-wing Japanese - amongst all right-wing people in the world, I would guess - that they are fascinated with foreign ideas.

The more I meet Japanese people, the more I realise that the people most interested in and engaging with foreigners seem to be, in general, the more conservative elements of Japanese society. This point was brought profoundly into focus by the Delightful Miss E's homestay family, Sir and the Lady T and their million progeny. The other day Sir T, who is a 61 year old business man, took the Delightful Miss E and myself out to eat at a sushi restaurant. Sir T has had many, many homestay guests before, but was eager to have the Delightful Miss E to stay while I was away in Kobe, and has taken quite a shine to the both of us. During the course of a thoroughly delightful evening of excellent sushi, he revealed to us with expansive pride that he is right wing. We had no reason to doubt this, given the general drift of his politics. But how can we understand it? This is the man of multiple homestays, who has friends all over the world, constantly reads up on news and current affairs in other countries, is eager to learn about other countries, and has been overseas myriad times. He enjoys the company of foreigners even though he generally cannot communicate with them on a level beyond basic food and lifestyle conversation (his English is not very good).

This is not an isolated incident either. It seems that many of the men, particularly, who are motivated to engage with foreigners in this country are also quite conservative and/or nationalist in their outlook. I suspect that this creeps across to other aspects of Nationalist politics too. Now that I think about it, even the layout and style of the Yushukan was based on foreign museum ideas, and much more modern and accessible than many of the musty and pointless museums I have visited in this country. Trust the right-wing in this country to go find the latest in Museum technology. The presence of that statue outside the Yushukan (it is an old statue) suggests that this is not a new phenomenon either, not even a post-war phenomenon. This makes me think it is an enduring aspect of Japanese nationalism. How can this be?

The only explanation I can think of is that in this regard, like all others, Japan must in some way be the exact opposite of the West. But it truly is a strange way to be consistent with the Japanese rule of opposites... I shall be keeping my eye on this, and see what I can ferret out...

The passing of things...

On the weekend the storm clouds rolled in and with a burst of wind and rain the summer ended. One day it was still hot, steamy and breathless, and two days later it was dry, cool and poignant. The evenings are closing in now, and before we have even had time to take more than a few breaths it will be winter again. I am told that October in Matsue is very wet, but I remember from last year the cool, dry days stretching one after another all the way into early December. This is my favourite time of year in Japan. The weather is comfortable, and the sky is suddenly so clear that you can see for miles and miles, and everything is in crisp relief even on the very horizon. The evenings are cool but the sun is bright and cheerful, and everywhere you go you can smell the smoke of woodfires. It is like the year has decided to pause and have a party, because it knows that soon everything has to slip away, into shadows and icy winds.

With the autumn breeze comes the second semester of university, and a two week period where, with the Delightful Miss E as my ever present companion, I have done literally nothing - we too have been breathlessly waiting the change in our little house by the river. To this end I have until today completely failed to get permission from the students in my laboratory to post pictures of them on my blog. Having finally done this, here are a few pictures of them at the summer beach party. From left to right: Dr. Naito (our teacher); Takuma; Gosuke; Masaru; and Yashiki. The second picture has Yashiki in funereal splendour. There is also here a single picture of Gosuke being cooool in our Kobe retreat. Interestingly he was completely confused by the idea that he should not do the two -finger salute in this pose, and merely act naturally. Apparently, two fingers in the peace symbol is natural for a young Japanese chap-about-town.