Spring...

... has come here and look who I found ambling his or her way to an uncertain future on my way home from the hairdresser. Currently spending a little time in my living room, we shall see if our little friend can be returned to the river, or will become a more permanent resident of the bucket ...

Journeys in rural Japan

This weekend past I went on a little country trip with the Delightful Miss E and her two friends, His Edenic Majesty and Prince R. We hired a car and journeyed about the Northern coast of Shimane, visiting the tiny towns of Usagi Cho (Rabbit Town!), Inome Cho (Boar's Eye Town!) and Mihonoseki.

These tiny towns are all fishing villages, varying in size from maybe 100 inhabitants to surely no more than 30 in the case of Inome Cho. Usagi Cho fishes for Sazae, a type of water snail, and probably also Shijimi; while Mihonoseki seems to have a more diverse range of catches, including cuttlefish and the fish you can see drying in the pictures above. These villages are picturesque and the weather was very fine, so we made sure to stop our little car and go wandering through their winding, narrow streets. In the case of Usagi cho and Mihonoseki we found quiet fishing villages waiting peacefully for their fishermen to return from their latest trip; in these towns we were able to take photos of quaint winding streets, functioning shrines, and an array of seafood products drying on hooks. Inome cho, however, was almost deserted and appeared to have little employment of any moment. The streets were deserted and many of the homes were slowly crumbling into ruin, or were already boardd up or collapsed. In the pictures above you can see houses overgrown with ivy, and a street of empty homes. We saw a family playing on the beach, and a single man walking from one house to another; but outside of the plots of vegetables thriving in the new spring sun, there was no evidence that this village had much life left in it. Nestled between the sea and the mountains which reared suddenly behind it, it straddled a narrow road that we did not follow, which led further into those mountains towards villages possibly more remote and abandoned.

We chose not to take this road, but instead stayed on the coast road, to continue our journey through the peaceful fishing towns and orchards of Northern Shimane. Stuck here between the cliffs and the sea, passing occasional tiny shrines and slumbering villages, one could almost feel one had stepped out of time to an era before the war. Here there was little of modern Japan to be seen - no foreigners, no English, no vending machines even. Just the rhythmic pounding of the waves, the quiet speech of hidden locals, and the occasional fishing boat to break the peace. A pleasant retirement indeed for our visiting friends, who after two days in this idyll were to return to the hustle and bustle of modern life, and the neon wilderness of Tokyo.

The affair of the Paper Cup ...

In April I commence a job as a part-time English instructor at the Matsue Technical College, which is a kind of combined Engineering University and High School. In order to start this job I had to complete a medical assessment, so last week I found myself fronting up to the Kobayashi clinic with a piece of paper and my electronic dictionary, intent on clinical investigation.

After an hours' wait I was shown from the waiting room into the clinic proper, where I was greeted by a cheerful nurse and a strange scene more suited to a movie about the Siege of Stalingrad than modern, peaceful Japan. A single large room lay before me within which all the main activity of the clinic was conducted in, as it were, public. Immediately in front of the entry way a small portion of the room was devoted to benches on which an array of people sat patiently waiting their turn. To my right - facing the waiting patients - was a large desk, behind which stood two more nurses and a massive clutter of books, papers and equipment. Beyond the waiting area were 6 beds, standing isolated in the middle of the room, and separated from each other by only a small mobile curtain stand, perhaps half the length of the beds themselves. Because thse curtain stands did not cover the heads or feet of the beds, i could see their two occupants' feet. Beyond these installations was a bit of empty space and then a wall covered in equipment. Doors leading off of this room led, I presumed, to the private spaces where one would be interviewed about one's private affairs.

