PureLandMountain.com

2012-01-25T15:52:00.009+09:00

EYE OF LIGHT

Among the many reasons for living in the naturally rich countryside are the continuous surprises of beauty it brings out for show when you least expect them.

This morning I was anticipating another chill but clear day; instead when I woke up and looked out the deck was covered with snow and the snow was still falling-- no motorcycling down to the station, have to go by 4-wheel drive.

So not much later I was steering down through the entire white, the tall mountain bamboos arching snow-laden over the roadway, when all at once I saw where Hokusai got the ocean waves design for his famed Mt. Fuji woodcut: there they were, ocean waves in the snow on the leaves of the bending bamboo, that he could copy at his leisure, with some colory tweaking for waterness!

Then turning a bend in the road in the thick part of the woods where the road opens out to a view of the Lake, the vista was all one silver thickness of snow: no lake, no sky; but there at one point was a line of burgeoning light that as we slowly descended began to grow into the form of an eye, an eye of pure, soft brightness that was the sun coming over the far mountains and reflecting off the still invisible lake: a skyful of softly falling snow with an eye of light at its heart.

Took that vision with me on the train.

2012-01-21T11:45:00.004+09:00

THE COUNTRY SIDE OF LIFE

When you move from the city into the country, a considerable number of municipally peripheral things suddenly come into your life in a big way, such as the moon and the stars. Also insects, trees and animals, not to mention the sky as a whole. As well general vegetation, and a welcome absence of the masses of concrete and asphalt and people that characterize city life, as do power and phone lines overhead.

The moon doesn't play much of a role in city life, except as a kind of urban add-on one sees occasionally that is played up in movies as an extravaganza backdrop, the moon coming up between the skyscrapers. City folks actually don't have all that much to do with the moon, let alone the stars, except in a mythico-cinematico-derivativo kind of way, isn't it mystical, they say in the park, that smattering of artificial countryside city folks resort to in their free time to evoke their roots with a distant wistfulness, as in a museum where you can touch the artifacts. And the sky---in the city the sky is pretty much an artifact too, the less significant part of what metropolitans call the "skyline." Isn't it impressive they say. Well, yeah, I guess so, if you like artifacts in your eye.

Out in the country the sky stretches all the way from here to there (not the city "here and there"; such words resume their original meaning out in the country). And of course the country is where birds actually live, and enjoy themselves. By birds I don't mean panhandling pigeons, but self-supporting warblers, wheatears, grosbeaks, ducks, thrushes, egrets, pheasants, finches, redstarts, hawks, swallows, wagtails, owls, the list goes on. Real birds. Not merely the species or two that can tolerate exhaust fumes for a discernable life span, like the trees the city inserts along the avenues.

And insects---not cockroaches, which can live anywhere, the pigeons of the insect family---but genuine broad-spectrum insects, buzz and hum and crawl, all going about their ancient business in their traditional ways in holes and hills and hives or just plain on the ground (there's actual ground out in the country) to the chirpings and trillings of cricket and katydid as evening comes, and through the night, the fragrant night, and then at dawn vast webs are strung with beads of dew and hung with warbler notes in the pink sunrise from way down at the bottom of the sky.

Then in the spring and summer eves and morns the oratorio of the frogs of course, in their timeless worship of all things high and low, which worship, in all its many forms, goes on all the time in the country but is pretty much extinct in the city, and then there's the occasional snake draped over a branch in the sun like this was the garden of Eden or something, not to mention glimpses of ferret fox boar stag raccoon monkey bear, and there are actual fish in the waters, waters which by the way in the country you can drink without even once thinking of wet laundry.

And fireflies, of a summer night! Or a rainy summer night, when the underneaths of leaves are lit by thousands of tiny lanterns as the firefly party goes on despite the downpour. Rain, too, in the country is different from rain in the city, where it is a wet bothersome thing serving no natural function (except maybe to water the park), only an artificial one when in the summer it sometimes brings desperately needed relief to what city officials and I guess everybody by now calls heat island syndrome, which is when the sun and the city work together to form a kind of sidewalk inferno. And I probably don't need to point out the difference between a city summer night and a country summer night, nor dwell at length on the differences between the other seasons as experienced in these respective locales, but I will.

In the country summer the nights are cool, there is tree breath everywhere and you can breathe its perfume beneath a sky broadcast with all the diamonds of the universe for you, and you sleep better too, since you're so much more at home, because we all came from the country. And when autumn arrives, who can describe what is more beautiful than all the masterpieces of all the museums in the world put together? This is the very beauty painters chase to the grave. And this isn't just oils on canvas on walls in museums next to the park; this is the real thing, you can go out and walk right in it for hours, and there's no admission fee.

Then comes the country winter, with its majestic, sweeping calligraphies of snow just sitting there on silent show, gleaming with sunlight for days and weeks in tree- and stubble- and furrow- and grove-shaped whiteness-impeccable sculptures, and the blue-blue air is so big that the snow show is but a small part of it all, and not in the way, as it is in the city where pretty soon after snow falls and makes headlines it gets slushy and ugly or dangerously icy; country snow, soft and plush, is by contrast a big down comforter mother nature always throws over the countryside about this time, and whereas in the city the snow merely treacherizes pedestrians and vehicularians, and taxes the sewage system with often excessive volumes of what is called "runoff," in the country snow has actual natural functions, among others of insulating the soil from the chill of late winter and watering it in spring the way spring is in the country, for in the country spring is exactly where it belongs, its green songs up out of the ground swelling in time into chorales of wildflowers and all kinds of random demonstrations of the beauty nature can build if left on its own, the way it is out in the country.

2012-01-19T10:26:00.004+09:00

WINTER GOLD

I love to sleep in a cold house then get up and get warm by getting the house warm. In winter I sleep with the window open because I love the feeling of being living toast, with the contrasting wintry coldness on my face.

I will considerately pass up this serendipitous but excellent entree into what I believe are the debilitating effects of central heating and move right on with what I was going to say, that today the dawn was a cold icy one more suited to late February, when it seems the sun has just about given up and acts as warm as neon, the kind of morning that when you go outside to thaw the water pipes shows you where your nose is.

Out there in the predawn air, the only light was a sliver of the moon, dangling like a bright icicle among the black-ice branches of the trees reaching into a gray empty sky, the kind of sight that tickles your history, stirs up thoughts of ancient gods...

Our firewood stocks ondeck had been getting low, but fortunately in the deceptive warmth of yesterday I harnessed a bunch of springtime energy and lugged a bunch of stovelength primo cherry and oak wood, lifted and stacked 'em up on the deck so we had a good supply of the wherewithal for a bright warm fire, before which to gaze out upon the frosty dawn.

Winter has its gold.

2012-01-13T11:45:00.002+09:00

THE NEXT GIFT

When in your life you have finished with the task of raising the child you've been-- the child we all begin with being-- when you are at last mature enough to move on, ready to bring a child of your own into the light of your experience, the moment that child is born an ancient door is opened to a place you never knew your heart could hold.

The difference between you then and you now is like the difference between a seed and its tree: neither at all like the other, yet each being the other, in the most secretly invisible and magical of ways. Thus we live and grow through stages with which life itself is deeply familiar, but to which we ourselves, at each advance, are utter strangers, entering new galaxies of being.

Raising a child is its own distraction: you have so few moments in that dense procedure to fully step aside, sit aside, think aside, stop and love as deeply as you can-- until, the moment you can, the child is grown and gone, loving on its own.

Then, if seasons follow, from that child is born the next gift: grandchildren. And on these new beings, now that you are free of the rush of child rearing, you can spend your love as freely as sunshine falls on green leaves. And when those grandchildren are far away, the question becomes what to do with all those warm rays? Thus is more indiscriminate goodness and warmth borne into the world.

Not long ago I came across a snapshot of my daughter when she was ten years old or so, a delightful little person I remember well, and realized I miss that 10-year-old very much; I tried to explain my feeling when she came to visit, now a mother, with my granddaughters, but I could tell she didn't really know what I meant. She hasn't been here yet. She'll understand one day, decades from now, when as a grandmother she's going through some old photos, and the past tells her what it told me, what it tells us all, if we stop to listen: open your arms to this moment and its children.

2012-01-10T10:25:00.001+09:00

NUCLEAR POWER GUINEA PIG

Headline: Shiga studies impact on Lake Biwa from possible Fukui nuke accident

I've written about this fact before, but it's seldom floated in the standard mediastream and so gets forgotten even by the Japanese: Japan, for its narrowness, size and seismicity, is truly the world's Nuclear Power guinea pig.

As you look at the map, simply center that big green circle on Tokyo, and the cities of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya (urban area population exceeding 60 million persons) and Kyoto (a few million more), not to mention priceless Lake Biwa (centrally just below the Takahama-Mihama cluster!) are within a short breeze of over 30 nuclear reactors!

Given the world-witnessed occurrence of the statistically impossible event at Fukushima, the potential result of this situation is truly beyond rationale. Yet these millions carry on, living in the shadow of another series of statistically impossible events that would pretty much bring an end to Japan: for most, if not all, of those who survived would have to be evacuated. To... where?

As much as I love and worry for Lake Biwa (where I live), things would be so much worse (especially if they ever start the Monju reactor) than what the authorities' experts are intently studying...

2012-01-04T05:01:00.004+09:00

Happy Birthday, Mike!

2012-01-01T09:27:00.008+09:00

BRIDGING THE YEARS

Last night we went south a ways to what once was a lively old entertainment district for travelers from old Kyoto along the West Lake road to the Japan Sea and elsewhere. Traditionally 'discreet' for 1500 years or so, it has changed a lot even since we first came here, and is a bit bedraggled and threadbare, but coming back in new ways.

We went there to enjoy the traditional year-end soba noodle meal known as toshikoshi (lit.: “year getting-over”). Eaten at midnight, the long noodles 'bridge the gap' between one year and the next. For that purpose we visited the big new sprawling hot spring ryokan that has everything for everyone and is always crowded with families and folks who come for the restaurants, baths (no tattoos allowed), saunas, hotel rooms, hot sweet potatoes, haircuts, massages, lounges, games, bars, karaoke, with narrow flows of warm water here and there inside and outside where you can stop and sit and dip your feet to be serviced by the tiny feet-nibbling fish. The restaurant has big creative menus, chairs and tables all over up down, sunken tables, big tvs, sushi bar, scrambling waitresses dressed in yesterday mode...

All around is the neighborhood of the old red-light district that has been so since way before Edo, when it was a two-day trip from Kyoto over the mountains, through Otsu and along the lake to Omimaiko for a summer or other distant sojourn; this was the first stopover on that way, sort of a pleasure side trip from the Nakasendo. Here were the big old rambly ryokans where everything happened and more...

Crowds still visit in the steamy, fragrant winter nights-- Happy New Year, from here atop all those old times...

2011-12-31T09:55:00.008+09:00

HAPPY DRAGON YEAR

2012

The Dragon is my birth year -

This one (Black Water Dragon Year) should be interesting...

2011-12-28T09:26:00.002+09:00

SPACE, TIME AND FIREWOOD

Folks who don't heat with firewood can't really appreciate all that goes into that bit of sunshine in your winter wood stove, they might think maybe it's easy just because it's free (at least mostly free, the way I do it), but there are other burdens that come with the erratic supply of gleaned firewood such as I use. There's really no need to mention here the sectioning and hauling and splitting and hauling and stacking and hauling and burning and hauling and hauling and hauling, but I already did so it's too late.

Take 2: Say you've got four or five cords of firewood crowding out there in various locations around your house, wood from various periods of time in the past couple years, some of it stoveready, some not, but you've run out of stacking space and have just been given access to a whole new multicord bunch of bigwood to be split and stacked so it will dry by the time you need it two or three winters from now, so you've got to put it somewhere but you can't stack new green wood on top of fully or nearly ready wood, so you've got to walk around, analyze your stacks, ponder the weather and your wood supply, juggling disparate concepts sort of like Einstein used to do with various other aspects of the universe while wandering his theoretical woodlot.

With these sylvan symbols as well, like Albert you've got to somehow bend time and space by combining a couple of nearly ready pieces of embodied light, i.e., photons+alpha = wood, into one taller stack, thereby clearing a place for the new incoming atomic structures. Then when winter comes, in the heart of your stove you unleash the energy of those atoms in the welcome form of heat while freeing up some space outside, thereby establishing a direct link between time, space and firewood, but right now you have to match the mix of new and old.

