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Broadcasting to an audience of three (and a goldfish)...
Comment, ramblings and musings... life through the eyes of a Japanologist...
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Tuesday, November 12, 2002 |
 My CDs finally came this evening. I put Badly Drawn Boy on straightaway-
the track 'You Were Right' is really excellent. I'll listen to the rest when I get time, but to be honest, even if the rest of the CD was completely awful, the price would still have been justified just for
YWR.
The best of Spitz, meanwhile, is fairly familiar because we
played it several times on the way back from Taishakukyo the other
weekend. There are several good tracks on this album, but my favourite
at the minute is one called 'Cherry'. All in all, a good buy.
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The reason for buying thirty bananas, of course, was because I'd promised to make Nigerian banana fritters at Koyo Elementary School. So I did. In three consecutive lessons. There's not really that much that can be said about banana fritter making, really, apart from that it went well. I can safely say that fritter making isn't so interesting that it needs to be done three times in one day, though! The third- and fourth-years seemed to be the best, although this was because of all the help they got...
I had school lunch with the third-years, who had a great time asking lots of typical third-year questions of me, and about England (the third- and fourth-years are really fun, because they're grown up enough to be interested in things, but still young enough to be amusing in what they ask, and to be playable with). One little boy also decided he'd eat exactly what I did, matching me mouthful for mouthful... until I started picking things up and then putting them down again when he'd put them in his mouth! I think this made his day! After lunch, one little girl came up to ask me about the English way of doing kuku; I'm glad she did, really, because otherwise I might never have had the opportunity to dredge up my knowledge of the Japanese word for 'times table' from the dark recesses of my brain...
Anyway, in the afternoon, I did the same lesson with the fifths, and then with the sixths; the fifths overran so much that they came back after the end of school to fry the rest of the mixture they'd made. The sixths, though, completed everything remarkably (for these sixth-years, anyway) smoothly and quickly, and we finished on time. It seemed that crushing the bananas proved to be the biggest problem- quite a few of the groups hadn't the first idea about how they should go about this. In the hanseikai after the lessons, though, all the class teachers said their children had enjoyed the lesson and had found the fritters tasty, although according to the third-years' teacher, her children had enjoyed talking to me over lunch more. Perhaps I should skip lessons and just go for school lunch...
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5{ A piece in the Guardian Unlimited about the manual carried in the cockpits of the tokko (kamikaze) planes, and its translation into English.
Just reading some of the excepts brings home the enormity of what these young men committed themselves to do, but this article has resonance for me not so much in itself as in what it makes me remember. You see, in the Naval Museum in this town are a series of final letters written by the pilots of the tokko raids. Arranged by prefecture, they cover virtually the whole of Japan, and a glance at any section shows the average age of the pilots to be in the early twenties. Their faces, in formal poses for the camera, stare out to posterity; the calligraphy of their letters is awe-inspiringly beautiful. What they must have been thinking as they wrote these letters, I cannot even begin to comprehend. One thing I do know, though: the idea of suicide missions might have been flawed (it's easy to make judgments like this with the benefit of hindisght), but I have the utmost respect for the courage of the men who took part. They might have been enemies, but irrespective of nationality, irrespective of the rationale behind the plan, irrespective of its (ultimate) futility, the men who took part are worthy of respect, honour and admiration, I believe.
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I think the people in Kawakami Shoten (the little grocery shop near the office) are used to me by now. Nobody so much as blinked an eyelid when I went in and bought thirty bananas this morning...
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There's an interesting article on the BBC website today about how a 'bathhouse' (their word, not mine- I'm not sure whether it's an onsen or a sento) has been found guilty of racism for refusing to admit foreigners. I remember this story from a few years back, discussed as it unfolded (by one of the plaintiffs, if I remember correctly) on one of the Japan-related discussion lists on the internet.
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This morning is oddly warm. If it weren't for the glorious reds of the trees on Furutakayama, one could almost imagine it to be spring...
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© Copyright 2003 Nathan Duckworth.
Updated: 8/1/03; 8:54:34 pm.
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