The Intercultural

The Four Seasons Hotel at Chinzan-so, Tokyo

2012-02-10T11:08:00.007+09:00

Most Japanese universities run orientation weekends for their new students. Such weekends are supposed to help students to bond with each other and to foster group loyalties: to the school, the faculty, the seminar teacher. I've been on a fair few of these, mostly to Nazi-run mountain retreats where I have enjoyed hiking the trails while my seminar students dawdle behind me moaning about how it's too far and too hilly and too 'outside'. And the panic that sets in when they can't get a phone signal ...

Last year, however, the first-year retreat was cancelled because our university's orientation venue is a Hawaiian resort in ... Fukushima. At that time, you had to get official permission to enter any of the disaster zones and you needed special government-issued chitties to be able to buy petrol there. So that trip was obviously out of the question. Instead, on Monday, all first-year students were treated to a table manners lesson and lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel, Chinzan-so.

Each teacher was seated at a table with a group of students, presumably to encourage conversation although I found it had the opposite effect, especially as I don't teach first-years and didn't know any of them. The students were extremely intimidated by the opulence of the ballroom and the rows of silver cutlery and tended to speak to their friends in hushed whispers, or else they sat in cowed silence. The table manners teacher, a manager from the Four Seasons I think, taught us that we should make light conversation and I did my best in both languages but by the soup course I was exhausted from having to hold a conversation largely with myself. So I suggested that we photograph our food (see above). Japanese young people are not the best conversationalists, especially since many Japanese are told that it is rude to speak at meal times or in the presence of someone of higher rank. Hence, I had to make all the conversation.

We started with seafood 'audible', it said in katakana which I assumed was French until on the train home I was reading the table manners booklet we had been given and discovered that it was Japanese for 'Hors d'Oeuvres.' Then there was soup, a fish course and a meat course with a grapefruit sherbet in between to cleanse the palate, then coconut and pineapple parfait with cocktail fruits, and a macaroon with the university's name and logo on it.

Watching the students pick up each item of cutlery was like the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ape wields the bone. And they had no idea what to do with the fish knives. I demonstrated although I have to say that I can't use a fish knife because I am left-handed and I have never come across a left-handed fish knife. At this point I think we would all have liked to have been given chopsticks. It is actually easier to eat fish with chopsticks.

The student next to me jumped when the waiter leaned in to offer bread rolls. There was a whispered discussion then one student asked me when they were supposed to eat the rolls. And their faces when, having got one roll out of the way, the waiter leaned in and put another one on their plates! The same thing happened when they finished their fruit juices. I told them they could just leave what they didn't want. "You mean it is OK to waste food?" They asked. I explained the idea of leaving a little on your plate to show that you had eaten enough but they weren't keen on the idea, even though several of the women at my table did not particularly like the food. One hated seafood. "But you are Japanese", I said. "How can you survive?" But looking at her I thought it was touch and go. Japan is the only first-world country where the birth weight of babies and of women is actually decreasing. But when I watched the women at the table just playing with their food, tasting a bit and making a face, I could believe it. And it was nouvelle cuisine. Each course was tiny. The only course they all finished was dessert.

The waiters reappeared and took orders for tea or coffee. The woman next to me said, "Anything is OK" which is the standard Japanese answer. In polite society your host is supposed to be attentive to your needs and provide what you want without you having to make any difficult choices. I have been to family dinners where friends have had to stop their mothers from piling food onto my plate by shouting, "She's a foreigner! She can choose for herself! Let her decide what she wants!" Anyway I said to the student that was OK to choose something but in the end she chose nothing. The woman on my other side chose tea but sat and stared at it like it was hemlock.

"Do you often go out for meals like this?" I asked the students, but they all said, no, that this was the first time in their lives they'd had such a meal, which surprised me. In Europe, we pick up good table manners as children and I hadn't thought there was much to learn about western-style dining. I was wrong. To the uninitiated it is an etiquette nightmare.

At the end of the meal, I asked them if they had enjoyed themselves and they said they would much rather have gone to Fukushima. But me, I loved it. And afterwards, I took a walk in Chinzan-so, the garden attached to the hotel. I hear that the Shangri-La is supposed to be the best hotel in Tokyo. I think the Four Seasons would come a close second. It's just a pity it is rather far from any of the main shopping or tourist centres.

Snow Days

2012-01-28T11:26:00.011+09:00

(Preview of the panoramic view I'm going to have when S Building falls down and takes my office wall with it.)

Hello and a belated happy new year. For the first time in years I went back to the UK for Christmas. I didn't want to advertise the fact that my apartment was empty so I didn't blog. I don't actually know anyone who has been burgled in Japan, in fact I know many people who leave their doors unlocked when they go out. When I ask why they say that if anyone stops by they don't want them to have to wait outside because that would be bad manners. Still, apologies to those people who wrote and asked where I had gone. (I had gone to the Marks & Spencer sale for new velour trackie bottoms).

Now I am back in Japan and looking forward to a more upbeat 2012 albeit one without peppers, peaches, courgettes, carrots or spinach, all of which are in my supermarket right now but all of which are from Fukushima. And people are buying them. A Japanese colleague - the one who said that Japan was 'not like before' - also said that Japanese people 'feel it's our fault if we don't want to buy' things from the affected areas, like they're letting the side down. If they want to take the risk that is fine - the chances of adults becoming ill are apparently small - but they are also feeding the stuff to their children. You may have read of the Meiji milk incident where the company was forced to admit - after a consumer did their own testing and then made a complaint - that their baby formula contained radioactive Cesium 134 and 137.

And now we hear that there is a 70% chance of a 7 in Tokyo some time in the next 4 years. I think it may be sooner. I had just got into my Lush Vanilla Fountain bath last week - the night of the Chinese New Year as I recall - when all the water began to slosh from side to side and the shampoo bottles fell over but I refused to get out because it is freezing cold outside and the snow is still piled up at the roadsides. We had tremors just about every day last week. At one point I was talking with a student in my 9th floor office when her mobile phone quake warning alarm went off. "We are going to have an earthquake" she said and we waited. Then she dived into her bag and brought out her i-phone which said that the quake was up north again.

Yesterday I arrived at my office to find a brand new hard hat sitting on my desk. I put it on and adjusted it, and then jammed it into my locker. Not two minutes later the floor began to shake, the locker door swung open and the hat fell on the floor. Perhaps I'll keep it closer to my desk. When the next big one hits and I'm on the 9th floor of a 12 story building, that hat's going to be my first line of defence...

'S' building - which stands for Sincerity not shaky or shoddy - is being pulled down in the next couple of months, apparently before it falls down by itself according to office gossip. The word is that it is no longer quake-proof. It has a lot of hairline cracks running along the corridors and it abuts one wall of my office which has a wide crack in it too which seems to be getting wider the longer I stare at it (the crack not noticeably my office). I imagine myself sitting at my desk (with my hard hat on) during a quake and suddenly finding myself with a panaromic view of western Tokyo.

Now to the chores. I was woken up before 8am this morning by a cluster of little quakes so I got up and vowed to get all my errands done before the next Big One. Then I had a cup of tea and went right back to bed.

Yakult Lady

2011-12-04T15:29:00.005+09:00

Yakult are recruiting new Yakult ladies to sell their yoghurt drink door-to-door in my neighbourhood. Well, the flyer says 'Yakult Staff' but I've never seen a man doing the job. The hours are 9 to 2 and you can earn more than 80,000 Yen. The flyer lists the daily routine as follows:

From 8.30 - Drop children off at nursery (Yakult seems to have a nursery which is 8,000 Yen per child per month.) Put on Yakult uniform and check appearance. Prepare your Yakult box and moped (Yakult mopeds are bright blue with cool boxes on the back).

From 9am - Check attendance and receive confirmation of absences. Cooperate and communicate with co-workers.

From 9.15 - Call on your area's customers. Find out about their health. Communication is important so deliver your products with a smile and full of sincerity.

From 12.30 to 2pm - Do administration at the Yakult centre. Eat your respective lunches. Clean up. Do preparation for the following days. Total up sales.

From 3pm - Pick up your children and return home.

They also have vacancies for cosmetic staff.

It's an example of 'parto', part-time jobs for housewives. It's the kind of job many of my female students want to do. They want to work for two years after graduation then quit to marry (with a kind, tall, very rich man they usually say), have two children - a girl and a boy, and do parto while their kids are at nursery. When they say this, the male students go very quiet because they know they've really got their work cut out to attract any woman in this recession and then financially support her and the children. Men tend to call housewives' lives, 'Three meals a day and an afternoon nap'. I don't really think such a life is viable any more, especially in Tokyo. Sorry girls.

Dere Santa

2011-11-21T21:28:00.004+09:00

Dere Santa,

I hav bene a gude girl this year. Pleas can i hav a "camouflage slanket" from the Tokyu Crismas catalog so that i can sit in the parc and rede my book without kids shouting, "Mummy, Mummy, ther's a foreigner!"

Also, can i hav a geiger counta.

And a hazmat suit.

Thank yu, santa.

A Hands Christmas

2011-11-20T13:14:00.001+09:00

Good call! Though personally, after the year I've had, I'm planning to get legless.

"Protecting smiles with fire-safety mind"

2011-11-08T10:43:00.008+09:00

The Autumn Fire Prevention Campaign has begun! In our town, fire volunteers will tour the town from 7-10pm every night for a week and there will be a parade with 14 fire engines and other fire prevention vehicles. So nobody even light a match during that time because there will be no staff or vehicles available. This year's campaign slogans are, as usual, in Japlish rendering them unintelligible to Japanese and foreigners alike.

The installation of fire alarms only became mandatory in April this year. A maintenance guy turned up to install them in my place while I was watching a documentary on the origins of Fleetwood Mac (the Peter Green years) and we got on like a house on fi ... sorry. He was an old hippy; when he wasn't doing maintenance, he and his son played in a band. Sometimes you meet the coolest people at the oddest times.

So winter is on its way. Japanese homes have poor insulation and no central heating, so keeping warm is a mish-mash of kotatsu (a table with a heater underneath to keep your legs warm), hot carpet (keeps your bum cheeks warm but little else) and giant padded jackets. A lot of homes use kerosene heaters and it is not uncommon to see students with their eyebrows singed off from having the dial turned up too high when they turned it on. Which is why the annual fire prevention campaign is so important. First world country, third world heating. Smile!

Let's Spell Check.

2011-11-06T17:14:00.007+09:00

Christmas is here. Crimbo trees are up in the department stores and 'All I want for Xmas' is on a loop in the malls. (It's a popular song here because it was the theme of a trendy drama several years' ago.) Starbucks have brought out their high calorie festive coffee flavours and here is their gift flyer. Let's spell check.

From where I am unable to sit ...

2011-11-01T11:44:00.003+09:00

I have only two positions: the wall bracket and standing very straight with my neck stretched up like a meerkat on guard. Yesterday I realised that no matter how many stretches I did I was not going to get better by myself so I found a local English-speaking chiropractor online and went straight there. He confirmed that my back is "out" and that one leg is now shorter than the other. I will have a spine x-ray tomorrow and start treatment next Monday. I hope it works. I like chiropractic treatment. I had it on my lower back years ago and it worked very well. I then took up yoga to keep my back in good shape. However at the beginning of this year I decided to work on my headstands. My back has hurt intermittently since then. My new chiropractor, who also does yoga, says I shouldn't do headstands any more and I am not going to argue with him.

Typing at my desk is all kinds of screaming agony so I will instead leave you with two articles to peruse. They are from the "From Where I Sit" column of the Times Higher Educational magazine. The first one I wrote whilst sitting under my dining table the weekend after the quake. The second was an update published last week.

From where I sit - After the quake: we shall carry on

From where I sit - A life still far from normal

The "Don`t Want to be Troubled" Types

2011-10-24T09:02:00.013+09:00

On this week`s post-Fukushima diet plan I ate my words. My back has been troubling me on and off since the quake. First it was my jaw then my upper spine. Lots of friends, colleagues and students have also been experiencing similar ailments. (See last post about hair loss.) Anyway this week my back seized up completely and I resorted to mind-altering medication and walking around doubled over like a wall bracket. At the same time, my computer began to freeze up. I had noticed that the Wifi hadn`t worked since the quake but unlike my monitor which toppled over several times and doesn`t have a scratch on it - thanks Benq - my netbook had simply bounced around on the table. Anyway, on Thursday it died. Since I need a computer for all my classes I had to buy a new one quickly. But which one? I grudgingly looked out "Happy Pasacon (personal computer) Select booklet for Women" (see July post) and started the heartful quiz (see above).

Start: Which do you like, cats or dogs?
Q1: When you love someone do you make every effort for them?
Q3: Do you take your own obento (packed lunch) to school or work every day?
Q4: Are you a little weak at karaoke?
Q5: Do you often buy clothes on impulse?
Q6: Do you go to the nail salon once a month?
Q8: Do you occasionally go to bed without taking off your makeup?

And so on. The results indicated that I was one of four types:

The Particular Type
The Firm Type
The Worrier Type
The Don`t Want to be Troubled Type

I was the Don`t Want to be Troubled by a quiz which has nothing to do with buying a computer Type so I skipped straight to the "Ask a Man" section. In this case the man was my father. He gave me some model numbers and I crawled to Yodobashi Camera and showed the piece of paper to another man who sold me a new netbook.

Back home I booted up and went straight to the "uses for your new computer" section of the booklet which told me how to:

Make postcards of cupcakes
Shop online for shoes
Chat on Skype with my besties

What lovely lives some Japanese women seem to lead ...

Back in the real world, we had our monthly faculty meeting last Friday and a seminar teacher from another faculty came and showed a film he had made of his students` recent project. They had noticed that no-one was buying vegetables from Fukushima so they had gone up there, met farmers, helped with crop planting (there was one photo of a student being shown how to drive a tractor) and then shipped the vegetables down and sold them at a stall in eastern Tokyo. While there was a very brief shot of one farmer holding a white box-like object which looked to me like a geiger counter, there did not seem to be any mention of the dangers involved in such a project. After the film ended, a couple of lecturers made an attempt to clap but in general there was silence. I turned to the Japanese lecturer next to me to confirm what I had just seen. "Some people just refuse to be troubled with the truth" said the lecturer. I wonder where the university stands legally if any of the students get cancer in the next 20 years?

But enough of this pessimism. This is not the Japanese way. We must ganbarou! (Do our best!) Me, I`ve got shoes to buy.

Tokyo Half-Life

2011-10-15T10:17:00.007+09:00

(Photo: The Shinjuku skyline from my office. Again. You can see Fuji just to the right of centre, lurking behind a skyscraper.)

A week without vegetables. Fruit I can get no problem: kiwis and oranges from New Zealand, pineapples from the Philippines, papaya from Mexico and mangoes from Chile. But the vegetables on sale now are all from Fukushima, Ibaraki, Nagano and Yamagata. And I`m not touching those. That leaves me with tomatoes from Hokkaido. And I just don`t know what to do about Hokkaido.

When Fukushima ... imploded, melted (I`m still not sure what it actually did but apparently it didn`t explode like Chernobyl) ... the wind was blowing north to south which is why I got out of town straight away. Then the wind changed which was good news for Tokyo but bad news for Hokkaido and the north west coast of the USA and Canada. Just how much radiation landed in Hokkaido, I don`t know. From this Tuesday the wind is forecast to turn again, north to south, as winter approaches. I am keeping an eye on stormsurf.com and checking the wind direction for Japan.

That first week after 3/11 I went to Nagoya where it rained on several days. It may also have rained in Tokyo. Now strontium 90 has been discovered on the roofs of several builidings in Yokohama. It is concentrated in areas where rain runs off into the drains. So it may be assumed (until the government decides to tell us more) that the strontium was carried down on the wind and fell over Tokyo and many other areas of Japan in the rain droplets. (Although I don`t think anyone would be surprised if a nearby Yokohama factory wasn`t pumping strontium into the atmosphere.)

The Setagaya hotspot is also interesting. It`s not as radioactive as the parks and neighbourhoods in eastern Tokyo over which the smoke from the nearby incerators wafts. These incinerators are receiving and burning the radioactive sludge from Fukushima. (One broke down last week.) Every prefecture has been asked to take an amount and dispose of it, to share the responsilibity. TEPCO`s responsibility. But the radioactive hotspot in the expatratriate-rich neighbourhood of Setagaya is apparently emanating from some bottles under an old house. They could have been there as a result of a doctor bringing his or her (who am I kidding, this is Japan) HIS experiments home, or even of someone bringing their belongings up from Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the bombs. And as I recall the doomsday cult, Aum Shinkrikyo, (which is still active) toyed with producing a nuclear bomb. And I read that looters stole abandoned items from around Chernobyl which were then sold on and sat in people`s homes giving off radiation. People in Fukushima have been allowed to return to their homes for a short time to collect their belongings. Is that wise? Anyway the current view is that the bottles contained old paint which was made with radium.

Today`s spiel sounds as if I am worried. But I`m not particularly concerned. It`s more of a dull resignation. I liked life before the quake. The food was healthy and delicious, the train companies ran a full schedule, and the loos had heated toilet seats. No more. It`s going to be a cold winter, in some parts more than others.

I wouldn`t even say that I am anti-nuclear. I liked all the neon lights, giant outdoor TV screens and the vending machines that lit up and played music when you walked by. I knew that all that power must come from somewhere. And Japan is a resource-poor nation. They either had to go nuclear or invade China again.

But now everyone around me seems to be suffering from some form of long-term stress. I know of two people in Tokyo whose hair has suddenly fallen out. They were worried they might have radiation sickness but I told them that the number of women in Christchurch, New Zealand whose hair has fallen out has increased by a third and they only had an earthquake. In the last week alone I have also learned that two foreign male lecturers have had heart attacks.

Cooking with Cesium ...

2011-10-08T12:15:00.013+09:00

(Sign for the Setsuden: the campaign to save electricity because Fukushima and many other nuclear power stations are currently out of action. The Setsuden officially ended last week. Now we`re just walking around in the dark on a voluntary basis.)

It has been a long summer. At Narita I couldn`t remember my Tokyo address for the re-entry card. Then I couldn`t remember what floor my office is on (the uni have moved my office three times in two years). But I can name every character on Downton Abbey so it`s not Alzheimer's. Just priorities.

