The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond

I have had a pair of Dr Martens sandals for about 7 years. I bought them second-hand from Ebay when they were already well used. I think I paid $12. I have a soft spot for Dr Martens shoes as they are made in Northampton in England. I used to live nearby and a shady friend would supply me with boots that he had liberated from the factory.

Anyway these sandals have been everywhere with me, seas, deserts, maquis, slaps, stiles and have given me a strange comfort.  We are very good friends. They remind me of the Clarkes sandals I wore at preparatory school.

Why should I care?

Alas a few months ago the buckle attachments broke on both shoes. They flopped around on my feet but I continued to wear them. I felt that a dreadful moment had come when I would have to betray my old friends by putting them in the cupboard and then, after a certain civilized period of mourning, consigning them to the trash.

During my stroll around Naha this morning I happen across a cobbler. He fixes my shoes.

I was all so easy. It took 10 minutes.

He repaireth my soles

My buckle is fastened anew

I am so happy about this.

I think I have mentioned before that the region of my birth has been of inestimable value in both my social and professional life. People want to talk to me because I was born in Campbeltown ergo Springbank and have been to Islay ergo you know what I mean.

Tonight I am invited to a very swish do at a restaurant called Blanc. Very well heeled Japanese group of about 15 people. I am the only non Japanese. We eat magnificently on lots of stuff notably roasted Hiroshima oysters.

This sort of thing

Everyone is very welcoming but my lack of Japanese restricts my conversation to ” I don’t want a plastic bag.”, “I live in Yomitan.”, “Where is the toilet?” and such. This until I blurt, “Scotulandu jin desu” which seems to mean “I come from Scotaland.”

From nowhere a bottle of 15 year old Laphroaig appears. I explain that I know Islay and  Laphroaig reminds me of my Mother.  Howls of joy and wonder. We slit our palms and press our hands together as blood brothers and sisters.

Here's looking at you pal

I said,"Man, that's my hobby."

As I blast home on Big Red a huge shooting star blazes across the sky. Good evening with great people.

Having been very pompous at the end of the last post about people confusing condescension  with sophistication, I will now indulge in exactly the same thing. Well, not really, as I actually find this er sort of art form, which I will eventually get to, very stimulating.

It started when I was trying to buy baby clothes for an er baby. I could find nothing that was traditionally Japanese but loads of stuff that had slightly off the mark English.

I have since noticed that the vast majority of Japanese Tshirts follow the same pattern. The writing is English but it is charmingly just slightly out of tune.

So, it reminds me of collage where you take random words cut from a newspaper and string them together to create a phrase that has some kind of sense but isn’t the whole deal. Friends MacGillivray used to have this as a fridge magnet set-up and they produced magnificent statements that were very reminiscent of Japanese clothes literature. So I hope I am not being condescending. I admire it totally. Is it done knowingly?

I wish I had written that

There are certainly two things that I will retain from my Japanese experience no matter where fate should lead me. The first is the genkan and the second the chopstick

The genkan is where you leave your shoes before coming into the main body of the house.

http://www.tjf.or.jp/eng/content/japaneseculture/02kutsu.htm

It makes so much sense that I find it difficult to believe that I never lived like this previously. It demarcates the concept of outside from that of inside. The inside is clean, cosy, slipperish or barefooted depending on season or inclination. Outside is like gross.

You can leave your hat on

Never again will I wear shoes in whatever humble butt and ben I should end up in.

Chopsticks are limited when it comes to cutting up huge pieces of beef but other than that  they are cheap , easy to clean, take up no space, er are made of wood, like come in many colours and lots of other reasons for being a good thing.

West meats East

Woof

This sort of condescension masquerading as sophistication or humour I find increasingly irritating.

“And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven’t yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?”
― Bill Bryson

So, lots of stuff I should be doing but as Albert Schweitzer remarked, “Do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.”  Not sure I understand exactly what he means but I interpret it as don’t write boring documents on Sundays.

I do however go to work as I have to make sure that a fashion shoot at the university does not gang agley.

Karyushi fashion

I also take pictures.

Cherry blossom comes very early in Okinawa. It is now on the wane.

Large billed crows

A moorhen, I think. It has all the marks except for red bill. Maybe it is wearing make up.

White Wagtail

Part of university

Great White Egret

So I worried for a while that it might be an Intermediate Egret but the book says they have a black tip to the bill.

Don't run over the blue er Bunny? Rat? Mouse?

Flowers and strange message

All road work signs have flowers on them.

The most un japanese meal I have eaten for a year.

I have always wondered what the expression First Base meant in the context of American courtship. Well, Wikipedia tells me this:

First base – mouth to mouth kissing, especially open mouth (“French”) kissing involving the tongue.

