Section 53 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 July 19 Saturday.
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I'm in the process of brushing up my rudimentary medical knowledge, and for this purpose I dropped by at Hibya Library yesterday afternoon. This is a little itty bitty library which the City of Tokyo maintains right in the center of the city, and it's convenient for me (more or less) because I commute through the center of Tokyo (or near the center) once or twice a week.
The study book I borrowed this time was "The Apprentice," Tess Gerritsen's sequel to "The Surgeon." This police-and-killers book doesn't muck around. There's dead flesh as soon as you hit page five (and, in fact, there's been a killing before we even get that far). Anyway, page five:-
Later on, there are places in which the language gets a bit more medically technical, for example:-
Bits of gray matter and other unidentifiable parts were dispersed in a radius of thirty feet along the street. A skull fragment had landed in a second-story flower box, and clumps of tissue adhered to parked cars.
Yesterday, inspired (sort of) to meditate on medical matters, I dug into my poetry archive and hauled out a poem from 1976, a poem on hypochondria which starts:-
A blood sample, drawn from my vein, will reveal a startling abnormality: an overwhelming host of white blood cells with multilobed nuclei and granular stippling. These are neutrophils, which automatically swam into action when faced with the threat of overwhelming infection.
I was pleased with it at the time, but, looking at it now, it seems to lack pacing. A full eighteen lines, and nobody dies.
The ground is a tract of infection.
The sun streams with X-rays,
And a tumour floats in the orange juice.
Today I posted my poem Tonga - medical aid mission. This poem has not been published until now but dates back to the 1970s. When I wrote it, I wasn't sure what it was about - didn't really have any idea. However, now, I think I can say with confidence that it was about my reaction to my first adult encounter with the Third World. It starts like this:-
Shrill antennae of hurricane
Worry the roof.
The spray drifts in the wind.
Yesterday, I swam
Adrift in the sponge-bath sea.
In the laboratory,
Clotted blood and faeces -
The interminable variations
Of human shit.
Coral, cowrie, a South-sea sun.
The spray drifts;
Flies, mosquitoes,
Die in the drift.
Faeces swirl in the selenite.
I also found and posted an old poem from the 1970s called Snails ... this is about snails, and, plotwise, the snails don't actually seem to do anything. (Bodycount zero.)
I also found a short poem called A Short Poem, also from the 1970s. And here it is:-
A short
Poem
Struts
On stilts
Across the garden
And
Topples
Into a red wheelbarrow.
Section 53 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 July 21 Monday.
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Last night, we were strolling along the road by the banks of the Meguro River, in Tokyo's Nakameguro district, when I was surprised (and shocked) to see the murder of the innocent in progress, this indiscriminate slaughter being carried out by a number of murder machines.
The murder machines were insect zappers mounted in the riverside trees - those devices consisting of a cool blue-purple lure light and an electrified insect-frying grid - and they were zapping whatever randomly selected insects had the misfortune to fly into them.
This is the most ecologically senseless thing I've seen in my six years of continuous residence in Japan, land of concrete wood and concrete hillsides, a land where innumerable streams and creeks and rivers have been sheathed in concrete.
(It's possible to make a case for exterminating mosquitos, which in Japan may carry a kind of occasionally lethal encephalitis, but, according to what I've read, electric insect-frying machines are pretty much useless for this purpose, as they generally catch larger, harmless critters.)
On top of that, the irritating zzzip! of frying insects rather spoilt the ambience, such as it was. If you've been spending the evening dining in a French restaurant, you don't really want to digest your meal to the sound of sizzling corpses. At least, I don't.
The French restaurant had a bilingual French-Japanese menu. The French part of this was probably just there for show, since it is unlikely that actual French-speaking people came to the restaurant. Even so, it was the French part of the menu that I read.
By this stage, my wretchedly inadequate schoolboy French has degenerated to the point where I cannot even self-introduce in French. Furthermore, when I hear French being spoken, as a general rule all I can work out is that "That's French!" However, when it comes to reading, it's still easier for me to read French than Japanese (at an exhibition of French art, for example, with bilingual explanatory signs in French and Japanese.)
When I'm looking at a menu, "gateau chocolat" communicates its meaning instantly, whereas I still (even now) have to work a little to decrypt the Japanese equivalent:-
(chokorēto kēki)
When it comes to reading Japanese, the basic problem is that the Chinese characters (the kanji) which are used to write so much Japanese are not self-pronouncing.
In the case of French, if I don't know the word, I can at least take a stab at the pronunciation, and the pronunciation (plus the way in which the word is written) may suggest an English equivalent.
For example, flicking open The New Oxford English Dictionary of English, I find the entry for "depend," which tells me that the English word is derived "from Old French dependre, from Latin dependere, from de- 'down' + pendere 'hang'."
