Planning a long one-way trip? Better take something to eat and drink.

Sorry to be back in the graveyard but it is Halloween after all. Foreigners,  (gaijin,  外人 "outside people"), have forever been fascinated by what's different about Japan.  Even now, in the 21st century, Japan a modern sophisticated and in many ways Western country has bits and pieces that continue to surprise.

So when we visited the family temple I had a quick look at the graves that had been visited that day and were still open. So what to take with you? Well your nearest and dearest are there to help and leave a great range of food and drink to help you on your way. Here is some of the ones I found: 

Grape Fanta, nothing but the best of course.

                                              

                                                     Cigarettes and a cold beer.

I wonder what carried this bloke away?

Fruit Jelly        Vegetable Juice

 Bananas       


Elsewhere I've seen toy trucks, for a truckie I suppose, video games and even a pack of cards. Eternity can be eternally long after all.

 A health drink.

Better late than never.

A rather nasty coffee scroll.

  Egypt

               

                                     The judge you may meet on the way.

With Tomono's mother, into her coffin went: Her best coat, her favourite handbag, her stuffed teddy bear, some of her favourite jewelry, tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden, her best Italian shoes, many bunches of flowers and her hat.

Fun with Kanji

Japanese writing contains thousands of Chinese characters, Kanji, they are used for their meanings but also sometimes phonetically. To be properly literate you need to know about 4,000. Today many Japanese are forgetting the more obscure ones and the use use of personal computers and smart phones has made this even more of a problem.

The characters themselves are a delight. Sometimes the meaning is obvious from the form of the pictograph. At other times the meaning is hard to imagine. Because in origin they are mostly so old there are fascinating bits of custom and history buried within.

家   Here a roof with a pig under it. It's the character for "House" . It tells you a lot about where the Chinese used to and sometimes still do keep their animals.

火山  On the left is fire on the right a mountain, so fire mountain = volcano.

電車  Left is electricity. You can see a cloud, rain and a lightning bolt striking a rice field. On the right is a chariot. So here we have an electric train.

好  A female form holding a heavily swaddled child. This means "Love". Female? I hear you cry. Perhaps the figure for mother would help you see how it was derived. 母. (Hint: she's lying on her side.)

電子 This time the electricity and child symbol are combined. So it says "the child of electricity", what's this? Well an electron of course. A good example of how old symbols are used to show modern concepts. This is really the fun part as to work them out is a bit like doing a cryptic crossword.

森  A forest.

禁止 One of my all time favourites. It means "don't" and you see it on Japanese no-parking signs. The character on the right means "stop" but the character on the left means "Don't do this". It is an altar in a forest with a bowl on it. In it is sacrificial blood.....your blood.

引く  The verb "to pull" you can easily see that it's a bow.

Written in Kanji, the place names have very literal and often prosaic meanings. The morning commute from my host family's house in Kamakura to the school in Yokohama takes me through the following towns:

西鎌倉              West Sickle Storehouse    (Nishi Kamakura)
湘南深沢          River South Deep Swamp

湘南町屋          River South Town Shop

冨士見町          Mt Fuji Viewing Place

戸塚                  Door Hill

保土ケ谷          Protected Soil Valley

横浜                  Sideways Seashore (Yokohama)  

The character for "Station", 駅, has a horse with its four legs and mane and then the symbol for a measurement of distance.

 
And finally "Japan", the sun and  the root of a tree, the origin of the sun, the country furthest to the East. Land of the rising sun.

Third year memorial service

It was the third anniversary of the death of Tomono's uncle Akinori. So the family assembled at their temple. It is in Yotsuya in central Tokyo close to where she was born. Families pay an annual fee to the the monks, well business is business, and they look after all the ceremonies. Tomono has many cousins so it was quite a crowd that gathered. Akinori was the last male member of the family of his generation, so Tomono's older brother is now  the head.

The old original temple was rebuilt and put inside a new building, there are now  6 floors of family shrines/graves arranged in vast corridors above. With reception rooms and the main shrines on the ground floor.

After the original funeral, which usually lasts three days, the family regather at regular intervals to do a shorter version again. This happens after 1, 3, 7, 14, 21, 28 and 33 years. So if you come from a big family of deceased relatives you can be quite busy all year round.

The family assemble in the main temple area and then the two monks chant in Sanskrit and ring bells, clash cymbals and so forth for about an hour.(At the original funeral this is about 3 hrs a day for three days). During this the family take turns in coming up to the front. You bow to the assembled relatives, who bow back, then turn to the front and take a pinch of incense raise it to your nose and put it on burning charcoal that is on a special platform  in front of you. You do this three times then join your hands together, pray, then return to your seat. Everyone does it but there is a strict order of precedence. In our case it was his widow, then the eldest son then the eldest grandson then the the eldest son's wife then the eldest daughter then the eldest nephew then the eldest niece (Tomono) then her husband (me) and so forth.

 Then we all go up to the person's personal shrine, in our case on the 5th floor. There is more chanting and incense burning here.

Afterwards we go down to the reception room and there is a large and riotous Japanese lunch. Many good things and lots of beer etc. The monks do very well from all this of course, in many ways they make the Catholic church look like a bunch of amateurs when it comes to extracting funds from the flock.

 The original funeral is an understandably sad and awful affair. These anniversary  get togethers are a lot more relaxed and actually in a way quite joyful.


 We'll be back again soon for Tomono's mother's anniversary and indeed every time we come to Japan there seems to be a memorial for someone. Its actually quite enjoyable and a great way to catch up with the tribe. Of course it's all deeply bound up with ancestor worship and some very old rites.