Ah, how wrong I was. The nurse who greeted me dragged me to the bathroom area, thankfully separated by a door from the gaggle of waiting patients, handed me a paper cup, and said "stool". Then she pointed me to the men's toilets and walked out. This had me mightily confused, since it seemed a little strange to be crapping in a jar just to get a job; but I figured "when in Rome" and entered the toilet. In the manner of most toilets in small buildings in this country, the men's toilet is not actually the men's; it is the urinal, and men have to use the women's for more serious matters. I only realised halfway through the task of providing my sample that as a consequence of this arrangement there was no toilet paper. Fortunately I am neither a member of the Tory Party, nor a prized show dog, and so am remarkably unable to crap on demand for strange women. After several minutes of (I hope) refined effort, I gave up and emerged a little shamfacedly, holding my empty paper cup as evidence of my failure.

The nurses were now stationed behind their desks on the other side of the room from me, so that between me and them were interposed the (empty) beds. One of the nurses, seeing me emerge with the cup, ventured to inquire after the sucess of my endeavours. However, rather than offer up a tactful question - such as, for example, "did it go okay?" - she asked me "Did it come out?" in a loud voice which everyone in the room could hear. I answered that no, in fact, it "did not come out", thanking my lucky stars that no-one in this country ever actually refers to the subject of the sentence when they speak, but guessing that everyone knew of my situation. The nurse frowned and bustled me off to another room, wherein I was to receive a chest X-ray.

Now, during this procedure I failed to find any kind of rubbish bin, so had to carry the neglected paper cup with me. The X-ray room, unfortunately, was very cluttered and completely lacking in rubbish bins. There were two beds for X-rays to be taken on, but one of these beds was completely covered in books, papers and general stuff, as was every other spare desk in the place. I sat down at a desk next to some eye testing equipment, plonked my paper cup next to it, and proceeded to complete an eye and hearing test. After this the nurse said "wait", and disappeared, frowning at my empty cup as she left.

A minute later the X-ray specialist came in to administer my X-ray. He frowned at me, looked into my paper cup, frowned again, and then busied himself with various arcane matters connected to the X-ray machine. Once this was done he said "Here" and took my photo, then disappeared. Another nurse walked in, looked into my cup, frowned at me, and said "Do you want to have another try?"

Fair enough, I agreed to give it another try. I wandered into the women's toilets (where they have the luxury of toilet paper), spent a moment imagining I was John Major, and set to work. Sadly nothing happened, so after a few more minutes I gave up and emerged, even more shamefaced, contemplating now the prospect of having to take this paper cup home, crap in it later, and then store it in the fridge. The nurse again yelled at me from across the room "Did it come out?" to which I demurred in embarrassment. One of the other nurses asked me if it might help were I to have a drink of water? And then it occurred to me that perhaps, just perhaps, for once someone other than me had screwed up the language. So I walked over to the nurses, hauled out my electronic dictionary, and said to them "Could you write down what I am meant to do? It's a bit embarrassing, but I think I don't have the right idea."

The nurses looked at the dictionary like it was Satan's own stool sample, and refused. They chattered amongst themselves for a moment, and then another of their number wandered over and said to me "Urine".

The mystery solved. Things flowed smoothly from this point, if you will pardon the pun, and there was no more frowning into my cup. I presented the specimen proudly within moments, and was then ushered into the doctor's room where various proddings and pokings were administered. The nurses in this establishment were so innumerable that there was even one on hand to hold up my shirt while the stethoscope was employed. The doctor's room was cluttered with 3 printers, two computers, and a massive scatter of papers and rubbish (in amongst which was buried the latest mp3 player and no less than 3 external hard drives!) The doctor himself could barely see me, crouched as he was behind a pair of 21" LCD monitors while nurses scurried around simultaneously holding my shirt, gesturing to a bed, testing my urine, and standing by looking stern. There is always at least one nurse standing by looking stern.

After this the doctor pronounced me fit to work despite my incompetent sphincter, and sent me about my business. I emerged proudly clutching my certificate of healthiness, blinking in the wan wintery sun, and thinking to myself "My god! I have to go through the whole ordeal again in 2 weeks," because I do - there is another test for my admission to University. I only hope that there are no more mistakes about sample material - there is only one other emission they can mistakenly ask me to give, and it will be even more embarrassing if I am successful in that endeavour!