The etymological relationship here is pretty obvious, meaning that if I see a French or Latin word like "dependre" or "dependere" or "pendere" then (if I know the context) I may be able to make a reasonable guess as to the meaning.
With Japanese, however, if I don't recognize the kanji, then I can't even get started.
So, when it comes to French, I can read it (up to a point) even though I can't speak it and even though my listening skills are not much better than zero. With Japanese, on the other hand, my listening and speaking skills are now strong enough for me to handle unscripted telephone calls from total strangers, but I'm close to being functionally illiterate.
(This morning, I fielded a Japanese-language sales call from someone in Osaka who wanted to speak to the "kuruma no tantōsha," the person in charge of all our cars. I was able to tell the person, sorry, but we don't have any cars. Handling this unscripted conversation in Japanese was pretty easy, but if the conversation had been in French then I probably wouldn't have had a clue what the caller was talking about.)
When I'm moving round the Tokyo-Yokohama area, I don't notice how weak my Japanese reading skills are, because by now I can reliably decrypt most of the signs that I see on the way, including the names of most of the railway stations. Yesterday, however, when we went to a museum exhibition, I once again found out just how weak my Japanese reading skills really are.
To start with, I couldn't even decrypt the name of the exhibition itself - it was "Edo Big Something Something Kai," with the "Kai" possibly meaning "meeting." Today, with my kanji dictionary at hand, I can translate it:-
"Bay Door Great Extensive See Meeting"
"Edo Great Exhibition"
"Great Edo Exhibition"
Now that I've decrypted it, I feel pretty ashamed at not having recognized that "haku," which is the "haku" of "hakubutsuakan," which means "museum." Somewhere, I've got a piece of paper tucked away which says that I have a university degree with a double major in English and Japanese, which is supposed to mean that I can read simple words like "museum" and "exhibition." But the problem is that I can't.
Anyway, this exhibition was at the National Science Museum at Ueno Park, and it was a fairly eclectic selection of stuff from Japan's Edo Era (otherwise known as the Tokugawa Era), the Edo Era being the period 1600-1868, during which time Japan was governed from the city of Bay Door (Edo, nowadays known as Tokyo.)
The stuff on view included toys, optical devices for viewing pictures in 3D (it seems you can build this kind of thing with pretty primitive technology), medical models and medical pictures (one of which looked like an acupuncture chart, though I wasn't sure, since I couldn't read the label), maps and so forth.
The thing I found most interesting were some formidable jawbones which seemed to be made of some kind of polished stone. Meeting the monstrous owner of these jaws would be probably not be a pleasant experience, at least not if the owner was hungry. This exhibit was marked, clearly and unambiguously:-
"ryū kotsu"
"dragon bones"
Section 53 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 July 21 Monday.
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Last night I had a weird dream. I was at a boxing arena, and the audience was waiting for the fight to begin. So far, so good. However, nobody had turned up to fight the guy who was in the ring, a black guy, very athletic, whose name was Ali. (Not Cassius Clay but some other guy.)
Now the problem was that I was in charge of organizing this fight, so I had to find someone to fight the black athlete. At first I wasn't sure what to do. Then I saw Woody Allen in the audience, so I asked him if he would fight the black guy. Woody, however, demurred.
Well, I could understand that. It was a mismatch. Then an idea occurred to me. I could see Bill Gates in the audience, so maybe Bill Gates would be agreeable to fighting Woody Allen. That would be a better match.
Anyway, I went over to Bill Gates to talk to him. However, I don't know whether the Allen-Gates fight eventually went ahead, because at that point I got woken up by the put-out-your-garbage music of the garbage truck, which was trundling along the road just outside the house.
(Usually I would have left the house before the garbage truck arrives, but this particular Monday is some kind of public holiday here in Japan, so I was still asleep when the garbage truck came round.)
Section 53 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 July 21 Monday.
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Okay, this is a first - today, at about 1505, the power here in my part of Yokohama failed. This is the first power failure I've experienced in Japan.
I was working with my computer when a thunderstorm started up outside, and after a couple of thunderbolts the power abruptly went off. It came on again after only a minute or so.
This is the very first power failure I've experienced in six years of continuous residence in the Tokyo-Yokohama area - usually everything here in Japan works pretty much perfectly.
Elsewhere in Japan, far to the south, in Kyushu, there has been really appalling rain, and we've seen scenes of devastation on TV - houses carried away by landslides and so forth. Some really graphic TV pictures from (I think) Fukuoka showed floodwaters pouring down subway steps into the subway. Someone took a TV camera down into the subway and filmed ticket machines half-submerged by flood waters.
Here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, I don't think it has really rained over the last day or two, but heavy rain is starting in now - right now it's 1513, with heavy rain falling. Although the power is back on, I've pulled the plug to disconnect my laptop from the mains, and I'm word processing on battery power - if lightning hits local power lines it's possible to get a dangerously high voltage come sizzling down the wires to fry delicate electronics.