Section 39 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 April 19 Friday.
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Spring. The grapevine in the garden is sprouting new leaves, much to my surprise. I was more or less convinced it was dead.

Last year, I bought a grapevine - a stick with a couple of grape leaves and some roots - and planted it. In my wildly optimistic fantasies, I imagined that it would be stretching along the fenceline by the end of the year.

Instead, it did little more than survive. The summer sun baked it. Typhoons lashed it. Some kind of plant disease blotched its leaves. Then winter came, and the leaves fell off, and all that was left was a stick.

I hypothesized that perhaps grapevines lose their leaves in winter, but I was too busy to research it. The first grapevine in my life, in the garden of the family house on Ocean Island, very close to the equator, certainly never lost its leaves - but then, there is no winter up near the equator.

Later, in Northland, New Zealand, I don't remember the grapevines in the neighborhood losing their leaves. But that was a semi-tropical area where frosts were extremely rare. Here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, we had a tolerably severe winter, with a surprising amount of snow.

Anyway, the grapevine has leaves, the grass is turning green, and it really feels like spring. It's quite a contrast to New Zealand, where most plants are green all through the year, and where the seasons blur into each other more.

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Section 39 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 April 23 Wednesday.
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Images from Japan ....

Hanging just above the river (this is on TV) there is an umbrella. It's suspended from a bridge by a rope. It's a small, stone bridge out in the countryside somewhere. The umbrella is hanging there, upside down, for a purpose. Hint: the umbrella is hanging above a little bit of white water. A local finally hauls up the umbrella. Inside are a scattering of little silver fish. The fish are jumping so they can get upstream, past the little bit of white water, and their leaps are taking them into the waiting umbrella.

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At Anamori Inari, a location not far from Haneda Airport, a plastic container is wired to a utility pole. The container used to hold drink of some description, but now a slot has been cut into it so people can post things in it. Smokers, understanding what is to be posted, have been posting their cigarette butts. The container is about three quarters full of sodden cigarette butts, marinating in their own amber exudate.

Later, on the approach to Anamori Inari railway station, I notice posies of flowers wired to some kind of poles. And, half-concealed by the flowers, something else. More drink containers, a couple empty of all but water, others jammed almost solid with the acumulated corpses which give evidence of the unclean activities of smokers.

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A return visit to Anamori Inari gives me a chance to check my recollections. No, not posies of flowers. Rather, sprays of dark green ivy-type vegetation. Made of plastic. When I first arrived in Japan, I really noticed the overload of artifice -- foot bridges made of concrete wood crossing streams lined with industrial-strength concrete. Now, I have more or less ceased to notice that I am living in a world made of concrete, plastic, glass and steel girders.

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Section 39 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 April 24 Thursday.
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SARS: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

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SARS Japan update:-

• As of this morning, officially there were no SARS cases in Japan.

• According to the morning newspaper, a new "thermal imaging machine" is being tested at Narita Airport. It "is intended to spot people suffering from SARS by detecting those with high fevers". Apparently Narita Airport began testing this machine yesterday, Wednesday.

• Japanese hospitals are making preparations to cope with a possible SARS outbreak.

• Personal observation: the average Japanese commuter is still not wearing a face mask.

• Conversation overheard today (in Japanese): "Is SARS in Japan?" "Maybe it is but maybe it hasn't been announced." "Do you really think so?"

On more than one occasion, I've heard Japanese nationals expressing a certain degree of scepticism regarding the willingness of the Japanese authorities to tell the truth, though I have no statistical data on how widespread this attitude of scepticism is, and I have no certain way of telling whether this scepticism is or is not well-founed.

• SARS - how is it spread? By two methods:-

(1) "in large droplets from coughs or sneezes" (the most important route).

(2) (possibly) via contaminated items (such as a pen, for example), as the virus can survive outside the body for twenty-four hours. (Here, "the virus" means the coronavirus which is, at this stage, widely believed to be the cause of Sars).

The data on the two methods of spread comes from an article by Lawrence K. Atlman of The New York Times. The appears today on page 8 of the International Herald Tribune (as published in Japan) with the headline "Canada's health officials intensify precautions against virus".

