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Section 74 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 October 24 Friday.
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I was coming home on the train tonight when I noticed a guy in a suit with a strange lapel pin. It looked like a little blue clock. A bit eccentric and a bit large. Maybe it was just his personal toy, or maybe it was one of the company pins worn by so many Japanese salarymen.
At least, they used to wear them (I think). Looking round the train, however, I realized that there weren't many in sight. At my stop, I walked along the platform, checking suits for company pins, but didn't see any.
It's possible that my statistical sample is simply too small, and, just by coincidence, few (almost none) of the suits on display had company pins. Or (perhaps) the Japanese scene has been changing, and, as company loyalty falls, the habit of wearing company pins drops away.
Or perhaps the pins were never that popular in the first place, and, remembering a time when they were more common, I misremember.
Tonight, watching TV, I've noticed a whole heap of lapel pins ... Japanese politicans wear them ... and people overseas wear them, too ... the American Secretary of State, Powell, seemed to be wearing two of them ... or perhaps I was mistaken, as I was sitting rather far from the TV screen, and perhaps he was wearing some kind of microphone instead ....
Section 74 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 October 26 Sunday.
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This morning I spent a little bit of time watching TV, studying an aspect of Japanese culture which, six years ago, was pretty much a total mystery to me. I'm talking about baseball.
The New York Yankees were playing the Florida Marlins and the game was being shown live on Japanese TV. Japan has its own homegrown baseball scene, but American major league baseball is becoming more popular in Japan now that a few Japanese players have carved out a niche for themselves in American baseball.
Before I came to Japan, I'd never really been exposed to baseball. And, when I first started watching it on Japanese TV, I was baffled as to why people should think it really watchable. But today, to my surprise, I found that I actually understood what I was watching, at a tactical level.
However ... it's taken me six years to get to that point. And, even now, I can't say that I'm a baseball fan. I only watched about fifteen minutes of the game, and didn't linger to watch through to the end. (The result was 2-0 to the Marlins, apparently.)
This is an indication of just how long it can take to adapt to an alien culture.
One member of today's losing Yankees team was Hideki Matsui, the big Japanese guy who has instant recognition here in Japan. A couple of days ago, I was watching some TV sports news footage shot in America, and it featured a couple of American kids saying "We love Matsui!"
It occurred to me that the kids were doing pretty well with the notoriously difficult Japanese "tsu" sound. To the average native speaker of English, the "su" of "sushi" and the "tsu" of "tsunami" sound pretty much the same, and it's very difficult to untangle the difference.
Then I started thinking that maybe the kids were actually saying "mat-su-i" rather than "ma-tsu-i" ... but, if so, it doesn't really matter, because the result was that they generated the right sound (at least, if my ear is any judge ... which is not a sure thing!)
Then it occurred to me that, given that the "mat" combination is easy, and given that the "su" combination is easy, maybe you could teach a native English speaker the authentic pronunciation of "tsunami," say, by first having them say the imaginary word "matsunami" and then, when they had this right, chopping off the "ma".
As I teach English rather than Japanese, this insight is not professionally useful to me. However, it's something I might think about when I'm working on my own Japanese, because "su" versus "tsu" still gives me trouble, both when speaking and when listening.
Anyway, that was today's really Japanese experience, something I'd never do if I was still living in New Zealand: blob out in front of the TV for a while and watch an American ballgame. The "immersion in an alien culture" business doesn't get any more authentic than that.
Section 74 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 October 27 Monday.
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Today I got to Ōfuna station at 1430, meaning to ride the Tokaido Line back to Yokohama, only to find that services on the Tokaido Line had been suspended because of some kind of incident involving a human body. This isn't the first time I've been held up by this kind of incident, and my reaction was irritation, pure and simple. I have to say I didn't waste any time feeling sorry for the owner of the body.
This is the second time this month that the Tokaido Line has failed me. Earlier this month, when I was trying to get from Yokohama to Ōfuna early in the morning, I found the Tokaido Line was out of action. The reason turned out to be that contractors had left some kind of shoveling machine's shovel sitting on the tracks.
The contractors were working by night, and, somehow, this shovel - a huge brute of a thing, big enough to sit in - was forgotten and was left sitting on the railway line, and the first commuter train of the morning ran slap bang into it.
The website of
The Japan Times
has an article about this incident. The incident happened Monday 6th. The article, dated the 7th, reads in part:-
link to article
The shovel was struck by the first northbound train of the day. Operations between Higashi-Jujo and Kamata stations were suspended until 8:45 a.m., while some trains on the Tokaido Line, which runs parallel to the Keihin Tohoku Line, were also temporarily halted.
JR East said it was unclear whether the scoop had fallen off the construction machinery or whether workers had forgotten to clear it away after removing it from the power shovel.
Officials admitted, however, that no one noticed the scoop on the tracks even during the final inspection of the working area before the workers left the site.
Fortunately, on that occasion, I was ahead of schedule, and I had time enough to take the slower Negishi Line, which runs through areas of scenic concrete nearer the coast, and still reach my first morning class on time.
This afternoon, similarly, I used the Negishi Line to get from Ōfuna to Yokohama.
On the train, a little boy kid sat down right next to me, and his brother kids, standing, crowded round, bumping me with their schoolbags ... one kid had a lump of ice in muslin or something similar, presumably for a bruised hand, and dripped meltwater over my trousers ... at least, I hope it was just water ....
I don't think any of this was done to be deliberately annoying. After observing lots of kids on the trains (if you're asleep and someone starts stepping on your feet then you tend to wake up pretty fast and observe) I've come to the conclusion that young kids (certainly kids in the youngest independent commuter age, which seems to start absurdly young, maybe six or seven) are simply oblivious to the effect that they're having on the surrounding adults.
Anyway. Being stuck on the slow train gave me time to work on a poem I've had underway for some time. (Fortunately, the kids got off after a stop or two.) By the time I arrived home, the poem was pretty much finished.
This is a globalization poem called The Erasure of Certainty and I think it does a pretty good job of capturing the dynamics of that disintegrating structure formerly known as "reality". (What we should call it now I have no idea. I'll leave that to the historians. If there ultimately are any.)
The poem starts like this:-
[i]
The erasure of certainty
Was never quite announced
But has arrived.
We start the day in rainbows,
Frogmarching the fractured colors
Into raw cement.
By noon,
We're into transformative commerce,
Renting the Andes,
Mortgaging Japan,
Selling Brazilian sunlight to central Alaska.
Evening.
It's getting hectic.
The temps are dancing upside down.
The boss starts speaking Tibetan.
A disenfranchised stapler turns carnivorous.
I suppose I could, instead, have written an ode to the human body which delayed my train. But, hey, if you stopped to write a funerary dirge every time someone got splattered by a train, you'd have no time left for anything else.
I guess that sounds pretty brutal. But the reality is that human body incidents are all too common. I wouldn't want to exaggerate it, though - although there are hundreds of such incidents in Japan every year, I think this is only the third or fourth time that a train that I've personally been waiting for has been held up by such an incident.
However, on top of that, these incidents show up on the morning TV news ... just like traffic jams and the weather ... so there's nothing unusual about them ... and the impersonal nature of life in a massively populated places like the Tokyo-Yokohama area is such that someone else's tragedy (a genuine railway crossing accident, perhaps, or, more likely, a voluntary suicide leap) just translates into "Damn, my transport is delayed again!"
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