The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond

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

So, I have to have a Japanese driving license. This seems fair enough seeing as I live in Japan. I go to the Okinawan version of the DMV in Naha. Brand new building of remarkable cleanessity.

Next to Godliness

My papers are checked and I have got it all right. I wait for a while before my papers are handed back with a smile. A carefully taken photo before which the lady minutely  rearranges my collar so I look my best.

I then have an eye test  and they still work.

Notice the space between people as we wait for eye test.

Next comes a 45 minute lecture that I do not understand but know to be a quick run through the Highway Code. This is a  typically, but delightfully, childish document full of cartoons.

Drive slowly

Draw your own conclusions

At the end of the talk our names are called out and we are presented with a brand new driving license. What a feeling of pride as I am handed mine. At last I have

Jatta!

achieved something in this vale of tears.

I now have 4 driving licenses.

The British one dates from 1970

So we go for a walk. The weather is bright and sunny and off we go to explore. The little river is full of fish, which we watch, and on the shore we see Grey Tailed Tattlers. We see kingfishers diving for little, baby fish so they can eat them.

Tittle tattle

The reservoir is the stage for Comorants, Egrets, Ospreys, Eurasian Coots and loads of turtles.

View from the reservoir

James nearly catches a big turtle and does catch a little turtle.

Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

Dead crab on the road Tra la la la la There's a Dead crab on the road Tra la la la la la Dead crab on the road Tra la la la la She looks like a sugar in a plum Plum plum

We go back down the river and O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ We see a Ryukyu Green Pigeon. This is a bird unique to the island and so if you want to see it you have to come here. You follow the logic?

Hooray!

The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.

Check out that ass!

Strange mixed race duck

We walk past the tombs to the beach.

Tomb

Beach

We then go to a shrine place and boing birthday boy Ben’s bell.

Bell head

We find some vegetation that behaves like nearly everyone we meet – it shrinks away when you touch it.

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.  ~John Muir, 1913”

It is Ben’s birthday!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KjrCjJ7yE&feature=relmfu

He gets shoes, a Cotterless Crank Extractor and, wait for it, a Bottom Bracket Installation Tool!

The shoes are cool.

Boogle loo

Looking for something different to give your loved one? Try a Cotterless Crank Extractor

Happy Birthday Ben!

Ben and James take me to the Haunted Hotel. This was a project in the seventies to build a hotel. The guy got it wrong apparently by building it on an ancient pet burial ground and the workers were attacked by rotting dogs at night. understandably this slowed construction and the project unravelled. However it stands yet and one of the wild experiences on Okinawa is to visit the castle of Nakagusuku – 14th century and then slip out the back into the Haunted Hotel.

The weather is scotlandish

Spot burial ground

Ben and James go to the well

The hotel is nuts.

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said we are all just prisoners here, of our own device
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast

Er, by beast they are referring to the rotting dogs from the ancient pet burial site on which the hotel was er built.

We wander around and come across art.

Do not eat dolphins

Netted

The hotel ruin is a gallery of murals with work by respected painters.

Caravaggio was here

Late Masaccio

Triptych

Boilers

Up on the roof

New Years Day. Cold, well by Okinawan standards, and windy outside. An opportunity to do very little indeed, which is probably the ultimate luxury. Here is a random visual record of the last few days.

Hermit crab in forest

Strange Fruit

Papillon

So be it

Ben

The World's Police

Make up

Slip sliding away

Fish without chips

Sea snake love

James er blows

I walk to the excellent bakery that is about 400 metres from my place. A mistake, as being New Years Day, it is closed. However I take a photo of each house that I pass to give an impression of the diversity, weirdness, ugliness, incomprenhendsibility of the architecture around here

What does it mean?

Spontaneous symmetry breaking

James likes this

Notice Greek columns

Windows er XP

Neo-penitentiary

Well?

Low rider with observation tower

Big garage roof terrace

Tuscan

Neo-Folsom

Groundfloorless

Lego

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

So as you can see the architecture is varied.  I don’t understand – here is the grey morph of the Pacific Reef Egret

A little bit of bread and no cheese

Can this be possible? I think I have been more or less inebriated every  New Year’s Eve  since 1968. Last night however not a drop of alcohol passed my lips. Why?

Well you do not drink and drive on Okinawa. We go for a meal of fish and shell-fish and more fish. No beer. On to visit old friends  –  we drink tea.

I had been told that the action on New Year’s Eve  was at the temple at Shuri Castle in Naha. We get there and the place is totally deserted. I realize that Shuri Castle and Shuri Temple are probably different places. Not to worry as it is a lovely night and we wander around the castle gazing out onto the sprawl of Naha. Finally we see some other people who speak English and guide us to a temple nearby.

There is Shinto ceremony. Small crowd of people lining up to ring the big bell by propelling a log at it. Very restrained, very dignified.

Dong

The donging starts at 11:45. Families wait for their turn to pull back  and let slip the log of dong. There is no change or obvious interruption to mark the passing of the year at 12:00.

Our turn comes. It is a little intimidating as we are like out of our element. We do not want to mess up and offend people. The  log priest is very gentle with us and we dong like the rest.  Great way to bring in the New Year. We walk back to the car listening to donging from several temples in the city. No other noise, no fireworks.

The closest we get to a drink all night.

Chrysanthemums are Yomitan's biggest export. They keep the lights on all night. This was taken at 2:00 just beside home.