Fortunately, last year you began to denote all this data in numerical symbols on the end face of one piece of wood at the top of each stack, but unfortunately as the universe would have it the newest wood always seeks the top of the stack, so to get at the older wood you have to go to the bottom, by for example turning the whole stack over, which is cosmically impractical (Albert, working in complete abstraction, had it easier in this regard), and practicality is what we're talking about here, so this approach needs work. Al's work led to atomic fissioning and nuclear power, which here in Japan has a bigly negative historic reputation but is still used in winter to power electric heaters, blu-rays, plasma tvs and game consoles, among other things.

This is a universe, after all.

2011-12-21T00:51:00.007+09:00

WHY THE WORLD WILL END IN A YEAR

Whatever time you live in, it seems that there are always some folks looking forward to the end of the world, folks who might have done better with the world they were given than to wind up with a headful of Armageddon. Those are the kind of folks who for example promote and look forward to December 21, 2012, a year from today, when the Mayan calendar will end (only because there are no Mayans around to extend it). According to the eager Armageddans, that will also mark end the world. Then they can live out their dream of laughing a righteous 'I told you so!' as they too vaporize.

In contrast, the mellow folks whose lives are considerately guided by that diminishing commodity known as common sense keep trying to explain to the worldflamers that 2012 as a date in this context is no more portentous than May 21, 2011 was. Fact is that of course the Mayans didn't know any more than anyone else when the world is going to end.

When they founded their kingdom and were working out their way-admirable calendar, they said at the imperial calendar council 'What's a good time to start an undending dynasty? What do we need here? When shall we have begun?' After mulling over all the recollections of what some great-great grandfathers were said to have said, they reached that earliest edge of their history, settled on an arbitrary time point further back in the local-time fog (sidenote: place/time points with no physical record are historically/religiously favored for dynastic startups). So the guy in the third seat to the left of the chairman said '730 years ago or so would be good, that fits nicely, better than 200 years ago for sure,' so that's what they did. And that's why the world will end in a year precisely.

Does that include the IRS, I wonder...

2011-12-19T11:04:00.008+09:00

SLOW ADVERTISING

If you were to pluck the fulness of your being from the fastforward lightspeed staccato rush of the modern megamedia mindflash, your body from the hypermomentum tomorrownow timeplasma of urbaniamania, and in a fully mindbodied experience softly send yourself meandering down a narrow village road anywhere in rural Japan, sooner or later you'd likely come upon a sugidama (sugi: cedar; dama: ball) hanging outside the door of a local sake brewery. In your strange new state of mind you'd pretty likely whisper wtf?

Unlike the Vegas Strip, say, or one of those tv uzi-ads that repeat the product name at a pace set to induce monetary seizures, when sake is first set to brewing, in accordance with the traditional manner a ball made of freshly cut green cedar branches is hung outside the brewery door as a sign to the community that the new batch is now brewing. In the real world, which is local, this is important news. As the sake brews in its natural way as time passes in its natural way, the cedar ball ages in its natural way. As the ball dries out and turns more and more brown, the closer the sake is to completion, until at last the fully brown ball tells all the village and all who pass along the road that the sake brewed and sold here is now ready and available. Slow advertising.

Imagine that: months of fragrantly tantalizing tenterhook advertising, all without using even one microvolt of electricity. So natural. So elegant. So knowing - and knowing of so many things - a tacit knowing, in which all share. Without neon or billboard. Who now knows how long it takes for cedar branches to turn brown, and that that duration matches the time it takes for sake to become sake? Some elderly folks still know these things, in the small, emptying country towns...

2011-12-12T18:09:00.004+09:00

Just posted Dream Car on the Blog Brothers

2011-12-07T11:13:00.008+09:00

Cesium in Baby Milk Powder

- Nuclear Risk for Japan Food -

2011-12-06T11:47:00.006+09:00

THE WIND AND I: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH FIREWOOD

Hah. Figured I'd finally beaten the wind on this baby. The wind and I have always had a relationship problem, especially the autumn wind, the worst of the Aeolian clan vis-a-vis keeping the damn tarps on the damn ready-to-burn firewood dammit, those gusts and I not seeing eye-to-eye on this human continuity thing.

Don't get me wrong; I understand the needs of the wind, how it has to fulfill its basic mandate of leveling everything as fully and quickly as possible, there are mountains to be flattened and oceans to be shoved around, an endless list of worldwide tasks that must be done, yaggeda yaggeda, but counterposed against this are buildings and other pro tem human artifacts with precious values of their own, such as my humble stack of tarped firewood that must be protected from the elemental assignments to wet everything down, blow it away, reduce it to fungus fodder or whatever-- so I and the wind, among other of my natural relations, are always in each other's faces.

It was therefore with a smirk of satisfaction, I must say - after recovering the wind-tossed tarp from the bamboo forest behind my fresh new facecord of first-class firewood for what I guess must be the xumpteenth time in the last few years - that I came up with the idea of tying some strong traditional cord to the grommets of one tarp corner, threading it through the stack of firewood itself, then tying it taut to the grommets on the opposite corner. Hah. Bite on that, windhead.

That should do it, I thought in that hubris for which humans are famed (which also sets us apart from the animals, though unlike sinning, speaking, toolmaking, blushing etc., it is seldom mentioned in that connection). That night, the wind knowing full well what was afoot, firewood tarpwise, did its damndest to rip that tarp off there. And when I went out in the morning to gloat, that activity was out of the question. The wind had blown strongly enough to cause the tarp and its loopy rope to actually lift and topple that portion of the woodpile! Crafty! Plus more muttery labor for yours truly. Our battle had reached new heights. So then I countered with a newer and even craftier approach, on which I may be reporting any day now.

But my real reason for writing all this was the treat I was afforded while all this redoing was going on, because you know how beautiful mountainsides and all their trees can be when they set their minds to it in the peak of autumn color? Well there was that, and on top of that there was a big, thick, glorious arc of light's components rainbowing from the top of the mountain down to the lake, and through that bow of many colors the leaves of all the trees were enhanced beyond the reach of speech...

I had to stop every once in a while (beauty will do that, thank heaven), amidst my irritation and hubristically driven efforts, to admit to myself that the beauty all around was so much more important than my meager doings, so much more nourishing and truthful than anything an angry or prideful person could ever come up with in a million years if we ever get that far, the way we're going, tarpwise.

So as a result of this experience I've grown a bit more in emotional terms, learned a few things about deeper personal issues, and am on a friendlier basis with the wind now for sure; it's a good wind, but no way it can get that damn tarp off this damn time dammit.

2011-12-02T11:08:00.007+09:00

INDIANA CAN HAVE THE PUBLICITY

I started growing - or rather attempting to grow - hiratake mushrooms sort of as a lark, a few years ago, as detailed here. I'd found the spore on sale, had a few oak sections available, thought I'd give it a try but didn't expect much, given my experience with other sorts of exotic mushroom varieties; plus, being in sync with dozens of shiitake logs all over the place for all these years, these mushrooms would provide but a drop in the bucket, if indeed anything at all made it into the bucket.

So far I've learned that hiratake fruit just after the shiitake have finished, at least up here in this ecolocale, and even though I got some sterling hiratake last year, the oak sections soon looked like they'd been coopted by shelf fungi, so I had by degrees begun giving up on the hiratake agenda. Thus it was that I 'forgot' to check the logs under their cover of leaves, twigs and burlap.

Then a few days ago I entered the jungle of my garden and headed along the ancient path toward where legend had it that some old logs had been sequestered under forest debris, plus some older cover; upon exposing the logs, I found that one log had done nothing, as expected, but that the other had sprouted half-heartedly about a week before, so such mushrooms as there were were no longer prime, but even subprime hiratake are a gourmet experience, so we enjoyed them. But I figured that this year was the last gasp of an amateur effort. I had learned some stuff, and might try again with some other varieties, maybe get some a couple years down the road.

So I forgot once more about checking any further until a couple of days ago when I chanced upon familiar signs of an ancient mushroom tomb and decided, albeit pointlessly, to look once more, see if the other log had done anything. I pulled back the cover from the unproductive sections and saw there amidst the crumbly dun of the forest debris the most beautiful fronds of graduated pearl-gray mushrooms cascading down in lifeglowing perfection that I have ever seen.

No treasure hunter has ever felt more awe. Well, Indiana Jones might have come close for the first milliseconds of beholding that golden idol he had expected to find, but the gorgeousness of this natural radiance, shining there amidst the the dull matte of leaves, twigs, burlap and duff where nothing at all had been expected, I think puts me a few paces ahead of that intrepid movie character, plus there was no curse on my discovery. And as to the deliciousness, I got the better deal. Indiana can have the publicity.

2011-11-29T13:18:00.005+09:00

Japan households reduce spending as unemployment rises
+
Japan's youth turn to rural areas
seeking a slower life

2011-11-23T11:51:00.002+09:00

CENTRAL HEATING

One standby item I dig out faithfully every winter that unfortunate folks abroad in the West know little or nothing of, much to their necessarily unspoken disappointment (rife indeed are the disappointments we know not of) is my good old haramaki. Or maybe my fashionably new haramaki.

Yes, when the days grow short and the temperature falls, when the skin gets bumpy and the snuggle factor begins to rise, when the spirit with spring in its heart but winter in its teeth calls for some sort of cuddle, that's when I feel sorry for all those shivery folks in the developed world who have to crank up the central heating merely because they don't have a haramaki handy.

I truly hope that doesn't include such a thinking person as yourself. And when you think about it, what better place to maki (wrap) than the hara (roughly: abdomen)? The ancient orientals knew all about these things. Long before infrared was made visible, they knew that major quantities of body heat were lost from the uncovered, or even conventionally clothed, hara.

A brief look at your handy anatomical model will confirm this. Note where the ribs end, and where the major organs are as a result exposed and essentially unprotected, sheltered from the world only by a smattering of muscle and a layer of skin. Shivering liver!! Icy bladder!! Snowy pancreas!! Chattering kidneys!! Frozen colon!!

And if you look closely at any of those ancient twelve-foot tall Japanese temple guardians, you'll see that the very center of their dynamic energy, the root of their ki, is the hara, firmly outthrust, and centered with a navel that looks like the satellite image of a typhoon (how well they understood the unity of energy in those days!).

Needless to say, the haramaki soon becomes an essential element of one's winter clothing here in the historically energy-conscious orient, where central heating is not yet the norm and you can go into any general store and get yourself a haramaki of cotton, wool or silk, even a self-heating haramaki, if you're of that persuasion, and lower your heating bills.

In the deeps of winter I sometimes think that perhaps Japan should organize some kind of relief effort and send haramaki out into the developed world to relieve the tremendous suffering caused by crushing monthly energy bills to heat an entire house when you only need to heat the occupant, but then I realize that the Japanese themselves are slowly but surely slipping out of life itself and into the intensive care of central heating, and I think maybe I should stock up on haramaki while they're still available.

On the other hand, though, with the big oil price rises looming incrementally the further we get down the centrally heated billion-lane expressway that is tomorrow, I think the haramaki could one day be, worldwide, the ideal form of central heating.

2011-11-18T13:36:00.001+09:00

UNSCROOGED

I suppose as one gets older there's an increasing tendency to get a bit more scroogey as the humbuggy holidays approach, it must have something to do with age and a greater understanding of the value of time or something - there aren't many teen scrooges that I know of - and even though I don't feel all that humbuggish for my age, I may have been scroogey a few times in recent years, especially around the holidays, though such topics make one evasive about the stats. Anyway, this was all more or less true until last Friday morning.

I had come home late the night before and fallen right into bed, having forgotten that the Trio of Brio were staying the night. I'd gotten up before 6 am and was doing some work on the computer, so engrossed in my task in the dawn silence that I continued in forgetment, until all at once the bedroom door to the loft opened and three little sleepyfaced girls came out with rumply pajamas and tousled hair, cute beyond the reaches of that word. Rubbing their eyes, they gathered around me where I sat and all at once began singing Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, for yes it was my birthday - I'd forgotten that too - and the early morning chill all at once became warm, as these three barefoot little angels turned humbug around on a pinpoint and made it sunshine. It was a touching scene, both inside and out.