What we learnt from TV this week

This week I have watched a little bit of TV, mostly in the doctor's surgery but also tonight while eating dinner. Television in Japan is a strange affair, being composed mostly of game shows, "variety" shows (i.e. various japanese tv stars talking to each other in a studio), badly acted soap operas, and various news shows. Mostly Japanese television seems to involve anything which involves a lot of talking. For people who are comfortable with their own silence, Japanese people love to talk.

So the three main shows I have watched this week are:

The graduation news, an hour long news show describing the fashions, songs, and activities at this year's graduation festivals. The graduations (sotsugyo) are from university, high school and primary school (that's right, primary school) and appear to be a very important part of Japanese life. Otherwise why would one have a news show (on cable TV no less - I watched this at the doctor's surgery) devoted entirely to the topic. The news show had three main sections, which were: footage of various high school graduations around the country, with particular emphasis on the pop stars who sang the graduation song at the end (for example, Angela Aki played at a graduation) and the screaming girls who mobbed them; a top 5 of the favourite graduation songs this year (Angela Aki was number 3); and footage of children crying with happiness at the primary school graduations ceremonies. These primary school graduations involve some very serious bowing and thanking the principal, and some crying. Also there was a cherry blossom motif through all the music videos, in the graduation ceremonies, and in the special newsflash halfway through the show, when two reporters live in Tokyo showed footage of the first solitary cherry blossom of spring, with breathless commentary. The cherry blossom is supposed to represent the ephemeral nature of things, so is perfect for a graduation ceremony.

The foreign housewives show: also at the doctors, this show gives profiles of foreign housewives of Japanese men in Japan. The first section had a Croatian woman visiting a Croatian restaurant in Tokyo (with a Japanese chef) to sample their cabbage rolls. Evidently they were very good, because she was reduced to tears and begged the chef to marry her. I think this sort of thing isn't quite the done thing hereabouts, because the chef was rather taken aback, though he didn't object to the breathless hug he got. Then there was a profile of an American woman who moved into her Japanese boyfriend's house, only to discover his mother hated her. Fortunately his Dad loved her and showed her around to all his friends; until he had a heart attack that is, and then from his hospital bed demanded to know why mum and girlfriend couldn't get along. At this point the girlfriend asked her boyfriend to marry her, and everything was okay. These shows were presented with an air of simple factuality, and no tone of either 'those stupid foreigners coming here and pissing off our mothers' or 'those stupid mothers who can't accept foreigners for daughters-in-law.' It was a mere presentation of facts, with a light-hearted tone and as far as I could tell no attempt at deeper insights into Japanese life (not that I could tell - I don't even know the Japanese word for racism).

Sasuke: a crazy game show in which 100 people attempt to complete a stupidly dangerous obstacle course in four stages. Whoever falls off the obstacle course at any point is excluded, and usually only 5-10 people make it through the first stage. You can see why here, where the entire series of obstacle courses is completed by one of the only two men in history to have done so. The successful contestant, Nagano Makoto, is a 34 year old fisherman from Miyazaki prefecture. I watched his younger brother fail a similar course tonight, along with all the other contestants. I think this show is every week, or at least every month. There are no prizes for failure; if no-one completes it, no-one wins. The last stage finishes with a mini fifth stage, which consists of a 25 metre vertical climb - half in a type of chimney, half up a rope - which must be completed within 25 seconds. An interesting side point of this sasuke show is the importance of talking in Japanese TV, and the humility with which Japanese people conduct themselves while being stupidly cool. Watch the clip, and you will see what I mean.