I thought the Fukushima situation would have been largely overcome by now but it has not. The plant is still not airtight and last week the papers reported a mystery build-up of hydrogen gas. Nevertheless many Japanese people seem adamant that all food and water is safe. There is even a Support Fukushima campaign encouraging shoppers to choose their products from that prefecture to save their rural industries. Some people are doing just that. With the idea of making a rataouille, I went to my local Co-op to buy peppers and zucchini. The zucchini were from Ibaraki, the peppers were from Fukushima. Instead I have been cycling to various supermarkets and buying anything from west of Osaka or abroad. Consequently I can`t know what I am going to make until I get everything home and see what is possible. Most of the time I`ll make a pasta sauce with canned tomatoes from Italy. The fresh ones are all from Hokkaido at the moment. If I find mushrooms or spinach I`ll make an omelette. But the eggs are all local so I won`t be eating those too often. I went for battery eggs instead of free range - I don`t want my chickens walking around eating anything off ground which may be contaminated. But I still can`t know what the battery chickens are being fed.

Speaking of Hokkaido, some people say it is safe and others say it is not. I have been buying small amounts of Hokkaido fat free milk for my tea but I am steering clear of its other dairy products. At the import stores I buy feta cheese from Greece and Dutch Edam. I`d kill for a yoghurt though.

My city, Mitaka, is conducting daily radiation tests at 104 local schools and playgrounds at 5cm and 1 meter from the ground. The results are posted on Twitter or can be emailed to you daily. The latest results for the school closest to my apartment are 0.07 micro-sieverts at 5cm, and 0.07 at 1 metre. Another neighbourhood shows 0.11 at 5cm, and 0.10 at 1 metre. This seems to be lower than average daily amounts around the world. But I also think it depends on what direction the wind is blowing. Radioactive waste is being transported from Fukushima and burned at Tokyo waste disposal centres. North and East Tokyo are radiation hotspots because of it. Anyway, it is not the wind-born radiation that most people are worried about now but cesium in the food.

The Japan Times had an interesting article recently, Hold the Cesium: `Ways to reduce radiation in your diet`. Kunikazu Noguchi, lecturer at Nihon University, has published a book on the subject so I have been following his tips as much as possible (assuming he is telling the truth and not a mouthpiece for the government from where, one assumes, he gets his funding ... and his job):

* Cesium can be easily dissolved in water so rinse all fruit and vegetable before cooking

* `Most` (most??) radiation can be removed from leafy vegetables if boiled

* 90 percent of wheat in Japan is imported from overseas so most wheat products are safe.

I continue to avoid seaweed, rice, meat, fish and green tea from Japan.

Of course, we cannot know what we are eating in cafes and restaurants. Where possible I eat Italian and choose pasta. And I take my G & T`s without a lemon slice.

Other than that, I am trying to put it out of my mind and get on with teaching.

Time for my Spam pasta ....

Thanks, Mark Foreman

2011-08-22T05:56:00.005+09:00

Thanks to Mark Foreman for his correspondence and advice. See his blog entry at:

http://markforeman.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/good-news-bad-news-for-dr-susan-burton/

I got the cesium information from the Japanese government so I am not surprised it is, shall we say, unclear.

I have now evacuated from the area - 6,000 miles away - I am in England for my summer hols where, free from a restricted Japanese diet, I went mad and put on 2kg in two weeks. And I an loving the English peaches ...

(Mark, I'm sorry my blog wouldn't let you post me a comment directly. I'll look into it.)

Women, know your limits!

2011-08-02T08:44:00.009+09:00

I was browsing in Yodobashi Camera the other day when I found this handy little booklet for all us girly airheads who have no idea what a computer is for. It`s the "HAPPY Computer Select Book for Women" with the tagline "Even alone you can choose a computer safely".

First, you take a quiz to decide your personality type which will match with your perfect computer. Then ... you ask a man.

Thanks Yodobashi! A pink netbook for me, please!

That reminds me ...

Style Free ...

2011-07-29T20:45:00.002+09:00

Friday, time for a beer. Here is Asahi`s new brew. It`s "Style Free". True. I drank it all and there wasn`t a drop of style in it. In fact it was rather raw. Tasted like Dad`s home brew before the full six weeks is up.

It`s not easy being green ...

2011-07-28T21:18:00.002+09:00

Nearly nearly nearly at the end of the semester. I am more excited about it than the students who have part-time jobs and job hunting to do. Because of the heat, I am very low on energy though. And I feel dizzy even when I`m sitting down. But the Kinokuniya Matcha (green tea) donut will see me through!

Let`s Strong Up!

2011-07-26T08:06:00.004+09:00

After the brief coolness of last week`s typhoon it is too hot again. And we`ve had two quakes in the last week. And we can`t eat the beef or the fish or the spinach... And I`m back on the Volvic because I don`t trust the tap water. And because of the Setsuden (Saving Electricity Drive) we`re still walking around in semi-darkness with the aircon set no lower than 28. And it`s exam week. Dear God, I`m exhausted. Vitamin Lemon Strong Up, I need you ...!

What can I eat?

2011-07-18T09:03:00.008+09:00

I DO NOT believe it. Yesterday at my local Co-op they had Fukushima peaches on sale. Who on earth would be stupid enough to buy peaches from Fukushima?

Shopping for food has become very difficult these days. I carry a Japanese prefecture map in my purse and check the origin of everything I buy. If it doesn`t say where it`s from, it stays on the shelf. My rules are no tap water, nothing from east of Osaka and buy foreign wherever possible. So in the summer heat I`m getting through a litre and a half of Volvic every day. Then there are bananas and pineapples from the Philippines, oranges and grapefruit from the USA, and mangoes and avocadoes from Mexico. Soya milk and tofu are labeled as being produced using mainly American and Canadian soya beans so they might be OK. That just leaves fish. I bought tinned sardines from Poland and mackerel from Ireland. Ireland - the country with the most radiactive sea in the world - safer bet than anything from Japanese waters. Because Fukushima fishing boats are still fishing in their local waters and then sailing down to Chiba and landing the catch there, thereby registering their fish as Chiba produce. So where did the tuna in my tin of low calorie tuna flakes (see pic) come from? The tin didn`t say but I took a chance.

I have to say that a great deal of my enjoyment of Japan has been spoiled (at least for the next 10-15 years, being the half-life of cesium) because one of the greatest things it had going for it was its delicious, fresh foods -especially sushi - and it`s low-fat soy and mushroom-based diet which produced people with the greatest longevity in the world.

For a while I drank Hokkaido milk and ate Hokkaido cheese but I was warned off it by Japanese and foreigners alike. The wind, which was blowing north to south when the first explosions occurred, is now blowing south to north which is generally good news for Tokyoites but bad news for Hokkaido cows. So no more dairy. I did check the government websites where they list their radiation testing results but despite the Hokkaido dairy industry being one of the major industries in Japan, they didn`t see fit to test it. I think that should read, "because of the Hokkaido dairy industry being one of the major industries in Japan they didn`t test it". If they haven`t tested it, it must be because they know they are going to get a bad result.

Obviously, I`ll not be buying any beef or green tea. I can take precautions at home but when eating out and buying takeout you just can`t know what you are eating. Take my favourite Starbucks Matcha Latte for instance. Where does the milk come from? Probably Hokkaido or Ibaraki (next to Fukushima). Where does the matcha green tea powder come from? Probably Shizuoka.

In March we had a once-in-a-millenium earthquake followed by the largest and widest recorded tsunami in history. And yet last Thursday evening when we had a fairly sizeable quake my first thought was, "I wonder how much new damage THAT did to Fukushima?"

My sister

2011-06-20T10:14:00.008+09:00

At around midnight on Wednesday 18 May I had just turned my light out when my phone rang. It was my sister who lives in England. Over the past few years she has always seemed to have one bug or another and since February she has been struggling with pneumonia. She was often tired but would never take time off work to fully recover. Since January she had lost almost a stone and a half in weight but had put it down to healthier eating. The last time we skyped she was showing me how she could fit into her new size 10 skinny jeans. She continued to cough a lot and had to sit down frequently. She was calling me at midnight to tell me that she had just been to the doctor`s and been told she had lung cancer. She is 39 and and a non-smoker.

I didn`t sleep that night. The next day I went in to work with no clear idea of what to do. Thanks to CH who sat me down and talked through my options with me, I took three weeks of leave, went to Shinjuku and bought a ticket to England, went home and packed a bag, got on the train to Narita and spent the night at a hotel near the airport. Thanks to G for booking the hotel for me. The next morning I flew via Schipol to Norwich where my family lives.

Because of breathing difficulties, my sister had been admitted to hospital after her diagnosis. She had spent time in hospital in previous weeks because her so-called `pneumonia` was not going away. Then the doctors had put a needle in her right lung to drain fluid from between the two lung sacks and suctioned it into a `bucket` (see photographs above). Now she had the needle in again and in the first 24 hours had produced over a litre and a half of bloody fluid. She was being given morphine on demand.

Lung cancer is the most common of cancers and has the worst long-term prognosis of them all. It is on the increase globally especially amongst young women, even non-smokers.

More later...

Purun Purun with QOO

2011-06-13T17:08:00.005+09:00

I`m back in Japan. I left three weeks` ago for a family emergency which I will tell you about once I am over jetlag. I arrived at Narita on Saturday the 11th of June, exactly three months since the Big One. Apparently there was an anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo that day. Lights are still dimmed, the trains from Narita seem still to be running a restricted service but there are no shortages in the shops and lovely aircon is on in my local supermarket.

Rainy season seems to have started. The weather is muggy, the air is green with tropical smells and daddy long-legs keep bouncing through the windows. With little appetite I`ve turned to jelly drinks such as Purun Purun above to fill my stomach with calcium, iron, vitamin D and probably a lot of sugar as well. And QOO (no idea).

This morning (actually 3pm, I am VERY jetlagged)I got up to read that Christchurch, New Zealand has been hit by more aftershocks. My uncle who lives there has lost power again. After the last Christchurch aftershock on 22nd February I read in a Japanese newspaper that because the Christchurch faultline runs north to south through Japan, Japan would probably experience a substantial quake before long. And so we did two weeks and three days later. So are we in for more? I have felt two very minor tremors since I`ve been back but I will now take 20 minutes to check my water and food stores and tidy up around the place just in case. I`d probably better put some clothes on too ... did I mention it`s VERY muggy?

Shaking coming ....

2011-05-17T21:35:00.003+09:00

(View from my office ... again. Can`t get enough of it ... the view not my office.)

Around this time last year I took my seminar students to the uni library to look for English books for their graduation theses. English books were pretty thin on the ground although, like most uni libraries I have visited in Japan, it has a plentiful stocks of German literature from around the late 1930`s. Before we went in, I told my students to set their phones to manner mode (silent mode) in order not to disturb others but about 10 minutes in, several students` phones begin to ring, not just mine but other students` phones in the study areas.

"I TOLD you to TURN your phones to MANNER MODE. You are being RUDE and THOUGHTLESS to other people. If you DON`T turn off your phones RIGHT NOW I am going to TAKE THEM AWAY from you and you will have to get the from me AFTER 5PM ...." Etc etc. I was on form that day.

The students let me finish then one guy said, "Erm, sensei, that`s the earthquake alarm. We are about to have an earthquake".

"Is that right?" I said, from underneath the table. "So, um, what do we have to do?"

Well, we didn`t do anything and luckily the quake struck up north. I have been teaching for over a decade in Japan and at no school or university have I ever been told what to do with my students when a quake happens. I have since told them that evacuation point is the Starbucks at Tokyo University.

What the students had on their phones was a quake warning app (which overrode the manner mode setting). Yure Kure - (shaking coming) is the most popular. You are supposed to get a minimum of about 3 seconds warning but sometimes a lot more before a quake strikes. Apparently they worked well before the big one in March, giving around 10 seconds warning. Much good it did people because 90% of those killed drowned in the tsunami afterwards.

Some colleagues asked me if I was going to get Yure Kure but I don`t see the need. I am surrounded by students who have it. Also when all those phones did go off in the library we didn`t do anything. We just waited.

The lights are going out ...

2011-05-09T21:35:00.009+09:00

After Golden Week, I went in to uni on the Friday to find that the bulbs had been removed from one of the two sets of lights in my office, and a sticker placed above the light switch urging me to save electricity. Since they are those nasty neon strip lights I do not use them much except after 5pm when it goes dark. (Being near the equator it gets dark around 7 in the summer and 5 in the winter. When I tell students that in England it sometimes stays light until 10pm in the summer they think it is some kind of Harry Potter magic.) My office is L-shaped, the other part of the square being taken up by the men`s room from which eminates a constant dripping and sometimes a flushing noise. So I tend to work elsewhere whenever possible. Sometimes I am there in the evening however and with one set of lights now gone, I need a torch to find books on the shelves in the L. Luckily I always carry a small torch in my bag. That`s fine.

In my pigeon hole there was a notice featuring a graph of power usage last July. This summer it seems the university must limit power usage to 955kw per hour. However last year university usuage exceeded this from 10am to 5pm. On the other side of the sheet was a list of instructions detailing how to save that power. For example, some large auditoriums will be closed and the dining hall will only be air-conditioned at lunch-time. That`s fine too. In fact at this rate Japan might meet its Kyoto Accord promises.

And today it was announced that the Hamaoka nuclear power station is to be shut down. The Hamaoka power station is on the coast to the west of Tokyo in Shizuoka prefecture. It supplies the power for the chubu or central area of Japan. It was the plant that the woman in my yoga class was petitioning two weeks ago to get closed. But why now? The Hamaoka power station has always been on the coast and in a region that had been designated (before the recent big one) as the most likely region for the next big one. So much so that in that prefecture. elementary school kids have to wear hard hats to and from school and keep them hanging on their coat pegs. I know the Hamaoka plant well as I used to live and work in nearby Hamamatsu and the place was a running joke even then regarding safety. So why are Chubu Power agreeing to Kan`s request to close it now? Kan has no legal power to order it closed. That decision rests with the shareholders who are going to lose money. Is the danger of another quake so great right now that the station must be closed immediately? Or is it that Kan`s position as PM is so precarious that he must bow to popular opinion on this one? I think it might just be the Japanese cultural trait of panicking well after the event. Japan has over 50 nuclear reactors. How many are going to be closed down?

So I think we are in for a really tough summer. Coolbiz (see my post last year) has already started and I have been sweating buckets teaching in classes with temperatures in the upper 20`s. And it`s not even humid yet.

Weight Loss Japanese-style

2011-05-05T14:59:00.005+09:00

No-one calls me a chubster and gets away with it, least of all my students. But look what I`m up against. These before and after photos are from flyers for local `aesthetic` salons. They seem to claim that you can lose weight with counselling and special massage techniques (as opposed to the usual Japanese methods of starvation or sticking your fingers down your throat).

The woman in the top photo is 60 years old and has lost 10kg in 3.5 months, down from a super hefty 58.8kg to a more acceptable 45.5kg.

In the bottom photo the before caption reads "Me when my husband looked at me with a cold glance". And the after photo, "Now my body is slim, my husband is very affectionate".

This is what passes for attractive in Japan these days, bow legs you could drive a truck through.

Me, I`ve spent the week walking, jogging and shopping, my personal weight loss methods. Today is the last day of Golden Week and it was been very quiet and peaceful, by which I mean no big quakes. Although we have had some vicious storms, one of which removed next door`s roof and deposited it in bits on ours.

Cracking up?

2011-04-30T17:56:00.004+09:00

It was warm and sunny on Thursday. During a class in new B building I went to open some windows and found that the lintels had warped and the paint cracked post-quake. The stairs in C building are a bit suspect too. We are still saving power and only one lift in the building is working so I regularly run from my office on the 9th floor to the teachers` lounge on the 3rd and back up for tea top-ups. It`s the same in shops and on the subway. At Todaimae there are 66 steps from platform to the concourse and 53 up to ground level. I`m actually quite enjoying it. I`ll be a wraith by summer. But those cracks in the stairs (see above) - and they are on every floor - are a bit of a worry. And while I was photographing them we had 2 more quakes.

Also cracking up are my teeth. Or so I thought. I have had trouble with my teeth since the quake but have never been able to narrow it down to one tooth. Then I thought that I might have a crack and an abscess in a tooth I had a root canal in last year. So I went to the dentist this morning and he took an x-ray. No problem. He suggests (and I suspect he is right) that I am holding tension in my jaw and he says I should massage my jaw and temples for at least 3 minutes before I go the bed. (Note to Brits on the NHS: cost of my visit including x-ray = about 6 pounds.)

One of my students wrote about her experience of the big quake. She was working in a dental surgery and when the quake struck the patients tried to get up and run out and had to be restrained.

They must be tired...

2011-04-25T12:05:00.007+09:00

Thank Buddha that`s over. The local elections were yesterday. Looking at the official board for sticking up the permitted election posters, I see there were 4 female candidates. And 32 male. One male has his wife lovingly attached to his arm. Haven`t seen that before. Another male is holding a baby. That`s definitely a new one. More and more candidates are smiling. It`s not traditionally Japanese to smile in photos .... or in daily life. Most candidates prefer to present a serious face demonstrating that they will work for the electorate diligently. But smiling is becoming more popular. The only problem with that is that most of the candidates are older males and after 40 have seriously bad teeth. Or seriously false teeth. And I have to go by teeth because their election policies are not written on the posters. I assume they have some ....

This week I have been coming home around 9 or 10 in the evening and at least 10 male candidates have been congregating at the station entrance bowing and shouting "Otsukaresama desu" - You must be tired - at the passengers. There were no female candidates there. I`m not sure they`d get a positive response in the evenings when they should be home cooking their husband`s dinner and helping their kids with their homework. However, one early morning last week I was walking past the day care centre when the parents were dropping their kids off and a female candidate, Tanaka, was bowing and saying good morning to them as they went in. And then ... she bowed to me and said good morning to me. And I`m - obviously - not even a registered voter. (I pay full taxes here but I`m not allowed to vote.) No other candidate has acknowledged my presence at all and no-one has attempted to give me an election leaflet. I thought she seemed very canny indeed, catching the mothers since it is other women who are more likely to vote for her.

