Diary 59

Life in Japan

zenvirus.com
diary blog

back one web page      forward one web page

       contents of this diary - contents     special topics written about - topics

First entry this page: this page: first entry    Hugh Cook - his blog: latest entry

on this page:-        aspects of American culture

85th Japan high school baseball tournament

rumors Japan Iraq       nostril torture and other weirdness

galactic storm threatens planet Earth

major league baseball        War on Terror zeitgeist

                 

site contents      diary      essays      poems      stories     




Section 59 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 August 07 Thursday.
(diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

One of the unexpected things about living in Japan is the degree to which it exposes me to various aspects of American culture.

Today, for example, the TV is tuned to baseball. I didn't do the tuning, but there it is up on the tube: the American game, which we don't see in New Zealand. (You'd have to search very hard to find a New Zealander who was seriously interested in baseball.) Before coming to Japan, I'd never seen a baseball game on TV. And, even now, I've never yet attended a baseball game.

Today's baseball game is the first of the Japanese high school versus high school series. If my informant can be trusted (and I don't guarantee this!) then 2003 is the 85th anniversary of the Japanese national interschool high school baseball competition.

If you subtract 1915 from 2003 then you get 88 - according to my informant "during the war no tournament. Even high school student had to go to war. During the Second War no tournament."

Today's game is being played (and, once again, I'm relying on a single informant, who is not guaranteed to be reliable) in Osaka between Kiryu Dai Ichi (Kiryu is a location in Gunma Prefecture) and Shinko Gakuen (which apparently is a high school in Kobe.)

Since today is the first day of this interschool baseball competition there is, as usual, a very elaborate ceremony to kick off with, complete with a parade and a speech. According to my informant, the guy giving the speech has just said that this competition got started in 1915.

I tune in to the speech ... "subarashii shiai" ... "superb match" ... he's enthusiastic ... I'm not ....

From a New Zealand perspective, it seems ridiculous to take high school sports so seriously, but this high school baseball competition really dominates the Japanese summer. Millions of TV sets get tuned to it, and it dominates the radio stations as well. It becomes hard to find a station which is NOT broadcasting high school baseball, and if you get into a taxi there's a sporting chance that the taxi driver will have his radio tuned to it.

My God! And now the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Koizumi, has turned up at the baseball stadium! And he's giving a speech! Very strenuously!

"Okashii," says my informant.

"Doshite okashii?" I ask.

"Shouting," comes the response.

Mr Koizumi's speech is strange because he's shouting. But I guess the guy is under a lot of stress. His latest project involves sending the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq. At this stage it's not clear whether this will actually happen, but Koizumi has run into a lot of flak because of this move, which is certainly not popular with the Japanese public.

(Addition, later in the day: Koizumi gets to throw out the first ball. The ball comes down from the sky, attached to a flag which has red and white stripes radiating across it ... Koizumi ... white shirt, sleeves rolled up ... necktie ... white baseball cap ... the crowd applauds as he walks out ... and, gee, after all that I miss the big moment, because I'm in the kitchen making tea.)

The other American thing I did recently was to pick blueberries. While I was living in New Zealand, I don't think I ever saw a living blueberry, and, although I may have eaten blueberry-flavored icecream, I didn't really have a clear idea of what a blueberry was.

However, from time to time blueberries would turn up in American novels or short stories, so they became associated in my mind with America.

And now, here in Japan, we have our very own blueberry plantation. Earlier this week, just before torrential rains drenched the Tokyo-Yokohama area, we harvested (and ate) our entire blueberry crop. This year's crop amounted to two blueberries - our plantation, after all, occupies only a small portion of a very small garden.

Followup: The Japan Times for 2003 August 8 Friday reports (on the front page) that in the opening game of the 85th national high school baseball tournament (yes, this year is the 85th anniversary of that tournament) Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi threw out the "ceremonial first pitch" at the Koshien Stadium and that:-


In the opening game, Kiryu Daiichi High School of Gunma Prefecture, the tournament victor in 1999, crushed Shinko Gakuen 9-2 to advance to the second round while sending the Hyogo school home early after its first appearance in seven years.
Followup on this website: Kiryu Daiichi makes the best of eight:-

baseball update 2003 August 21



Section 59 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 August 07 Thursday.
  (diary)    (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

If Japan does send troops to Iraq, it seems hard to see how they will avoid being caught up in the killing cycle.

In yesterday's English-language edition of The Asahi Shimbun (which in Japan is bundled with the International Herald Tribune there's an opinion piece by a Japanese woman, Yuriko Koike.