So what did I learn from the TV I watched this week? Allow me to share the profound insights one can gain from quality Japanese TV:

• It's cool to have a foreign wife, even if she pisses off your mother
• Graduations are really important
• Forklift adverts are best shown during game shows
• The best advertising method is to cut to the advert in the middle of a scene without warning (as in, for example, when Mr. Nagano's younger brother is about to make his final leap for glory in the cliffhanger)
• Japanese game show contestants are crazy (watch the video - there is a crazy rolling log!)
• Japanese women like watching hard men do crazy things - half the adverts in Sasuke were for perfume, women's drinks, or makeup, as are half the adverts during the K1
• Advance hair, yeah yeah (actually the slogan is different, but I think the company is the same)

Plus of course, talking is a crucial part of television life. But we knew that already. Soon I hope to obtain satellite tv for the house, so that we can watch the rugby world cup and K1 in comfort; at this point I also hope to be able to learn more profound lessons about life from music Television shows, more gameshows, and even higher quality badly acted dramas. Enlightenment will surely soon be mine!!!

On Fascism

This post is a slightly edited version of an email I sent 18 months ago, when I visited the Yushukan in Tokyo during my holiday. This was before I moved to Japan, when I still almost no Japanese and no Japanese people. A year in Japan has not changed my view of the fundamental wrongness of the material I discuss here, and I would like to present it as a counter to my perhaps overly forgiving interpretation of mainstream Japan's view of the war...

...a few days ago I mentioned that I visited Fushimi Inari shrine amongst a horde of people on New Years Day. Today I read in the newspaper some crowd estimates for the period 1-3rd January, which put the attendance at Fushimi-Inari shrine over the 3 days at 2.7 million people. This makes it one of Japan`s most popular shrines. One of Japan`s least popular shrines overseas is the Yasukuni shrine, which Koizumi Junichiro (the Japanese PM) visits every year. Here are enshrined the souls of Japanese citizens who died fighting for Japan at any time since the Meiji restoration. These souls become "kami" or "tutelary spirits" or some such, and there is a bit of concern about this fact since the shrine includes the souls of 14 war criminals, one of whom is responsible I think for a great deal of torture and horrific crimes towards prisoners of war. Although torture is now something of a popular tool of justice in the west, I thought I might visit the shrine to see what the fuss was all about, and particularly I thought I might go to the "Yushukan", which is a big fat museum of Japanese war history on the grounds of the shrine. I have alluded before to my suspicions that there is a fascist tendency in this country, and the locals have certainly implied this to me - on my Shinkansen to Tokyo I chatted to a real estate company director, who told me that many Japanese refer to Koizumi as "the Little Fascist", and don`t like what he is doing. My experience of foreigners here, and foreign ideas about Japan, suggests that there is more to ideas of racial superiority than war criminals, but since Yasukuni has become such a focus for the debate about Japanese fascism, I thought I`d give it a go.

If enough people are still reading my blog to constitute an audience, I think I can safely describe the audience as mostly Australian, and so I think I can summarise for you the experience of the Yushukan by telling you about the first thing one sees upon entering the museum - a steam engine for a train. For the briefest of moments when I saw this steam engine I thought that the Yushukan was going to be one of those weird japanese museums with bad exhibits, which would in this case blend trainspotting and war history (not a novel combination). However, after this brief moment of hope I realised the truth was far, far more disturbing. I didn`t even have to read the explanation with the exhibit to know that this train was straight from the Burma railway. Here it was, presented at the entry to the war museum as a great feat of human engineering rather than a terrible feat of human cruelty. There was no mention of any of the POWs who died building the railway, just the importance of the railway itself and how brilliant the Japanese were to build it.

The Yushukan consists of a series of exhibits laid out in separate rooms, starting with the history of the empire and progressing through the Meiji restoration (the foundation of modern Japan 150 years ago) to the "Greater East Asian War". The early stage subscribes to beliefs about history which I believe many modern scholars think are based in mythology, and it also refers regularly to "bushido", which I have heard is a fiction concocted during the Meiji restoration (I am starting to think the truth of this is a bit more sophisticated). I have no way of knowing what the truth of the Yushukan`s version of Japanese history is, but I think I can present to you some evidence that the narrator for this museum is far from dispassionate. After slogging through 10 rooms of Shogunate history I finally reached the room which contained the exhibit about "the Incident at Nanking", which we in the West know as "the Rape of Nanking". This gets a very very small space in one room. Rather than saying that "thousands of the citizens of Nanking were brutally raped and murdered", the information on this "Incident" tells us that after it was over "the citizens of Nanking could return to a life of civil order, peace and security". It also suggests that the Chinese army fled and Nanking was taken quickly, when in fact I think it involved a large-scale and drawn out battle with (I seem to recall) tens of thousands dead.