The rest of the week their election vans have been crawling up and down the streets, broadcasting the candidate`s greetings over a tannoy. Often the candidate is not even in the van so there are usually two young women wearing white gloves waving regally out of the windows.

So that`s all over now and I hope Tanaka - whose teeth looked real - got a seat. The buddhist monk with his begging bowl can have his patch outside the station back now. But the "Go Home Yanks" lot who want all American airbases removed from Japanese soil have been absent since the quake, when GI`s were sent up north to help with the rescue efforts and a large warship was parked off the Fukushima coast with a disaster team on board.

PM Naoto Kan`s party did very badly ... did I need to mention that?

Do not be deceived by demagoguery

2011-04-24T16:11:00.011+09:00

(View from the chalkface Wednesday evening, whilst waiting for the graduate class to arrive.)

On Thursday evening I was reading in bed when there was a shake. It went on for about 2 minutes and was a little stronger than usual. I carried on reading. After about 10 minutes it began again. And then stopped. Another 10 or so minutes, another shake. This went on for about an hour and after the 5th shake I gave up reading, turned the light off and pulled the covers over my head. A uni office staff member said she and her daughter were so scared they crouched on the floor in their apartment. It was a strange evening. Definitely something is on the move in the Kanto area. So on Friday, instead of hitting the bookshops after work, I just came home. After the big one, a student said she walked from our university to Shinjuku in two hours. I estimate that from Shinjuku to my home is another 3 hours walk. So I think I will stay local whenever possible over the next few weeks. Just until we`ve got this 8 out of the way. Or we`re all fed up waiting for it.

I`m still translating the emergency booklet. From 10 minutes to 3 days after a quake we "must not be deceived by demagoguery". (デマに惑わされない。Dema ni madowasarenai.） I assume they`re referring to press releases from TEPCO.

I have been talking with staff and students about the small changes we have all made in our lives since March 11. No-one is making long trips. Plane and train tickets for the Golden Week holiday which starts this Friday are well down. Why go somewhere if you are not sure you can get back?

I have eaten the contents of my freezer. In a quake or a blackout, the word is that your fridge and freezer will stay cold for up to 5 hours. But after that the food is spoiled. So I have been replacing frozen vegetables with canned. And frozen meat with Spam!

I have taken only one bath since the quake. Every time I feel like a bath we have a shake and I change my mind.

My computer monitor is still taped to my desk and when I go out I put my netbook on the sofa with a cushion on top.

I stopped jogging for a while but, as is usual at the start of a new semester, a female student has already come up to me, prodded my stomach and called me a chubster so I`ve started again. (I gained one kilo ...)

There are lots of other small things but some Japanese people are loathe to admit that they have made any changes to their lives, even when it is obvious that they have. (And that includes criticism of the flyjin, the foreigners who left after Fukushima ... blew up or whatever it did ... I was at Tokyo station that Tuesday and it was PACKED with Japanese leaving too.) They don`t want to be seen to be going against the permitted Japanese norms. The Japanese people, as a nation, are brilliant in disasters. They simply carry on as if nothing has happened. They work round the clock to achieve the only permitted solution, a complete return to exactly how everything was before. But this rigid stoicism is what makes them unbearable in normal circumstances, refusing to consider new ideas or see any leeway. Which is why, although they have survived the geological disaster up to now, it may well be the political and economic repercussions which are the real catastrophe.

Coming soon ... the next one?

2011-04-20T22:07:00.009+09:00

(View from my office window this evening: the sun going down over Ikebukuro)

Back to the chalkface. Lessons have begun and undergrads are now around full-time. Textbooks, paper and pens, not so much. There still seems to be a fair amount of chaos post-quake and this first week I am just introducing the courses and distributing course outlines.

The two things I forget every semsester: whiteboard markers, and just how hard teaching is on your feet. I like to wear suits and heels for the first week and this evening, after my third class of the day, I had to take off my shoes and walk back to my office in my popsox.

I was talking with an adult graduate school student this evening. She had waited 7 hours for a bus after the quake and when she arrived home she found deep cracks in the walls. "So did you get them repaired?" I asked. "No" she said, "I`m waiting until after the next one. The official word from the meteorological office is that the Kanto area (which includes Tokyo) is due for a big shake sooner rather than later. In fact, I get the distinct impression that people just want this big shake to come and then they can relax and get on with life.

I found an emergency manual in Japanese in my uni pigeonhole this morning, and emergency posters have appeared in classrooms. The students don`t bother to read them and I can`t understand them completely. (Although there is one particular instruction that I often see in Japan which I thoroughly enjoy. 無理はしない、Muri wa shinai. Literal translation: Do not do impossible things.) They really should have been up BEFORE the quake. Part-time English-language teachers have not received anything. I checked.

That Day ...

2011-04-17T13:01:00.016+09:00

Other than posting the video of the quake I haven`t written that much about the day itself. Now that the new semester is starting I have been catching up and sharing stories with people I have not seen since before that day. (There are also many `foreigners` whom I have not been able to contact by phone and I am assuming that they have not yet returned to Japan. And may not return ever.) What we all seem to remember is not the quake itself but what happened after, mainly the aftershocks and their effects.

I had been working on something - can`t remember what - all morning on my computer and after lunch I had put the dishes in the sink and sat down on my sofa to read a journal article about narrative structures which I`m usually quite interested in, but this article was so staggeringly dull even for an academic piece that I dozed off. When the quake started it was the usual shake that we get once or twice a month so I wasn`t in the least worried. However on the Wednesday some friends of my sister had arrived in Japan on holiday right around the time of a 5 in the Narita area. As one of them is a geologist he said he was interested in quakes, and when I met them on the Thursday I said he might be lucky enough to feel a shake or two while they were here. (Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!) So on the Friday when the tremor started I got up and hunted around for my camera which also records video and I turned it on. By this time the quake had been going on for about a minute and I thought I might miss it altogether but when I pressed the record button it was still going. Then it kept going ... and then it got bigger. It was only when my tape recorder fell on my foot that it occured to me that this was bigger than we were generally used to but it was only when I actually couldn`t stand up any more that I decided to get under my table. When I crawled back out, the video recorded the time at 2.49 so the whole thing lasted 3 minutes. At this point I realised that the quake was more serious than usual but since the building was still standing and none of the windows were broken I didn`t feel too worried. The ground was still undulating as I put some outdoor clothes on (the day was sunny and bright but it was still below 10 degrees C outside) and then went out. As I was changing my clothes, the quake siren sounded.

Outside a woman had fallen off her bicycle. She was standing but, like me, she was shaken so we stood together and said things like, "Kowakatta ne!" (That was scary,wasn`t it?) and "Sugoi shock, da ne!" (That was a real shock!). We stood there and looked around at other people who had evacuated their homes. The hairdressers from the salon next door were squatting on the pavement - this is what many people do during quakes, they kneel or squat and look up for falling objects - and the ground and telephone poles and wires was swaying non-stop. Groups of people were standing around all along the road. After about 5 minutes, they began to disperse and the hairdressers went back inside. The woman said she was going to go home and I went back inside and up to my 3rd floor apartment. I looked around at all the things that had fallen on the floor and thought that I ought to phone my parents in England sooner rather than later to let them know I was OK. (As an oral historian who interviews foreigners in Japan I have several recordings of Kobe quake stories. One woman who was there said that the phones worked for the first half an hour or so but then went off.) I phoned home and said, "Hi, it`s me and I`m fine. There`s been a big quake but I`m fine". They said they would get on Skype so I hung up. At this point I didn`t know if we would still have internet but we did. (Sure enough the phones and mobile lines soon went off so the internet became an important resource for people over the following days and has remained so since.)

The aftershocks were constant, the apartment building shook every few minutes and whenever I put something back on a shelf it was shaken right off again. Dad put on the BBC in England and after some time he said "Tsunami!" so I turned on the TV in my apartment. The BBC and NHK were showing exactly the same scenes so I recall seeing the film of the house burning whilst it was being swept inland by the tsunami wave but as everything was in Japanese at that point I had no idea where it was nor how widespread it was. Also over the next few hours I had to go outside or get under my table every few minutes so I didn`t watch the TV much. And I still haven`t seen most of the tsunami footage, nor do I want to. (I only found out a couple of weeks ago that there was a tsunami in Chiba, just east of Tokyo.) The rest of the day I was on Skype or under the table or outside with the hairdressers. I kept the TV on with the sound down and at some point NHK started broadcasting their tsunami warning in English, Portuguese, Chinese and Korean as well. But I got most of my news from the BBC. I don`t recall hearing anything about the Fukushima nuclear power plant other than that it had been damaged. Radiation was not mentioned at that point, at least in English.

In the early evening, I stopped Skyping and decided to tidy up. The earth was still moving constantly. Around 9pm I decided to take a quick shower and it was at this point that I realised I had not eaten or drunk anything since the quake because the quake had tripped the emergency cutoff and the building had no gas. I hadn`t even made a cup of tea. I went outside to look at all the windows in the building but no-one was home. (All trains and subways had stopped. People in the centre of Tokyo either had to sleep in their offices or walk home. None of my neighbours made it home that night.) So I went back upstairs, hunted out my gas safety manual and sat for half an hour looking at a very complicated diagram of the gas `junction box` or whatever it is with a button on it. There was a picture of a hand removing the cap from the button and then a finger pressing the button. Then a cartoon figure in glasses pointed to a bubble which said "3 minutes". I got my torch and went outside with the manual and opened the junction box. I took the cap off the button and then hesitated whilst I wondered if I was about to incinerate the neighbourhood. This was probably the scariest moment of the day. I pressed the button. Nothing happened. I came back in and waited for three minutes. Then I turned on a gas ring. It worked! I took a very quick shower, made a cup of tea and a sandwich and went back to sit in front of the TV. Every few minutes we had aftershocks and the TV screen would make a beeping noise and then the details of the quake would begin to scroll across the screen. The tsunami warning was still in full force as I recall. In the end it was all too much and I switched the TV off. When it`s on and constantly giving out warnings or showing tsunami damage you just stand in front of it for hours and hours which is what I had done.

When Japanese people are expecting a big shake they sometimes say they will sleep in their clothes. I didn`t sleep in my clothes but I did put my futon under my table and slept there for two nights. I didn`t find out until I saw the animation above for the first time yesterday that there were 575 aftershocks, on average 1 every 20 minutes in the week after the big one and over a hundred that first night, but I can believe it. I don`t think I got more than a few minutes` sleep that whole weekend after the quake because every time I dozed off the table would start shaking and books would fall off the shelf again. In fact my starkest memory of the whole incident was lying in my bed watching all my furniture and the wall and books and the curtains lurching back and forth all night in the semi darkness.

I don`t recall if there was much traffic outside that first evening. The noise of the quakes drowned everything else out. But from Saturday morning it was very very quiet. Saturdays and Sundays are usually pretty busy with people driving out to parks and shopping centres. That weekend, nothing. Gradually I heard my neighbours returning home and the crashes and bangs as they started to pick up their apartments.

That Saturday and Sunday I was very tired. I don`t clearly recall what I did except speak to my parents on Skype again and try to contact my sister`s friends which I was finally able to do. (I was able to get hold of them on their British mobile phone with global roaming when I was not able to contact any friends on the Japanese mobile system. Why?) The quakes kept on coming all day and all night.

Gradually that weekend I became aware that there were problems at Fukushima but it was not until the Tuesday when I received an email from an expat who told me they were leaving Japan that I switched the TV on and watched the press conference in which someone ... Kan or Edano ... I think it was Naoto Kan ... announced that they had lost control of the plant and that radiation was escaping and was heading who knew where. (In fact by that Tuesday morning it had already reached Tokyo.) They told people in the immediate area to evacuate and people within 30km to stay indoors. That is when people really started to panic. I packed some bags and headed down to Nagoya just ahead of the mass evacuation of foreigners and Japanese on the Wednesday morning. By that time, I had not had a full night`s sleep since the quake and I was completely punch drunk. It is only recently that I have begun to find out what was actually going on during those first few days. I did not know that there were so many aftershocks but of course I felt them. In fact I have felt two small tremors whilst writing this but people have come to be very blase about them now. A 5? Not getting out of bed for that. A 4? Not really even feeling those any more.

I have to say though that like many many people I have "quake sickness" which is thinking we are having a quake when are not. It`s something to do with the inner ear and general quake tension. A lot of people including myself seem to be more tense when we don`t have them than when we do.

Time for lunch. Every time we have a shake I get really really hungry, especially for meat or raw tuna. On the plus side I have started sweating again. Many people, including myself, got very dry hands and skin after the big one. We seemed to stop sweating altogether. Now the sun is out and the weather is warm and all seems to be well again. Enjoy the animation.

Quake Sound

2011-04-16T20:33:00.003+09:00

I think the scariest thing about quakes is not the sight but the sound. And this is VERY scary.

The quake ate my homework ...

2011-04-16T12:09:00.012+09:00

Knew it. Lovely sunny morning. Prior to getting started on my uni lecturer stuff, at 11.19am I was relaxing on my sofa with my morning tea and In Style magazine (thanks so much for that, M in Buckingham) when I felt the vibrations coming up through the sofa. I grabbed my camera and recorded the Mag 5.9, although in my neighbourhood it was only a Mag 3. They`re getting closer though. What you don`t see is my cup of tea go flying all over my papers including my uni lecturer stuff. My papers are now drying outside ...

Back in 1995, when I was an assistant high school teacher in central Japan, I was woken early by a fairly sizeable quake. No damage, just a Mag 2-3 level shake. I went to school and at the morning teachers` meeting the quake was mentioned. Then I taught the first class at 9am. Walking back to the teacher`s room later I was passed in the corridor by the science teacher. She was crying into the sleeve of her white lab coat and when I asked her if she was OK, she said, "This is the worst ever earthquake in my lifetime". Blimey, I thought, she`s a bit sensitive. It was only a 3 tops. When I got back to the teachers` room the TV was on. As it was usually only allowed on for the national high school baseball finals, I knew something was up. I joined the other teachers round the set and saw lots of buildings on fire. Back then there was very little in English and no internet or mobile phones, so I had to rely on the Japanese English-language teachers to tell me anything I needed to know. But there were no English-speaking teachers around. I was able, in my beginner`s Japanese, to ask where the fires were and a P.E. teacher just said, Kobe. (P.E. teachers tend to speak simply and clearly and slowly so I often went to them or to the cleaning lady - the other teachers tended to tie themeslves in knots trying to simplify their Japanese enough for me to understand and they tended to speed up the more embarrassed they became.) Well, well, I said, this morning we had a quake here and now there are fires in Kobe. It`s all go today, isn`t it ... or something equally as dumb. It had to be explained to me later by my supervisor that a quake did not have the same seismic intensity ALL OVER, that it was at its strongest at the epicentre - in this case Kobe - and weaker several hundred miles away where we were. The quake and the fires were connected. Duh. Now, nearly 20 years and a PhD later, whenever we have a quake I always go immediately to the Japan Meteorological Agency website to find the epicentre (jma.go.jp/en/quake). So when you hear that Japan has been hit with a 6 or a 7 or (the one we have been told to expect within the next three months) an 8, don`t assume that`s everywhere. Or was that just me? Duh.

Back to my tea-stained magazine ...

Ex-student Y`s earthquake story

2011-04-15T16:14:00.004+09:00

As they say in the old cowboy movies, "It`s quiet .... TOO quiet". There have been no shakes since Wednesday. Nothing at all. I`d quite got used to the aftershocks. Most days when I went to my office there might be a book fallen off a shelf or a pile of papers that had slid to the floor. Then when I got home, there would be a bottle of shampoo toppled into the bath or my full-length mirror on wheels would have migrated half a metre across the room. It was like being haunted by a rather apathetic poltergeist. Is it all over, I wonder? And by all over I mean are we back to the old routine of a minor tremor every couple of weeks or a slightly larger one once a month? Tokyo is always moving.

As promised, here is ex-student Y`s earthquake story. He works for a travel company in one of the high rises in Shinjuku.

When it happend, i was in my office of 6th floor. (it is consist of 16 floors)
At the biginning of the earthquake, i thought it will be end soon, but it was not. it was harder and
harder, people started screaming and everything was dropped down on the floor. Then one of my
colleague shouted "we need to go out!!". Then we tried to go out from the office, but it was not easy
to do it because of the shocks. I managed to go down the stairs and fortunately, i went out with no
problem. My colleagues were also safe. After a hour, it was going to settle down, so we went back to
the work. We thought that we survived from the horrible happening, but this was just a biginning of
the worst situation.

First of all, we couldn't go back
Next, there was no food.
Last, we are face to the bad economic situation.

As for the result of the first and second one, we cooperated eachother, share a little food and slept on
the floor with cardboard. We made it!

The biggest problem is last one. There is still some after shocks in these days, so people dont go out,
buy, and pay. I cant expect that when we can go back to the normal day, but im sure that this happening
will make us be stronger and have a good future.

Love his upbeat ending .... so Japanese. Ex-student Y and his colleagues spent the night in Shinjuku. Then they woke up and did a full day`s work.

Gossip, rumours and a little information ...

2011-04-14T10:21:00.012+09:00

First day of the new semester. Or rather first evening, as it was a graduate school class. I arrived in time to watch the disaster safety demonstration carried out by several gnarled members of the Tokyo Fire Department. They demonstrated how to use the fire extinguishers. Then one of the admin managers took over and explained many important points, few of which I could understand. I said to a nearby admin person that I couldn`t understand what he was talking about but she said neither could she. "He has his own language" she said. I asked if there would be any information available in English for the native English-language teachers and the dwindling number of overseas students but she said no.