Although SARS has not yet (officially) reached Japan, it is getting more and more attention on television, and is sometimes the lead item on the TV news. In Japan, SARS is being referred to as a "shingata uirusu no haien," a "newtype virus of pneumonia," - or, to translate another way, "pneumonia, newtype, viral". (The intended meaning is "the new type of pneumonia which is caused by a virus".)

(Today's Japanese grammar point: the modifier or modifiers come before the thing which is being modified. The thing being modified here is "haien," meaning "pneumonia". The words doing the modifying are "uirusu no," meaning "viral" [literally "virus of" or "of virus"] and "shingata," meaning "newtype" or "newmodel".)

Over the last few weeks I've been watching the progress of the SARS outbreak with some considerable interest. It's now Thursday April 24, and on Saturday 26, the day after tomorrow, I'm scheduled to head out to Narita airport to meet my parents, who are coming to Japan for a couple of weeks.

This holiday has been long in the planning - so long in the planning that at first I was worrying that it might be derailed by the George Bush war on Iraq, or by a sudden war between George Bush and North Korea.

All going to plan, we will get to do the whole tourist thing - the ancient capital of Kamakura, the old imperial city of Kyoto, the Tsukiji fishmarket in Tokyo and so on and so forth. But there's still time for this whole thing to be derailed.

Because of this additional personal factor for taking an interest in the SARS outbreak, I would probably be posting more often, except that right now I'm in an intensely busy period. Fortunately, however busy I get, I always have to spend a certain amount of time sitting in trains. Today, I'm spending something like three hours in trains, all up, and it's this transit time which has enabled me to make this entry.

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Section 39 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 April 26 Saturday.
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Yesterday I got an e-mail from America asking me if it was true that there were "only two" SARS cases in Japan. I wrote back saying, basically, "I don't know". Meantime, I was thinking to myself - two SARS cases? What two SARS cases!?

I looked around the Internet and found the World Health Organization statistics for 24 April. According to the WHO stats, Japan had, yes, two SARS cases, which was news to me. However, Japan did not feature on the WHO's list of countries where local chains of transmission are occurring ("as reported by the national public health authorities".)

As I read (or misread) the WHO statistics, as of the 24th local transmission of SARS was occurring, officially, in Canada, Singapore, China, the USA, the UK (to a limited extent in London only, apparently) and Vietnam.

As for what is really happening, who knows?

The most responsible and authoritative source of news in Japan is NHK, and on the Japanese-language NHK TV 1 news starting at 0700 this morning there was no mention of any SARS cases in Japan itself.

I didn't listen to the news broadcast myself (I was too busy vacuuming and doing laundry) but a native speaker of Japanese listened to it for me (which is actually much better than me listening to the news myself, as my Japanese language skills leave a lot to be desired.)

So, on the one hand, there's that figure on the WHO stats, a simple "2" devoid of any context. On the other hand, there's the absence of any mention of any Japanese SARS cases on this morning's NHK news.

There seems, on the face of it, to be a discrepancy there, but I have no way to know how to interpret this discrepancy.

Later, I listened to some NHK documentary coverage of SARS in China and elsewhere (it was on TV, but I was listening to it rather than watching as I was still doing housework) and I noted that SARS was being referred to, sometimes, as "shingata haien," or "newmodel pneumonia" (a cut-down version of the more elaborate "shingata uirusu no haien" or "newmodel viral pneumonia").

(Incidentally, listening to Japanese people talking in Japanese over the last week, I've also noticed that the English term "SARS" has been creeping into conversational Japanese.)

Well, so much for SARS. The next topic is yesterday's adventure with the Japanese language, which is a bit embarrassing, and falls into two phases.

Phase one. I'm home alone in the evening, at the end of a very LONG week, and the intercom chimes. It's a guy at the gate, who speaks to me in Japanese. It turns out that he's selling newspaper subscriptions, so I cut him off and tell him we don't need one.

The Japanese for this is very simple. "Kekkou desu". (The "ou" indicates a long "o" sound.) It means "Okay is," or "Unnecessary is."