To my shame, I am a bit of a cultural relativist, so I am always willing to consider the possibility, however slight, that maybe our view of history is just as warped as everyone else`s. After all, don`t the victors write the books? I had heard that in fact the Yushukan holds examples of schoolbooks which claim Japan did not start the war with America, but I am afraid this too must go down in history as a great Myth about Japan. In fact the Yushukan makes it very clear that Japan started the war with America by bombing Pearl Harbour. It spends a great deal of time, however, detailing why Japan was forced to do this. Apparently America was intervening in Japan`s possessions in China (which is bad) and had moved to embargo Japan`s oil supply. I am inclined to believe this tale, since the western view of the war has always been a bit wierd to me - Japan just decided one morning to bomb the shit out of a bigger and richer country. Everyone who is taught the history of the European war is taught that Germans had lots of reasons to go to war (due to the Versailles treaty) while absorbing the clear moral lesson that what they did was wrong - I don`t see why it should be any different for Japan. If German fascism can have a historical context then so too must Japanese fascism.

So what context does the Yushukan give us for all this bombing and dying, and the necessary restoration of "peace and security" to Nanking? It gives us 15 rooms of exhibits all presenting the standard whining fascist self-exculpation, that the pure-hearted and good nation of Japan was constantly beset by nasty outsiders who continually forced it to go to war to defend itself. Oh, those poor beknighted Japanese souls who died defending such an innocent nation ... of course there is a grain of truth in this, Japan having been forced at gunpoint to open her doors to the west in the 19th century after years of isolation, and being close to a very large and increasingly chaotic nation (China). But our rather overly subjective narrator continually intervenes to assure us that the Japanese were entirely blameless, and something about the tone of the exhibits leads me to question their veracity. Perhaps I would be more inclined to believe the narrator had I not been presented with that train ...

Finally however, this exhibition of the warlike achievements of the Japanese nation ends in a sad tale of self-destruction. The Yushukan has to present the righteous nature of the Japanese war dead within the context of their complete and utter defeat by the Americans, a quandary for all fascists I think we can agree. It was easy for the Germans to escape this trap - they just admitted they were wrong. For some reason Shinto Japan isn`t going to take this easy option. So instead we have two whole rooms full of exhibits focussed around the kamikaze, or as the Japanese call them, the "Special Attack Squadrons". Suicide being a ritual here they developed a whole technology for suicide bombers and they make very clear that this practice was very noble and good. The exhibits included a full-size suicide bombing submarine ("human torpedo", of which the inventors, we are told, were "very proud"), and a rocket-bomb with a human pilot. They even had a sculpture of a guy in underwater apparatus holding an explosive device on a bamboo stick (to destroy landing craft - "many soldiers died testing this ultimately unsuccessful device", a fact that is stated with no sense of guilt). I think the attitude towards these kamikaze is best described by two exhibits: a scale model of an anti-aircraft destroyer, and a diorama of a kamikaze attack. The former is a small model, perhaps 3 feet long, of a boat whose sole purpose was shooting down enemy planes. The boat is bristling with guns, all anti-aircraft weaponry, and was part of a carrier group ( i.e. its job was defending the aircraft carrier). In 1944 the entire fleet to which this boat was attached was sunk in a sea battle, leaving the anti-aircraft destroyer the sole survivor. Rather than surrender this ship turned on the American fleet and attacked, even though it was outnumbered 16-to-1 and had no weapons capable of doing any damage to ships. The boat was, of course, destroyed, and "all the crew shared its glorious end". The diorama of the kamikaze attack takes up a whole wall, and depicts a squadron of fighters escorting four bombers, each of which carries a kamikaze rocket-bomb. They are descending towards Okinawa, with the islands of Okinawa visible in the background against a setting sun. The whole thing is sombre, beautiful, glorious and of course completely senseless (this is the picture shown at the top of this post, taken from the Yushukan website).