Later when I went to the foreign studies faculty teachers` room, some of the foreign teachers had heard a rumour that during an emergency all the large metal fire doors in B building would automatically close and we would be trapped if we didn`t know the `special way` to open them again. But no-one knew the `special way`. People were worried. Some teachers made the point that we had responsibility for our students during class time but that the foreign faculty members had no idea what to do. Our campus is in the middle of Tokyo and has no open space. We looked out of the windows and spied a car park across the road. "The building next to it is old and will probably come down but the car park could be usable" I said. We decided we would evacuate our students to the car park. On my way to B building for my evening class I stopped by admin to ask about the `special way`. They had no idea what I was talking about. We went to the building manager. He said that the special way was just to give the doors a really good push with both hands. So much for that. But it highlights the problem of being a foreigner in this country during a disaster. Our access to information is limited, so we go by gossip and rumour ... and the foreign media. That is why so many foreigners left so suddenly. We just didn`t know what was going on. Having said that, neither did the Japanese but they have family and jobs here. We had a discussion in graduate class last night about how far you trust the Japanese government and no-one, Japanese or foreigner, would trust them as far as they could throw them. (The Chinese students, like me, get their information from the BBC. )

On a related piece of gossip, a teacher told me that she had heard from a radiation expert at Tokyo University, that the reason TEPCO are coming across as utterly clueless in press conferences is that many of the people who work at Fukushima are part-timers, who are in fact local farmers supplementing their incomes. And they have no idea what they are actually doing. They are just following orders from the higher-ups ... what`s the betting the higher-ups are in Tokyo? Can that story really be true? Who knows? I also heard yesterday that the `rumour` that the emperor was moved to Kyoto last month was a lie. Yeah, right. Show me a picture of the emperor in Tokyo last month and I`ll believe it. I notice the Imperials are being wheeled out on every occasion now, visiting shelters and evacuation centres in the Tokyo area. Even Princess Masako has been allowed out.

On the subway after class, I met a staff member from admin. We discussed the possiblity of getting some emergency information in English for foreign staff and students (though many of the overseas students have cancelled their visit). Apparently the local government office may have something. She told me that in an emergency every admin staff member has a role; one to check buildings and offices, one to stay with the injured, one to phone the emergency services and one .... to accompany students to the evacuation point ..... on the Tokyo University campus! At last, some actual information. I also asked whether that admin manager really was odd. "Oh yes," she said, "Sometimes he even goes home before the women". Weirdo.

Rattle, Stop, Rattle Rattle, Stop ... Aftershocks

2011-04-13T08:41:00.011+09:00

What are aftershocks like? Take a look at the video below. We get these every 2-3 hours. They aren`t strong, they don`t do any damage and we just carry on whatever we are doing and hope that the shaking doesn`t get any bigger. Sometimes they go from side to side, less often up and down, and occasionally they swirl in a circle. The swirly ones make you feel as if you are having a dizzy spell. As you can see my bookcase shakes but doesn`t move, whereas I have to move my sofa and my desk back into place once a week. Aftershocks generally don`t last long either. I`ve been trying to capture one for a while but was only able to video the one below yesterday because my camera was on the desk in front of me at the moment it started up. Also yesterday was a busy day for aftershocks, 30 according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. And two of those were 6.3. This morning, we`ve had two already and it`s only 8.30am.

7.1, 6.3 .6.3 ....

2011-04-12T14:46:00.007+09:00

A busy day on the tectonic plates. After last evening`s shake and a couple of hours of aftershocks, overnight there was almost nothing and then we started the morning with a 6.3. It was a bigger shake than last night, not because the magnitude was higher (because it wasn`t, it was lower than last night`s 7.1) but because it was pretty much a direct hit, right under Tokyo. Chiba to be exact which is the eastern part. Narita airport closed immediately, I heard. I was getting ready to go to yoga class and was slightly concerned that the quakes could continue all day but, to be honest, I really wanted to do something relaxing so I headed out at 9am. Several of the city`s rail lines had been temporarily knocked out by the quake but I got a train OK - albeit one that stopped before Chiba - and enjoyed a nice, relaxing class. I`m still very stiff though. It`s one thing to be out of condition, but I feel like a heavy stone, due to being slightly tense all the time. We must be alright though. If Ishihara is correct and this is divine retribution then we`re in the clear. Our class has a photo of the Dalai Lama in the changing room. Could do without the giant crack in the wall though, a reminder of the big one last month.

That reminds me that right after the quake last month one of our class members tried to volunteer for the relief effort at Saitama Super Arena but was turned away. Many, many people turned up to help out but at that point they really needed people with skills, in particular forensic dentists to help identify bodies. Today one class member had a petition which she asked people to sign. It was a petition demanding the closure of Hamaoka nuclear power station which is on the coast in central Japan. "So what then will we do for energy?" asked the other western class member. "We must change our lives" she answered. I can`t see Japan being able to survive without nuclear power. Japan is resource-poor (which is why they invaded the rest of Asia in the Second World War). The only viable alternative would be to buy gas from Russia, and since Japan and Russia are still technically at war, that would be a big loss of face for Japan. I didn`t sign, even though Fukushima is now a Level 7 disaster.

After class I met a student in a coffee shop to write her a reference. In all the time I`ve worked in Japan this has been the worst year for graduate jobs and many students even had their job offers rescinded after the big quake last month. So hopefully this student will be successful in her application to get an internship abroad. I was on my way back home when there was another 6+, this time back up Fukushima way. I didn`t feel it though as I was walking at street level. I recall a colleague telling me that her parents went out very early morning for their walk and when they returned, she was crouching in the destroyed apartment of their 11th story home. They, being at ground level, had noticed nothing. That was in Osaka and it was the Great Kobe Earthquake. We had a 5 a few days ago but I was on a train and no-one noticed anything. Yet when I am at home, I notice all the tremors because I am always sitting at my computer. I get a few seconds` warning because my computer monitor starts to sway.

Marketing opportunity: I have noticed that in any office footage of quakes, people make a grab for their computer monitors. Can`t someone come up with a way to clamp them to the desk? I had mine taped down but it`s inconvenient because I can`t move it around. How about weighing them down with bags of rice? I will try it.

Not Going Out?!

2011-04-11T09:47:00.010+09:00

MONDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE: All OK here so far. Today`s 7.1 was about a 4 in the Tokyo area. The apartment has not stopped moving in the hour since the quake. Damage up north again, I hear.

SUNDAY EVENING:
The media is saying that Japanese people are expressing jishiku or extreme self-restraint and not going out, not doing cherry blossoming viewing, not spending money enjoying themselves - or using up precious electricity - whilst others are suffering up north. The media was obviously not in Shinjuku last night. It was heaving. After battling the crowds - Japanese people are the SLOWEST walkers in the world - I met up with Y and K, two ex-seminar students, now Japanese salarymen. We went to a restaurant (which was packed with people also not expressing jishiku at all) and began the usual way these days, by swapping our earthquakes stories. Y and K said they would write their stories down for this blog. Another ex-seminar student, N, is now a policeman and is up in Sendai helping with the relief programme.

I was reading an article about a sake brewer up in Fukushima whose vats survived the quake but who is in danger of going out of business now because of jishiku. He urged people to get out and get buying again. So we did our bit for the economic recovery of the north, some more than others, right K?

K said that there is talk going round that Fukushima women will not make good brides because of the radiation. Doesn`t apply to the men, I see. The same thing happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survivers could not find spouses because of the risk of birth defects. Even today some families use private detectives to research a prospective spouse`s family history in case there is a Hiroshima or Nagasaki connection. And yet that bloke who experienced both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions married, had healthy kids and lived into his 90s.

Also now - according to the media - some Fukushima evacuees are being turned away from doctor`s surgeries. Some doctors are refusing to treat them, presumably in case their ailments are caused by radiation. And these are supposedly educated people. Certificates proving that you have been tested and found free of radiation are becoming very valuable now.

In other news, Shintaro Ishihara has actually been voted in again for a fourth term as governor of Tokyo. This is the guy who said that the tsunami was tembatsu or divine punishment, apparently for Japan`s egoism. (I think he may have been slightly misquoted in this. Maybe.) Although my personal favourite Ishihara quote is, "old women who live after they have lost their reproductive function are useless and are committing a sin". Who voted for this loon? Nobody I know will admit to doing so. But nobody I know has admitted to actually voting. People under 40 are generally disinterested in politics. I guess it is a generational thing. He has been re-elected by the older generation who support him when he says things like this (about Nanking), "People say that the Japanese made a holocaust but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie".

Lots of teeny tremors this morning. Think I`ll go out to look for bottled water.

Radioactivity, it`s in the air for you and me.

2011-04-08T10:56:00.007+09:00

The only upside to breakfasting on becquerels is that people are listening to Kraftwerk again, in particular the song above. Though they`ll need to update it before they tour here again. They`ll get a big cheer for sure. Other than those in the 30km radius, people in Japan are not that bothered about radiation any more. Judging from the internet, more people seem to be worried about it in the USA and Europe. And I had sushi yesterday. 48 hours ago my lunch could have been swimming up and down outside Fukushima power plant with its mouth open but I doubt it. In all likelihood it was caught and put in cold storage long before the quake.

Ah, Kraftwerk. I adore them! Their music is great for riding the Tokyo subway to. For my students who don`t know their cultural history, the German group Kraftwerk pretty much invented electronic synthesizer rock music, or Krautrock as it was known then. They met as students in the 60`s but became famous in the late 70`s and early 80`s. So they pre-date Japan`s Yellow Magic Orchestra. They sing in German and English. Try `Das Model` below. If you like that go for `The Robot` and `Autobahn`.

They remind me of when I came to Tokyo in 1997 on a monbusho scholarship. In our student dorm there were scholars from many different countries: a Dutch geographer, an Australian lawyer, an Italian architect, a German photographer, one British potter and one British singer, and me, a British historian. There was also a German musician who specialised in experimental synthesizer music, a la Kraftwerk. He had all his furniture moved out of his dorm room to make space for his keyboards, and he was so busy he would walk up and down the corridors throwing his hands in the air and saying, "I have to compose ALL!" Nevertheless he was the only one to sit with me to watch Princess Diana`s funeral. He was very sympathetic but kept looking at me and asking, "So this is emotional now, yah? And now you will cry?" Happy days!

Magnitude 7.4 - 23.32pm

2011-04-08T08:12:00.000+09:00

And another one .... Definitely the biggest since the big one. There has been an increase in aftershocks over the last few days and then yesterday there was almost nothing and I was wondering if it was all over or if we were poised for something big, and we were. I had just switched my light off and the windows were rattling because a strong wind is blowing warm summer air (and pollen) in, and then my whole apartment was shaking and I quickly switched the light on and wondered if I could make it down my ladder to catch hold of my computer monitor but I didn`t think I`d risk it. It didn`t seem to last more than a minute or two and then I went straight to sleep. And then I was woken several times in the night by aftershocks. Tired now. However I didn`t realise it was such a big quake until I woke up this morning and read the papers. It wasn`t that big in Tokyo, 4 tops.

I think, like a lot of people, I am just tired and fed up of the whole situation. Not scared so much. I don`t like being in my 9th floor office and I do think twice before I make plans to go out - I keep a map book in my bag in case I have to walk home. I got really annoyed with my university for being disorganised this semester with no clear term dates and suggestions to move times of classes. But it`s not the university`s fault. It`s not anyone`s fault. There`s no-one to blame and say, fix it now. All I can do is shake my fist at the ground and say, damn you tectonic plates! (So it`s the fault`s fault.) A lot of people are feeling the same. A couple of teachers and several students have admitted to recurring nightmares. Not me ... because I can`t get any ruddy sleep!

Pray for Japan

2011-04-06T18:12:00.001+09:00

Back at work pretty much full-time from now on, if not actually in my office then out and about in Tokyo trying to catch up on research and carry out all the interviews I had planned to do before the quake.

Yesterday we had guidance for 3rd-year students and part-time teachers. The current record for walking home after the quake now stands at 9 hours, in heels. Many teachers had photos of damaged homes on their phones. Up on the 8th floor I thought they were moving offices but one of the lecturers told me that all the bookshelves came down during the quake so the workmen were bolting the shelves to the walls. Apparently it was the same story in the library. This is DEFINITELY the right time to ask the uni to buy me an e-book reader, out of my research budget of course.

Some universities have applied for a special dispensation from the Department of Education in order to run a 10-week term only. Our uni`s neighbourhood is due to be hit with blackouts soon so I guess we will just have to see how far we can get. We have been advised to do continuous assessment of students in case we don`t make it to final exam week.

Cracks, Squeaks and Wobbles

2011-04-03T18:21:00.000+09:00

Our university held its shortened opening ceremony yesterday. But the semester won`t start for another two weeks because of the quake. Several other universities are starting late but working Saturdays. Rikkyo and Waseda are not starting until after Golden Week at the beginning of May ... and Rikkyo is teaching through the summer vacation. The horror! There is already concern over what will happen once the summer blackout schedule kicks in. Students will have to be let out early. And are we going to have to teach without aircon?! The Japanese Department of Education says that the spring semester this year must be 13 weeks long minimum (it`s usually 15 weeks). It could all be chaos but that is the situation here right now. No-one knows what will happen so we just carry on.

It`s quite nice to be back at work, to catch up with people and hear their quake stories. One teacher walked for 7 hours to get home. Another had no water for two days. Many people lost TV`s, glass items and crockery. It was the heavy and the tall things that seemed to fall. Small, light things just bounced up and down. Maybe the heavy things built up momentum with all the shaking to and fro.

I also had a laugh watching ex-student Y in the uni brass band rocking out with tambourine and bongo drums to medleys from Disney. Three weeks ago we had a series of national disasters. Now we are singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. I hope we don`t have a quake now, I thought, in this giant auditorium with all the curtains and heavy lighting. But we didn`t. We had one later during the graduate guidance meeting on the 8th floor. Most people ignored it.

Back on campus, I have been moved to an office on the 9th floor. Office 99. Bodes well, doesn`t it. The guy who came to do the heavy lifting asked how I felt about the two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves next to my desk. He wobbled them to demonstrate the danger. I had him remove them. Later I walked around campus and found quite a few cracks - see photos above. Back at my apartment, the ladder (to the sleeping platform) squeaks, the laminate floor creaks and the fridge wobbles.

3 weeks ago today

2011-04-01T21:53:00.000+09:00

(Photo: Local maps give locations of emergency shelters, mass evacuation sites and places to get emergency water. I live near all three!)

I can`t believe it was three weeks ago today. So much has happened and Tokyoites have very quickly got used to a new way of living. For example, in exactly 5 minutes I must go downstairs to my local supermarket and get in the queue for water. I will shop in semi-darkness but not only have I grown accustomed to this, I actually prefer it. Later I will go in to work for a meeting but I must leave a little earlier because there are fewer trains (though it is still a VASTLY superior system to any of the rail networks in Britain). And I`ll take my own bottle of water. And I`ll make sure I come home before the blackout.

Going outside in Japan use to be like walking around in a giant video game. Now it has become much quieter and rather peaceful. The vending machines don`t glow at night. Those backlit advertising posters have been switched off. Most shops shut early. My supermarket closes at 8 now instead of 11. I was walking past a pachinko parlour a couple of days ago and it was so quiet that I went in to see how many punters were playing. There were only two or three (and they were obviously professionals). Then I realised that the sounds of the pachinko parlour that you can hear from outside are not actually people playing, it`s all sound effects, piped pachinko music. Which has now been turned off along with all the neon lights. It has made pachinko seem a rather dull game. (Which reminds me that there used to be a channel on Yuusen Housou – subscription cable radio – that was the sound of a pachinko parlour so if you were somewhere you weren`t supposed to be, you could put it on in the background and phone home saying, “I`m just at the pachinko” when in fact you were in a hostess club or a soapland. I can`t really see how being in a pachinko parlour gambling would be that much better but anyway ...)

It`s also surprising how quickly we seem to have forgotten all the hints, tips and resolutions that seemed so important right after the quake. I can barely remember any. I should have written them down.

POST-QUAKE/TSUNAMI/NUKE RESOLUTIONS

Always wear decent clothes, even if I am staying home and have no plans to go out. This particularly applies to brown velour tracky bottoms (and matching velour zip-up jacket, now forever immortalised in my quake video and the reason I didn`t evacuate the building until 2 minutes after everyone else).

*That little resolution lasted a week – I am wearing them right now. I would put them in a clothing bag to send to the people up north but I don`t want to add to their suffering.

Always have easy-to-eat high energy snacks such as biscuits and chocolate in my grab bag. In an emergency you don`t have the time nor inclination to cook. You just spend long periods standing around the TV or the radio or outside or under the table.

*Bought `em, ate `em.

Always have a quick getaway grab bag. Most Japanese have a grab bag in their porches. These contain everything they need for a few days in an evacuation shelter. I have an evacuation wheelie trolley, containing toilet roll, moist towelettes and all my recording equipment. Now minus snacks. It weighs about 10 kg.

Always have a week`s supply of bottled water. Speaking of which, it`s 9.58am – gotta dash ...

10.07am Got water and Kansai strawberries. I left my apartment at 9.58 and was instantly overtaken by several middle-aged women running in the direction of the supermarket queue. Once inside we all went straight to the water shelf. Nothing. Not a drop. Some people took bottled tea instead. I headed off to look for oatmeal (which I haven`t seen since the quake). Just as I turned down the next aisle there was a tap on my shoulder (which would be very handy in the circumstances) and one of the running women said to me, “Pet bottle?” and guided me back to where there were several boxes of 2 litre bottles on an aisle end under a sign which said one bottle per person. So they`re making us search for it now. I thanked the woman and then I was going to thank her again at the checkouts which is Japanese custom but when I got there I realised that I couldn`t recognise her. Every woman in the queue was wearing a black hat and a face mask. They can`t all have colds. It IS hayfever season but I suspect it is anti-radiation protection. I came home and looked out my black cap, but it says “Forensics” on the front and I don`t think that is an appropriate message right now.

Tokyo Supermarket Sweep

2011-03-31T18:11:00.000+09:00

(Still circling the local supermarkets on my bike. Until I return, here`s a copy of an article I wrote for a magazine last week.)

We start the morning with a cluster of magnitude 4`s at 5.30am and a couple of lower 5`s around 9am, all of them originating just north of Tokyo. I am under starter`s orders and outside my local Co-op supermarket at 9.50am. This puts me about 30th in line. When the doors open at 10am we all press into the semi-darkness and proceed at high speed up and down the aisles in a giant snake. At the first stop, the bottled waters, a sign reads that water is limited to one bottle per family. But the shelves are empty. People begin grabbing bottled teas and Calpis and Mitsuya Cider, any clear liquid.