So far so good. Then the intercom chimes again, and it is the same guy with the same sales spiel. Guys coming round selling newspaper subscriptions are a regular event, but this is the very first time that one of them has ever tried twice inside of five minutes.

The downside of acquiring a measure of fluency in a foreign language is that you become exposed to the temptation to tell people exactly what you think of them. In this case, giving way to temptation, I went outside and did exactly that, in a voice which got louder and louder and louder and louder to the point where I could probably be heard by everyone within a hundred meters or more.

"Do you understand?" I finished.

"Yes," he said, smiling cheerfully. "I understand now."

That made me REALLY angry. I just HATE it when I get boiling angry and the other guy just smiles at me.

However, I decided this had gone far enough, so I went inside and the newspaper guy went on his way, leaving me thinking to myself, "You know, you really have to keep the volume down. Next time, get right up close to the guy and say what you want to say so only he can hear it."

Then, five minutes later, the intercom chimed AGAIN, and this time it was some woman whom I'd never seen before in my life rattling on about the something-something "chounaikai," whatever the hell a "chounaikai" was, and I was in no mood to find out, so I told her "Kekkou desu" and killed the intercom.

Then it chimed again, and it was the same woman, so I just said "Wakarimasen," meaning "I don't understand," and killed the intercom again.

Ten minutes went by, then the intercom chimed yet again, and it was the same woman, so I thought I'd better go outside and find out what was going on. The intercom features a one-way closed circuit TV camera which lets me see the face of whoever is outside, but communication works best if you actually have the whole person, not just a little itty bitty face on a black and white TV screen.

So I went outside, in a less than pleasant mood, and let the woman explain things to me, all in Japanese since she didn't have any English to speak of, and bit by bit comprehension started to dawn.

The "chounaikai" is the neighborhood committee to which we belong, and this woman had the duty of collecting annual dues from all the households belonging to the committee. The duty of collecting dues changes once a year, and this woman had just taken over the role, which was why I had never seen her before.

At this stage I was glad that I have had at least the rudiments of polite Japanese drilled into me, so I could do the "I humbly apologize" bit. And I was also glad that my Japanese was strong enough for me to explain that "I'm sorry, but I've had a really long week, and I'm not really thinking straight, and, what's more, a guy selling newspapers has been making himself troublesome, so because of that I was angry, and I do apologize."

Anyway, the woman was very nice about the whole thing (I mean, very nice, a model of mature and sophisticated diplomacy - and, on top of that, she came across as being geninely friendly in a good neighbor kind of way), and I paid the dues (2,400 yen for the year) and she went on her way.

I've now added "chounaikai" to my list of essential Japanese.

These neighborhood committees are a standard feature of Japanese life. In most places, their functions are limited to circulating a community noticeboard, which generally features nothing of any importance whatsoever. However, here it's a little more complicated, as the road is in private ownership. (It seems that quite a few backstreets in the Tokyo-Yokohama area are in private ownership, although you wouldn't realize it if you just happened to be passing through - the concept of the "gated community" does not seem to exist in Japan, and, to my eye, a private road looks no different from a public road.)

Because the road is privately owned, the chounaikai has to foot the bill for streetlighting - not much of a bill, since we're just talking about a couple of neon tubes tacked onto the local utility poles. Also, because the road is privately owned, the chounaikai has to decide where the garbage collection point should be. (All garbage is heaped up in one single place for the convenience of the garbage truck.)

And if it is suggested that the garbage collection point should be moved, then the question of whether this happens or does not happen is a decision for the chounaikai to make. And, on that subject, I could a tale unfold ... but will not, since this issue is, I think, far too sensitive.

Anyway, to summarize the lessons of the above:-

(i) Don't be rude to the guy selling newspaper subscriptions - he's just doing his job.

(ii) If you do decide to be rude to the guy selling newspaper subscriptions, do it quietly, not in a huge bellowing voice that can be heard over quite a considerable portion of the city of Yokohama.

(iii) Remember that not everyone who presses the intercom is selling newspaper subscriptions.