So this is the final lesson of the Yushukan. Fascism leads to self-righteous war that ends in glorious defeat. Unbowed, we can invite our Prime Minister to come and honour our war criminals even though they were torturers and mass murderers, and then we can rise again from the ashes of our own defeat ... after all, none of it was our fault, we only wanted to live peacefully on our island (and the half of the pacific which we conquered). Ultimately I left the Yushukan saddened by the tale it told, and saddened also by the way the "righteous war dead" were having their souls used so self-righteously by Japan`s modern fascists. But then, some of the tales of sacrifice in this museum make me wonder whether the men who died in this war would really have objected to the way their story is presented; and that, I suppose, is the nature of fascism in modern Japan. If ever you are in Tokyo, gentle reader who hails from a country that has clearly never done anything bad - only made a few mistakes here and there, such as the Vietnam war and that small matter with the Aborigines - I recommend a visit to the Yushukan. Only rarely in modern life do we get to see both sides of a story (whether true or not), and the opportunity is worth taking.

Should they or shouldn't they?

It seems to be a universal truth of the study of Japanese history and the Japanese people that they refuse to acknowledge their role in world war 2, that they refuse to apologise to their neighbours or victims of the war, and that young people do not understand the war, its causes or their country's responsibility for it. This belief is reflected most clearly in the annual visits by the last prime minister, Koizumi Junichiro, to the Yasukunji Jinja, where 14 Class A war criminals are honoured. This rightly offends the victims of the war in neighbouring countries, and of course is taken by foreigners generally to represent the overall opinion of Japanese people, since everyone knows those inscrutable Eastern types all think the same.

This has recently been reflected in one of those periodic calls for an apology from the Japanese government for one of its many crimes of the time, on this occasion from the US Senate, for the Comfort Women issue. Comfort Women are prostitutes who served the troops at the frontline in world war 2, and it is generally believed that they were forcibly recruited, by some accounts even abducted and forced to serve at gunpoint.

So how do I see this while I live here? When I came here on holiday I visited the Yushukan, the museum attached to the Yasukuni Jinja, and I will post the email I sent at the time, as a reminder of the conservative view of the war. However, the Yushukan does not seem to reflect the view of most Japanese people, which from my conversations with young people in Tottori and Matsue I would characterise as something like this: Japan behaved badly before the war, the foreign powers did some things to force the issue, but ultimately Japan was wrong to start the war and it was a tragedy for everyone involved. Further, no-one in Japan seems to harbour ill-will towards the victorious powers, except that some have a bit of resentment towards the US over the fire bombings and nuclear attacks (a picture of the former heads this post). In fact, I have never met a Japanese person who had any opinion of Australia except that it is a wonderful place.

So how does this sit with the view that Japan has never apologised for the war, that it's young people know nothing about it, and that the Japanese cannot comfortably reenter international political life until they give this acknowledgement? I would say, it doesn't. And the reason it is thoroughly inconsistent with this assessment of Japan's remorse for the war is that the assessment is, like most views of Japan from outside, completely wrong.

Maybe I am silly to think this, since the prevailing view (except among academics of Japanese history) seems to be the opposite. So I shall defend my claim, and I shall start by characterising an apology. If a country were to start an aggressive war with a manufactured incident, in order to defend a political policy subsequently shown to be wrong, leading to the deaths of millions and the destructions of whole countries, how would that nation behave after its defeat? Would it

1. rewrite its constitution so as to be unable to wage any form of aggressive war
2. allow its victors to establish bases on its soil
3. pay reparations
4. Give aid and loans to nations it had previously occupied
5. Make 40 apologies for its errors
   

Or would it alternatively

1. continue to maintain the war was just
2. claim it only lost because it was stabbed in the back by domestic political forces
3. refuse to admit the war was a mistake
4. refuse to publicly acknowledge or apologise for the destruction caused
5. maintain trade embargoes against its previous foes
6. build the worlds most powerful military and use it in subsequent reckless adventurism

