Forget Cherries Look at the Plum Blossoms!

For the past three weeks we have been watching as all the plum trees around the neighbourhood, and my two bonsai plums, have been opening into quite intense displays. The Asian plum is a very long lasting tree blossom (compared to it's cherry cousin) and sends off a strong yet delicate fragrance into the air around the tree. This has made the start of spring really feel...um...springy. If you are ever in Japan around this time of year ask the locals where a good park or farm or even a natural forest featuring "oume" (梅 ) is located. This plant is a great one to take in as it is scented pleasantly and provides an interesting contrast with it's bare twiggy branches.



We took a trip to the walk behind our friend Seiji's psyche hospital (his job is there, not a patient) and although a rainy day, the sight of so many plum blossoms on a terraced slope was incredibe. Definitely a relieving stroll for a sufferer of dementia.






Jackie posing with the plum out the front of our house, quite a nice view for the past few mornings, actually I think this is the first picture of our place. Spring is really here, the plums told me so.

The Mechanical Wonders of Japan

Hello! We went to Kobe for Chinese New Year, it was fun... but that is not the point of this post. Our friends Dan and Yuka took us to Kobe with them. After we checked out Chinese New Year, Yuka had to take us to Harbour Land. An amusement park that would make any carni proud. It was then that I saw them....they were beautiful! Large fuzzy animals and monsters that you pay 200 yen and then sit on and drive around. I was in cheesy heaven.

Here is Yuka on her amazing giraffe and me on my awesome elephant!

This is Yuka and Dan, in the background I am concerned because my elephant seems to be malfunctioning.

And off we go! Two girls and the mechanical wonders of Japan!

Don't worry in this country two full grown women riding mechanical animals is not an unusual occurance.

"Bamboo Fence Nails Need Not," Confucious Say

So do you remember the episode of our cutting bamboo in the woods? The whole ill-gotten booty was worth the risk as we now have a bamboo fence, thanks to a saw and a whole lot of jute. We were growing tired of saying Konnichiwa to every person who walked down our street and so needed a slight privacy/shade screen for our summer backyard lounging. Interestingly enough I found out that Japanese fences made of bamboo should only be tied with a strange square not tactic using wet jute, which tightens as it dries. This is because nails break the chi of the bamboo, well actually they just crack the bamboo as it shrinks over time splitting your fence into a loose pile of sticks.
After over two weeks of planning and a good week of morning digging burying posts and tying around eighty knots I have a decent (maybe not the straightest) Japanese fence, the only one in my neighbourhood. I often wonder if the neighbours think I am nuts, kind of like a Japanese guy moving in to Waterloo and building a traditional Canadian Cedar rail fence or log home in his backyard the day after he moves in. The responses have been pretty copasetic so far as I have even had a few elderly neighbours walk by and shout Gambare (endure the hard work with pleasure), Kirei desu nei (Pretty thing you have there) and Otsukari sama deshita (you have worked hard) so all in all I think the hood is liking my Japanese fence. It divides my walking garden from my veggie plots (more on that later) quite well and hopefully since we have installed it we will recieve less Konnichiwa, Gambare and other comments for the privacy it provides. Hope you like the pictures.

SUBORDINATE THE CORPORATIONS

Ralph Nader has long been a champion of society and community over the elite, we have always admired his outspoken ability to raise consciousness and get results (he is after all the guy who formed the seat belt laws of the USA). This is a short video series that everyone who is living in this world should watch, he implores us to subordinate corporate power to the rule of the people, not communism but a taming of the international financial oligarchy by WE THE PEOPLE. You have the 30 minutes to watch, I mean you are just looking at our silly blog are you not? Forget Obama, if you wanted real change you should have been supporting Nader.



On "you tube" you can catch the last two parts of this great speech titled "Ralph Nader on corporatism".

Please get together and act as communities, watch what is going on and actually write your MP, otherwise you may as well live in a feudal system. The most important point made in these videos is for us to actually become a civil society rather than an individualized mass of consumer slaves to the corporate elite. Let us not sit idly by as our society is ruled by unelected public commons looting pirates, you only live once!

Spring of the Jerk bird

Hey everyone.
The sun has been shining here in Sanda Japan for the past few days and all the plum blossoms on my bonsai have opened. Shinto shrines now smell richly of a host of plum blossoms and tulips and daffodils have been coming up. This warming has also meant another things, the birds are coming out stronger than they were in winter. I have made a friend with a neat one with peach cheeks, white eye stripes and a black cap. He is a rather well dressed chap who I call momo (japanese for peach), all he wants to do is peck insects from my garden and I am more than happy to make his acquaintance.
There is a smattering of other birds not nearly so character filled or pretty but entirely new animals to me being a North American. One of these new birds is a bird I have named the "Jerk-face-jerk" bird or simply "jerk bird". This long tailed grey bird (jerk) chases all other birds, including my friend momo and then mocks everyone and everything with his loud call, when he belts no other birds come near. He does not sing like the rest he screams, like a cat/whinney baby/construction-worker-whistle. This squak is so piercing it can be heard all around and he just keeps doing it. Most annoying thing about this is that he even does it into the late evening and early night! Maybe he is working on developing a new call or has something caught in his throat, whatever it is just be glad you do not have a "jerk" bird in your country.
\PS. I am sorry if such low-ball words lower the esteem of my blog, but it needed to be said, this bird is a real jerk, he is currently ruining my morning view.

Hikikomori

Like kimonos, sushi and hello kitty ... hikikomori is thing unique to Japan. What I have to tell you might find upsetting, in fact I hope you find it upsetting, it has upset me. Do not worry I am not actually upset but ever since I have heard about this phenomenon it has confused me so much that I truly felt that it should be part of our blog.