It's not clear how recently Koike-san was in Iraq, but she says she entered the country "in late June". Apparently this was her fourth visit to Iraq, and she was able to stay with "an Iraqi acquaintance" and to get a handle on the way in which rumors circulate by word of mouth in Baghdad.

She writes:-
A worrisome piece of information is also making the rounds: "Japanese troops are joining the U.S. and British occupation forces."

This is an indication that we need to do something to keep SDF troops from becoming targets of attacks by Iraqi guerrillas, like U.S. combat troops.
This is the problem: while Japanese troops, if they do go to Iraq, will be sent with the idea of helping the Iraqis rebuild their battered country, it is quite possible that the rumor mill will portray them as a fresh wave of invaders, the legitimate targets of Iraqi guns.

Speaking of rumors, this zenvirus.com site recently took a hit from someone searching the Internet for "yeti and Islam."

This site gets some pretty strange hits - everything from "nostril torture" to "Japanese necrophilia suicide girls" - but "yeti and Islam" really boggled my brain. I don't know what the question was, but I think the answer has to be "No, there is no truth whatsoever to that particular rumor."

Since there's obviously an unsatisfied demand out there, I considered sitting down to write a story about the Japanese Necrophilia Suicide Girls (a heavy metal band, obviously) who fall into the hands of a yeti-worshipping nostril torture cult operating in one of the Islamic areas of Shangri-la.

However, I rather suspect that any such story would suffer the same fate as my as-yet-unpublished tale about snowmen who happen to be vampires.

There's a big audience for vampire stories (people have been conditioned to think them conventional) and there's also (at a guess) a market for stories about snowmen. But if you blend too many genres, then you end up with something which no longer looks anything remotely like the same-old same-old, and it's my belief that it's that same-old same-old which the market really wants.

After a LOT of trying I've found that NOBODY wants to publish a story about vampire snowmen. The rejection that sticks in my mind is one from the editor of a magazine which touted itself as being the home of "really bizarre fiction." He wrote back saying, in part, "sorry, but this is too bizarre for our readers." Then there was the guy who started (not encouragingly) "This is the weirdest story I've ever read in my life."

In short, the vampire snowman experiment was very definitely not a success. Rather, it faced universal rejection. And it seems logical to think that "The Japanese Necrophilia Suicide Girls Pack Up Their Spare Body Parts And Visit Shangri-la" would suffer the same fate.

Still. I'm tempted.

Meantime, if you're looking for a story which features both torture and the human nostril in one and the same text package, the place to go (on this zenvirus.com site) is:-

VORN THE GLADIATOR



Then she produced a pair of tweezers. Ruthlessly, she grasped one of the black hairs which was protruding from Vorn's nostrils and






Section 59 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 August 8 Friday.
  (diary)    (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

Today I found a couple of articles in yesterday's paper about threats to life on planet Earth. One of them is well known. The other was new to me: a "galactic storm." This news in an article headlined "Galactic storm linked to extinctions heads to Earth."

The article is on the front page of The Japan Times for Thursday 7th. It's datelined Heidelberg, Germany, and it starts like this:-
The sun's shifting magnetic field is focusing a decade-long storm of galactic dust toward the inner solar system, including Earth.
Apparently nobody knows how bad this will be (or whether, in fact, it will have any practical effect on us at all), but some researchers have speculated that there might be a link between "sustained periods of cosmic dust bombardment" and the ice ages. And mass extinctions. (Remember the dinosaurs?)

The paper quotes "Newscientist.com" as saying that "the effect the storm will have on our planet - if any - is unknown."

What the paper doesn't say - and what I'd like to know - is the arrival date of this "galactic storm." Today? Tomorrow? Next year? Or when? I'm also curious as to whether this "storm" is raging through the entire galaxy, or whether the "galactic storm" is a misnomer. Are we perhaps talking here about something happening just in our neighborhood, the solar system?

Anyway, no time today to check it out.

The other threat to human civilization is atom bombs. The anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing fell on August 6th, and Hiroshima's mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba (the family name here is Akiba) had a few words to say about this.

The Japan Times reports in an article headlined "Hiroshima mayor rips U.S. on anniversary of A-bomb". This says, in part, that Akiba's words included the statement that "The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the verge of collapse."
"The chief cause is U.S. nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and calling for resumed research into mini-nukes and other so-called usable nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God," he said.
To my mind, this statement is a little too specific, focusing narrowly as it does on the worship of nuclear weapons. It seems more reasonable to argue that the Bush regime, rather than worshipping nuclear weapons per se, worships power.