The latter constitutes the US response to the tragedy of Vietnam (which we must recall included the destruction of much of Cambodia and Laos and is credited with creating the conditions for the appearance of the Khmer Rouge). The former represents Japan's approach to its war responsibilities. In fact I would say that, as far as international acceptance of guilt for past crimes goes, Japan's acknowledgement of its role in the war is a sterling example. The UK has not apologised for its air war in Iraq in the 20s- in fact most children in the UK never learn about this crime, and I know I certainly didn't. John Howard refuses to acknowledge that the Vietnam war was bad, and the US still has difficulty even discussing the Vietnam war properly. So who should be lecturing who about the credibility of their response to past war crimes?

As for the Comfort Women issue, there is evidence that some women were paid to do the work, and strong evidence that the army turned a blind eye to the methods used to recruit them. Early in the war most of the Comfort Women were Japanese but later they were recruited mostly from foreigners. They were not recruited directly by the army, so it is likely they were strong armed into it by contractors and handed over to the army. Certain egregious instances of western women being abducted and treated harshly were determined after the war (at the Batavia trials) to have been isolated incidents unrelated to the Comfort Women program. There is evidence that the Army directly press-ganged women or at least tricked them and in many cases hired women whose families were in debt (a time-honoured means of getting third world women into this line of work). There is certainly evidence that a lot of the sex workers were left broke and destitute in foreign countries, since although they were paid 10 times what the front line soldiers were paid, they were paid in war bonds that became worthless after Japan surrendered. It is also the case that Japan has apologised for this activity, and established a (private sector) fund to offer compensation to those women affected. To my mind this is probably an exceptional example of restitution for the mistreatment of women in wartime. Although there is debate about the significance of the apology and the fund, I somehow doubt that the victims of Serbian agression, or those prostitutes who served US soldiers in Vietnam, or the women abused by German soldiers in Russia, have ever received quite the same kindness from their defeated foes.

One should ask oneself, how many times will the Japanese continue to hear these claims of their lack of remorse before they give up saying sorry to people who obviously are not interested in acknowledging the gesture? Certainly it is convenient for the current crop of politicians, born after the war and trying to harness Japanese conservatism to their cause, to point to the rest of the world's continuing refusal to credit Japan's strict post-war measures as a perfectly good reason to avoid further apologies or even to rewrite past concessions - which is exactly what Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister, seems to want to do with this issue. Perhaps it would be better, if someone apologises, to thank them for their graciousness rather than wait a year or two and demand another...

Grotesque food 3: damn their eyes!

Some of my more sophisticated readers may have had the pleasure of watching the Iron Chef, where they make all sorts of strange foods deserving of the title Grotesque. Some of you may even have seen the episode where the gourmet chef serves up a roasted Tuna Eyeball, still in its socket, and the judges all love it. Sitting in your loungerooms in various foreign countries, surely you would have thought this was a put-on, some kind of crazy double dare.

Sadly not. The Deligthful Miss E and I visited the loungeroom of my supervisor, the Inscrutable Professor N, last weekend, and amongst the many excellent dishes prepared for us was a whole Snapper baked in salt. Of course such a snapper comes complete with intact head, and at his 7 year old son's request the Inscrutable Professor N pulled out both eyeballs and plopped them, half-deflated, onto Professor N Junior's plate. If any of you are familiar enough with Black Adder to remember the line "We shall sup on their exquisite floppily -doppilies" you will know exactly how I felt when looking at this slimy concoction smeared across Professor N Junior's plate. But worse was to come! For he immediately popped the slimy mess into his mouth, chewed it around a bit and then popped out a small white ball, for all the world like ping-pong ball the size of half a marble, and daintily returned it to his plate. I prodded this bulbous little monstrosity with my chopsticks and confirmed it was, indeed, too hard to eat. Professor N Junior had begged for that eyeball just so that he could slurp off the slimy stuff and spit out the inedible remainder. Hmmmmmmmm.

