Hiroshima Day

 

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In excess of 200,000 people were killed, in the immediate blasts, in the aftermath and of longer term radiation sickness and cancers. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remember, and so should the rest of the world.

Stay safe. Be kind. Never again.

Days of audiobooks : day eleven

Listening to audiobooks in my 'office' and doing puzzles has been my relaxation for some weeks. 'Bird Life' by Anna Smaill was a delight; curious and turned into something unexpected, it tells about the friendship between a New Zealand young woman teaching english in Japan, and mourning her brother, and a Japanese woman, also a teacher and also mourning a loss. Here just a lovely moment (that I had to take down like dictation so I may have the punctuation wrong):

 "Dinah placed the carrier bag on the table, she cleared the pile of advertising circulars, the place from this morning's breakfast, the new letter that had been misdirected, sent to a different prefecture, finally redirected to the correct address, finally out the carrier bag on the cleared table and reached inside. It held a box made of thick quality cardboard, white as snow, white as bedlinen, folded along pre-scored lines. Inside the box she felt something shift, heavy and unevenly weighted, it slid. she put the box down in order to delay the moment of opening. She went to the bathroom, studied her face in the mirror, her heart was beating. she washed her hands and face, removed her makeup. She drew the curtains so she could see the light outside, then she walked back to the table and opened the lid. Inside was a pie. It was the pie from Shinjuku, the one that she had not bought. She sat down. Had anything before ever been so beautiful? It was unlikely. The pastry was crisp and fragile, like a bank of fine, sunny, buttery sand. The apples and sweet potato were so thinly sliced they were transparent, glimpses of the apple's perfect pink skin shone through the caramel glaze like flowers caught under rice. It was a fairy tale of a pie, a platonic vision of a pie, it was a pie you might find cooling on a windowsill with a red gingham cloth beneath. she folded the lid to prop up the interior so that the box sat on the table like an expensive display case. Then she took a knife from the drawer and cut herself a thin slice. She took a clean plate from the cupboard and returned top the table, placed the thin slice of pie on the middle of the plate. She sat down. Outside it had started to rain slightly and the sky was a vessel slowly filling with dark resonance. There must be a hole in it somewhere, something leaking. She thought about that bit of lore, was it true? that if you were in a car accident and the car was submerged, that you had to wait until the vehicle filled up with water, until the pressure of inside and outside equalised, then, and only then, you push the door open, and swum out.What strange beauty there must be in that darkness, she thought, the car's headlights illuminating the silt world of the water. You would not need to surface then, you would be able to swim forever. She looked at the piece of pie on the plate, then she took a fork and ate the first mouthful." 

Also 'When We Were Bad' by Charlotte Mendelson, that I may have started previously and then abandoned as it felt familiar. A lovely family saga, guaranteed to make you feel like your own family is nice and normal and well adjusted, and a wonderful window into reform Judaism. The fallout of the decision by Leo to walk away from his wedding echoes through the family and the community and seems to allow his siblings to face up to how much they are living their lives for others. I love a good story examining close family relationships.

Currently listening to 'The Way Home' by Mark Boyle, about his experiment living without money ... 

Stay safe. Be kind. Listening to audiobooks is reading.

Day 2 - Visitor from Japan

Well, I totally failed that. I sat down with the computer yesterday but got distracted. Whatever. 

Today the house has rarely been so clean, not in recent memory anyhow. Monkey sensei's friend Tomoya is arriving from Japan tomorrow, for, shall we say, an extended visit. It started off as perhaps a couple of weeks, but in the end he's staying till August. In Japan you do not quit your job to go off travelling. It's just not done, so it's safe to say he is taking a chance to do this. He wants to improve his English, go to gigs and spend extended periods browsing in record shops. Monkey is very worried that he is so laid back about the whole thing, he insisted I did not need to meet him at the airport so he's getting the bus on his own ... but at least he'll look the right way when he crosses the road.

His mum and dad have made Monkey very welcome when she visits so I wanted to do likewise:

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Reflections on Monkey

When Monkey first went to Japan back in March 2022 she started sending us 'pyjama selfies', because the hotels provide pyjamas for guests, such a wonderful idea. This was our first pyjama selfie and Tish said we looked like we had joined a cult. 

While I had the overarching plan for our trip to Shikoku it was Monkey who worked out the details; she knew when the trains were running, she found interesting places to see and knew when they were open, she checked what the local specialities to eat were. She found the garden and the workshops and the boat trip, and shared her wisdom about life in Japan. She made the whole trip a delight. I could not have done it without her and would not have wanted to do it with anyone else.