So now for the rest of my life if for some reason I happen to get a scroogey twist in my psychoshorts, all I have to do is picture those sleepy, loving little faces singing to me in their really early morning celebration of my long-ago birth and I love everything about this crazy world.

What a birthday present.

2011-11-16T10:48:00.003+09:00

TIMES OF NO GARDENING ramble

Left pretty much on its own the garden has gone autumn-wild and punky looking, the marigolds taking over where the tomatoes used to be, the peppers going wild with fecundity. The cucumber and goya vines have withered, the only structures now remaining are the unexpectedly graceful ad hoc architectures of bamboo that once balanced reaching festoons of green and yellow but now stand without purpose. Before it snows I shall turn all that into next year's compost, apart from the marigolds.

Surprisingly, the monkeys have left my 6-week-old shallots untouched! I can't really convey the surprise in this, those green fronds are so succulent and simian-vulnerable. It's a you-had-to-be-here-for-15-years kind of thing. There they are, my happy green sprouts growing unmolested by simian hands for all this time. Either there has been major monkey culling of some kind or the redfaced gang is planning a large operation. It's been suspiciously quiet.

Gardening will get you through times of no marijuana better than marijuana will get you through times of no gardening, apart from the hallucinatory aspects, unless you're growing the weed itself (a topic for another time), to which by the way I am not opposed, though marijuana has never been my drug of choice, which is any kind of pie in season.

I also endorse the weed's use under circumstances of wisdom seldom observed nowadays, particularly in politics and finance, which aspect might interest any young persons who happened to read this without zoning out at the logical and grammatic challenges embodied in some of these sentences, education (another form of gardening) also being what it is today.

Implicit in this pastoral metaphor of course is that knowledge is the seed, the educator is the farmer and the student is the soil, which seems apt enough... Seeds are what they are, but basic educators today are overworked and students are underchallenged. The knowledge is there and vital; we need many more and justly compensated teachers who love to 'garden,' and hungry students rich in compost...

2011-11-15T10:27:00.004+09:00

JEE 2012 ECO-CALENDAR NOW AVAILABLE

The new Japan Environmental Exchange Eco-calendar for 2012 is out,
in support of recovery in East Japan:
— 12 Key Concepts to Open Up a New Green World —

Part of the proceeds from sales of this calendar
will be donated toward recovery in East Japan.

2011-11-07T03:08:00.006+09:00

LIVING WISDOM

I've learned a lot of things from stones, both from building with them and from butting my head against their walls, the latter when I was mostly younger and stone walls were largely metaphorical. The main thing I've learned is that the process of building with stone is that of the Socratic dialog, with me as student and stones as teacher.

Stones do the Socratic thing well; they have infinite patience, impeccable honesty and know their stuff right down to the ground. You can trust a stone completely; a stone will never lie. So if you listen with care, and don’t mind a few of the pinched fingers and bruised toes that are the price of stony knowledge, the stones and the wall will show you in true Socratic fashion that you already know how to build a stone wall.

I seek to build it one way, and in learning I cannot do it that way (the rocks will not stand for it, they have their scruples and are not constrained by logic; they understand a much greater fundamental than we humans do), I learn some small thing that only rocks can teach, a kind of stony grammar, a petrosyntax. I focus on that and build... no, that will not do either; that is not the whole of the thing, only a part. Rocks know it cannot all be learned at once, and wisely do not crowd me with knowledge. But with that part I go on, and try again, and fail again, but when, after a week away I come back to the task, I find I have learned another little bit that is part of me, part of what I know about stones and stone walls, part of what stones in their limitless patience embody. With that I go on again, begin to build, and fail again, learn another thing. So it goes on, as bit by bit what I learn rises up like a stone wall. And when that wall is at last all learned, it is but a slight step to build the wall itself.

If I want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, I must learn the bit-by-bit stones teach me until at last I have a stone wall, not a book wall, not a Bob wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore, is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in the builder, no integrity in the wall.

But the bigger lesson comes later, when the wall is standing at last and you go off into the world filled with the realization that this dialectic pertains to everything you do: that any worthy effort is a dialog, that wisdom is a living thing, not frozen in time, not a doctrine or a dogma, not a monument, not a library, not a printed book or etherpage, and that you are born with wisdom ready and waiting to be known to you.

What does living wisdom tell us? Among other things, that the solution is where the problems are: in ourselves. Loss of beauty, true beauty, within and without our lives, is the sign, the lesson, the indication, the marker of our deviation from the living wisdom that comes from within ourselves.

Lack of contact with that wisdom lies at the heart of our problem, and if we continue in our current way we are ended: the real thing won’t stand for it. Existence must be a dialog with the present, as the living, thinking person is taught by any art, any worthy endeavor. You are instructed and guided by the very task, the very ongoing. You are taught the true way most truly only by traveling it, not by standing still and listening to others tell you the way, or by looking at an old map of where others have gone. The way is vast, greater far than we are, and it will prevail, no matter how we treat it or view it. We either go as it goes or the walls we have built will collapse upon us.

And as there is living wisdom, so there is dead wisdom. Dead wisdom obviates dialog by saying: "Do it this way because we have always done it this way." Dead wisdom souls a dead society. Living wisdom, on the other hand, like all that is ongoing, is always and ever new. Living wisdom is green, the green of grass, the green of leaf, green of the living layer beneath the bark of a tree. It is the green of youth and hope in hearts that are alive.

Earlier version published in Kyoto Journal #53

2011-11-03T04:16:00.003+09:00

IMPORTANT VIDEO ON FUKUSHIMA AND JAPAN NUCLEAR POWER TODAY

Part 2, Part 3

2011-10-28T08:43:00.000+09:00

SLIGHTLY AIRBORNE PORCUPINES ramble

We don't have porcupines here in Japan, but absence has never prevented wondering...

If evolution advances by sheer chance and mutation, how is it that apes never had feathers? What ape would not have loved to fly, given half the chance (though in a way it did come about featherlessly, after a descendant had learned to talk)? One or two early simians might have tried feathers along the way but it didn't work out. Apes in lighter gravities likely do fly, somewhere in one universe or another but there've never been any ape-birds on this planet... Look at the simians trying even now, up there in the treetops, thank Evo they at least have those tails, though not the Japanese monkeys, who need no tails, being more interested in purloining potatoes, far as I can see...

No creature ever got something because they needed it, but because it just happened to open the door to a nearby niche that still had elbow room. Need is teleological; evolution isn't. Purpose has no place there. Evolution has no preference or intention; it allows new tries, rewards success with another chance, like Vegas rewards winners. For a time. Of course if you keep on playing,,, Above the trees there is no niche for apes, other than clothed descendants in aircraft.

Another thing: why are there no slightly airborne porcupines? Those spiny rodents might very well have preferred featherment to some degree, if given the choice - clearly they tried and succeeded part way, but at some point said Hey, these quills alone are good-- possibly even better, given the animals' current milieu and ambitions, though they might have enjoyed flying around, even if only slightly above the ground, instead of halfheartedly waddling quillfully along, surrendering their near-feathers to predators' noses and just chewing on stuff right there on the ground. So close to feathers, yet so far from airborne, living symbols of hope...

And just because porcupines still can't run fast enough or at all, to maybe jump-start the aerodynamic feedback, is that their fault? I thought we all had a chance in the long run... With their sudden protofeathers they had no need to run; is that a rule of evolution, that once you no longer need to flee, you're never gonna fly? Evolution is even more disappointing now than when I was a teenager...

Those running dinosaurs that in time did develop feathers, and precisely where feathers were needed (as compared to the divertive attempt by porcupines) - there are no dinosaur fossils with feathers coming out of their noses - and that grew in just the right ways (compared to the infinity of wrong ways) to be the feathers that increasingly enabled smaller dinosaurs to fly, to the point that flight pretty much characterizes dinosaur lives nowadays: how did they do that? What made them so special? How did the whatever know the wherever for growing feathers? Why not quills into feathers? They're not that far apart: feathers have quills, and clearly the porcupines tried to grow something! For eons! What have the snakes done? And the other reptiles? Nothing! Some scales, coupla scary colors and a little venom is all they could come up with, also obviating the necessity for fleeing (syn. "flight," btw).

Plus, porcupines can yearn as much as lizards can, maybe even more; also they're warm-blooded mammals, definitely endorsed by the big E! So where are all the even slightly airborne porcupines? I think some other kind of feedback's been going on here all along - something so unscientific that no scientist would ever notice - on the inner end of the process that receives the feedback and tweaks accordingly... some kind of tweakolution, as invisible and beyond defining as beauty... Quills per se no good for moving air... so broaden them, lighten, minimize for aerodynamic lift and insulation... grow porcupine wings... See to lighter bones as well, and various beaks... try different colorings than plain old dun... Try some porcupine warbling in response to the porcupine joy of evolutionarily advanced aerodynamic success...

And in a tangentially similar vein, why should a bright red frog mean Don't Eat Me? Early post-Columbus Eurofolks thought tomatoes were poisonous, but now the bright red fruits are eaten everywhere, with no means of escape. And apples. Will apples ever fly? So far they've only mastered falling, thereby famously inspiring a pre-Darwinian speaking animal as to the nature of downness.

Porcupinian thoughts evolve...

2011-10-26T02:43:00.005+09:00

ON THE ROAD TO CODGERDOM

I've written before about the the dawning of fogeyhood, the slow tickytocky process of becoming the old coot you used to hate as a kid and how to avoid it, although some parts of said becomance are spot on; smart-ass apple-stealing punks must be put in their place before they get too far along on the road to full-fledged codgerdom.

Back when I wasn't too much younger than I am now even though it was about 60 years ago, the words codger, curmudgeon, grump, coot, geezer and galoot were a few of the words we codger-fledglings used to use to describe folks who were about the age I am now... I and my less conservative contemporaries, however, are none of the above, a representative selection from a nomenclature used by earlier generations who in fact perfectly became the codgers, curmudgeons, grumps, coots, geezers and galoots of yesteryear, as crisply evidenced by my memory.

We of this new group have, at the dawn of this new millennium, evolved into a new generation, what one might call ultrageezers, neocodgers, ubergaloots, for lack of precise terminology. The actual term for what we are has not yet been coined, but I'm waiting, I'll know it when I hear it, and since I seem to be the only one paying any attention to this curmudgeon gap, and hence the only one looking to fill it, I may just coin the damn thing myself.

For now I'll just go with ultrageezer or neocodger. No, maybe ubergaloot. No. I'm not gonna go sit on the porch and try not to forget about this, like one of the those real old codgers of the past would do, I'm gonna go sit on the deck and keep a sharp eye on those etymological apples.

2011-10-22T03:23:00.004+09:00

Just posted HOT CHICKS, COOL GUYS on The Blog Brothers...

2011-10-14T15:52:00.006+09:00

FLAVORS OF THE MIST

Up at dawn this morning in a cloudy light, awakened by an odd crunching sound outside that had an inviting succulence to it, like a horse eating a bunch of carrots beneath my bedroom window. I got up and looked out into the dimness and there saw the ghostly shape of the Baron, enjoying a late banquet of the chestnuts that now litter the ground, he having pretty much finished all the acorns.

He would nuzzle around among the spiky hulls, his rack of tines waving in the air, until he found a free chestnut and gobbled it up, then he'd stand stock still savoring the sweetness, crunching the nut hull and all, eyes half closed with the ecstasy, zoning out every bit as deeply as I would over a big chunk of chocolate or cheesecake or apple pie let's not go there, let's get back to the Baron standing lost in the flavors of the mist, his fine antler tines all well sharpened against the tines of fellow suitors that now and then wander into in the Baronetcy as I hear now and then in the clacking of head swords up in the forest.

What puzzles me, though, now that this year the chestnut harvest has sort of slipped by us humans unnoticed in the rain and workdays, is why the bears don't come and get it, given the abundance of acorns and chestnuts we have here. I hear a lot lately about country folks all over Japan being hassled by bears whose natural diet of wild acorns and chestnuts has been seriously diminished by unfavorable weather, so there's frequent news of bears wandering into human habitats like mine for acorns and chestnuts...

The Baron may be noble, but royalty has no value in the wild, than which nothing is truer...

Somehow this brings to mind the happenings on Wall Street...