(iv) If you live in Japan and get asked to join the chounaikai then join. Remember that if the Americans decide to invade and trash the local regime then it will be handy to be part of a basic self-governmental unit which is already up and running.

(v) If you live in Japan and speak some Japanese, then learn more. You never know when it's going to be handy. But try to resist the temptation to use the kind of stuff you pick up from watching yakuza movies and listening to tough-talking junior high school kids.

(Actually, I wasn't nearly as rude to the newspaper guy as I could have been. I was simply very, very direct. It's sometimes said that Japanese people tend to be vague because the Japanese language itself is vague. But this is nonsense. The Japanese language comes with a full set of tools which are more than adequate for saying EXACTLY what you want to say ... but, culturally, saying exactly what you want to say is often going to be rather less than entirely appropriate.)

And that's it for today, I think.

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Chounaikai. Once again, the "ou" indicates a long "o" sound. My dictionary translates this as a "town block association". The "nai" means "interior," the "kai" means "meeting" or "committee" and the "chou" ("cho" with a long "o") is one of the subdivisions of an urban area, roughly equivalent to a "block". The "chounaikai" could reasonably be referred to as a "neighborhood committee" or a "community committee".

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Section 39 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 April 27 Sunday.
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Yesterday I went out to Narita airport to greet my parents, who were arriving in Japan for a holiday. I got to the airport a little early, so I wandered around looking for signs of SARS panic.

I didn't find any, although I did overhear the following conversation between a man and a woman who were speaking English, the woman masked:-

Woman: "It's so hot under this ...."
Man: "Well, you don't know if it will protect ...."
Woman: ... [inaudible] ... if someone sneezes ... [inaudible] ..."

Statistically, people wearing masks were in a minority. As I wandered around the departure area, I only saw a few. At the arrival area, rather more masks were visible, worn by arriving passengers, but I figure that only about ten percent or so of arriving passengers were masked.

As for the airport staff, I only saw one single person wearing a mask - a woman manning a kiosk selling convenience-store-type goods. However, after my parents arrived (maskless) they told me that the immigration officers who were checking passports were wearing masks.

Theoretically, yesterday was the first day of the Japanese Golden Week holiday, when it is traditional for tens of thousands of people to flood into the airport and pile onto planes for overseas holidays. However, apparently it is projected that, this year, the traditional Golden Week travel rush will be thirty percent smaller than usual, because of Sars and the George Bush war on Iraq.

Certainly the airport felt really quiet.

Loudspeaker announcements at Narita were actually using the words "war on Iraq" as they advised that security precautions for departing passengers were being intensified. Because the acoustics were less than perfect, and because the announcement was only occasionally repeated, I didn't catch all of it, but I gather that security checks for departing passengers are extending even to the coat you are carrying and the drink that you have in your hand. (How one security checks a drink I cannot begin to imagine.)

What struck me on yesterday's visit to the airport had nothing to do with Sars. Rather, what struck me was how Japanese everything was, particularly the restaurant area. In the Tokyo-Yokohama area, Western-style restaurants are fairly common, so if you wander around a restaurant area then you may chance upon an Italian restaurant or a Spanish restaurant or whatever. (And, of course, other cuisines are represented.)

But at Narita I really got the sense that traditional Japanese food was dominant, perhaps because the average Japanese traveler is looking for a taste of home before they get on that plane and head out into the wild blue yonder.

My parents brought me a copy of The New Zealand Herald and, also, a couple of anecdotes from home. Sars features very prominently in the newspaper, but what really made an impression on me was one of the anecdotes. Apparently a woman was sitting on a wharf out in the open air, waiting for a ferry, when she coughed. And the man sitting next to her, a stranger to her, got to his feet and immediately evacuated the area.

Statistically, this kind of anecdote constitutes just so much gossamer-thin nothingness. However, putting the anecdote together with the heavy coverage in the newspaper, I started to get the feeling that a degree of Sars panic exists in New Zealand, and the thought that went through my head was, "Hey, guys - get a grip!"