Certainly the "might equals right" equation seems to be in the ascendency in America right now, and the Bush regime seems dedicated to a vision of an American ascendency which is sustained by the possession of invincible annihilating power.

Whether invincibility is achievable on a planet as fragile as the one which we inhabit is an open question. One, I suspect, that George Bush does not bother asking himself. I don't imagine that he wastes much time meditating on dinosaur extinctions, galactic dust storms and the like.

When Akiba spoke on Wednesday, he mentioned the hibakusha, the atom bomb survivors, some of whom have dedicated much of their lives to the task of warning the world about what happens when nuclear bombs are used in war.
"The world without nuclear weapons and beyond war that our hibakusha have sought for so long appears to be slipping deeper beyond a thick cover of dark clouds that they fear at any minute could become mushroom clouds spilling black rain," Akiba said at the annual Peace Declaration.
America is leading the nuclear pack, but in Japan itself there are a certain number of people who seem keen to join the nuclear race. As The Japan Times notes in an editorial on page 20:-
In a bold but dangerous departure from tradition, some younger politicians are pushing for an aggressive defense policy. They are willing to discuss subjects that have long been taboo in the defense-policy debate, including the possibility of arming with nuclear weapons.
Where all this is taking us is anyone's guess. However, it really does seem that the imaginative shock of the world's first nuclear war, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki war, is wearing off.

Frankly, puzzling over these heavy-duty problems on a Friday just makes me feel tired. Which I suppose is a bit sad, but seems to be the way the world works.

We live in a mountainous region, with the cloudy peaks of the Big Issues all around us. However, our lives are spent in the valleys. And, most of the time, we're too busy hunting worms (that's why we get up early in the morning, right?) to spend much time worrying about the avalanche risk.


Section 59 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 August 9 Saturday.
  (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

This morning I emerged from consciousness to find the TV tuned to major league baseball. Here in Japan, some TV station was broadcasting, live, a match between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners.

From a Japanese perspective, this looks like a match between Ichiro Suzuki (of the Mariners) versus Hideki Matsui (also known as Gozilla). We saw quite a few shots of those two.

The commentary was in Japanese, for example:-

"Kibishii booing desu."

This provoked a question: when English-speaking people "boo," do they actually vocalize the sound "boo"? (That, after all, was what the American audience seemed to be doing.) I confirmed that, yes, they do. "Like pigs," came the response. Welcome to the wonderful world of English-language pig noises!

Although the commentary was in Japanese, the microphones picked up background noises, including a public address announcement:

"Everyone stay alert and be aware of your surroundings."

This reminded me that this broadcast was coming from America, Land of Living Terror, which in turn reminded me of some war on terror stuff that I found on the Internet.

The first item is a great set of comic strips, starting at:-

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html

These are just so good! This piece of dialog cracked me up:-
Woman: "I'm a little confused. Are U.S. citizens allowed to kill suspected terrorists now?"

Man: "I think so. But you have to be really, really sure the person is a suspected terrorist! So be super-double sure that they make you feel nervous!"
I feel these comic strips really capture the zeigeist, the spirit of the age, the age of the War on Terror. (Mind you, currently, I'm living through the Age of Terror pretty much as a spectator - here in Japan, it hasn't started to happen yet.)

Here in Japan, we're still living in the Age of Post Cold War Normality, although of course that, like all things, could change.

The other thing I found online recently is the blog of someone in the American military:-

turningtables.blogspot.com/

with associated photoblog at:-

moja_vera.fotopages.com/


The guy's blog gives you a good feel for the quotidian moment-by-moment life of someone stuck in Iraq, a real blogging blog, stuff like this, for example:-
i'm beyond sick of MRE's...and the brown and root chow hall just isn't very reliable...sometimes it is extremely good and then they next day it will be something like 'sweet and sour gopher curry'...
Here in Japan, a typhoon day. Heavy rain in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. I spent the day recovering from the working week, catching up on stuff like sleeping.

Still haven't had time to research the alleged "galactic storm" which is maybe menacing planet Earth (maybe, but, then again, maybe not). However, since there's been nothing about it on TV, my working hypothesis is that it's not going to happen (if it happens) any time soon.


(diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

top

Website contents copyright © 1973-2006 Hugh Cook



site contents

diary

essays

poems

stories

flash fiction





FAQ



e-mail









write fiction

CHRONICLES

MILIEU MAP

WORSHIPPERS

WITCHLORD

free novels





Hugh Cook

story list

novel list

poem list

Trojan War

Wizard War




Diary

Life in Japan

Hugh Cook

zenvirus.com