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Section 91 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 February 13 Friday
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Was away from my computer for ten days so, on my return, found six hundred and forty e-mail messages waiting for me (no kidding!) ... and, on sifting through the spam, found half a dozen of these were from real human beings ... one alerting me to a story written by a Japanese individual whose brother, who is in the Japanese military, either has been or will be sent to Iraq.
The story is at:-
http://nofrills.hp.infoseek.co.jp/hon/story.html
Section 91 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 February 14 Saturday.
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Just back from New Zealand - returned to Japan yesterday, making the transition from blue skies to gray. Really, these two countries are different worlds.
You'd know that from this snippet of Kiwi conversation:-
"He's the guy who ran into the car, isn't he?"
"Yes. I was in the back of the car when he ran into it."
For some reason, in Japan you just don't end up having conversations about cows. (Not unless the topic is BSE, that it.)
While I was in New Zealand, there was a party, and we had a choice between shifting a table or hacking back an inconveniently located trees. We took the Kiwi option and hacked back the tree.
Not only that, in order to properly prepare the garden for the party, we also chopped down two entire trees and tore out their root systems with grub hoes. Actually, I did the chopping and tearing myself.
I'm ashamed to say that this was the first time in my life that I'd ever used a grub hoe. In fact, when I was sent into the garage to look for "the grub hoe" I wasn't even sure what I was looking for, though I'm pleased to say that I did recognize the item in question as soon as I set eyes on it.
I'm searching my memory - did I ever chop down a tree before? I can't remember that I ever did. Given that New Zealand is a nation that was built (for the most part) by chopping down trees, I feel that every New Zealand child should, as part of its school education, have to personally cut down its own tree and dig up the roots.
Of course, these days, we're all green, and (in public, at least) we don't believe in clear-felling the landscape. In fact, while in New Zealand I had a conversation with someone about the environmentally disastrous land-clearing operations going on in a certain Third World country.
"Sure," I said, not disputing the truth of the criticisms being made of the defenseless country in question. "But we've cut down all our own trees."
(I don't think the person I was talking with quite got the point.)
Anyway, feeling culturally refeshed, I'm back from New Zealand, and I've brought back with me a host of educational photographs for use at the schools I teach at, including pictures of Kiwi cow pasture (created by clear-felling forests), gorse (a thorny shrub imported from Britain which invades the land as soon as you clear it), scotch thistle (thematically similar to gorse) and pampas (imported from Latin America, and happy to take over any niche not filled by gorse and scotch thistle.)
These things I'd expected: gorse, scotch thistle, pampas. Other things were a bit surprising.
In particular, in the New Zealand newspapers, there was a lot of news about something called "P," which apparently is Kiwi slang for methamphetamine, which, it seems, has become a major problem in New Zealand.
And other things have changed. There are even a couple of shops, in Queen Street, Auckland, which have security buzzers which you have to press to beg for admittance ... you can't just wander in off the street. And there are banners in the street advertizing the presence of surveillance cameras ....
It's not quite the country I remember. It's true, you can never really go back, because the place you came from doesn't really exist any more, at least not in the form that you remember it.
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