2011-10-09T10:54:00.002+09:00

THE TREETOPS OF THE SOUL

The other day Echo was telling me that when you get up in the morning it is beneficial to the health to say OHAIYO GOZAIMASU!! (GOOD MORNING!!) or OSU!! (MORNIN'!!) loudly and deeply from the hara as the monks and the martial arts students do, as being stimulative to that primal source of ki (spirit energy) for the entire being, and I could not but agree, with the proviso that on certain mornings, such as Mondays, there is no particular reason to get all that excited or pepped up about anything, that's life, give it a rest.

Then later as I was whistling my way through a task or two as has been my wont for my entire life (well, ever since I first managed to whistle and didn't want to stop, from then on polishing my whistle to its whistliest), I realized that whistling whenever a whistle is willing is also a very good thing for the hara and the general mood of oneself, and possibly of others, if one is a good whistler. Extending this thought over to the cultural realms, I came to realize that no one ever whistles here in Japan, I am usually the only one doing so in the silent crowd, for which I am now and then likely looked upon as being a bit daffy, but as a traveling whistler through multiple cultures, I don't mind at all.

Whistlers usually don't mind at all-- it evolves in their natures, whistling being somewhat of an absently showoffy thing, when done right. That's another of the powers whistling bestows upon the whistle-blessed. In the States, especially when I was a kid, I used to hear folks (by 'folks' I mean men in this case, and politically correctly; women never whistled except maybe in private, and that still seems to be true) whistling all the time: garage mechanics, mailmen, milkmen, paperboys, even guys just walking alone down the street with no particular objective (whistlers are right at home without objectives); I have never seen such a thing in Japan, even among foreigners.

I suppose that whistling, wherever it is done in earnest, is thought of as such a solitary endeavor that one doesn't seek it in others, listen for it or even think about it: it is just a matter of tuneful happenstance, unlike attending a performance by the New York Philharmonic, for example.

But whistling is a sure sign of contentment, of essential comfort, of the primal joy that can be found in simply being from top to bottom, adorned only by the curlicues of a whistle that dances upon the air like birdsong from the treetops of our souls, a song to sound out to your footsteps or the tool of your labor, even if the tune is one of the old standards, played on the instrument you always have with you.

Of course you can compose your own melodies ad libitum if you're of such a mind, as most whistlers are. That's another of those great unsung pleasures. And if you can't whistle, then you can get a flute or a recorder or a penny whistle or a harmonica and bring your music into the world wherever you go. You can give birth all your life, you know.

2011-10-03T09:30:00.002+09:00

THE VEIL OF LIGHT

The garden is turning brown, the once-taller-than-me tomato plants that were toppled by the hurricanes are ripening the last of their fruit near the ground and the cukes have called it quits; only the shisso is reseeding, and best left alone.

So on mornings like this I get to just stand out here in the prime of the sun and gaze along the light upon the Lake, enjoying the deeper purpose of eyes, savoring the air from the breath of mountains, Lake and distant ocean, an atmosphere rich with all that muse food...

Some old thoughts at once come down unbidden from the mind's attic, about Hiroshige spending artistic time around here centuries ago in pursuit of reality's details, hungry for sights he could capture somehow, get world into woodblock as best he could, and there before my eyes on this autumn morning was that ancient sight, one of the very things I'd first marveled at in those revered pictures.

The Lake on an early autumn morning, glittering with silver in a light-chill breeze, and on the Lake the islands, along the Lake arising the edges of mountains and reeded shores; and there, like the cream of light, somehow settled at the unknown junction between aboveness and belowness, as though each was ever turning into the other behind the mysterious veil of changes, that edgeless layer of vapor the color of washi paper that I'd always thought was an artist's trick to avoid detail, as in the golden clouds that always roil among various key scenes of historic battles on painted screens-- but it was true: that layer really is there at this time of year. Hiroshige must have been here and seen that veil of light on one or more autumn mornings a few centuries ago, and stood there wondering: Could I reproduce that on paper with shades of ink and blocks of wood?

And so he did, in another part of time that is still here.

2011-09-29T09:00:00.007+09:00

PUMPKINS IN AMERICA: THE MYSTERY

The other day I was enjoying a bit of pumpkin at lunch - Echo makes a nice dish of plain steamed pumpkin cubes with various additions that go great with just about anything-- tasty, sweet, rich in all sorts of noots, long shelf-life etc. While savoring the experience, I got to thinking for about the 9,463rd time why Americans don't eat pumpkins straight as a vegetable, over there in the land of 600lb pumpkins they don't know what to do with other than carve into jack-o-lanterns in the autumn of every year or have biggest-pumpkin-in-the-county contests for the gourd that symbolizes Thanksgiving. Which is admirable enough, but why isn't the pumpkin used as food? Why are pumpkins so looked down upon in America? That splendid squash, standing proud and golden right next to the turkey, symbolizing Thanksgiving for plenty in difficult times! What has happened to that rep ever since?

They do put some pumpkin in cans, to use later for pies at other times of the year, when folks want pumpkin pie, if there really are any such times, but just go and look in any US cookbook for some pumpkin recipes and that’s basically it: pumpkin pie and pumpkin puree, muffins, bread, cookies, which like the few other recipes are basically a way of disguising pumpkins.

Even when I stayed with my frugal aunt and uncle on their country farm where they grew and ate turnips, parsnips, squashes, beets, pumpkins too, even ate turnip greens and rutabagas, but never pumpkin, other than as pie. Strange, no? All that food just tossed... to the pigs of course. Pigs love pumpkins, supreme truffle-finding gourmets that they are.

Here in Japan there is no Thanksgiving day, which is nice because this way we get to eat pumpkin whenever we want, since it's grown all the time because folks here love pumpkin as a food and do not look down upon it as some cultures do without knowing why.

In Japan the main food pumpkin, comparatively less eye-appealing than the shunned US variety, is a smallish, green, rough-skinned pumpkin that is golden inside, much like the US pumpkin, sweet and soft like any squash when cooked, and I would guess somewhat the same texture and flavor, but there my comparison must go hungry, because I realize that never in the American portion of my life have I eaten any steamed pumpkin!

Why should this be? When I first came to Japan back in the early seventies and looked for brown rice, folks were aghast at the idea. Back in feudal Japan, when only aristocrats could afford white rice, and commoners had to eat brown rice, white rice became a status symbol, and so it remained even centuries later, even though brown rice was tastier and more nutritious. Does the US pumpkin historically have a white rice equivalent?

It is a mystery.

2011-09-24T08:19:00.006+09:00

BARONIAL EPILOG

Speaking of the Baron, early yesterday morning before heading off to the grandies' undokai (of which more later, time and mind permitting) I was out in the garden for the first time since hurricane #15 (came right after #16!) to check things over, see what had grown and what had gone. I walked along the east side of the net fence to check the cucumbers, which hadn't fared too well, though most of them had hung in there; thence along the north side to check the goya, which had done well - very hardy against hurricanes, coming as these do from Okinawa - then, in all the massive nonchalance one carries effortlessly at such moments, I turned the corner to walk along the west side just as the multi-tined Baron stepped through my blueberry bushes to graze around my cherry tree and among my shiitake logs, when he saw me standing less than five meters away. I froze. He froze. We stood there staring at each other for about a year, both about the same height, but I without antlers.

He tried to work out what he was seeing here, on his turf, as I decided what I should be doing. No way I should run, since the Baron is the Ferrari of local animals. No way go inside the fence, where he could follow and we'd be contained together for quite an event. So I just started waving my arms and jumping up and down, shouting what I hoped was near-deer for Get out of my garden! He gazed at me with his big brown eyes for a quiet moment, deciding, then lowered those antlers and charged.

I had often wondered what would happen if he and I ever got close enough for no escape. But thought was not required now. As the Baron's hoofs pounded in my direction my body just turned and ran me faster than a parked Ferrari back along the North fence, me thinking his highness at least might not be able to make the turn so quickly, give me a microsecond in man-racing-irritated deer terms, then I'd quick-cut south along the fence for another length in which he'd gain fast... I turned my head to see how close those antlers were to the end of my days and -- there was no Baron!

I stopped to looked carefully, but he was nowhere about! Then I saw his antlers in the distance, disappearing up mountain into the undergrowth. He hadn't been charging, he'd been escaping by the fastest way possible, which had been toward me to get the quickest way around the cherry tree, then straight left upmountain away from this clearly unbalanced interloper. To cement the illusion I yelled righteous conquest stuff after him, like That’s right, you mushroom thief, you tomato eater, make tracks! And stay off my property!

Righteousness doesn't have to be absolutely right, necessarily.

2011-09-19T07:53:00.000+09:00

TERRITORIES

While I was upstairs changing into my work clothes a few afternoons ago the Baron stopped by, elegant as you please, walked into my garden and started casually marking his territory on my territory, specifically on my momiji tree, in the corner between the blueberries and the compost. I think of garden and tree as mine in that way peculiar to humans, though the Baron knows better, as his attitude makes clear. Because in deer fact, the tree and what I call my territory comprise just a small part of his family's vast ancient holdings; they go way back in these parts, and he knows it. Facts are facts, are they not, whatever the species.

The Baron has a much bigger crown of antlers this year; he wielded them with impressive grace as he rubbed his head here and there along the multiple trunks of the low-branching tree as evidence of possession. At some point, though, he being near my vegetables, I felt I had to remind him that despite his pedigree and borderless familial heritage there were members of another species using this land who have priorities other than random forage, but how do you just come right out and say such a thing to aristocracy with antlers.

At a loss for words, I opened the windows wide like glass wings spreading, then closed them again, then did the same again a few times, sort of being a giant butterfly, whatever that might mean to an antlered ruler, me whistling the while and making other sounds to remind him of the situation and act like I am larger than I am, which sometimes works with nobility, especially the wild kind. He paused and looked my way, trying to determine what was going on with those oddly transparent wingy things on the side of that big strange shape that the two-legged antlerless creatures have erected on this spot and go into and come out of ever since, all without his permission.

He thought for a deer while about what he was seeing and hearing, and deemed the situation an unwelcome perturbation. He casually turned, nose in the air, as nobility does in all cases, trotted back along the hedge, down the stone stairs and out onto the greater portion of his domain. The land wasn't going anywhere, as he well knew; nor was his well-marked momiji.

He paused outside the gate looking this way and that, in the certainty inherent to his lineage that all was well, by and large: he had marked his tree, he had made his point and it was sufficient; that was then, this is now. He turned upmountain, walked along the unnatural roadway for a bit until he came to a fully Baron-scented section of forest he enjoys, and became it.

2011-09-18T19:48:00.002+09:00

Out in the countryside

pull out the earplugs-

The Song!

2011-09-16T09:46:00.004+09:00

WHERE IS THE WILD?

"I love the wild not less than the good," said Henry, in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, and "In wildness lies the preservation of the world." Henry was wild about wilderness, just couldn't stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he saw it disappearing.

But that was a long time ago, over 150 years now. The interesting thing is that even back then, when the wild must have still been pretty much all over the place, Henry was already condemning its decline, already lamenting the relentless incursion of the artifactual. His were admirable early sentiments, though they fell on mostly deaf ears in those times of righteous conviction in broadscale clearcutting of the greater soul. Walden wasn't a big success until the results of manifest destiny became manifest.

Despite that ongoing revelation, however, it seems we still haven't realized that the wild is more than just nature venues or camping grounds; in its fulness it is the counterpart, the balance, to the wild we carry in ourselves, in every cell and sinew of our bodies. Remove the wild from our outer lives and in our hearts and souls we suffer, our compass goes awry. All who still revere the wild know this, as Henry did; he recognized it as the greater part of the soul. So now, some 150 years later, where has it gone? Is it out on the lawn? On the hiking trail? In the Winnebago window, the satellite image, nature video, national park, endangered species, inner child, urban shaman, modern warrior, rabid zealot? Is it caught on the Net? Can it be seen with commuter eyes?

In our nowadays, with government keeping us anxious about government, business keeping us unbalanced and selling us the next step at apparent discount, the further we get from whatever wild there once was and the more we are isolated and channeled by the careers, fashions, incomes, appliances, habits, sciences, arts, rebellions, religions, schools of thought and mannered ways we think comprise us, the less we are the creatures of creation, one thrust of all the universe, and the more we are the static but remarkably lifelike exhibits in that big fancy museum of our own construction we call modern life.