Last week we were told that no radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear reactors could possibly reach Tokyo in any quantity that could be dangerous. Then yesterday the Tokyo Metropolitan government announced that radioactive iodine in sufficient quantities to harm infants has been found in the city tap water and we all learned the word `becquerels`. The level allegedly poses “no immediate danger” to adults, by which most Tokyoites take to mean that they will announce that it IS a danger to adults this time next week. This is the drip-drip method of informing the Japanese public of any major disaster or balls-up, releasing gradually worsening news slowly so that we get used to it and don`t riot in the streets. So the announcement surprises nobody. We simply redouble our efforts to obtain anything edible or drinkable that is not radioactive.

Round the corner to the milks and there are several dozen but it is unclear where they are from and it takes time to read the backs of the cartons so we keep moving. The yoghurts are very confusing. There are about 10 large pots but none specify their prefecture of origin. Some people grab one anyway. I pick up two pots of tapioca pudding in coconut milk, and we move on. There is no rice, Pot Noodles or tofu. In the fruit and vegetables section I pick up bananas from the Philippines. A notice on the spinach shelf reads, “This is not from the affected area” but no-one is going for it. There are some breads and rolls but now people are wary. What kind of milk and water was used to make them? Into the final furlong, and I pull ahead and get the last packet of toilet rolls. I`m checked out at 10.10am. As I hurry home, dozens of women are arriving on bicycles. The city tannoy comes on to announce the day`s blackout schedule.

I dump my haul in the porch and am on my bicycle by 10.12am. This time I cycle to a supermarket that is closer to the train station. Mama`s Plate is used mainly by commuters so I figure fewer housewives will put this shop on their hit list. I go first to the water section. There is none so I buy three bottles of club soda and a carton of tropical pineapple juice. Fukushima is not known for its balmy climate. Or at least it wasn`t before the nuclear reactor caught fire. At the milks, an old man is conferring loudly on his mobile phone with his wife who seems to be in another supermarket up the road. “It says `Oishii` (Delicious) brand milk on the packet. Is that OK?” He is given instructions. He calls over to a woman stacking shelves and asks where the `Furusato` (Hometown) brand milk is from. I am examining a carton of Nagano milk but am hesitant. Nagano is south west of Fukushima. In what direction was the wind blowing yesterday? And would the cows have been indoors or outdoors in the rain? The stacker shouts back that the `Hometown` milk is from Hokkaido and several of us make a grab for it. I add a papaya from Chile and check out. I make my regular stop at the electronics store but there are still no torches, no batteries and no portable radios of any kind, just `sold out` signs hanging from gaps on the shelves. All the gadgets are switched off to save electricity and there are more sales clerks milling around than customers. As I leave the shop empty-handed two Chinook helicopters fly over, heading for Fukushima.Cycling home, a road is temporarily blocked. There are now so many people cycling in all directions that there has been an accident at the crossroads. A young man is sitting on the tarmac looking at the grazes on his hands. When I pass the Co-op again, the bicycles stacked up outside look like a giant pile of scrap metal. Just as I turn into my road, a delivery truck goes by with a group of middle-aged women cycling furiously behind it. I am back home by 10.40am, ready to begin the day`s work but with no inclination to do so. It will be the same drill again tomorrow. This constant struggle to get safe food and clean water is making us all realize how good we had it, and how well-ordered our lives were before the Tohoku earthquake on Friday 11 March.

Clean us up, Scottie ...

2011-03-26T19:44:00.000+09:00

Queues and rationing. Naoto Kan was right, it IS like the Second World War. Milk, rice, water, tofu, and toilet paper are all rationed to one per household. So you`ve gotta get to the supermarkets early. I arrived 15 minutes before opening time yesterday and I was still 30th in line. AND they`ve put up the price of water. Last week it was 98-120 Yen per 2 litre bottle. Today in the one shop that had any at all, it was 298 and 368.

Financial tip: Only `Scottie` loo paper and tissues seem to get getting through. They`re in most shops when the doors open but they go quickly. Buy shares in whoever owns that brand. You could really clean up...

Tokyo Disneyland ...Liquifaction

2011-03-25T21:11:00.000+09:00

Eastern Tokyo was hit much much harder than the west, where I live. Urayasu is said to be sinking slowly back into the sea of Tokyo Bay. This area was created from reclaimed land. So was Tokyo Disneyland and Disney Sea. Take a look at this news report of the damage inflicted by liquifaction during the quake. It`s in Japanese but you don`t really need to understand the words, just look at the pictures. The pavement moves, liquid seeps up from the ground. In many homes there is no sewage, no gas and no electricity. And Disneyland is still closed. I can hear the wailing of my students from here. What are they going to do in their free time now ... homework?!

I hope to be back blogging by the weekend but I am currently too busy doing the supermarket sweep, heading out every morning to try to get basic food supplies and water.

Wednesday 23rd March 2011

2011-03-23T09:57:00.000+09:00

Freezing cold last night. This March weather is very strange. It should be warmer by now. I planned to have a nice lie-in this morning and just get up seconds before my local supermarket opened at 10am. But here in Japan we start the day the earthquake way, with a 6 at 7.12am (in Fukushima, not as strong in Tokyo) and several more until 8am when I gave up and got up. The tremors/quakes can last 2-3 minutes so I suspect it`s not just the one quake. Apparently the big one last Friday was three quakes, with one setting the others off all down the tectonic plate.

I put my glass bottles on the floor and headed out the the supermarket at 10.03am. It is 30 seconds from my apartment but I passed two people coming away with packets of toilet roll. Was I too late?! Apparently I was. When I got in there, all the loo roll had gone. There was no tofu, Pot Noodles or rice. The only cereal they had was All Bran. There were some meats but I think most people are being careful with food that must be chilled or frozen because of the power outages. There were a few yoghurts but I couldn`t understand why they hadn`t been snapped up so I didn`t touch them. There was no soya milk but I got a soya drink called, `Nice Soya, like Milk` or `Milk-like Nice Soya`. Water and milk were limited to one bottle per household per supermarket visit. I guess Japanese families can send family members in one at a time but I`m too conspicuous to get away with that. The last time I saw another foreigner - a middle-aged couple - in my local supermarket was last summer and I stared and stared. They were lily white and flabby, with real bottoms and muscles in their upper arms. I got one 2 litre bottle of water from the southern Japanese Alps because the supermarket own brand didn`t specify the region of origin. I think there`s going to be a lot of that in the future. If manufacturers could just write "Not from Fukushima, Ibaraki or Miyagi" in large letters on the front of packets that would be a great help. I also got egg biscuits with a shelf-life of six months and Kanpan which are Japan`s traditional `disaster` biscuits with a shelf-life of a year (no, I don`t know why the packet has a Scotsman playing bagpipes on the front). When I got to the checkout my hands were frozen. There is no heating in the store and people shop in semi-darkness.

I was back home in ten minutes and straight on my bike to the Summit supermarket further up the road, slightly more upmarket. They had no flat water at all but I got some sparkling. They had Scottie toilet paper only. No yoghurts at all, some Pot Noodles, some soya milk. There were plenty of vegetables, fruit and some milk but I noticed that everyone spent a lot of time reading the backs of packets. I bought a mango from Peru, a papaya from the Philippines, and a pumpkin from New Zealand. I was back home by 11.10am. I think I am now pretty well set up for the next few days as long as I can get bread from somewhere. As long as you aren`t too fussy about what you eat (but are strict about where it comes from), you can get by.

What I didn`t buy: I didn`t buy any mixed vegetable or fruit juices because I couldn`t know where each item came from. I was going to buy a piece of hot, spicy chicken from the deli counter but I noticed that no-one else was touching it and I thought a ready-cooked chicken might be a good way to hide the evidence.

The city tannoy system keeps coming on and announcing something. Surely no-one in my neighbourhood can hear the words. For the first week it was a man`s voice which didn`t carry at all. Now it has been downgraded to a woman`s job we can at least hear a high-pitched `Arigatou gozaimasu` (Thank you) at the end of the mysterious announcements. It`s probably about the blackouts.

After lunch I got back on my bike and cycled to the station bakery. They had a couple of varieties of white bread,`Royal` and `English`,(since when has anaemic white bread been English?) but no wholemeal, so I didn`t buy anything. On the way back I paid my Tepco electricity bill, grudgingly.

I got back home at 3. Same drill again tomorrow.

Monday 21st March 2011

2011-03-21T21:13:00.000+09:00

First of all, thanks to everyone who turned out to help me record my podcast and also to those who joined us for dinner afterwards. It was all very short notice but luckily I travel prepared, even when I am fleeing disaster areas. While Romanticists seem to live in the 18th century and never leave home without their fountain pens I, as an oral historian, am never without my audio gear, generally enough to sound engineer a Rolling Stones concert at short notice. Thanks everyone.

Sunday morning I awoke with a very sore throat which I blamed on Christopher Robin`s smelly bags of mothballed books. Apparently bookworms are eating some of his antiquarian editions. They particularly like the tasty leather-bound volumes but avoid those that Christopher Robin purchased off a chain smoker (possibly Coleridge). So he thinks mothballs might have the same effect and treats his books by putting them in bags with mothball tablets. The stink is appalling.

However it wasn`t the mothballs. I had actually caught a cold. Nevertheless today, Monday, I travelled back to Tokyo. The regional blackouts were cancelled but rail companies are running disrupted services, lights are off in stations and the trains which do run are not particularly crowded, especially when you consider today is a national holiday. My apartment suffered almost no damage from the second quake (last Tuesday). I went straight down to my local supermarket to buy bottled water because, since some radiation was detected in the tap water, I think I will use bottled water for the foreseeable future. However there is no water, no tofu, no meat or fish, no rice or Pot Noodles or sliced bread. And VERY LITTLE CHOCOLATE! I will try again tomorrow morning. In the mean time I will drink beer.

Finally, thanks SO MUCH to Christopher Robin for putting me up and putting up with me for a whole week. Thanks to CR, I am the only person in Japan to have fled the disaster and promptly improved my standard of living. I don`t know if he reads my blog because he`s not good with new-fangled 20th century gadgets like computers but if you are reading this, CR, I owe you a fancy dinner at the restaurant of your choice next time I am in town. And a new fountain pen.

Saturday 19th March 2011

2011-03-20T15:01:00.000+09:00

A friend of Christopher Robin`s says that the main effects of the quake/tsunami/reactor disasters will be economic, that Japan is about to enter a nuclear winter without having experienced a nuclear explosion. His friend is a lecturer on nuclear issues in Tokyo, where he is staying put.

Christopher Robin makes us Avocado milkshakes from a recipe he was taught as a boy by his Sri Lankan maid. (His family have two maids.) He loves cooking but says that at home he never had to think about food. It just arrived. He didn`t clean either.

But Saturday is cleaning day. He gives me a cloth and tells me to wipe all the surfaces. Then he gives me a wet cloth and tells me to wipe all the surfaces again. Then he sparingly sprays the bathtub and I wipe it with a dry cloth and then a wet cloth. (He doesn`t like using chemical cleaning products.) These are his small rituals to cope with the chaos of my presence in his apartment.

In the afternoon, we go to his university where a group of us record a radio podcast that I have written about Japan and academic life. Then we go out to dinner (again). I ask my Japanese friends if they are worried about Fukushima radiation but they say they are worried about the fact that the Hamaoka nuclear power station is just up the road, and that the quakes seem to be making their way down the country. To prove their point that night we have, not a quake, but a jolt.

Friday 18th March 2011

2011-03-19T14:38:00.000+09:00

Wake to the sound of the Hallelujah chorus which Christopher Robin uses to time his boiled egg. It must be firm on the outside and completely raw on the inside otherwise, he says, his day is ruined. He and the English lecturer head off to an antiques fair, while I take his supermarket `Heart Point` card and buy bread, grapefruits and tea. There is little bread but plenty of rice and Pot Noodles. And plenty of everything else.

There is one minute`s silence at 2.46pm for the victims of the quake and tsunami but I don`t find out about it until later. (Christopher Robin doesn`t watch television – too modern, I am guessing.) But I am asleep anyway because I am exhausted. Having said that, I was also dozing last Friday when the quake struck.

In the evening a group of us go to Yamachan which is famous for its fried chicken wings. Then to Karaoke. I sing `Anarchy in the UK` because I am tone deaf and can still sound good.

My Japanese chum spends the evening referring to her i-phone. Apparently there has been some nuclear development. We are now at Level 5. As with much else we have heard this week we don`t know what it means (except for Ukranian D H Lawrence who says that Chernobyl was a Level 7). Is it out of 10? Apparently not. Should we be worried? D H Lawrence just wants to sing and shake his tambourine.

More understandable for the women in the group is the internet gossip that Kimutaku (SMAP boy band member) may be about to divorce his wife and may be planning to announce this news during the current crisis in order to bury it. Apparently he was seen going into a love hotel with a `beer lady`. Japanese people are good at looking for hidden news. In honour of the occasion we sing their hit “Dynamite (my Honey)” although I have trouble reading the Japanese fast enough and don`t catch up until the chorus.

This week has actually been a case of making the best of a bad situation. At times I`ve even had fun. Like everyone in Japan I have felt very stressed because I don`t know what is going on or what is going to happen. Also, except for those in the immediate disaster, area there seems to be nothing we can do. Except donate money. But Japan is a very wealthy, high-tech nation. They`ve got plenty of money to deal with the situation.

At least I THINK so. After the Kobe quake in 1997, the government said that everything was under control and no help was needed. I was living in Hamamatsu at the time, about two hours by train from Kobe, when a colleague suddenly got a call from a fellow teacher in Kobe asking them to send the basics, in particular food and nappies. So they got in their car and drove to the outskirts and handed the stuff over. And even on the 10th anniversary of Kobe, people were still living in the emergency housing. Kobe is another reason why no-one believes what they hear now.

Anyway, I am planning to head back to Tokyo on Monday. I need to clean my apartment, prepare for the new semester and get back to work. I will take a bag of food. A Japanese friend says that her mother is wearing her hard hart indoors in north Tokyo. She says I should buy one. But there aren`t any. Never mind. I really just want to get back to normal. I`ve had a break, calmed down and met up with old friends. But enough is enough. I actually want to get back to reading my academic journals... Even if it is by candlelight.

Thursday 17th March 2011 - morning

2011-03-18T11:12:00.000+09:00

Photo: Maxiumum radiation levels detected in the Tohoku and Kanto region.

Woke this morning to news that the British Embassy was going to charter planes to evacuate British citzens to Hong Kong. The flights will be free for those from the immediate disaster area but will cost 600 pounds for those outside. SIX HUNDRED POUNDS!! FOR A FLIGHT TO HONG KONG! The benefits of privilege are becoming apparent.

I would like to know how company expats were told (by whom?) to leave on Tuesday while the embassy did not officially advise British citizens to leave Tokyo until Wednesday. Were companies given an unofficial tip-off? Company expats will have departed, probably in business class, to some expensive hotel in the USA or the UK – or to their homes. Us local hires make our own arrangements. I am a university prof and have the money to buy my way out if need be. One British colleague has relocated to the Sheraton Osaka. Another, an American, departed for the US from Fukuoka. The real losers in this situation will be the young graduates who are working here at language schools to pay off student debts. Average language school salaries are about 250,000 yen per month (1,932 pounds). They may not be able to afford to leave. And they may not be allowed to leave. Japanese universities are on spring vaction until 1st April but language school employees work around the clock. If they leave, they may be fired. Having said that, there must be plenty of empty classrooms this week. With lights off in Tokyo and few trains, most people will be staying home. But the teachers must still turn up.

Yesterday morning I went into the HIS travel agency in Nagoya just to see what flights were available. All English-speaking staff were dealing with non-Japanese-speaking foreigners. Is it OK Japanese? said a clerk. Yes, it is. An American woman sitting at the next counter said she was flying to Guam. You should go there too, she said. It`s an American ..... She couldn`t think what to call it. She settled for `territory`. While my travel agent looked for available flights from Nagoya and Kansai airports, I asked him if many foreigners had been in. He gave me a big smile and said, Oh yes. There were various flights at different prices. On some airlines there was just one seat or there were seats only in business class. Other airlines were charging over 400,000 yen for a seat. But Emirates was less than 100,000 yen. I said I`d think about it. The new semester begins in two weeks. If I fly out , I`d just have to turn around and come back.

I phoned my university and asked what the situation was. They said there was going to be a meeting about whether the new semester would begin on time or not. I said I was considering flying out for a few days and was told, “Well we can`t stop you”. Well we can`t stop you. What is that supposed to mean? I appreciate that admin must have a lot to do, particularly as they had been trying to contact students in the north, but like Japanese officials they seem to be reacting to events rather than having any plan of action. Decisions seem to get made on an ad hoc basis. A couple of hours later I got a text saying that all university clubs and circles had been cancelled. You think? Like the Japanese people, I would like a clear statement from my leader, in this case the university president. I am getting one lot of news from the Japanese press and a completely different story from the foreign press and nothing at all from my university. The Japanese people too are seeing this disparity.

I think this is the issue that is really annoying the Japanese people. Naoto Kan was on his way out before this disaster. No-one trusts him or his government. It was reported that he became very angry when he found out that Tepco had been lying to him about the seriousness of the reactor situation. If he doesn`t know what is going on, who does? The emperor? I asked a Japanese chum how she felt about watching the message from the Tenno (Japanese emperor). Was she impressed? She would have been more impressed, she said, if he hadn`t been speaking from Kyoto.

The emperor is in Kyoto? I said, amazed.

Yes, she said, he`s been evacuated down there with all his family.

Way to send a message of calm and solidarity to the Japanese people. I told her that the Tokyo crows seemed to have disappeared too.

Of course, she said, They are very clever birds.

The key to staying safe is to follow the crows or the Emperor then, I said.

Follow the crows, she replied. They are much smarter.

So this is why Japanese people are panic buying and why foreigners are voting with their feet. There`s no clear message or instructions from any respected leader and now Japanese people are worried that anywhere east of the Emperor in Kyoto is going to get radioactive fallout.

Japanese people are the best at keeping things on track. The trains run on time to the second, every food imaginable is easily available here, and there is little crime. But when something goes badly wrong, it seems very difficult for authorities to get a grip of such situations. We saw this with Kobe and with Aum Shinrikyo. Which is why no Japanese person with any common sense believes the government now.

So now no-one knows what is going on or what is going to happen. The newspapers carry worst-case scenarios which show that Tokyo is perfectly safe from radiation. I`m sure it is. The real problem is that there there is little transport and no food and more quakes and power outages.