Anyway, this was brought on by a raid on Kadena base today. I have been on base only twice in my year of Okinawaness. It really is amazing. The moment you go through the gate you are in the  good ol’ USA. My wonderful neighbor Connie escorts me to the shops. I love it – everything is cheap and good and you can buy everything you could possibly think of. I love living in Japan but the occasional visit to a huge US supermarket is a real treat. English muffins.

Shnurt

Wheee!

Kapoweee!

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

I do not stop to plunder but buy and buy and buy: a birthday cake, polo shirt – $3.95, shorts – $1.99, beef, a huge leg of lamb, English muffins! Apple TV, Californian chardonnay and loads of beer, which is more or less free.

Cornucopia

2 pound, thick Porterhouse steak – $8

A Coors Light anyone?

So, that time of year rolls around again. Yes, its spend your free time at the dentist season. If you go back to my blog of 31 January 2011 you can read about last year’s dentistry fun. Last night, February 3, I conscientiously floss my teeth and plink a crown drops into the sink. Ho hum.

This morning I go back to my dentist clinic and realize how much I have picked up in the last year. I knew how to use the slipper machine. I could say my name and “look at this” as I displayed my fallen crown. I understood when the lady receptionist she said “sit down please”.

Press the button and a pair of slippers peek out of the bottom

I  wait for 30 minutes and then my old friend Dr Murata leads me to my seat. An X-ray and then the dreaded words “root canal” float through the Higgs field.

This is what Root Canal means

Old man teeth

Last year the treatment took 6 weeks. What a drag.

This is how I will spend the next few weekends

So I have now been in Okinawa for a year. During about half of that time I have endeavored to grow vegetables. I compare the vicissitudes of the garden to my overall Okinawan experience.

June 25 2011 - Pioneer spirit

Thanks to Natori san I gain the right to use a patch of land near Kina Banjo for horticultural ends

Brave New World

I have done much gardening in the past and so enter the project with confidence and no little arrogance.

High apple pie in the sky hopes

I dig it over and plant, though admittedly late in the season, what I would plant in Europe or the USA. Beans, carrots, aubergine, peppers, some flowers, onions, tomatoes, radishes, including the mighty Daikon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikon, and of course Beni Imo the famed Okinawan purple sweet potato.

No problem

Everything goes very well, plants sprouts, the weather is perfect if a little hot and then comes the typhoon. Four days of a trillion mph winds and twenty feet of rain devastate the garden. The only survivor is the Beni Imo.

Apres le deluge

I replant. More aubergine, peppers, tomatoes but now also cauliflowers and cabbage. The Benii Imo prospers.

This is when my lens started acting up.

However now we are dealing with extreme heat and despite much watering the leaves shrivels and basically everything dies – except for the Beni Imo, which just goes from strength to strength

Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain.

The more or less total harvest

I  realize that I have got things badly wrong. The idea that the growing season should be April – September  is of course misconceived. The time to grow stuff is in the winter. There remains two last great hopes. Potatoes, which I have been growing for decades and of course the Beni Imo harvest. I plant 40 seed potatoes .

This what came up

Due to an exceptionally wet Fall the seed rotted in the ground and about 3 plants came up.  There is always the Beni Imo.

Wait, I did get some reasonable cauliflowers.

So Yysterday I harvest the Beni Imo. The growth has been spectacular and I anticipate a pile of tubers and bring many bags in which to ship them home.

Before

After

The crop

Deception! A lot of show on top but only a very  few slightly wormy tubers in the soil.

I sheepishly put away my garbage bags and put the entire harvest into a small Starbucks bag. It is half full.

Feed the Family?

So has my Okinawan gardening experience been mirrored by my overall Okinawan living experience? Well er yes in as much as many preconceived ideas have proven to be wrong. In as much as constant inquisitiveness and curiosity have been the best vectors to progress. In as much as the process has been as valuable as the result.

My garden saga has basically not been a success but the pleasure  of gardening and the anticipation  of bounty have outshone the setbacks. This is where the gardening and living analogy stumbles for I have not only enjoyed life on the island enormously over the last year but  have also met with some success.

Next year the garden will match. “G0d Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which, buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks;” Bacon

So, one aspect of living here that pleases me is the playfulness of official communication. I remember in the UK getting letters from tax people concluding, ” Your Obedient Servant.”  The French are even more baroque.

Here the content of most documents and signs are explained through characterization by happy cartoon personalities.  I find this delightful. A general debunking of officialdomness.

They lead me through the Highway Code

I recall getting a pink envelope covered with anthropomorphic cars grinning at me. It was my road tax.

At the bank

I interpret this abundance of cartoon characters as a denial of pomposity. Life is just a game,  a stage.

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. As, first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

I got this in the mail today. I think it is car insurance.

I think it is part of the disdain for earthly stuff. There are more important Shinto everlasting things and accordingly our scrambling on Earth may as well be described by childish cartoons.

Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Saturday in the park

My name is Ozymandias