Commensurately, the less informed we are by what is ever ongoing in the currents of the universe: the sun that is shining, tides that are flowing, moon rising, spiraling stars, galaxies whirling, blooms that are opening, seeds that are falling, scattering on all the winds and swelling with the rain; we are no longer fed by the wild, that in us is ferally fertile, and so do not germinate, let alone grow into what we were all engendered for, which is beyond dimension, in the seed of wildness.

Published in slightly different form in Kyoto Journal #62

2011-09-14T16:35:00.003+09:00

God, I dig

how that black and white butterfly

loves those pink blossoms

there is no enough

is there

2011-09-12T11:17:00.007+09:00

MOUNTAIN ROAD INFORMATION

On my way this morning to pick up the grandies for a day at the beach, I as I wended my slow way down the curvy mountain road from the upper unshorn rice paddies rich in rice stalks pendant with their weight of gold, on past the lower shorn rice fields still gleaming in the morning sun, the lines of stubble echoing the curves of the paddies like stitches on an ancient tapestry - halfway down there was a farmer harvesting, streaming his whole field of rice into the back of his truck - in between the eaches of it all I looked out over the Lake that was mostly Prussian blue, with long winding bands of dark sapphire and lapis layered in here and there all the way to the far shore, the entirety speckled with bright sailboats and motor boats, cruisers and yachts, one long white wake of a cigarette boat slashing along in a loud hurry to get out of all this beauty, as across the Lake the mountains rose in sun-stippled granite, above them in turn the way-higher mountains of alive white clouds tumbling upward, ending in the same sheer blue where the silver full moon lives, all below shimmering with the gold that streams from that early slant of the autumn sun... There is priceless information on a mountain road...

2011-09-07T12:15:00.003+09:00

A PLACE IN THE SPIRIT

This morning after a long bout of weed-whacking I was standing by the deck railing cleaning off the debris from my work pants when I noticed a tiny tree frog, one of many that hang around the deck, with its nice smooth resting corners, angles affording excellent views of possible dangers and superior bug-hunting ambushes.

His greenness was hunkered atop a center railing, placidly gazing at the humungousness of me just a few inches from his nose, loudly whacking my hands on my pantlegs and shirtsleeves, debris flying all over the place, shirt-tails swinging about in big blueness, Greenie just sitting there like in a rockin chair on his porch with a stick of hay in his mouth, watching an eccentric neighbor go through his baffling motions, and it came to me that there is this odd relationship between me and these frogs--

Wherever I come upon them, whether they are atop the garden faucet, among the tomato leaves, on a shiitake log, here and there on the deck or inside the house, they seem to know that I mean them no harm, so they stay where they are, maybe squiggle about a bit to get a better look at what this consistently odd neighbor is doing beside this shiny tower that water sometimes comes out of, among these way leafy plants where there are great bug feasts, amid these mushroom forests or all over this perfect froggy playground facility, and at this evidence of trust I always get a little warm feeling somewhere deep inside where I don't go all that much, otherwise; there must be a tiny ancient place in the spirit where we can still experience amphibian friendships...

2011-09-04T10:20:00.002+09:00

JABBA THE HURRICANE

So here we all are, all 130 million or so of us living here in the big J, the entire country, all the prefectures bright red on the weather map, bright red meaning big-time torrential rains, carrying on with or lives as best we can beneath the vast rain muffin that comprises whatever number this typhoon is - already a bit early but maybe not, since it’s been a wet summer anyway hard to tell the difference but whats new, some kind of prepping for weirdness to follow.

The strange thing is, this typhoon doesn’t move -- it just sits there right on top of the country like Jabba the Hurricane, slithering wetly maybe ten feet a day toward China. It delayed the trains in Yamashina (one end of the Rashomon path) on Friday night and its still here on Sunday afternoon, will be here tomorrow and for who really knows how long thereafter, hanging around blocking the light, puffing a bit here and there, blowing some stuff around, looking into the windows like a big wet wild creature you shouldn’t have fed, now it’s gonna hang around and drench everything, bring down mountainsides, flood villages and cities, rain rain rain on everything, no exceptions.

It does produce bit of wind at times so it can earn the name Typhoon, it shows up round and whirly on the weather maps, has an eye at its center and all that, but. Even now it sits atop the mountains, the fog of its being slowly drifting down over our house toward the lowlands... I cleared the rain gutters this morning, and yesterday was out in the rain-blustery garden propping up the toppled tomatoes that were burying me in tangly wet dripping green, when I was just trying to save them, get them up there where they could catch the most sun, if they remember sun, if there still is such a thing that will ever reach the surface of the earth again if Jabba ever moves before all the green things just say the hell with this we’ll give it another try next year, maybe there’ll be sun at a new budding...

2011-09-02T13:13:00.000+09:00

THE SONG OF BREATHING

The rain arrives in the early night and comes down hard in the dark, all the louder for being unseen; after a time the air grows cooler as the rain drifts away on softer and softer notes, when from a tiny sound swells the insect chorus until it replaces the song of the rain that has gone, all those lives had been waiting out there to sing again into the dark, sing to each other each their own song, the same song we carry, in our own version, in ourselves, that we cannot always hear, but it is there-- we move to it even unknowing, responding in our light to the song of breathing, the song of heart beating, the song of walking, the song of loving, of dancing, we put them in our poems, we dance them to our moves, we sing them with our lives, or try to, when the rain has passed...

2011-08-30T10:59:00.010+09:00

THE NEANDERTHAL SEQUENCE

When I was a teenager I was often called a Neanderthal by Mr. Rapizzardi, who generally sat on his front stoop keeping an eye on that nice front lawn of his that I used as a shortcut. For my part, I felt that Mr. Rapizzardi was the Neanderthal. Turns out we were both right.

Later, in my college years, I smirked at the academic puzzlement over whether or not the noble Cro-Magnon, crafter of superb arrowheads, pure high-browed ancestor of those strong-jawed subjects of highest nobility, known as "us," had ever, ever deigned to couple with the bestial, low-browed hairy chipper of nothing but hand axes: the Neanderthals next door! I smirked because, well, I was in a fraternity; we were much closer to how reality actually worked.

So all these decades later I was not shocked when the scientists announced that, like all non-Africans, I am part Neanderthal, and so was Mr. Rapizzardi. There have always been certain ancient cave-dwelling propensities, have there not, certain primal feelings in taking a risk, hefting a stone, sighting a wild animal, gathering around a fire, spotting an untrod lawn...

So what does this mean for us modern human folk, this Neanderthal quality so many of us share, even without reference to certain reality tv programming? It could explain some major anomalies, such as creationists, Wall Street financiers and certain folksy politicians, who are torn between the progressive abilities of one ancestral line and the inviting stolidity of the other, between malignant greed and staunch integrity, complexity, simplicity, pride, humility, the list can be found in any "holy" book, whichever from wherever. Familiar mixes that are especially stressful to politicians and financiers, for example, who as a way of life must appear one way while acting the opposite.

No real need at this point in these exciting revelations to mention that I am also very likely a descendant of King Tut, who was probably also part Neanderthal, as are you, maybe you have the Tut part too, all of which means more to me, such as it is, than the Adam and Eve agenda I was heir to, but there you are-- people are impressionable are they not, yearning as they do for admittedly mythical roots, even as they carry the actuals in their very genes, with far more lineage than any mere king.

So now, thanks to science, we mongrels can at last perhaps begin admitting who we all really are, begin finding, studying, facing and accepting the many gifts and glitches we have inherited from the Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals and Denisovans, among all our uncounted forebears - including King Tut, where applicable - and so get past the dark sides of politics, finance, other bipolar activities and evolve at last into the beings that have been trying for so long to be.

2011-08-24T17:47:00.007+09:00

LIGHT AND DARK AND LIGHT

Here and there in the grains of the photos that remain from that time you can see the blurred outline of a person, sometimes with a child or even two, walking where the way was once familiar, but that now was the bottom of an incinerator the size of their city, that still burned through them even as they walked, perhaps to escape the heat of all the nothing that remained...

At other places in the mass of the ashes of a hundred thousand lives turned into wind and rain you can make out the speck of another one still living, bent over searching, sifting in vain through blackened flakes of what once was life, once a place of daily living, where now nothing stood, where all was flat and dark, dust and fragments of death...

After the fires died, first they came seeking their loved ones, one mother searching for her daughter who that morning had gone into town early so she could pay the rent on her way to work, but the mother never found her daughter...

That mother and all the others - fathers, sisters, sons, daughters and brothers, wandered for days, weeks, the rest of their lives in their hearts in those ashes of a city of families, passing by in their dreams those passengers on the train who were charcoal statues in their seats, or those still just alive who wandered also, in search of death that waited not far away, or the ones who had left those instant white shadows on the darkened stone of the bridge or building where they'd joined the unseeable light...

All of it on that August morning-- every ash of bone, every unheard scream, every sear of pain or cry for love, every tear of life, every atom of vapor that had been a person, all of it, is in our voices now...

2011-08-22T12:22:00.010+09:00

GOYA

No, not that Goya, the big-G Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, the renowned Spaniard who painted such works as The Third of May 1808 or Saturn Devouring His Son and who sadly never in life tasted the small-g goya that is this ramble's subject, also called the bitter melon, which originated somewhere in the tropics, has long been enjoyed throughout Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and could, I don't see why not, also be grown and enjoyed in the USA but isn't yet, as far as I know.

Now that we're past that bizarre but subjectively necessary opening sentence I can get right to the topic at hand, the wondrous goya. I first tasted that crisp and uniquely astringent fruit (the bitterest on the planet, Wiki says) on Okinawa in the early 1960s. After leaving Okinawa I didn't have goya again for decades, since it was then unknown and ungrown in the USA. Even when I came back to Japan, the wonderful veg was unavailable in central Japanese supermarkets until a few years ago, but by then I was growing my own. It's one of those produce items that has to grow from low-class food to high cuisine.

The reason I'm rambling about this now is because on Saturday, after two non-gardening days spent in the big city where little grows, I found that those many little tiny baby cucumber-sized goya had, in the two rainless days since, grown to include 4 full-sized gourds hanging there in hefty beauty. Goya don't fool around when it comes to growth and prolificity, they don't sometimes curl up to hide behind leaves and try to avoid being seen, like cucumbers do, they just hang there on their strong vines, heavy and straight down, saying Here! Here I am! I'm ready, pick me! Went out again this morning and among the 2 dozen or so small to midsizers yet on their way to maturity, 4 more had grown to size overnight! For just a few seeds and a high vine-climbable surface with southern exposure, you can have them all! Fresh! And tasty! And property/action rich!

Because I put up the high net fence (ca 3 meters) (and thereby tripled my growing area!) I began to grow climbers there-- cucumbers, pumpkins, climbing squashes, runner beans -- cukes love getting up so high, waving their tendrils around to bring their bright yellow blossoms even higher, but the goya has a special wild viney quality about it, it grows left and right and up and down, covering the whole surface. This year I planted just two plants, about two meters apart, at the foot of the northern wall, and those two alone cover the entire wall and beyond (one vine reached out and got into the chestnut tree!) with palm-sized translucent jade green leaves, here and there a butter-yellow blossom that more often than not turns into a tiny greening gourd that grows like blazes; this morning I harvested four of the biggest ones (well over a foot long; they biggen fast, the biggerer the bitterer). Now there are about two dozen of all sizes remaining, with about 6 weeks of growing time left to go!

The bitter melon is also a beautiful plant. Hardy as well, once it gets going. And the gourds. Crunchy, nice bitterness, they don't dissolve into a mush, great in salads, stir fries, tempura etc. I bet Western chefs are about to come out with some great new goya discoveries. As for the health aspects, the bitter melon is pretty miraculous; Dr. Wiel praises goya too, it is a wondrous health veg full of salubrious goodies yet to be detailed, or even discovered!

Here's some recipes from Todd, an organic farmer in Wakayama.

Todd also provides a link to lots of good-looking recipes

at the National Bitter Melon Council's (who knew?) website

And some goya recipes from Okinawa (Beware sudden music)

2011-08-19T10:25:00.004+09:00

"HONEST JAPANESE RETURN $78 MILLION IN CASH FOUND IN QUAKE RUBBLE"

2011-08-13T11:26:00.015+09:00

SHAKESPEARE NEVER MADE IT TO JAPAN

Bill was an eclectic guy, he mentioned slings and caldrons, hawks and bodkins, arrows and handsaws, everyday tools and devices all over the place, whenever they fit a niche in one of his plot structures, but as far as bootjacks go, despite their undeniable convenience he never mentions them even once, as far as I know. And there’s a reason for this; it came to me in my genkan a few days ago, which I'll get to in a moment.