Since I have nothing to do down here, and no books or journals to read, I went to the British lecturer`s lecture. It was on Magic and the City. Christopher Robin introduced me to many of his colleagues, I am a Romanticist, said one. I am a Romanticist, said another. I am not a Romanticist. I am a historian. I felt deficient in some way. I asked Christopher Robin why there were so many Romanticists and he said that it was because it was an interesting period in literary history, when the industrial revolution and the ability to do mass printing sparked the birth of the modern novel. That didn`t explain however why so many Romanticists were taking notes using expensive fountain pens. The old guy next to me kept taking a fountain pen out of his breast pocket, unscrewing the top, writing a note in copper plate, screwing the top back on and replacing it in his breast pocket. Every five minutes. I thought it might have something to do with the weight and importance that literary types place on the written word but Christopher Robin said that many Romanticists actually live in the 18th century. His thesis supervisor lives in a Georgian house surrounded by 18th century literature. He had the curtains replaced with shutters because this was the norm in the 18th century.

The main point I liked about the lecture was when the lecturer talked about the self and its relationship to place. Peter Ackroyd wrote that the chaos of a large city can only be controlled by means of private ritual, and that people focus on something small to make sense of something frightening. This has been very true this week. It was not the quakes nor the reactor fires which caused me to leave Tokyo. It was the small breakdowns in my daily routine: the power cuts, the lack of food, the dimmed lights.

Half way through the lecture an alarm went off. People jumped and Christopher Robin had to explain that it was just the bell for the start of lessons.

After the lecture I met up with my Japanese chum and we went out to a kaiten sushi (conveyor belt) sushi bar on the pretext that pacific ocean fish was probably going to be contaminated, expensive or just unavailable in the near future. A couple of of ojisan (middle-aged Japanese men) next to me ordered whale sushi. It was 525 yen a plate and it was snow white.

Wednesday 16th March 2011 - afternoon

2011-03-17T10:17:00.000+09:00

Yesterday afternoon I met up with my Ukranian lecturer chum (I don`t have many normal, non-academic friends) and we went for a walk around my old Nagoya haunts (I used to live and work here.). As soon as I stepped outside it began to hail. The weather - and the wind - is coming from the north. We went to a secondhand/recycling shop and I bought a Mah Jong set which I`ve wanted for a long time. We talked about Chernobyl. He was living in the Ukraine when that disaster happened so I asked him about “death ash” which the Daily Mail (yeah, I know but I like the women`s page) had written about. He didn`t know anything about it. But he did remember that the Chernobyl disaster happened before May Day because they still held the May Day parade and people got rained on. Also he said that it took many weeks to build the concrete sarcophogus and during that time radiation was spewing freely out of the reactor. But he seems healthy. He`s grown a beard and looks the spitting image of D H Lawrence. He said that the 10km radius is still uninhabitable but that people are now living in the 30km exclusion zone. He told me a Chernobyl joke.

A man is selling apples in a Ukranian market. “Apples, lovely Chernobyl apples” he calls. Another man says to him “You can`t sell Chernobyl apples here. No-one will buy them”. “Yes, they do” replies the man, “For their bosses, their mothers-in-law ...”

Ukranian D H Lawrence says that 300ml of wine (or 100ml of vodka) per day is recommended for flushing radiation out of the body. I asked him for the science behind this attractive survival tip but he doesn`t remember. Still, worth a try ...

Wednesday 16th March 2011

2011-03-16T17:33:00.000+09:00

I see now why some people left Tokyo yesterday. Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara said there was no cause for alarm. When Japanese officials say there is no cause for alarm, there is some cause for alarm. When Japanese officials say there is some cause for alarm, we know we will start dropping dead in the streets. This is the Japanese way. Tepco have been in trouble before for telling lies about radiation leaks. And Shintaro Ishihara is the man who said that the French don`t have a proper counting system and - my personal favourite – that women who have not given birth should not be eligible to receive the state pension since they have not done their duty to the nation. Was that him? Or another of the ojisan (old guy) politicians? I don`t have my books around me today. Anyway, Shintaro Ishihara is an incendiary version of Boris Johnson. You admire his hard work and outspokeness about issues he believes in but you know he`s a loony. So it was time to leave.

Last night`s quake was west of Tokyo, halfway between Tokyo and Nagoya, in fact. I can`t help but feel I`m being followed ... It was a 5-6 magnitude in Tokyo so I guess my apartment has been trashed again. I just hope the fridge door hasn`t fallen open. There were some tremors in the night but nothing serious. I had some trouble sleeping because I am “bomb-happy”; I jump if a door slams or the wind blows against the windows. Now I feel much more rested.

This morning I awoke to a hot shower, a cooked breakfast, half a grapefruit and a cup of tea. My chum is ex-British public school. He wears proper pygamas and a navy blue dressing gown. He has a newspaper delivered and reads it at the breakfast table while his morning choral music plays on his hi-fi. (Did you know there is a choral version of “I am Sailing”?) I am staying with Christopher Robin. He collects art and handicrafts, and I am sleeping in his library surrounded by first editions.

Also this morning a Japanese uni colleague phoned me and said that that the graduation ceremony on the 20th has been cancelled but certificates will be given to those students who attend at 10am. So I will (probably) go back to Tokyo on Saturday night to be ready for that. She also said that of our university nine students from the north of Japan cannot be reached. Hopefully that is just a phone problem.

The shops here have also dimmed their lights. There are no noodles, bread, rice or water. But there is plenty of everything else.

Tuesday 15th March 2011

2011-03-16T11:41:00.000+09:00

On Tuesday morning, I wrote a quick email to some British women I was hoping to interview this week for my research on expatriate life in Japan. They replied that they had been advised to evacuate and were leaving immediately. By whom? And why now? I turned on the TV to watch the Prime Minister`s announcement of the fire and radiation leak in whatever reactor had blown this time. Advice to those within a 30km radius was to stay inside with the doors and windows shut and not to use their air conditioners. Don`t bring in washing. It was obviously an extremely serious situation. I went back to the internet to see what the expat bloggers were writing. Some wrote that a radiation cloud could reach Tokyo within five hours. I packed a suitcase, took it to the local convenience store and had it sent by next-day delivery to a chum in Nagoya. It cost about 5 pounds. Then I went home, had lunch, switched the gas off and left. There were few people out and only one other woman at the bus stop. She had a backpack, two large bags and a toddler.

As I took the bus to the train station, I could see that shops had switched off a lot of their lighting. There seemed to be vegetables but no rice, bread or noodles. At the station, Starbucks was still closed but I was just in time to catch a train heading for Tokyo station. I expected it to be packed, as the Chuo line always is. I got a seat. The train was nearly empty. Most of the other passengers, like me, had cases on wheels.

At Tokyo station, I queued for nearly an hour for a seat on a Nozomi (super express bullet train) and then waited another hour until it left. I wanted a booked seat because I knew the non-booked carriages would be full. The station was packed and the ticket lines were so long that station employees were arranging people in neat, very long lines so as not to block the station concourses. Tokyo station is always busy but I heard one of the station guards saying, “Sugoi” (Wow!). Passengers seemed to consist of women, children, young people and foreigners.

I left on the 4.40 train which was on time as usual (although it was a few seconds late arriving in Nagoya, tut tut). The man sitting next to me was Chinese and he spent an hour calling a travel agency and booking flights and hotels. I had bought a latte and two croissants at the station designer deli and I sat on the train thinking that this was a bizarre situation. I was now a refugee. A latte and croissant refugee on the bullet train..

On arrival in Nagoya I met chums at a restaurant for dinner and had a very large beer. I told them about the constant quakes, the radiation leaks, the lack of food and the power outages, and they told me about a lecture they had just attended. The lecturer, from a British university, and I are now staying with my chum – also a lecturer. We went back to his place and I sat down. Phew, I said, it`s great to be out of it. At which point I felt vibrations coming up through the chair. We are about to have an earthquake I said. Rubbish, said my chum. Yes, we are! Said the lecturer, positioning himself in a door frame.. It was his first experience of an earthquake. Bless.

Monday 14th March 2011

2011-03-16T11:36:00.000+09:00

Last night I took an early shower, prepared my dinner, put a torch in my pocket and checked yet again that the gas was off. At 6.19pm I lit a candle, which I didn`t particularly want to do with tremors every hour, and I counted down to the Tepco power outage. Nothing happened. I checked the TV for the next half hour until they officially announced they had cancelled it.

I got to bed around 1am and slept on and off being woken every so often by tremors or quakes or aftershocks, I don`t really know the difference. When does a tremor become a quake? And does it really matter? More than the jolts it`s the continual swaying that tires you out because you don`t know if it`s going to turn into something. Lying down you feel it more too. At 5am there was a quake that had me crawling towards the table – I was sleeping on a futon next to it – but it was fairly short. It also woke up the neighbours. I waited to hear if they were going to go outside but instead they took showers and went off to work.

I am punch-drunk with fatigue. I`m a heavy sleeper but being woken every hour or so is very draining. You tense in case you need to move quickly, but then it`s all over and you have to try to go back to sleep. My neck is so stiff I can`t turn it properly.

This week – this week! It`s only been 4 days! - has been a steep learning curve for me and the Japanese people. We have all learned what a microsievert is. And how to get to places when you have to walk there. And what to buy when the shelves are emptying.

As a foreigner here I have felt more isolated than usual. My previous university had a large foreign faculty and we made a “jishin tree”, an earthquake list detailing who to phone and whose house to check after a quake. At my current university there are only four other full-time foreign staff and they all have families. A Japanese friend emailed me, “Be careful when walking around and living alone”. No-one will be rushing to dig me out if the building goes down.

So I have learned to watch people closely. Where are they going, what are they buying, what are they saying to each other? Listening in to a few conversations in the supermarket, most are saying, “I called and called but I can`t get through at all”. Getting through to anyone by mobile or landline is problematic. You get the engaged signal most times. Since I don`t understand all the news bulletins I am resorting to going round the shops watching people, looking for clues as to what I should do. Surprisingly, several local shop-keepers have asked if I am OK. Granted, I am the only white foreigner in my neighbourhood but I never realised they remembered me. When I went to the 100 Yen shop to buy a spare torch (I got one the day before they all sold out) the shopkeeper welcomed me back. Did she think I`d do a runner? I am not French.

I have to say that Facebook has been a real lifeline. I never wanted to join, I only did because my students asked me, but when the phones failed I was able to get a lot information quickly, and give it out to those who understand less Japanese than me.

The only thing I don`t understand yet is, is everything in Tokyo back to normal now? Because if so, I want to drain the emergency standby toilet-flushing water from my bath and have a nice long soak.

Question: Where did all the crows go? I`m a big fan of crows and one of my favorites can deconstruct a bin bag in seconds before the Monday morning rubbish collection. A couple roost in a water tanker on top of an adjacent building but they are not there. I haven`t seen a single crow since the quake.

Monday 14th March 2011

2011-03-14T13:50:00.000+09:00

Mood: Extremely short-tempered because I am very very very tired.
Health: A sprained back from having to push the fridge back into place.
Favourite hat: The blue fire-proof hood in my new profile picture. Do they sell matching fire-proof gloves?
Favourite book: Anything that stays on the shelf.
Favourite food: Carbs. Biscuits, toast, chocolate. I now realise that my stocks of earthquake food are completely wrong. When the (next) big one strikes I do not want to eat tinned sardines or Spam. I want Tim Tams and chocolate-covered Macadamias.
Not-so favourite friends: All those people who are saying that the quake up north has put an incredible strain on the faultline under Tokyo and we are really in for it now. You sods.
Scariest moment: Being only 99.9% sure that the Japanese-language gas company manual, showing a very complicated diagram of the outside gas junction box with pipes and meters and blinking lights, said, “Press red button once to restart gas supply”. And then pressing the red button.

As a foreigner with no local Japanese friends, I need to go out every day and see what`s going on. (I have local foreign friends but they have even less idea than me what is going on. Facebook has been very useful, the British embassy website pretty useless, BBC twitter very interesting.) At 11am at the supermarket there was controlled panic buying with queues all the way to the back of the shop. People seemed to be buying a lot of rice and eggs, and everyone was picking up a bag of toilet paper too. But when I went back in there 30 minutes later the queues were gone and there was still plenty of food. Milk is rationed to 1,000ml per person but there was plenty of it. The Japanese don`t drink much milk. There were salads, sushi, tofu, fried fish and plenty of vegetables. So either they have had some deliveries or they still had some stock which they put on the shelves after I had visited last night. By noon however, there was no loo roll, rice, eggs, yoghurts or water. But there was still plenty of beer. I went to several other shops and there is no bread to be had. There are a lot of men and kids about so I guess they have taken the day off. Many of the men have backpacks and are standing in shops holding lists or on their mobiles receiving instructions. The roads are very crowded and the side streets are packed with people on bikes. It`s a bit like a national holiday, only everyone`s carrying toilet roll.

Mitaka station has some trains running but all the shops there are closed including the bakery and .... Starbucks! So this is really a national emergency now. However Mr Donuts had all their donut varieties in stock. The video store was open. So was the bank and there was no queue for the cash machines. Some restaurants were closed, others open. The bike shop was open so I got my bike tyres pumped to the max for a quick getaway. (Prime Minister Kan was right, this IS just like the Second World War. The French are evacuating. Brits and Americans have been advised to stay put.) Back at home, the rubbish was collected and the postman delivered yet another academic journal.

Tepco annoyed me and a lot of other people by announcing and then cancelling the power outages this morning. I spent a long time last night trying to find out when my block would have no power (the Tepco website went down as soon as the outages were announced). Eventually I found out that my block would have no power from 9.20am to 1pm and I prepared accordingly. I did my washing last night and I had my breakfast ready to go. Then this morning they moved the outage to 6.20-10pm, and now we don`t know if there will be outages or not. Of course it is good news that they currently have enough power not to have to cut us off. Apparently enough people turned off their heated toilet seats.

We had one tremor this morning that had me reaching for my camera but it stopped quickly. Bright and sunny now so I think I`ll get back to my work.

Sunday Evening

2011-03-13T20:21:00.000+09:00

Just went down to the supermarket to see what Japanese people are doing. What Japanese people are doing is emptying the shelves. A shop sign says that there have been no deliveries. There is no bread, rice, cereals, tofu, or sushi. Packet food is gone and there are few tinned goods (still a lot of spam and sardines, I see). There is plenty of beer and milk. I stocked up on water, toilet paper, milk and nuts.

Power outtages start tomorrow and will last for 3 hours.

According to the government, there is a 70% chance of an aftershock in the 7 magnitude region within the next 3 days, so for the next 3 days I am staying put.

Sunday Morning

2011-03-13T11:10:00.000+09:00

All tidied up and the computer monitor still works. On Friday the earth moved constantly. It was like being on a plane during bouts of strong turbulence. None of my neighbours made it home that evening so I had to read the Japanese manual and figure out how to reset the gas supply by myself. Which I did by torchlight at 9pm. It was only then that I realised I hadn`t eaten or drunk anything since the quake. Friday night I got very little sleep because there were strong aftershocks every 30 minutes. Saturday was calmer. We had a 6 this morning but the aftershocks seem to be lessening. My only injury is a large bruise on my head sustained when I got up in the night to go to the loo and forgot I was sleeping under the dining table. Worth every Yen, that table. I feel safe and cosy underneath it and so do all the spiders who are living under there with me.

As for the video, some friends of my sisters are on holiday in Japan and said that the tremors they experienced when they arrived on the 9th were an interesting experience. So after another tremor started on Friday I hunted around and got out my camera in order to take a video for them as a fun holiday souvenir. The tremor had been going at least a minute by the time I turned the camera on and, as you can probably tell, I wasn`t expecting it to get worse. We get tremors like that all the time.

Up north, foreign rescue teams are arriving. It is strange to see so many other foreigners arriving at the airport. The foreign population of Japan has probably doubled in one day. It feels odd that international rescue teams are required because west of Tokyo and for the rest of Japan it`s business as usual. I realise Japan needs specialist teams but it`s Sunday morning, the rest of us aren`t busy. Can`t we do something?

Quake 11th March 2011

2011-03-11T17:52:00.000+09:00

Japanese prefer Glaswegian accent, says study

2011-02-09T10:06:00.000+09:00

I didnae ken that an` a dinnae howp it naither .....

From today`s Independent online:

Glaswegians have the most attractive accent for Japanese speakers of English, a new study has revealed.

Robert McKenzie, senior lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Northumbia in Newcastle, questioned more than 500 people to study how worldwide perceptions of the English language are changing.

Those who participated in the study listened to speakers of six varieties of English and rated them on personality traits. The six accents used were from Alabama and Ohio in the United States, Glasgow, Scottish standard English, moderately accented Japanese English and heavily accented Japanese English.

I like the Glaswegian accent but I still think Taggart should have had subititles. This study doesn`t say that the students could actually understand what was being said and I myself am highly dubious. Most Japanese students seem to be accent blind. Likewise in Japanese, unless it`s a strong Osaka accent, I can`t hear any difference.

Still, for next semester, can anyone lend me a copy of Parliamo Glasgow?

Repobitan D - the greatest drink in the world EVER!

2011-01-30T22:08:00.001+09:00

At the recent national center tests, all invigilating staff were given Repobitan D, a nutritional supplement it says on the bottle. I skim-read the back and it said it contained various B vitamins. So I drank mine straight away. It tasted like very strong Lucozade. Some teachers didn`t want theirs so before lunch I drank three more. We had 40 minutes for lunch but that was just enough time for me to write all my review classes, all my final exams, tidy my entire office, do A LOT of shredding which I like doing, and have an-depth but animated discussion with the vice president, the subject of which I cannot remember. In the first exam after lunch I was veryveryvery thirsty and I had trouble sitting still for the full hour. In the break I decided to have another bottle and it was at this point that - having read the three novels I`d brought - I decided to read the rest of the back of the bottle. It was then that I realised that the ingredients included nicotine and caffeine and something called taurine. Then I got veryveryveryvery sleepy so I didn`t drink any more.