Yakitori Olympics and strange fruit

Back in Fukushima city they were holding the Yakitori (Japanese satay) Olympics. Yakitori cooks from all over Japan lotsa beer and good cheer. Yakitori should always be charcoal grilled, sadly its getting harder to find these days. These sort of food festivals and regional get-togethers are something Japan does really well. Next week they are having the Dumpling Olympics, wish I could go back.

Luckily there was no problem parking as there was the other parking.

 

Finally, strange fruit: This is Akebi which we bought in the mountains where it grows wild. The colour is a lurid luminous mauve, most unusual for any food. The flavour is a bit like dragon fruit and apparently you can cook the, incredibly bitter, pods as well. Haven't done this yet having had an unfortunate experience with a seafood once that looked like a bright orange rubber glove and tasted worse.

To the Hot Spring

On a happier note  we headed deeper into the mountains to a wonderful hot spring area called Makugawa, "Curtain River".

 Down this road and past this volcanic activity: A 140 year old very isolated little inn just below the cloud line. Like many of these places it seemed to have been renovated during boom years of the 70's and nothing much has happened since. The outside of these places can look very run down indeed but the inside of the rooms are usually well maintained. Also the average age of the staff seemed to be about 85. Great stuff really. Three hot spring pools two outside and one a steaming rockpool of sulphurous water by a pretty stream.

 Dinner for two.  As you can see it is quite generous. Many mountain vegetables, river fish, etc etc. Served in your room and for  the set price. Such places usually cost about $150 per night per person and included everything except drinks.

And then this is breakfast or at least part of it.   Speaking of breakfast we had that in a communal room with the other guests, about 7 of us in all. Including a farmer, his wife and 95 year old mother who had been evacuated from the radiation zone and were living 3 to a room in temporary housing somewhere down in the valley. They had come for a night's break from it all. He had a lot of interesting information about what is going on. 

His mother, born in 1917, good heavens, was a sharp as a tack and very cheery considering everything. I wanted to take her photo, but chickened out. The reason I wanted the photo was during breakfast she was happily seated next to the marvellous object below. It is about 2 meters tall and Tomono tells me it is a fertility symbol, I would never have guessed.

Fukushima

Well, that name always gets everyone's attention these days. In Japanese it means "Fortunate Island" ...we should be so lucky already. It's a prefecture dear to our hearts and of course much in the news.  It is also very large and has at it's mountainous center the marvellous city of Aizu-Awakamatsu which I'll talk about in a separate post.

We are back i n Japan for three months and I am going to do another stint at language school. For the last two days Tomono and I went on a road trip North to see first hand what is going on up North. To put you in the geographic picture the nuclear power plant is about 200 km away from our house to the North and the capital city of Fukushima Prefecture, Fukushima, about 250 km barreling up the autoroute it takes about 2 1/2 to 3 hours to get there.

We went to the town of Minamisoma about 30 kms from the plant, so outside the 20km exclusion zone but severely hit by the tsunami. These are photos of what is left of the seaside part of the town. 400 dead, 1,000 missing and totally upsetting and strange. Streets but no houses, just the odd plate and cup and a bit of a bike or something sticking out of the mud. It is but one of hundreds of towns like this along the coast.

Two houses right on the edge of the wave caught a slap but are still standing, sort of.

Then a few meters away, where the wave stopped, the rest of the town looks completely normal.

Although there is a lot of very small and very cramped looking temporary housing built in parking lots etc.One family to a room.

We then drove back over the hills and mountains away from the trouble towards the center of the prefecture... but, totally unplanned and about 60km from the plant we suddenly came across a "hot spot" there were no warning signs but I started to notice that the rice fields were untended and unplanted and the greenhouses empty and falling apart, from uncleared snow I suppose. Then three towns, the biggest Iitate, completely empty except for a few guards. Like one of the worst scenes from "The Day of the Triffids" or some  other cheery film. Obviously a spot where the luck of the draw and the prevailing winds or a rain shower dumped a concentration of radioactive material on these poor citizens and their farms and livestock.

Everything just left and abandoned. No cars, no washing hanging out, dead pot plants on the verandahs, overgrown gardens, empty shops, empty schools, empty livestock barns. Think neutron bomb. It was totally appalling you can only think of those poor people whose families have probably lived in the area for a 500 years or so and seemingly can never go back.

We did not stop to take photos for fairly obvious reasons. But then around the bend and down the road a bit you see this: Which is what it's meant to look like. Fukushima is/was famous for it's unspoilt agriculture and small scale farmers who take incredible pride in their produce. Even the ones who survived everything are finding it hard to sell their goods due to the stigma. Tourism was also the major industry and that has dried up almost completely.

And then there's this: The scientists amongst you will well recognise this one. Unhappy with the data you're getting? Doesn't fit the hypothesis?  Simply change the method of recording and/or remove a few annoying variables...easy.

On July 17, 2012, the Japanese TV morning news show “Tokudane” reported that 31 out of 38 monitoring posts in 6 cities in Fukushima showed far lower radiation levels than the general actual levels for the areas where the monitoring posts are in. They measured the radiation levels with Professor Kato of Tokyo Metropolitan University. When they use a survey meter and walk a few steps away from the monitoring posts, the radiation levels shoot sharply up. One post measured 0.24uSv while a measurement showed 0.41uSv only one meter away. A monitoring post in South Iitate indicated 4.51uSv, but a survey meter read 9.5uSv. Professor Kato says that such monitoring posts have been set up on decontaminated spots. Citizens have been skeptical of their measurements for a long time.
TEPCO made a document for public release on April 20, 2012 explaining that they have “improved” the area surrounding monitoring posts by cutting trees within 20 to 30m, replacing soil and placing shielding walls, so that readings remain below 10uSv/h. It details the case of 8 monitoring posts, and they cite an example where the radiation dose went down from 83.6uSv to 9.7uSv.

P.S. How do you decontaminate a forest or a mountain?