Fact is - to stay off the main track for a bit the way Bill often did, though in his case for dramatic purposes, I'm just rambling - Bill was a borrower as far as plots went, so he had to go with what was at hand; still, to never even once mention a bootjack... He himself had a bootjack, if he had boots (and who didn't, back then?), and if he wasn't a noble-- they had their own living vassally hands-on Jack-of-boots, who gave the device its name.

And if you have a bootjack, despite its well-worn humility you know how much it means to you, bringing such ease and decorum to an inelegant task; same for Bill, yet he never mentioned a bootjack, never let it strut it its moment upon the stage, never made it a star, never gave it a bit of well-deserved fame; why might that be? I here hypothesize for the first time in history that it was because, despite his broad reading and deep familiarity with travelers' tales, Bill himself never really got around much. (Who had the time, wazoo shows a week, and writing them, too!) No, he never really got international, deeply intercultural, but mainly he never lived in Japan, which is why he never saw the bootjack for what it was.

These kinds of realizations come to one here in the Orient, particularly Japan, as happened to me one evening a couple of weeks ago when, as I returned from work the Trio of Brio was waiting to rush me at the genkan, where in Japan you take off your shoes before entering the house. I was not realizing anything of bootjack level at the time, it was just genkan city, plain and simple.

Where they stood on the floor-edge of the genkan, the girls were poised to pounce as soon as I slipped off my shoes (as 99.9999% of Japanese persons do, upon returning home). I, however was wearing a pair of rodeo boots I got in New Mexico some years ago, and did not simply slip off my footwear and step up onto the floor; rather, I bent way over...? reached under the shoe cabinet (there's one in every genkan)...?? and pulled out my old and trusty...? bootjack?!

The effect upon the vibrant Trio was like pulling the plug on a house-sized generator: a large and deep silence descended as they gazed wide-eyed upon this object from another reality, this long piece of looked like wood, of alien shape, with a wedge cut for some reason into the wide end, whose edges were trimmed with soft leather-- and underneath there was a single cushioned stub jutting out at an odd angle...

I stood there with the exoplanetary device in my hand, tilting it this way and that, like the steering wand of a spaceship, so that those young and hungry eyes could view it from all angles; I turned it over slowly in educational silence so they could study it. Then I handed it to them, so they could examine it closely, in detail, and determine... no, this did not seem to help; proximity did not clear their eyes of the mystery that was there. Sharp senses and hungry minds were not providing an answer. The purpose of a bootjack does not come easily to one who has been raised in a historically bootless culture.

Six wide and puzzled eyes looked at me for the answer: What was this thing? What was I doing instead of just taking off my shoes like everybody else does? What was the point of this theater? (Bill slipped into thought at this point.) Six eyes went from me to this piece of wood, then back to me, back and forth, looking for answers.

As Bill has demonstrated so well with his many characters, like Hamlet (who could never decide whether or not to bother using his bootjack) and Lady MacBeth (who bootjacked daily, offstage), plus Rosencranz and his buddy, coming and going (rabid bootjackers), timing is everything. The tension built... the audience of big brown eyes looked at me; I turned the object slowly, then suddenly dropped it on the floor! Hooked my right bootheel into the wedge, placed my left foot atop the wooden slab, pulled my right leg upward, and-- VOILA! A boot was standing there empty of my foot, which now stood bootlessly elsewhere!

Amazement filled the genkan. There was a loud and multivoiced kiddy version of all those adult shockwords that were frequently given voice during Bill's presentations at the Globe... Whoa!! What the ***? How the ***? and so forth, in this case followed by Lemme see that, I wanna try that, Can I do that! Me too! And so for the next 15 minutes the little stage that is the genkan was crowded with auditioners, trying on all the boots of all the kinds in all the genkan, shoes too, just to see how that went, and now all three understand and are greatly impressed with this radical new concept and cultural item from the Occident (a place Far East of here), called a "bootjack." Some day it will find a place in their plays, I'm sure.

If only the same thing could have happened to Bill when he was a kid...

2011-08-07T11:15:00.006+09:00

PURE LAND MOUNTAIN SUMMER DAYS: Season 10, episode 42

Headed out for the cherry tree his morning to add some kitchen garbage to the compost pile that is currently nourishing the cherry tree, the Baron, his harem and his offspring, plus the smaller herbivores (no meat added, other than occasional fish bones), who all make good use of the leavings and add their share, leveling it all out with their rooting searches (likely the occasional wild pig too, though I've never seen one there). Crows and other birds also find goodies in the pile now and then, the crows being particularly fond of the rare pineapple crown, which they pick utterly clean; watermelon rinds are also a summer favorite.

When I went out there this morning, though, my approach prompted a big WHOA!, as a cloud of semi (cicadas) burst into flight all around me. (Some time when you've got a minute in your good pants, just try frantically dodging chunky buzzing lifeforms while carrying a dodgy load of drippy compost.) The semi had been convening not at the base of the oak, the chestnut, the other cherries or the cedars, but that particular cherry tree. The compost therefore must have been of some attraction for them, though it couldn't have been as food, since semi are the ultimate fasters, being mouthless and so not taking a single bite in their entire lives (Do not try the New Semi Diet!), staying alive in this form not being their purpose, their actual lives - such as we call life - being spent underground as larvae, in which lightless phase they get to be teenagers, yearwise; the rest comes later in the aboveground semi part that we're familiar with, a sort of pre-heaven for them, a quick agenda to perpetuate the race, leaving their lifeless husks lying around afterward, in some ways like the human teen age, though without the junkfood.

As I approached, the semi hadn't yet begun their daily waaa-waaa-waaa chorus, and were silent apart from the perennial morning background music to this unsponsored reality show tacitly titled Pure Land Mountain: Summer Days (audience too low for rating), which thankfully has nevertheless had quite a long run. This familiar buzz and hum was why I approached without knowing any creature was there. There was just a low busyness all around, as at a human conference. It certainly appeared that the semi were having some sort of convention, so may of them together, and as I neared their venue they began bursting away from the base of the tree in roaring sporadic dozens, zooming past my head WHOOM! WHOOM! WHOOM! as they took off, rudely interrupted, perhaps in the midst of some kind of mating meeting, an insect orgy, my sudden presence thus causing countless coitus interrupti. I couldn't tell exactly, but that is what they live for... Sorry guys.

Next time I go that way I'll cough loudly first...

2011-08-04T11:27:00.003+09:00

MOSAIC

So there we were on a perfect blue-sky summer afternoon, all of us out on the deck, Echo napping on the big futon spread out in the shade while the Trio of Brio sat on the edge eating fresh watermelon, I standing near the door sipping iced coffee watching the far thunderheads rise in skycolumns of crisp white high above the blue shock of the Lake, over here the deep air itself flowing softly over us bearing the rich scent of summer growth-- blossoms and catkins, grass and trees, swelling rice heads in their imperial green robes nodding with wealth in the long late sun, the bamboo and weeping cherry branches swaying at the direction of the breeze. As I sipped and the girls giggled over their sweet afternoon snack while Echo slept, calm in the embrace of all outdoors I could not help but think that paradise is not a place, but a time, a moment, a mosaic of moments...

2011-08-03T07:51:00.006+09:00

Citizens go

$2,400,000,000,000

deeper into trillions of debt -

politicians applaud

A National Debt Of $14 Trillion? Try $211 Trillion

2011-07-29T11:51:00.006+09:00

TRY THAT, MERE HUMAN!

I was out in the garden this morning adding some kitchen garbage to the compost pile under the cherry tree when the warbler began his dawn concert, to which I always delight in whistle-responding as best I can; I suspect we featherless bipeds all have a bit of warbler in us somewhere.

Although I am a good whistler (frugal traveler entertainment) and love to take part in warbler performances - in a kind of duet, extended roundels, syncopation or whatever strikes my fancy - on occasion I have the feeling that the warbler involved finds it irritating. He often seems to sing more insistently, like a parent might talk louder over a noisy child. Or he tries something more complicated. Which is understandable; the warbler is the pro here, no question about that-- but still...

Sometimes with just a simple basic warbler riff I can fool the wee bird into thinking there's another male about, at least for a while, which can be fun with a warbler new to the neighborhood, as he bounces here and there singing irritably while looking for the upstart intruder, only to find that there's nothing around but one of those wingless, songless humans...

This time though, as soon as I repeated the warbler’s standard initial riff, he departed from the old songlist and performed a completely new number, a flashy and soaring glissando composition that had just arrived in warbler world, and it was a doozy. No way I could imitate that one, that was way beyond my ballpark, that was out among the stars somewhere. What a solo performance-- it just went on and on! I've never heard anything like it; I was struck dumb, whistlewise. If I could have seen that maestro, I suspect there might have been the hint of a smile on his beak at shutting me up so effectively, but it was worth every note to be so wonderfully humbled.

Warblers are evolving fast up here; got to get to work on my repertoire.

2011-07-27T08:03:00.003+09:00

SPECIAL REPORT-Fukushima long ranked Japan's

most hazardous nuclear plant

"Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant ranked as one of the most dangerous in the world

for radiation exposure years before it was destroyed by the meltdowns and explosions...

After the earthquake, contract workers at Fukushima were sent in without radiation meters

or basic gear such as rubber boots. Screening for radiation from dust and vapor inhaled by workers

was delayed for weeks...

But that kind of stepped-up review never happened in Tokyo, where the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency remains an adjunct of the trade ministry charged with promoting nuclear power...

Because of Fukushima's high radiation, Tokyo Electric brought in thousands of workers each year,

often to work just a few days on the most hazardous jobs..."

More...

2011-07-25T17:38:00.004+09:00

HEY, THAT'S MY LEAF!

All my life I've been nice to various species, Ever since I got past the frog-snake-salamander-catching age, it's been live and let live. Even in gardening, a worldwide battlefield, I say let's go organic, no insecticides etc. But when I walk out to my quietly growing garden and observe that many of my tomato leaves look like antique lace, gnawing at the edge of which lace is not a cute little aphid-devouring ladybug, but a Bob’s-tomato-leaf-devouring bug, to whom I say "Hey, that's my leaf!" but I'm talking to myself, they never listen, so

I amble back to the house to get some liquid detergent, pour a little into a cutoff PET bottle, then add hose water to 2/3 level to get a good head on it, after which I make my rounds from laceleaf to laceleaf, tipping and flicking the not so lucky notladybugs into the frothy mixture, where they can enjoy a warm bubble bath and come out all clean and dead. While I'm at it, I do the same for the weasely weevils on my peppers, who also love a bath, and dive right in with a little prodding. I do two rounds to be sure. A couple days later the tomatoes and peppers are taller and healthier; the bugs are clean and together with their gods.

It is a service I perform for the vegetable world, which rewards me with its delicious and nourishing fruits, some of whose seeds I save for the following year; it's a deal we got going. As a vegetable vassal I help the scarlet, emerald and golden nobles grow, and they help me get from year to year.

Now if I could get a bubble bath that would hold a dozen monkeys at a time, we could move on into the Renaissance...

2011-07-21T15:48:00.004+09:00

LONG NIGHT OF ANOTHER KIND

On my routine way out the routine doorway to routine work this routine morning, as I closed the heavy dark-brown paneled routine door in that part of the routine, the corner of my eye noticed something non-routine, something that was - how shall I say it - different, something that broke the obsessive continuity of the quotidian.

Nature loves to do that. Some kind of reality insistence was being foisted upon me, something that was on the door and that resembled the door, but that could not be of the door, as my eye corner - which gazes always outside the routine - had insisted. This kind of thing is meant to grab your attention and save you from a conventional bout of zombosis, if you have any attention left.

It will snap your head and focus your eyes, make you lean in closer, make you say What the fenk? To a door, for godsake, all of which I did, excepting a letter or two in the last part. There was a lump on the door. A brown lump. A granular, mottled lump, doorlike in color and texture but not conforming to the panel molding. It shattered my zombie mode into a random number of little pieces that lay scattered invisibly on the ground. I stood there for a take, then hunkered to look more closely at this door tumor. As I got closer and put on my glasses I realized it was staring at me.