I brought that last bottle home and today whilst doing my pre-"Devil Out, Good Luck In" cleaning, I found it in the fridge. And I drank it. My house is now reallyreallyreallyreally cleanincludingthewindowsinsideandoutandIpolishedthewhole floorandtookdownandwashedallthecurtainseventhoughIthinkmyneighboursacrosstheroadcanseerightintomyapartmentbecauseIcandefinitelyseerightintotheirsincludingreadingthetitlesofallthebooksthey`vegotontheirshelveswhichareprettymuchjustmanga. And I`d like to go to bed now but I can`t stop blinking.

Repobitan D - gives you wings ... and hallucinations.

Japanese Embassy, "too shy" to complain about this one?

2011-01-28T18:35:00.001+09:00

In a recent class on intercultural communication we talked about stereotypes and I showed the students this clip from `Come Fly with Me` with David Walliams and Matt Lucas. I asked the students what they thought of the clip and if they were offended at this stereotypical view of female Japanese high school students. They answered that although it was strange to see two British men portraying Japanese girls they thought the sketch was funny because it was pretty accurate. "Too shy, too shy!" got a big laugh. Because that`s us, the students said.

Two points which were not accurate. I have never seen a Japanese person wearing braces. Crooked teeth are considered attractive here so having them straightened is not considered necessary, although things are slowly changing as more young people watch the OC and Gossip Girl. Having white teeth is certainly becoming more important, for women at least.

The second mistake is that Japanese people do not bow with their hands in prayer position. That`s a Thai greeting.

Still, we all enjoyed the sketch. Little Britain is also popular here. You can buy their DVD with Japanese subtitles. Sebastian is the students` big favourite.

QI and the Unluckiest Man

2011-01-24T19:08:00.000+09:00

I think I will weigh in on the QI "Unluckiest Man" uproar. It`s been on a lot of the news programmes here in Japan generally accompanied by scenes from a documentary of the man himself, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, standing on the riverbank in Hiroshima and explaining how after the explosion the water was full of burned people. Then they show his daughter praying for the spirit of her now-dead father at her butsudan (home shrine) and saying that although they used to joke within their family that he was indeed the unluckiest man in the world it is unnacceptable for the British, who have nuclear weapons, to do so. It`s not exactly unbiased reporting. In addition, although several Japanese people have complained to me about the show NO-ONE I have spoken to has actually been able to understand what Stephen Fry or the other contestants are saying. Their English is too just fast.

In fact, Stephen Fry explains how the man is unlucky and the other contestants joke, not about him at all, but about how the Japanese trains kept running even after the atom bomb whereas British trains have to stop if there are the wrong kind of leaves on the line. The joke was at Britain`s expense not Japan`s.

Another news programme noted that when Stephen Fry said that the man then got on a train to Nagasaki and got bombed again it got a big laugh from the studio audience and that this was not an acceptable subject for laughter. On this I take their point. Neither the bombings nor the man`s extremely unlucky experiences nor the war itself is a suitable topic for laughter but I really do not think that the audience was laughing at that or for that reason. They were laughing at the irony of the man`s situation. And after all the man lived to 93. He was in fact extremely lucky.

At the end of the news segments, the announcers say the situation is kanashii (rueful, regrettable) which is generally the sentiment that the Japanese have about their actions in the Second World War in general, including, my Chinese friends note bitterly, Nanking.

Japanese people care a great deal about how they are viewed by foreigners. I think the real issue here is not that a British quiz show seems to be making fun of one Japanese man but that Japan itself is considered a source of mirth.

Here is an extract from one of the Japanese news shows followed by the offending clip from QI:

Flashing Japanese Smiles

2011-01-24T10:36:00.000+09:00

It`s been a tough couple of months. I`ve turned completely "Japanese salaryman", regularly staying late at the office to read piles of graduation theses. It`s dark when I walk home and my landlord STILL has not replaced the outside light on the third floor. Luckily I can see my way by the light of my teeth ... They`re `thenewexcitingthingforhighschoolstudents`.

I can picture next semester`s classes already. I close the curtains, turn off the classroom lights and do my PowerPoint presentations to a room full of students wearing flashing LED teeth. THAT would be pretty cool.

A Parking Space-sized Home in Tokyo

2010-12-20T13:25:00.000+09:00

Good Customer Service ... Japanese Style

2010-12-06T11:41:00.000+09:00

Power, gas suppliers to cut January charges due to stronger yen
Tuesday 30th November,
Japan’s 10 electric power companies and four major gas suppliers said Monday they will cut monthly charges in January from the previous month due to lower fuel costs caused by the yen’s appreciation. Tokyo Electric Power Co announced the largest cut of 44 yen for an average household among the 10 power suppliers, followed by 39 yen by Chubu Electric Power Co and 36 yen by Chugoku Electric Power Co and Okinawa Electric Power Co.
A cut of 39 yen in gas charges is planned by Osaka Gas Co, while Tokyo Gas Co, Toho Gas Co and Saibu Gas Co announced respective reductions of 37, 35 and 22 yen.
Prices of crude oil, liquefied natural gas and coal in the August to October quarter, which are the base of charges for utility services in January, fell 1.8, 2.7 and 2.2%, respectively, from those in the July to September period, the base for charges in December.
Hokkaido Electric Power Co and Tokyo Electric will lower their charges in January for the fourth consecutive month and the eight other power suppliers for the third month in row. The four gas companies will carry out cuts for four months running.

It may only be a token amount for households but it`s nice that the companies are thinking of its customers at the coldest time of year. Makes me feel like a valued customer rather than a complete mug which is how I feel when I have to buy a train ticket in the UK.

Let`s do the Otagei!

2010-12-04T19:40:00.000+09:00

This is for those people who wrote and asked why Japanese men never dance ...

Otagei (Ota from otaku meaning nerd and gei meaining performance) has been in the news recently. Groups of otaku gather in the nerd nerve centre of Akihabara and all over Japan to enjoy dancing while supporting their favourite female bands. In this news clip, a journalist visits a 21-member otaku group who are practising their dance at a karaoke bar. They are all fans of the dreaded Morning Musume (Morning Daughters). Otaku have gained some cool points recently because manga and anime (which they collect obsessively) are becoming more popular abroad, and last week a student showed me an i-phone video she took at a wedding with the guests doing the otagei. But just in case you think the entire Japanese nation is doing this, my own students who are too cool for school (judging by the number of absences and tardies they are racking up) fell off their chairs laughing when they saw this.

Yes, Japanese society can be juvenile but because of this it is also relatively drug and crime free. So altogether now... Pan Pa Pan Hyu!

(Thanks to my seminar 3 students who put me on to this video.)

Negotiating the road to gender equality ... with a flip-up map

2010-11-15T18:36:00.001+09:00

With attention focused on the APEC conference in Yokohama, here are some stories from the past week you may have missed.

On Monday 9th, police arrested a panty thief who had attempted to steal three pairs of underwear from a washing line on a woman`s balcony. When police searched his home they found 3,000 other stolen pairs of panties. The 55-year-old man said, "I have always been interested in women`s underwear". So too, apparently, were the police who displayed the panties at the police station and invited journalists to photograph them.

Also on the 9th, Seibu announced the launch of Maid Trains on the Chichibu to Ikebukuro line. Maids will ride the trains, playing games with the passengers. Some station shops will have photo studios so travellers can have photos taken with the maids. (http://www.maidtrain.info/)

On Thursday 11th November, Triumph displayed their `concept bra` designed to introduce foreigners to Japanese tourist spots. The bustier has three buttons which when pressed welcome tourists in English, Chinese and Korean. A short skirt `flips up` to reveal a map of Japan.

What a sad, third-rate little country ... which by the way ranks 94th out of 134 in terms of gender equality in the annual World Economic Forum ranking.

Next week, granny arrested for pinching Y fronts from launderettes and police display them for women who have `always been interested in men`s underwear`, Seibu launch the Beefcake Express and Triumph display the concept tourism boxer shorts ... with flip-up map. Never going to happen, is it?

Accio final Harry Potter movie and the end of an era!

2010-11-11T09:36:00.000+09:00

Feeling very British today. Did two lectures on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the continuing popularity of Sherlock Holmes. Then on the way home I was greeted by this poster on platform 9 3/4 at Iidabashi subway station. (Note: magical commuter apparating in foreground.)

Aokigahara Suicide Forest on VBS

2010-11-08T18:45:00.000+09:00

I have received some emails asking why the Japanese birth rate is so low. Today I have been correcting some essays written by students for an upcoming essay competition. They could write on any topic and several wrote about how difficult it is to live in Japan. Looking over their essays they say much the same things, that Japanese people have little spare time, are forced to overwork, take few holidays and that Japan is "not a gentle country for women because the co-existence of work, housework and childcare is difficult in our country". Another student writes, "I think many people feel a lot of stress and tiredness". Yet Japanese people seem unable to express their worries. The student states,

"When we need help, we cannot ask for help. Why? In my opinion, many Japanese have superficial relationships, so we don`t have close relations. As a result, we can`t consult about our worries ... I guess there are many people who have negative thinking. People are sometimes afraid of failure in work, and they don`t speak actively. If they fail in something, they will lose their confidence. On the other hand, I think power harrassment by their boss and bullying also causes suicide".

Of course there are many good points about Japan. The trains run on time, it is clean and safe. But this is only the case because the rules here are very strict, and happiness of the individual is forfeited for the benefit of the group.

Watch the beautiful but tragic video below to see what happens to those who cannot ask for help.

Nice lunch, shame about the students ...

2010-11-08T09:53:00.000+09:00

In 1992 there were 2.05 million 18-year-olds in Japan. Due to the drop in the birth rate there are 1.3 million today. There is now a university place for every 18-year-old who wants one but since just over 40 percent go on to tertiary education that leaves a lot of empty chairs in a lot of expensively air-conditioned classrooms. MEXT, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, estimates that around 46 percent of Japan`s 595 private universities are missing their recruitment targets and around 40 percent are in debt. Small colleges, in particular tandai (two-year colleges), are closing or amalgamating. The word from colleagues even at higher level universities is that they are lowering entrance standards in order to attract enough students.

How is it playing out at my university? A few weeks ago, we held our first round of entrance tests and interviews. 29 lecturers were called in to work on a Saturday (tasty obento provided, see above) to test 17 high school students. In a room which seats 144, I and a colleague invigilated a 30-minute entrance examination for three students who were interested (hopefully) in attending our college`s tandai.

Last weekend, I and a colleague interviewed 9 students (6 colleagues interviewed a further 28). They had to read a paragraph in english and answer one question about it. Not a single student could answer the question correctly, nor could they adequately answer other simple questions that I put to them. What the hell are students studying for 6 years in their compulsory junior and senior high school english-language classes? The sad thing is, on their shibo douki (the part of their application on which they write their hopes for the future) most wrote that they want to work for travel companies or as english-language teachers. (Last year it was hotel staff and flight attendants but since then JAL`s gone into the red and the strong Yen has emptied the international hotels of foreign tourists). Moreover they were well prepared for the Japanese-language part of their interviews with many reciting answers that they had obviously memorised in advance. They seemed to have motivation but were let down by the poor level of education they had received.

Will they get a place at our university? What do you think? And even more importantly for us, will they accept it?

Yamamba!

2010-10-18T11:38:00.000+09:00

Para Para is popular outside Japan?! Thanks for this link:

http://www.hyperjapan.co.uk/watch/para-para-dance.html

But you have to get the makeup right. Here`s a tutorial, from Jonathan Ross of all people ... he speaks good Japanese.

It`s Friday ... Let`s dance!

2010-10-15T14:52:00.000+09:00

Thanks to the 3rd year seminar students who put me on to this gem of a para para dance video. Whatever happened to the Yamamba/Ganguro girl gangs .... you never see them any more ...

Back to the Chalkface

2010-09-28T21:09:00.001+09:00

Hello all, I`m back from summer hols in the UK. Japan`s hottest summer on record is over (HUGE thunderstorm today) and it`s back to the morning commute. Like this one.

Tokyo Bay Summer Evening Boat

2010-07-27T14:30:00.000+09:00

In the last week, 9.436 people have been hospitalized with heatstroke and 57 have died. Half of those who died were indoors. Outside it is burning hot, inside it is stiflingly humid. It averages 35 in the day and 26 at night. My main room is air-conditioned, and I keep it at a steady 28 with the curtains closed. But my small kitchen has become an oven. I only go in there to get drinks from the fridge. Continually moving from an air-conditioned area into the heat and humidity can bring on heat stress and exhaustion.

One of the best places to be in this weather (apart from a cooler country) is on the water. Here`s a short video from the Tokyo Bay Summer Evening boat, a two-hour booze cruise around Tokyo Bay. That is Rainbow Bridge we go under.

Heat Strokes

2010-07-20T20:57:00.000+09:00

Is rainy season over already? It`s 35 degrees most days and very humid. Government officials are warning people to stay out of the burning sun. Apparently this weather is a ripple of the heat wave the USA is suffering at the moment. Here`s a notice that just went up in the subway. Subways generally provide free water fountains on the platforms for customers. I often used them until recently when I saw an ojisan rinse his mouth out and then spit the water back into the fountain.

Subway Train Manners

2010-07-12T09:31:00.000+09:00

Double seat, double seat, gotta get a double seat ... (Ben Elton)

Macho in Japan!

2010-06-29T17:53:00.000+09:00

Loving the new Protein Water ad! It`s shown incessantly in the ad breaks of Tsuki no Koibito (Moon Lovers), the latest Kimutaku drama. I have completely lost track of what is going on in the drama. I`ve asked my students and they don`t know either. We all agree that it is all rather strange and illogical. The interesting issue is that the story is about a Japanese company setting up business in Shanghai. Shota Matsuda, the main guy in the Protein Water ad and son of Yusaku 'Black Rain" Matsuda, plays a bicultural business man who seems to have just taken over the company. It will be interesting to see how the final episode plays out but this drama seems to be a sign that Japan has realised it is part of Asia ... and that it`s about to be overtaken by China. Japanese business people had better drink A LOT more Protein Water ...

Below is the old Protein Water ad which demonstrates more clearly what they are actually selling. The slim guys on the left drink Protein Water to get "Hoso Macho", Slim Macho unlike the fatties on the right who are gori macho ... What`s gori macho, anyone?

Rainy Season 2010

2010-06-22T19:53:00.000+09:00

So it has been raining for the last two weeks. Then a couple of days ago the Japanese Meteorological Agency woke up to this fact and announced that rainy season had officially begun. At which point the rain stopped. But I`m saying nothing this year. Usually what happens about this time of year is that I notice that it is raining heavily and ask my Japanese chums if this is the rainy season. "No" they say, "This is not rainy season rain. This is different rain". And then the JMA officially announces rainy season and then they say it IS rainy season rain. I think this is an aspect of Japan`s hierarchical society. No-one wants to call it until an official body higher up officially approves it. In a hierarchical society information is controlled and rolls from the top down. As does the rain. And something else.

Cookies & Green Tea Ice-cream

2010-06-21T15:57:00.000+09:00

I have tried every bottle of cough syrup and sucked every mentholated jube in my local chemists. But the only thing that soothes a really sore throat is Haagen Dazs Cookies and Green Tea ice-cream. Nector of the Kami (Japanese gods)!

I am "bad condition"

2010-06-19T22:10:00.000+09:00

Thank you so much to those of you who have sent emails asking where I have gone. Tokyo is awash with bugs and bacteria and I have had my fair share. I started with possible Whooping Cough which has become a global epidemic amongst adults, and I have now moved on to a stinking cold. Who knew that the Whooping Cough vaccine wore off? Not me. Apparently adults need to get booster shots. Six weeks on and I still can`t speak to my students without dissolving into a coughing fit but then a lot of them are coughing and spluttering right back at me. And you want to hear the noise on the subways in the mornings. Some people really sound as if they are going to collapse right there on the train.

I am doing the right thing and wearing my mask in class despite the students` amusement. One member of staff said it must be difficult for me to wear a mask because they are designed for Japanese people. I could only think she meant that Westerners have higher noses? They are very difficult to breathe through however - the masks not Western noses. Even so last week I forgot I was wearing one and tried to drink a cup of green tea through it.

I am slowly recovering, sleeping on average 10 hours a night and craving bbq beef for some reason (well, I have lost 2 kg). The only thing that is getting me through my lessons is my Lemon plus Collagen drink. 1,000mg of each plus around 1kg of added sugar judging by the energy buzz I get from every little bottle. Soon I will be back to full health and looking 10 years younger!

Who ya gonna call?

2010-05-03T12:29:00.000+09:00

In the USA, if you have a problem and no-one else can help you can call the A Team. In Japan, you can call the MR Ladies, the operatives of the Mission Research Detective Agency. They investigate affairs, missing persons, absences from home, moral issues, stalkers, wiretapping, electromagnetic waves, and they also carry out pre-marriage investigations. Consultations are free. They take visa.

Detective agencies advertise freely in Japan. I get similar fliers every week. Japan is a country in which much is hidden. Conversations can be vague. Confrontations and showing anger are considered bad manners. Silence is often the answer to a difficult question. In order to avoid shame and embarrassment employing a professional to ferret out the truth may be an acceptable option. And judging from this leaflet, the people most in need of such services in Japan are women.

What can I eat?

2010-04-30T19:17:00.000+09:00

I have been asking my students who work in sushi bars if there has been any downturn in tuna consumption recently. "No", they have all replied, "Why should there be?" No-one in Japan seems in the least aware that we are facing a global tuna shortage due to overfishing. We are in Golden Week here, seven days of holidays, and the weather after a couple of weeks of constant heavy rain, is warm and sunny. Sushi is the perfect meal for this weather but it is impossible to buy a sushi obento that does not contain maguro (raw tuna) (see pics above). So I have switched to shrimp. (I have a child`s taste in sushi. Tuna and shrimp are the least sophisticated tastes.)

If the Japanese don`t care about the shortage of tuna then they might be persuaded to consider their health. A recent report by the US Environmental Agency found that all the tuna they tested (in the USA) contained higher concentrations of mercury than was considered safe to eat in one day. Their recommendation is to eat no more than 7-8 pieces of tuna per month. Japanese mercury limits are lower than the US but aren`t they both fishing the same sea? I eat A LOT of raw fish. No wonder the fridge magnets keep sticking to me.