(Yes, Sars is a problem. But, when we think about the problems that we have to confont, panic is not efficient. Okay, let's all calm down and think about our problems ... the Japanese economy may collapse tomorrow ... everyone still calm? ... good ... the North Koreans may nuke us the day after tomorrow ... pulse rates still low? ... good ... okay, now ... if we get two simultaneous earthquakes in vulnerable areas then we may be looking at twenty thousand dead ... everyone doing okay? ... and if Mount Fuji erupts ... still doing okay? ... good ... now ... George Bush is still on the loose, and he still has nukes ... everyone still calm? ... well, excellent! ... take a deep, slow breath ... hold it ... now let it out ... nice and easy ... relax ... now let me put on the reggae CD ... don't worry ....)

I rather got the feeling, then, that the New Zealand reaction to Sars was perhaps not optimal, and might possibly contain just a small trace of hysteria.

However, the New Zealand news that made the greatest impression on me was the fact that the population of New Zealand has now reached four million, and will climb to five million in scarcely more than a hundred years. Wow! The population of New Zealand is now larger than the population of the city of Yokohama! (Not much larger, but larger.)

So that was what I saw at Narita: a quiet, fairly relaxed (but extremely well-policed) airport with a few surgical masks in evidence but nothing else worth mentioning.

Once we were out of Narita airport and on the way home, masked people were few and far between. I confess to having felt just a little uneasy myself, at the airport, breathing the same air as the people from all those international destinations. However, once back in the land of the normative, the infinitely familiar (Keisei Ueno, Ueno, Yokohama and so on) that feeling of anxiety was totally forgotten.

In The New Zealand Herald for April 26-27, an article on page A28 headlined "Publicly healthy, privately good" by Michele Hewitson, about Colin Tukuitonga, the Director of Public Health in New Zealand.

Michele interviews Colin and:-

In the public interest, I say, I'm going to be forced to investigate the Director of Public Health's refrigerator.

Go ahead, says Tukuitonga.

And, reading that, I just wished I'd had that article to show my students last week.

Last week I was teaching a course which included a chunk of cross-cultural material, including the concept of "power distance". A society with a high "power distance" is one in which rank and status are seen as highly significant. My students decided that Japanese culture is a culture with a high power distance, and I told them, without producing any evidence to support the claim, that New Zealand is a culture with a low power distance, perhaps the lowest power distance of any culture anywhere in the world.

If I'd been able to cite Michele Hewitson's article, that would have been just perfect. Reporter interviews high-ranking public official and decides she's going to interrogate his fridge - from a Japanese perspective, that would be unimaginable.

To start with, in Japan a reporter would probably never get inside a public official's house, and probably wouldn't even dream of trying. Plus, in Japan, the public official wouldn't give the interview while wearing "jeans and socks," even if he was at home "on the morning of Anzac Day". And, on top of that, thinking of the "What's in your refrigerator?" angle, I don't think that even the most liberated of modern Japanese women would even dream of asking a male authority figure such a stunningly cheeky question.

Footnote: it seems that the Director of Public Health's refrigerator "contains nothing that could be construed as unhealthy".

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News snippet from today's paper: it seems that a couple of the prisoners that the Bush regime is holding without trial in the oubliette at Guantanamo Bay are kids who are 16 or younger. This falls into the "words fail me" category.

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Section 39 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 May 02 Friday.
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SARS update Japan - Sars Japan 2003 May 02:-

In this morning's English edition of The Asahi Shimbun there is a statement on page 25 saying that the Japanese nation "has so far had no confirmed SARS cases". This in an article headlined "Stricter safeguards to blunt risk of SARS". The same article contains the following:-

Kosei Ueno, deputy chief Cabinet secretary, said Thursday that Japan had 45 cases of possible SARS and 16 other people with suspected SARS, suffering from some form of pneumonia.

On the trains in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, surgical face masks are few and far between, and there are no obvious outward signs of any SARS panic.

A footnote: on NHK TV here in Japan, SARS is still being referred to as "shingata haien," or "newmodel pneumonia". However, I've noticed that in at least some Japanese newspaper headlines the English letters "SARS" are being used.

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