The most disturbing part of this tale is that Professor N Junior was decidedly disinterested in the remainder of the fish. He had to be sternly admonished to eat some of the fish's flesh before his father would grant him access to the only part he wanted - the drapery of slime oozing from the eye socket.

And he ate both!!

Kombat Kulcha VIII

Checking my records, I find I have not blogged for a full month; and today is St. Patrick's Day, a big event in Matsue, so I feel I should post some notes concerning Sumo, and the most recent conversation I had with Mr. Y while driving to Yonago to do some kickboxing. The conversations are the best part of the Yonago kickboxing trips, mostly because I get 2 hours of Japanese practice and sometimes as little as 25 minutes' kickboxing practice - Mr. Y leaves his work late, and we often arrive at class halfway through.

When I told Mr. Y that I had been watching the Spring Sumo tournament (as I am watching it now while I type this) he was most amused. His amusement served to open a conversation about Sumo - which is rally a bit strange, as far as fighting arts go - and its significance, which is stranger still in some regards. Sumo, Mr. Y informed me, is a sport conducted in front of the Gods, and therefore is an essential component of Japanese civilisation. It has all the necessary ingredients to be an essential component of Japanese civilisation:

• it is incredibly formalised
• it happens in line with the seasons, except that
• the number of times it happens is a bit odd
• it is a bit odd
• it is a religious festival and everyone knows this
• in practice it just looks like a big picnic
  

It is an essential component of all culturally important, seasonal religious festivals in Japan that they be just like a big picnic. Sumo, I admit, does have a central stage where some guys have a fight; but everything that goes on around them is just like a big picnic. While they prepare to fight a chap wanders about sweeping the stage off; even though attendance is apparently difficult and expensive to secure, the audience sit around on large cushioned benches, eating the picnics they brought with them and waving at the camera; people wander in and out of the walkway by which the (religiously significant, almost holy) wrestlers enter the ring, slapping them on the shoulder, taking photos of them or wandering off to find the toilet; and throughout there is a general confused babble of talking and movement as people come and go, play with their kids, call their friends on the phone. It is just like being at a beach bbq, if the only sandy part of the beach were just large enough for two very fat men to throw each other out of.

Nonetheless, everything which occurs in that small part of the beach is of profound importance. The ring must be sanctified before the fight starts; each wrestler must drink from a cup of purified water before entering the ring, and must be given this water by the last victor to leave so there is a continuous chain of purification going on; before the important wrestlers start, the grandmaster (of whom, like the Emperor, their can be only 1) must perform a ritual dance; and before every fight there must be a ritualised ceremony involving a bit of some kind of special dance, a bit of intimidation and psyching, and a fair amount of slapping of one's own arse. At the end of the day a wrestler comes back to the ring with a special longbow and performs another dance to finish the days' events. The referee is (according to Mr. Y) something between a referee and a Shinto priest (and he talks like a shinto priest); and when they interview wrestlers the presenters have to be very very polite. The wrestlers in their turn have to be extremely humble, lest someone get the impression that just because they are the best wrestler in the world they might actually think they were good at something. In this regard the Japanese value the same trait of humility which everyone in Australia (except our cricket team) values.

Interestingly the current grandmaster is not Japanese - he is from Mongolia, where a sport like Sumo wrestling is also popular. Mr. Y revealed to me that this Mongolian chap - Asashoryu, or "morning blue dragon" - is a very popular sportsman in Japan, as is the Bulgarian Kotooshu. In fact every time Asashoryu moves, walks or breathes in the ring area he gets a cheer, so popular is he. Right now on the television they are broadcasting pictures of his father, and earlier they had a little background trip to Mongolia to show where he grew up. Such is the Japanese kindness to foreigners, which enables me to spend 2 hours discussing their national sport with Mr. Y even though I can barely talk with him in his own language and he cannot speak mine at all.

I suppose, however, that one would expect such respect from a nation which aspires to the finest of national ideals - a religiously imbued combat art as its national sport. This, my friends, is the very epitome of combat culture.