*Child`s Taste: Last week I read an article in a British Sunday newspaper in which a restaurant critic tried to get his children to enjoy sophisticated dishes at an elegant restaurant. They would only eat pasta or pizza and he couldn`t understand why. The Japanese know why. They believe that children`s taste buds must grow and develop so they start their children off with simple tastes such as rice, tuna and shrimp and as they grow older offer sea urchin and eel. As a Brit I believe `bland` is a very palatable flavour and I`m sticking with it ...and avoiding the new season pizza, the Mini Dog.

Pet Paradise Spring 2010

2010-04-18T21:25:00.000+09:00

Need ... help ... must ... stop ... photographing ... dog ... fashions. But look at the little necklace!

And another one!

2010-04-17T19:15:00.000+09:00

And another one!

Dear students, spot the mistake .... in a national newspaper no less!

And this one ....

2010-04-11T20:31:00.001+09:00

Gudby korect spelng!

2010-04-08T10:45:00.000+09:00

Dear Students

Good news for poor spellers! You know how I tell you that English is not a language but a constantly evolving animal? Well, it now seems that the email generation (that`s me) and the texting generation (that`s you) have prompted an evolutionary leap in (or the total extinction of, depending on how you choose to look at it) English spelling. On my recent trip, wherever I went in the UK, I spotted howling spelling errors and no-one seemed that bothered about them.

I can`t say I`m totally happy about it though. I LOVE good English and recently added the word gelid to my lexicon. (It was in a crime thriller.) And as I have told you before, the better your English, the more educated you sound, and the better your chances of getting that dream job and/or dream date. So keep bringing your electronic dictionaries to class. + sav the texts 4 ur fone.

And Writing 2 and 3 students, the weekly spelling test STAYS.

SPELLING QUIZ: There are 7 spelling errors in the coffee shop sign above. Can you spot them all?

Hanami - Blossom Viewing

2010-04-02T18:14:00.000+09:00

It`s official. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency Tokyo cherry trees are in full bloom right now. And to prove it, here`s the tree outside my office.

This week companies will be sending their junior employees out mid-afternoon to spread plastic sheeting in the parks and sit on it in order to bagsy the best spots for the evening company party which will involve singing songs, drinking beer and getting completely bladdered in the name of cherry blossom viewing. Except so far this week the weather has been really strange. On Monday there was a snow storm. Today it was 20 degrees. And much of the Tokyo transport network was disrupted due to `wind`. Which may have blown most of the blossoms away already.

Bog Standard Britain

2010-03-26T11:51:00.000+09:00

Apologies for the long silence. I was chaperoning some students to England for intensive English study. It was such an interesting experience to see my country through their eyes. I`ll write more once this terrible West-to-East jetlag has worn off. (East-to-West is no problem but West-to-East is like being drunk, drugged and then beaten with a kendo stick.) For the moment I will just post the one photo that I think sums up the England experience for them and for me: the traditional British toilet. For me, this toilet at Canterbury West station represents all that is wrong and shameful about England. It`s old, cold, dirty, poorly managed and broken. The bolts in the cistern to stop people placing drugs in there are just the final insult as far as I am concerned. However it is toilets just like this one that my students` rave about when they come back from the UK. It`s old! It`s whimsical! It`s like something out of a museum! They have the same ones in Harry Potter! You have to pull the chain many times to make it work! As far as they are concerned England is like some Victorian era theme park.

Later we visited a public restroom that was bathed in an ice-blue light. The students oohed and aahed at how the glow relaxed them and took away their stress. "It is just like the blue lights on the subway in Tokyo" they said. "The ones that are supposed to calm people down and stop them jumping in front of trains. English restrooms are very relaxing". I`m not sure if they really understood when I pointed out that the blue light was to stop druggies finding a vein.

Many things which made me very angry (high school students drinking beer on Canterbury city wall, people swearing, vandalism of public services, rudeness in shops, litter) the students didn`t seem to notice at all. They were too busy marvelling at green grass and women in burkhas and taps you work by hand, and holding 50 pound notes up to the light in public.

We see only what we want to see and interpret it according to our own culture.

Butoh - the only known antidote to Cute

2010-02-24T20:03:00.000+09:00

In 1959, a dancer called Tatsumi Hijikata performed a strange dance based on the novel Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima. He used a live chicken which he placed between his legs and the audience, mistakenly believing that he had killed it, were outraged. And so Butoh was born, a modern dance form that is grotesque, extreme, sometimes painful and in one case, fatal. Though Butoh was first performed during a time of student riots it is also believed to be influenced by the devastation at the end of the Second World War, in particular by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Typical Butoh costume is a loin cloth covering a body painted grey and is reminiscent of the bomb survivers burned and in shredded clothes, staggering out of the cities.

I don`t claim to understand Butoh but I do like it and having lived for over a decade in Japan I can see where it is coming from. Both the local and foreign media tend to portray the Japanese as a well-meaning, law-abiding nation of placid people who do their homework on Friday night and spend the weekend shopping for cute fashions. And on the whole they are right. But Japan also has a very dark side. You only have to look at movies such as Ring and Juon to see that Japan has a colourful tradition of horror and ghost stories. It also has a high suicide rate. It has a growing problem with hikikomori, people who become recluses, some of them as a result of the bullying culture that exists in this competitive, hierarchical society. Although it has a very low crime rate, the murders that are committed here are often extremely bizarre and horrific. As a Japanese student once said to me, Japanese rules and laws are so strict that if you do step out of line you might as well go all the way to hell.

But back to Butoh. Sankai Juku is Japan`s most famous troupe and here is a short extract from a performance. This lot would eat Beckii Cruel for breakfast. Literally.

Beckii Cruel

2010-02-23T21:15:00.000+09:00

God, I wish I was cute. I wish I had the giant doll-like eyes and stunned expression of the moe (meaning literally 'beansprout', implying not a child, not yet a woman) cosplay cutie. Then that could have been me promoting the anime movie `Pretty Cure All Stars DX2 Protect the Rainbow Light Jewel of Hope` (which is the top class in all Jewels of Hope) in Akihabara this week. And I could have won the `gold medal of cute`, just like Beckii Cruel (real name Rebecca Flint, 14) from the Isle of Man who is here doing her cute dances. Cute is big business in Japan. There is a limitless market for cartoon cosplay costumes, Hello Kitty products and amateurish singing and dancing talentos and idoru. The other morning on the train (the same morning it was announced that some supermarket in the UK had banned customers from shopping in their pyjamas)the girl strap-hanging in front of me was wearing teddy bear print pyjamas, a crocheted shawl, carpet slippers, a giant loopy bow in her hair and a pink heart-shaped badge on which was written the words, "Spank me". She was studying for a university entrance exam and carried her notes in a wicker basket. Take that Tesco! But don`t get the idea that all Japan is like this. It`s actually popular with about the same percentage of people who like to dress up little girls in boob tubes and make-up in the UK. It`s the same old story, the objectification of women.

Beckii Cruel is being soundly rubbished by the foreign community here but if she pays off her parents` mortgage and covers her future university fees then why not? And besides we`re all just jealous because we had to get PhD`s and jobs in Fortune 500 companies to come here. However her parents should be aware that the major fans of cute here in Japan are not tweens as in the UK but young and middle-aged men, as you can see from this rather creepy video below. And is Beckii herself aware that the men in the front row are trying to get up-skirt shots on their mobile phones? Not so innocently cute now, huh? On second thoughts, I think I prefer being, as I was apparently voted by a group of my students, `the teacher we were most scared of this year`. Does that award come with a Jewel of Hope?

吉田兄弟 The Yoshida Brothers

2010-02-22T19:14:00.000+09:00

I`m not one of those foreigners who go in for immersing myself in traditional Japanese culture. Noh and Bunraku bore the arse off me, I`m too hyperactive for the Japanese tea ceremony, and I don`t like to get the soles of my feet beaten with bamboo sticks in Buddhist temples. I do however like the Yoshida Kyoudai, the Yoshida brothers, Ryoichiro and Ken`ichi. They are two brothers from Hokkaido in the north of Japan who play the tsugaru-jamisen, a northern version of the 3-stringed shamisen. I like their music because of the way they mix the traditional sound of the shamisen with rock and even J Pop. Here they are in two videos. The first is of their most famous hit to date, Rising. In the second they are playing (with kodo drummers) in a live concert of the plastic boy band, Exile.

Many aspects of traditional Japan are becoming popular with the younger generations in Japan now. To a certain extent I think it is connected with the economic rise of China, and Japan`s sudden realisation that it is part of Asia not America. However when I asked a student about this she replied, "We are becoming interested in these things because foreigners seem to like them. If foreigners like them then we think they must have value."

I`m still not interested in getting my feet beaten ...

Tesco in Kichijoji .... kind of

2010-02-22T13:16:00.000+09:00

I have always known there was a Tesco outlet in Tokyo. My students said it was in Chiba (eastern Tokyo) but that it was rubbish. And since the only time I go west of Tokyo Station is to get to Narita airport, I had never bothered going there. But last week when a colleague said he could buy Branston Pickle from a Tesco in Ookubo I decided to look it up on the net. In fact there are 54 Tesco outlets, most of which can be found in a supermarket chain called Tsurukame Land. Since there is a Tsurukame Land store in Kichijoji I decided to walk over there and find it. Well, I wandered around near the train tracks for about half an hour before finding Tsurukame Land actually under the tracks. It`s a bottom-end supermarket although the prices are still higher than my local Co-op. Sure enough it carries Tesco items: Tesco soy sauce, Tesco seaweed, Tesco dried squid and Tesco bean snacks. But it also has Tesco milk, Tesco grated cheese, Tesco plain yoghurt, Tesco white bread, Tesco instant coffee (but no Tesco tea!), and Tesco Bourbons, Malted Milks, Custard Creams and Choc Chip biscuits. There is no Tesco beer, preserves or Branston Pickle or any other Tesco products. I`m not sure what I expected to find there, some item that could epitomise the Great British cuisine, I guess. Black Pudding? Chips? Scones? I settled for Pumpkin seeds.

Tsurukame Land seems an odd choice to carry Tesco products. It`s a supermarket of the stack`em high sell`em cheap variety. And yet Tesco milk is 157 Yen, in the Co-op it`s only 138. Also it`s trying to sell Japanese products to the Japanese. What on earth is the point of that? What can Tesco be getting out of the deal? Does Tsurukame Land have some Chinese connection, I wonder? Are the bulk of Tesco`s goods headed for a supermarket in China?

Japanese Cafe Signs

2010-02-12T19:31:00.000+09:00

Chocolate Beer

2010-02-11T17:32:00.000+09:00

I`m always looking for new ways to consume chocolate so Chocolate Bitter Beer seemed like a good idea. And it`s not bad at all. Like sweet Guinness.

The Center Test

2010-02-10T17:10:00.000+09:00

Huzzah! Final exams are over and grades are in. All except for one make-up examination which I have been persuaded to give to a student with too many absences because my class was thoughtlessly scheduled for mid-morning and she has problems getting up `early`. Note to the student concerned: sloth is a deadly sin not an underlying medical condition.

This year for the first time I also proctored one day of the Center Test, a two-day nationwide examination taken by motivated high school students (the ones who are able to get up before noon) looking to get into the higher-ranked universities. The students take a series of short examinations in various subjects such as national language (Japanese), maths, English, sciences etc, and universities take their results into consideration when offering places.

I noted several things:

1) My uni took the whole event very VERY seriously. At one point one of the admin staff called up the speaking clock so we could all synchronise our watches to the second. Having never been bothered with my watch`s third hand I didn`t know how to change it but then I noticed it was already correct to the second, and I recalled that I had had the battery changed a year ago at the watch stand in my local Japanese supermarket.

After the first examination, when we returned to the teachers` room to hand in the completed papers every teacher was given a small bag containining a Vitamin B drink, throat sweets, breath fresheners and chocs. Attention to detail, so Japanese. And of course at lunch-time we were given our obento with a nice piece of salmon, two meatballs (they may have been soy), rice, pickles, beans, spinach and other vegetables.

2) It is important not to disturb the students` Wa (their harmony). Many of the students spent time setting up their desks in the cutlery positions just so, with up to 5 very sharp pencils (some in metal pencil holders) all aligned in the knife position, erasers, eye drops, hand towels and tissues arranged horizontally in the spoon position and student identification (with photos often covered by an eraser due to shyness) in the place of the fork. Nudge one item out of place accidentally when handing out the examination papers and the flustered student would go red in the face and frantically realign everything. One student had THREE watches on this desk. I examined them all. One was his wristwatch, one was an alarm clock with luminous hands, the third was a countdown timer so he could know how many minutes he had left. Of the 21 students in our room who sat the first examination of the day, a one-hour social studies paper (students don`t have to take them all) 5 had to be accompanied to the toilet.

3) At least a third of the students had some grey hair. I first noticed this when I was an assistant school teacher (for those who know the Japanese education system, I was a Jet ALT) at a high level city school. Since they are sitting and I am standing hair is one of the first things I notice about students and generally the more `high tension` a student is the more grey hair they have. After changing jobs and moving to Tokyo one year ago, I noticed a large patch of grey hair on the right side of my own head which I pointed out to my colourist. "So you`re left-handed then" she said. I am. "If you are feeling some stress and you are left-handed it will show on your right side because you are right-brained". I found this to be rather far-fetched but have since discovered, on asking my over-achieving, high tension (`hai tenshon` is a common Japanese phrase) friends that it appears to be true. Students tell me that once `exam hell` is over their hair grows back its original colour.

I would have thought that due to the drop in the birth rate resulting in there now being a university or college place for every 18-year-old who wants one, that students could relax a little. But it seems that competition for top places is as fierce as ever.

Wan Wan Matsuri

2010-01-19T17:46:00.000+09:00

My local J-Mart (a hardware and interior furnishings megastore) was having a Wan Wan Matsuri today. Wan Wan is woof woof in Japanese, so it was a woof woof festival. Puppies and kittens were on sale. The average price for the really small dogs - daschunds being the most fashionable dogs at the moment - was 130,000 Yen, that is 866 pounds.

Pets are an obvious status symbol. They require space to house and leisure time for walkies. And that`s even before you start putting clothes on them.

Since J-Mart sells pets and pet supplies, you are allowed to take your pets inside the store ... in your shopping cart. It is not uncommon to round a corner and come eyeball to eyeball with a large dog standing in a cart. Alternatively you can leave your pet in the Dog Parking.

Keitai (Mobile/Cell) Battery Charger

2010-01-12T13:35:00.000+09:00

Picture this, non-Japanese readers. You`re a Japanese wakamono (young person) and you`re out and about making essential calls and sending thousands of vitally important text messages to all your friends about what time you got up this morning (after 11am if my students are anything to go by), and what you had for breakfast (nothing for the girls, a black coffee from a vending machine for the guys), and how totally boring Burton-sensei`s class is (you think I can`t see you trying to send messages when my back is turned whilst I`m writing on the whiteboard? I can). Suddenly ... oh no! Your keitai battery has died. You risk being out of contact with your besties for the rest of the day. Social suicide! What to do? No problem. You simply find a public mobile phone charger (see above). 100 Yen for 10 minutes` charge. So now you can watch TV on the train home.

Puppy the World

2010-01-07T20:41:00.000+09:00

It has come to my attention that there are dogs running around in this cold winter weather ... naked! Get some clothes on them! There is a great range of padded winter coats at Puppy the World in Odaiba.

Venus Fort, Odaiba

2010-01-07T16:45:00.000+09:00

Odaiba is a waterfront entertainment area in Tokyo Bay. It takes about 30 minutes to get there from Tokyo station changing at Shimbashi and taking a train over the Rainbow Bridge. There are several shopping malls, museums, swanky hotels, a ferris wheel and a hot spring theme park with 14 bathhouses. The photos above are of the Venus Fort shopping mall, three floors of discount outlets, shops, restaurants and a games arcade. That is not the sky you can see, that is their famous sky ceiling. At 3pm, the sky darkens, and there is a light show. Odaiba itself is beautifully lit at night, as is the Rainbow Bridge - hence the name.

Year of the Tiger

2010-01-02T20:24:00.000+09:00

It is the Year of the Tiger. In celebration of all things feline, I went to Cats Livin in Odaiba, home of the Cat Cafe (where you can have a coffee and play with cats), cat hats and cat costumes. Weird, yes but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sometimes Japan is so far through the looking glass it blows my mind.

明けましておめでとうございます！

2010-01-01T17:45:00.000+09:00

Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu! Happy New Year! This year is the year of the Tiger, a good year for creative projects apparently. Today Japanese people are sitting around eating special New Year`s Day meals and talking about last night`s `Red and White` Singing Competition in which various talentos sang a song, and it is generally agreed that Susan Boyle (who sang live on the show) was the best thing on it by far.

Me, I`m sitting at home in front of the heater eating dried sugared persimmons and reading my New Year cards (the post office makes a special delivery on the day).

Seminar Marketing Project Part 2

2009-12-31T19:47:00.001+09:00

The winning group in the marketing project was the cupcake group. They had 3 marketing ideas to appeal to 3 different types of customer. I have included some slides from their PowerPoint presentation above and below.

Seminar Marketing Project Part 2

2009-12-29T20:42:00.001+09:00

And what did I learn from the project? When I showed the advertisements to Western friends, they assumed I had been teaching junior high school students. "But it`s all so childish" they noted. True. What it is, is amaterish and cute. Now this is partly because the students, like most Japanese students, have very little experience using computers. On mobile phones they can do anything but many students don`t even own a computer. Essays are hand-written, at least in the first year at university. The other reason is that slick and sophisticated is a Western concept, and one that many Japanese do not like or trust, at least until they spend some time abroad anc can learn to understand it. (And you can tell when that happens because their fashion sense changes.) `Cute` is the No. 1 brand in Japan. Think Hello Kitty. It`s fun, it`s not threatening, it`s nostalgic, like memories of your childhood. The idea of `growing up` in Japan is not a popular one.

I also learned that going out for coffee or tea and cake is a women-only pastime. Food is gendered and our survey results showed that no matter the price bracket no Japanese man is going to waste his money on a cake. For 500 yen he wants a whole meal. Japanese men choose their food by mass. A large cheap meal keeps you fuller for longer. That is their dining criteria.

Congratulations to all my seminar students. Next year, it`s thesis writing!