I found myself staring into the two onyx eyes of a large, dark toad, in whose mind I was of no importance whatever. He was precisely where he had decided to be. He had climbed up onto what he didn't care was a door, conformed his color to that of the wood (in the night!) and there he was, Jabba the Toad, fully in charge, focused and ready for the day when I zombied out in the grip of routine and found a chance to step out of mode, for which moments we should all be thankful, that's why we love nature so-- not just because of her beauty or wisdom, vast as they are, or because a few of her countless secrets led to the miracle of tv and suchlike artificial distractions, but because she rescues us even from ourselves, breaks the zombie spell, brings us back again and again to where we actually are, if any of us is still paying attention.

As Jabba indicated by his austere presence, there ARE other ways of living and being, and we should be aware of them just in case, the zomboid way being nowhere near the only way; the ways are countless; but then again, he who speaks of the way etc. In any case, you never know when we might need a big cosmic door of a kind to hang out on throughout a long night of another kind; besides, the cool shall inherit the earth.

2011-07-18T07:33:00.008+09:00

FUKUSHIMA STORIES

A FIREMAN LOOKS FOR HIS FAMILY

Often, in moments of doubt, as he scours country back roads and rarely trodden trails, he takes out the photographs of his 29-year-old wife, Emi, and 15-month-old Atsuki and he talks to them.

"I'm sorry," he says softly. "I'm sorry."

w/thanks to Chris

2011-07-14T11:15:00.006+09:00

THE BOLT LOOSENS CLOCKWISE

I remembered that, of course. I would have remembered to wake up as well, but all short-term remembrance is in the waking state, and I was asleep.

On Sunday we had the usual bi-annual community roadside manicure in which all able-bodied humans take part from 8 ~ 10 am, the physically capable men with their weedwhackers, the others - from kids to grandfolks - with their clippers, hand scythes, rakes and brooms, and since I would be doing the section up near my house, which involved whacking multimeters of mountain bamboo, I would have to change the whackerhead from the strings to the sharp-toothed blade. I knew all this in advance. Unlike last year, however, when for some reason I overslept, and in my unbreakfasted haste, among a series of lapses forgot that the whackerhead bolt loosened clockwise, as did the universe of that morning, this year I vowed to be breakfasted and ready at 8 with my whacker new-bladed and gassed up, ready to go.

But for some reason I overslept (something I seem to do each year on this day) and was awakened by the growing sound of weedwhackers along the road toward me when fresh from dreams I realized I had to change from strings to blade -- and the whacker was ungassed! But this time, thanks to the mind-branding nature of last year's experience - plus I happened to have an espresso in the fridge - I jumped out of bed right into my workpants, snatched the espresso, opened it with my teeth as I grabbed my workgloves and headed for the toolshed, the sound of whirling blades drawing nearer as I gassed up the whacker, changed the strings to the blade (THE BOLT LOOSENS CLOCKWISE) and was out there already wailing away at that road-leaning bamboo and other over/undergrowth when the village whackers arrived from below.

By ten o'clock I was drenched with sweat as one of the grandpas handed me a bottle of cold green tea as we all stood around there in a morning sunlit crowd overlooking the sparkling blue lake below and enjoying the chance to socialize while dripping sweat.

Also I got to see and greet almost all the village grandmas in one place! It is an ancient joy one feels at the sight of so many grandmas, something way deeper than knowledge that science will never get at. Mostly the local grandmas and I meet and greet occasionally, me biking down the road to the train, they biking up to or down from their fields, just a good morning/afternoon/evening or so in passing, but here we were all out together in the summer morning sipping green tea amidst all those bright smiles of grandmas in their monpe, tenugui draped over their heads, we actually got some conversations going, beyond good morning and how are you, thank you and it's so hot, and well done with smiles as I say everywhere. Later one of the grandmas came to our our house with a big box of fresh onions.

Next year I'll get the whacker fueled, bladed and ready to go the day before and set the alarm clock just in case. The work is hard enough; why pile all that stress on top of it?

Though it's nothing a grandma smile can't fix.

2011-07-09T16:51:00.002+09:00

SUI GENERIS

As addendum tangential to the aforegoing, I figure I must also have the largest collection of late 20th century western music on the mountainside, if not in the Prefecture, to say nothing of formats. I have actual vinyl, though I no longer have my turntable; the LP (for the museum-quality term: "long-playing," back from when things had duration worthy of mention) albums are part of my art collection. I have some remnant tapes, but also no player. I have instruments. I am the player.

I am the only one on the mountain who has ever played Frank Zappa to this air, I am sure. RL Burnside too, and the Pixies, Chet Baker, the Feelies, Van Morrison, Radiohead, Concrete Blonde, thousands of songs... And when I play them, I play them loud, as befits the passion thrust into the notes in the first place, and in the summer with the windows open, the birds love it, especially the warblers.

As the local farmers ride their mopeds up to their greening paddies or come walking up the road with their paddy tools they pass through my broad airy wash of Zappa Pixies Concrete Blonde and although they never actually knock on my door to ask me What IS that album, where can I get it? Who is playing Plastic People or Snake Drive or It's Only Life or Where is My Mind or Still in Hollywood? That sonic baptism is a deeply cultural event for them, one to be found nowhere else in the Prefecture, so it is no surprise that they are muted by the experience. It is a big one.

When they walk into one side of that sonic flux and let it wash over them they do not run for their lives; rather, they walk toward their lives, as though all is now well with the world, if not in fact even better, and when they emerge from the other side of that torrent, richer than when they entered, they are transformed in some way, if only at the molecular level (which includes DNA). One of their progeny may some century hence thrill the world with his or her deeply inspired and unpinpointably original music without ever knowing why.

Like those farmers and their descendants, you heard it here first.

2011-07-08T16:02:00.003+09:00

TWAIN ON A ZOOK

Talking to a book-loving friend this morning about the gradual disappearance of physical books, and how infants today, growing up into an increasingly bookless world, may learn to read from a kindle or a nook, dook, fook, hook, kook, mook, zook or whatever comes after, and for their children it may be implants.

They'll never learn to love the promise in the heft of a book, portending the words, thoughts and adventures within; they'll never learn to love the scent of pages or the thrill of an entire library-- no exploring the stacks, no class visit to learn about books and how to use the card catalog-- the Dewey Decimal system will go the way of the pen, and cursive writing's ancient grace will have no place in their minds, as is happening already. It may all be MacWisdom by then, with one day the entire politically and academically corrected canon implanted at birth, science fictionally speaking. [There may come trolls who say that life is grate witout reeding or riting we got lots of time for other stuf an joystiks to]

And judging from what is considered worthy reading matter these days, comes the correction of Huck Finn, the dumbdowning of Gatsby, the dispassionate writing-class flavor of modern LitFic and all that will follow as the word bends over backward to accommodate the loss of education that schooling is becoming, I realized that I may well have the largest genuine library on the mountainside... I certainly have the largest English library on the mountainside, maybe in all of Shiga Prefecture...

Until recently it has been a problem for me, what to do with all these books, but now that there are Nooks and the like, which I will not use for hefty mindstuff; maybe a mystery for the train, but I will never read Fyodor Dostoevsky on a Pook or Mark Twain on a Zook, are you kidding me? Some literary efforts and their life-passions require the heft of deep respect; there is something karmic going on here, after all, there is more to books than pixels...

So rather than continue to be burdened as before by the mass of my own tomes, I now realize that my home has become a cultural repository against the looming loss of calligraphy-driven writing, much like the stone cloisters of the Dark Ages, when books were known, scribed and saved from the dark by a passionate few as treasures for the future, when they would be needed. So for you folks centuries hence who can still read and have somehow found this blog, up in that ruin on the mountain you can find Mark in the original.

2011-07-07T10:32:00.007+09:00

PARALLELS CAN BE DRAWN HERE

Woke up this morning and as my head came out of my sweatshirt neck I saw out in the garden something that looked as though a large crowd of monkeys had raided my potato patch yesterday, but this wasn't possible, had to be a trick of the morning light, I hadn't seen a monkey for months and months! I rubbed my eyes, but still...

So I got dressed, went downstairs and out there, saw that yes, it must have been at least a dozen monkeys, going along the rows carefully pulling up the plants and scarfing the dirt-encrusted tubers right there on the spot, laying the stems neatly aside and moving along from Brady possession to Brady possession, no doubt noting the greening tomatoes nearby, the baby cucumbers just over there and duly entering the relevant data into their Mpads for about the 12th of the month.

I of course will harvest whatever's even remotely ready before it can ever fall into their thieving paws! But the monkeys already know I'll do that don't they, and have factored that in, you see? Which means that I'll have to act even sooner than soon, and eat my produce way before it's ready, or else! You see what is happening, don't you, as we humans go blithely about our daily lives while... Parallels can be drawn here, you know, but I won't draw them, I have to live here.

[This paragraph is whispered, over in a corner] Yes, there are obvious parallels between this agroeconomic microevent and the global activities of Wall Street, the privately owned US Fed and the US Treasury Department, in re the inside-out pockets of the held-upside-down-and-shaken US taxpayer/pensioner, not to mention the shenanigans of the unnamed country of my current residence, and like the monkeys those entities know where I live, plus now and then I am at the tender mercies of picky-picky immigration and the intimate gropings of the TSA, so I won't go there, you can if you want.

In any case, like the US taxpayer I had once again been suckered by foxy simians who somehow knew I was going to be harvesting some of my hard-earned bounty this weekend - they have spies everywhere, of course, especially in offices, where among many other roles they play pointy-haired bosses and feral officials, you'd swear they were human. I told no one I was growing potatoes, but despite my precautions the ferals found out and got to the tubers yesterday, had me penciled in for the brief window while I was at the office in the big city and Echo was out shopping in the afternoon. They were so efficient as to afford a note of sarcasm, in all the big ravage-patch leaving me one golfball-sized potato, as a kind of fillip.

As I said, I hadn't seen a monkey for months, until a couple days ago I saw from the kitchen window a large male monkey hotfooting it away from my property across the open field on the other side of the road. I figured maybe I had finally put the fear of Bob into those redfaced brigands, until just proximity to my garden was enough to send them packing.. I admit, I relaxed my guard a little at the sight. But that's all part of their plan, don't you see? That's the way they work! They keep you in the dark until one day, just before harvest, all your potatoes are gone.

Globally, quite a few pensioners are about to understand this.

2011-07-04T20:06:00.001+09:00

THE FROGLINGS

The tiny green tree frogs are out in growing numbers now that the air itself is wet in the rainy season, there are so many of them but they’re all solitary individuals, prefer to be left alone in some corner of nature with their dark pasts, their jade thoughts. I go and get the ladder to fix something high and there’s a whole disparate committee of the little greenies, steeping in their solitude, each sequestered in a nook on his own ladderstep, just staring at you whatever happens like they know you very well and they probably do; their gaze says they’ve seen it all in their duration on this earth. They probably saw the human race when it was just a baby, so they know more about us than we do and have been keeping a dark eye on us ever since, especially since my own frog-catching childhood. Even now as I go about my gardening one of them is sitting on a tomato leaf watching me with that look of long times.

Elsewhere they jump from my hat, ride on my shirt, doze for hours on my pepper leaves, hide in every little secret place. They know all the little secret places, since that’s their job, but that makes them just the thing for treasure-hunting, doesn’t it, so when the KMM trio came to visit Saturday afternoon Mitsuki right away spotted the bright dot of froggy jade tucked away in the corner of one of the deck railings. After she caught that one, Kaya and Miasa right away set out to catch the microfrogs of their own, and I knew a lot of the best hiding places, one of the keys to grandfather popularity.

So the girls right away had to get containers for their growing collections of tiny new pets, which they gave individual names. Soon the competition turned from mere quantity to who can catch the smallest frog, and the winner for the evening was about 1cm long. He just hung there on the inside of his container unaware of his froggy Oscar and tried to comprehend outside/inside while among more frogs than he’d ever been among in his life, or maybe her life, I didn’t have time, I was helping with dinner and each KMM table place was marked by the respective container of frogs.