She has struggled with anxiety and depression for much of her 20s and to see how learning Japanese and going to Japan has transformed her makes me love the place even more. She has grown in confidence and become a real grown-up, but retains her childlike enthusiasm for everything she does:

dancing on the udon dough ... don't ask me why

insisting on putting on the entire set of Samurai armour

ice-cream pretty much every day

crossing the vine bridge

and skimming stones in the river down below

We rode bikes and climbed mountains together

We managed to balance the things that I wanted to do and the things she wanted to do to create the perfect holiday ... but we hardly have any photos of the two of us together.

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Reflections on Reflections

In Takamatsu we went to the famous Ritsurin Garden. It strikes you straight away that Japanese gardens are not like British gardens. There is very little in the way of flowering plants, and almost no 'flower beds'. It's all about the trees (see previous post) and the water. It is what is called a 'strolling garden', you walk around and admire the views. It is created to look like beautiful scenery, and the pools are integral to the plan as the reflections of the surrounding trees are all part of the view. Build for the wealthy it was opened to the public in 1875.

The Kikugestu-Tei tea house dates back to the early Edo period. 

The purpose of the tea house is that you sit in the open sided building and take tea and look out at the beautiful scene that has been created for you.

(and here on the Window Research Institute website is a fascinating film about the wonderful ingeniously designed shutters that surround the building and how they open to allow a view in any direction)

It was a complete delight, one of the highlights of the trip for me.

Go to Japan, take tea in the tea house.

Reflections on Mountains

 

Japan is an entire country of mountains. I think the thing that makes Mount Fuji so iconic is that it stands alone, not in amongst loads of other mountains. Everywhere we went on Shikoku we were surrounded by mountains. We drove up them, down them and through them. We stopped and admired them. We gazed in awe.

This was our view from the restaurant the first full day when we stopped for lunch:

So many mountains ... so we just had to climb the biggest one.

Mount Ishizuchi is the tallest mountain in western Japan, just short of 2,000 metres.

A seven minute cable car ride takes you probably about half way.

then you hike up to a shrine, and back down into the dip. This chart shows that point at 1300m, from where you go almost straight up:

This friendly sign give the 'rules for hikers', stuff like taking your litter home and being careful on the mountain:

In places there are these climbing chains that allow you to cut off some of the meandering route (if you're up to the climb):

It was very early April. We did not anticipate how much snow might remain on the mountain. The wooden steps were buried in places:

... until the path disappeared altogether. This is the point at which we admitted defeat and turned back. We were not well equipped, the last cable car was at 5 and we were not going to reach the top:

It was an exhilarating adventure just to look down from what felt like the top of the world.

View from the castle across the city of Matsuyama:

Go for the food ... stay for the mountains.

Reflections on Art

My first day in Japan we took the train to Tokyo and went to the Ueno Park to the National Museum and the Metropolitan Art Museum. The Joan Miro exhibition was so extensive that we didn't have time to look at anything else, but it was ok as it was fascinating and we learned a lot about him.

The island of Naoshima was my inspiration for our trip to Shikoku, so at the other end of our holiday we took the ferry from Takamatsu to see the extensive collection of modern art. Much of it is very large and site specific. First up Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama, hundreds of metal spheres, floating in a huge pond, filling the garden and inside the rooms of a concrete bunker, reflecting the viewer, each other and their surroundings:

We moved on to the Benesse House Museum,

Fish and Bread by Jennifer Bartlett

Inland Sea Driftwood Circle by Richard Long, which I photographed for my dad, who has made driftwood art himself, and the lovely muddy circles on the wall that are made with River Avon mud, transported all the way to Japan.

100 live and Die by Bruce Nauman

The Secret of the Sky by Kan Yasuda (who has a very cool website), 

and I thought the little sign said no climbing on the stones, but on second glance realised it meant 'take your shoes off the climb on the stones' and look at the sky.

Seen/Unseen Known/Unknown by Walter De Maria, reflecting the view across the sea.

Don't know what/who this was: a circular structure of mirrors that you can enter, creating a surreal illusion ... here we are actually facing each other on either side of the central divider:

Is this a sculpture that is also a bike park ... or a bike park that is also a sculpture?

(What's more fun is the little sign that says 'no 

bikes' and 'no parking')

We took the bus to Honmura to the Art House Project, where seven abandoned houses have been repurposed as art. This is the Go'o Shrine, the glass steps continue down into an underground cavern beneath the huge stone.

One of the transformed houses. 

The Yellow Pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama. It was this image that I saw online, never imagining that we would actually end up here. The queue of Instagrammers is just out of shot.

So much art, so little time, we had to catch the boat back at 3 to stay on schedule for the mountain ...