Hikikomori or 'the withdrawn' are people who for a host of social reasons choose to live as complete hermits separate from Japanese society. They shut themselves in their bedrooms and do not come out for months and in many cases years. The definition of hikikomori on the Japanese Government site is a person who has not gone outside for a period of over six months. According to psychologist Tamaki Saito, who first coined the phrase, there may be one million hikikomori in Japan representing 20% of all male adolescents in Japan, or 1% of the total Japanese population. Although, the majority of hikiomori are boys there are also many girls. Many begin as students who refuse to go to school and slowly slip into further social isolation.

Now the question is.... what is causing so many young people in Japan to choose this lifestyle? The videos I watched showed shy young men and women who seemed to have considerable problems communicating and did not seem to trust any of the people around them. Many analysts point to the unbelievable pressure students are under in Japanese middle and high schools and in their homes. Pushed to succeed until they flatly refuse and after a time shut out everything and everybody.
So while we in Canada are worried about students dropping out of school, the Japanese parent's worry is their child dropping out of life. Sorry for dire thoughts but this issue or disease (whatever you want to call it) was just so interesting to me that I thought I needed to share it.

The Anal Banality of Japanese Garbage

What I am about to tell you will never make you curse your blue box sorting again. As with everything in Japan the garbage is under a rigourous system that it is best not to think about because it will warp your mind. The garbage people do not go door to door here, each street or crescent (called a dai in Japanese) has a cement platform with cement sides and a net with poles that covers the garbage, this is placed over only when there is garbage in it. Luckily or unluckily our cement garbage platform is right across from our house.
Forget putting your garbage out the night before; here, you are not allowed to put your garbage out before 7:00 am and the truck comes around 8:30 - 9:00 am so one can see this leaves only a small margin for error. The truck comes playing happy music, everything here comes playing happy music (but this happy music, bells and whistles is entirely another blog entry).
The sorting system is nothing short of completely anal, Josh has no head for this sort of thing , so it has been me; Jackie the garbage sorting superhero who has taken on the task. I am happy to say that the whole thing is colour coded otherwise I would be at a complete loss.
Get ready! Here comes the sorting system:
Burnable garbage (your basic garbage, including paper for some reason that we cannot figure out) goes out in the blue bags on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Non-burnables (metal cans and other things like light bulbs, shoes, and extraneous odds and ends) goes out in the green bags on the first and third Wednesday of each month.
PET 1 Bottles (the hard plastic bottles used for pop) go out in the red bags on the third Thursday of each month. The caps must be taken off, they need to be rinsed and the labels cut off.
Glass Bottles get put in one of four what look like blue oil drums on our cement platform. The corks and lids must be taken off and there is a perfectly logical explanation for the four drums. Green bottles go in one drum, the brown ones in another and the clear ones get two drums as there are usually more of these. This was supposed to happen on the third Friday of each month but it appears to be moved up to the second Friday, good thing I was already out there with my burnable garbage in its blue bag to see other people sorting their bottles.
If you are wondering how one obtains all these coloured bags; the answer is you have to buy them from the store for extortionist rates.
If you were wondering where cartons, trays and other things go, that to the Canadian mind are not burnable garbage.... well.... we have to go down to the grocery store which has its own sorting system for everything and I mean everything. They even have little bins for different coloured caps from your PET1 bottles.
On to further craziness, the cement platform needs to be cleaned after each garbage removal. In Canada this would be some one's minimum wage job, not in Japan. There are two folders that go around the neighbourhood each in opposing circular directions, each household takes its turn cleaning the cement garbage platform. We received the burnables clipboard the week after we arrived. I went out on Tuesday and Friday and swept the platform and splashed water on it (the water seems only to be splashed to show the neighbourhood that it has been cleaned). Just when I thought we were out of the woods... we received the non-burnables clipboard from our nice neighbour to the right of our house. I went out the next Wednesday and swept and splashed the water. This was the easy part.
Yesterday I had to hand the non-burnables clipboard over to our not so nice neighbour to the left who has been spying on us through his curtains for the last month. Boy, did I not want to go and ring his doorbell. We signed the sheet and checked the map that shows the route the clipboard should take (all these things are included on the clipboard), I summoned up all my courage and rang the neighbour's doorbell.
I smile said 'konnichiwa' and gave him the board, he smiled and refused to accept it. At a loss, I went home. I checked the clipboard route and got a empty can formerly holding tomatoes and went back over and rang the door bell, I showed him the route and the tomato can (clearly indicating it was the non-burnable garbage clipboard) and said my house was 17 and his 1 so it was clearly his turn. He pointed at the signature and smiled and refused to accept it. I said 'Arigato Gozaimas' thank-you and returned to the house. Not five minutes later he rang our doorbell. I refused to deal with him and fed Josh to him. Apparently we had written the date under the signature. This was wrong... you are to write your house number under the signature. He could not deal with this breach of protocol and refused to deal with the clipboard until we had changed the 20 to a 17. He sat down with Josh and explained every detail I have told you about garbage in Japanese to Josh. Josh changed the 20 to a 17 and this time he did not refuse to take the clipboard. After a long session of deep bows and apologies we went our separate ways, we are sure he will continue to spy on us.
As you can see, the Japanese are highly efficient and systematic, but one little thing will throw them for a complete loop. It is sometimes (toki doki) like you are on an airplane that is crashing but the plane is on autopilot and will not deviate from its flight plan. So welcome to the algebraic equation that is Japanese garbage day.