During dinner the girls were informed they’d have to say goodbye to their tiny living treasures, they’d have to let them go, which news they accepted without too much grumbling when told that they’d have to start right away to every day catch a nightful of bugs for frogfood. As it turned out they couldn’t bring themselves to set their little friends free, though - I wonder if they’ve seen The Yearling - because before going to bed I noticed by the door to the deck three jars of frogs embodying all those eons of experience, yearning for solitary but still doing time in the crowded slammers, and every one of them innocent. I took the jars outside, one by one removed the tops, and you never saw so much frogcitement in your life: leap, leap, leap, leap, far bigger and faster leaps than normal for such generally unmoving creatures, splat, splat, splat, splat, in every direction, they’d been waiting all dusk and evening for this moment-- they are night people, after all. Lotta green karma there.

By then the girls were probably fast asleep, dreaming of frog happiness, confident that Bob would see to it. Each life must attend to certain tasks, and mine is no exception.

2011-07-01T10:55:00.006+09:00

ALONE ON THE MOUNTAIN

I spend great stretches of time alone up on the mountain with the sky on my hands, tending soil, seeds and plants, rearranging rocks the better to suit their natures vis-a-vis my need for stone walls, gazing out at the Lake and its majesty, getting as involved as I humanly can in thunderstorms and hurricanes, learning from them the many small things about myself, my past, my path, and the vortex of truth and illusion.

There is no greater teacher than solitude, as anyone who makes it back from the desert knows. Not solitude in the negative standard 'loneliness' sense, but in the aboriginal magnificent spirit-quest uplift sense. In the city, when you are alone it is a societal matter; when you are alone in the country you are alone, you realize, with everything. In persisting, you learn to listen at last to the symphony of all. You learn the geography of silence, find your way at last to the gate at its heart, and pass beyond into the secret garden. You learn there are places where the soul does not grow.

The need for such knowledge is the reason children leave home and go hungrily into the solitude of their own lives, to learn what is to be learned there. Too often, though, this quest is stifled at the start, even before the start, by societal and parental agendas, derivative teachings diluted to local purpose and contemporary assumptions of morality.

And so in the same nature of things are parents given a second chance when the children leave home, leaving the parents alone at last to learn (or not) what is now there for them to learn. Too often, though, because they have always followed a prescribed path, they do not know what to do with newness, and now is as opaque to them as tomorrow. It will take time, and changes, for them to truly grow from here. But to those who have never stopped growing, there is no change involved; one simply continues becoming.

2011-06-30T20:29:00.000+09:00

MORE THAN A MELTDOWN

"TEPCO has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the nation of Japan: cronyism, collusion, gentrification, corruption, weakregulation, and entropy. Despite being in the spotlight for the worstnuclear disaster since Chernobyl, TEPCO continues to engage inquestionable labor practices, and has escaped bankruptcy in closed-doormeetings with politicians, and through denying culpability has shiftedpart of the reparations burden onto taxpayers – deeds which testify tothe extent to which TEPCO still has plenty of political power, if not asmuch nuclear power."

TEPCO: Will Someone Turn Off the Lights?

2011-06-25T12:09:00.000+09:00

THEY LIED TO US - Michio Kaku

via reddit

2011-06-23T10:26:00.040+09:00

A RADIANT PROPOSAL

"It's the only way to secure a stable supply of environmentally clean electricity at a relatively low cost," Mori, who also heads the Kansai Economic Federation, the biggest business lobby in western Japan, said last week in an interview in Osaka. "Nuclear power should keep its current status." No agendas there...

That current status includes Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Monju, Fukushima, among others; nuclear statuses tend to last a while. Anyone who had a resume like that would never get a job. But what do we misled and newswinked members of the public really know about this complex subject? If what you say is true, though, Chairman Mori, why not build your next big reactor right in the center of Tokyo? And one in Osaka! Every large city in Japan should have the safety of radioactive warmth at its heart! You could make use of the rivers! Apart from all the macrosieverts of stability that would radiate outward, this would yield tremendous cost reductions by eliminating electricity loss via distant transmission! And in the gentle embrace of nuclear power's radiant cleanliness you could have kindergartens right beside the containment vessels-- with playgrounds, neighborhoods, restaurants all around! Food gardens! You could even eat the fish!

Rumor has it that Chairman Mori plans to move to Fukushima with his family, unto the seventh generation, to be as close to the reactors as permissible - outside the expensive and toxic forced evacuation area - to reside among his aggrieved customers amidst the glowing ambience of radioactive safety and prove to the world how environmentally clean and how stable is nuclear power.

Any word on that moving date, Mr. Mori?

2011-06-21T11:51:00.008+09:00

THE BARON DOES A HOUDINI

Yesterday morning after getting some beans etc. from the garden, since I'd be coming back again later to plant some things I closed the upper portion of the gate - which is all netting anyway (like the entire fence) so it keeps ground creatures out merely by the troublesome look of it - I then went inside and was up in the loft wrestling with some powerful editing concepts when Echo, downstairs in the kitchen, shouted "The Baron is in your garden." Not THE garden, but YOUR garden. Impossible, I thought. The noble beast couldn't spot, let alone get through, that tiny hole among all those holes.

Nevertheless I went downstairs, just to humor Echo's endearing (note explicit avoidance of nearly irresistible pun) hallucination, and there I saw out the big kitchen window not the expected absence, but the undeniable presence, of a large and fully antlered male deer in MY garden. Fortunately, the beast had just gotten in (how?) and was sampling only some weeds near the entrance - rich lush weeds, compared to his well-used dining area outside the fence.

The last time I'd forgotten the gate at the end of a gardening day, the Baron had come in the night to partake of his royal pantry and had dined on some weeds and spinach, with strawberry leaves for dessert, then left quietly by the same fully open way. This time, though, there had been but a tiny way in; would he find it instantly when panicked in broad daylight? I couldn't just walk out there and open the gate for him; if he freaked, I'd have a powerful horned creature tangled up tightly, perhaps together with myself, in one or more of the walls of my ruined garden fence and would have to call some wildlife authorities to get him/us out of there.

On the other hand, I wasn’t about to let a savage ruminant wander my garden at will, so I opened the door to the deck and stepped slowly outside, about 20 meters from him. He saw me at once, and dashed straight away to freedo... No. Not that way. He saw me, still there, folding my arms - though I doubt that deer sense umbrage - and dashed over that way to free... No again. He ran this way then that then this again, through my peppers, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, spinach, new radishes, baby cucumbers, goya, sunflowers... much wincing was exercised. But he could not find the way out.

Back and forth he ran, more and more casually, looking for his exit while I just stood there, quietly reminding him by my inaction that he should get out, but could take his time. He seemed to be trying to gather whatever passes for deer thoughts, then finally went back to that corner and paused, head lowered...there was a memory there... pushed forward and an entire huge antlered body slipped out through a tiny hole in the bottom of the fence. He was a cervid Houdini. Taking no bows, he whitetailed it upmountain.

When I went out to view all the damage he must have done, and to CLOSE THE #%&$#* GATE, I found that despite all that running around he hadn't done any damage! The only changes were one slightly tilted potato plant and one deep hoofprint in the pepper bed. Oh, and some weeds near the gate were a lot shorter, but I'd been meaning to do that myself on a larger scale as soon as the rain stopped.

Thanks for the head start, Baron.

2011-06-17T13:11:00.010+09:00

INTERESTING TIMES

Some of the trees up here been playing havoc with our way of life, and folks 'round these parts won't stand for it, nosir.

For example there's the big chunk of incipient firewood from the gargantuoak a few hundred meters above here whose monstrous branch was lowverhanging the road and was cut down a couple of months ago before it could crush somebody, its superbulk then being rolled over the roadside edge into the bamboo and down toward the stream before the cutters knew that I was a firewood type person and would want it, so later I found out it was ok for me to take it away, but now I'll have to stand on that steep slope as if beside a nervous elephant and chainsaw the mass into half-meter segments weighing about 300 k each that I'll have to stay out of the way of, then have to split and quarter in situ so as to render them liftable to the road above. Love those kinds of tasks...

After that I can tackle the big oak on a transverse road thereabove that the recent hurricane blew over onto some power wires, causing a multihour blackout up there until the power company cut it down in big sections and shoved it into the woods where it now belongs to me but I won't get to that for a week or two beyond the first cache, though whats the hurry, since no way will it ever be dry in time to use this winter, even with the impossible miracle of constant sunlight during the rainy season plus the worst of global warming. It's warmth for the winter of 2012-13, if we're still here then, given the ongoing govern/mental revelations of Fukushima, but even so I'm going to try to leave the split wood out in the sunniest, breeziest place...

Then I'll have Azuma-san fell those three big crowdy oaks that our upmountain neighbor girded because they need the sunlight on their house, so when that's done I should have enough firewood to last until the world economy has successfully collapsed and everyone has gotten used to bottom line frugality so we can hopefully move on to essential changes.

We do live in interesting times, do we not...

2011-06-14T19:58:00.002+09:00

IN JUST THREE MONTHS +

Three months. Hard work. Together. What’s new? We’ve done it this way before...

BTW: As to the sudden dearth in detailed US coverage of the aftermath of this world-altering event: “The Fukushima reactors (Mark I) were built* by General Electric, which also owns Comcast, NBC, CNBC and MSNBC, so the absence of timely information is not surprising.”

*(Designed, actually; built by Japanese companies, though GE supplied the reactors for units 1, 2 and 6.)

+

Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

2011-06-10T09:58:00.003+09:00

ON LITTLE PINE BEACH

On Wednesday afternoon I took the beach-hungry beasties to our favorite secret beach, called by us Little Pine Beach, where on that ultrafine calm blue feather-clouded day the four of us got out of the car at the end of the long narrow road to the sand and water about a hundred meters or so away. When I turned around after getting my bag from the trunk, there in the far distance, arms raised in glee, were three tiny silhouettes already screamsplashing into the calm water...

I headed at a slow pace along the hundred meters or so to the beach, and when I was almost there remembered the beach mat in the trunk so turned and walked the hundred meters or so back to the car, got the mat and walked the hundred meters or so back to the beach where I realized that since school was in session, the season does not begin for about another month and there WAS NOBODY ELSE THERE WE HAD THE ENTIRE BEACH TO OURSELVES!

As I spread the mat amidst the joy I couldn't help but notice that beneath the many little pines were strewn about seven million pine cones, perfectly seasoned for starting fires in a woodstove, and there's only one household I know of around here that has any such need for pine cones. Everybody else uses nuclear power. Even better, these were free pine cones, with no meltdown.

But no way would (or could) I ask the girls out of the water when the swimming was perfect, even to gather also perfect pine cones just lying there waiting to be claimed by this lucky winner of the Pine Cone Lottery. No questions from the press, please. So I alone jumped right on the pine cones, but I only had my small back pack and a little plastic bag of the kind they make that holds maybe two pine cones, go figure. And it would rain before I could get back here on the weekend... What's that old saying about Lord, thy pine cone-covered beach is so vast etc.--

So I walked the hundred meters or so back to the car and was lucky to find some large plastic bags that we sometimes have in the car for wild vegs, fruits and herbs, walked the hundred or so meters back to the beach and commenced harvesting pine cones by ones twos and threes in the mango gold of the late afternoon as the girls splashed in the shallows and a powerboat roared aimlessly back and forth offshore, playing music of the kind that requires volume to offset some central emptiness, the roarers seeking in the midst of nature's beauty to somehow drown out her insistent presence in a dull version of fun that seeks distraction from what it will not see and does not want to understand. Unlike the girls, who in their bigger world were fashioning beach toys and houses from bamboo and sandpiles, having deep fun with water and earth-- no boat, no motor, no fuel, no blasting along the surface, no costly layers of separation from what is, bottom line, the ancient part of ourselves.

And so as the girls played in all that majesty I bent to my task about 500 times, wandering not bent/bent/not bent/bent along the shore beneath the pines, gathering only the finest cones - one becomes a pine cone gourmet of sorts after a few years - strewn there by the hurricane of a few days ago and normally soon raked away and burned by the beachkeepers, but the season hasn't begun so I was doing them something of a favor, and I must say I haven't seen such a fine crop of pine cones in all my years here, they were that golden amber of the fresh unweathered kind-- I got 8 big bulging bags full.

Later, after a cooling loll on the shady sand, as it approached time to leave - me wearing my white hemp pants, orange NYC t-shirt under white shirt w/long sleeves rolled and straw cowboy hat with the silver concho on the front - I gathered up three big bulging bags of pinecones in each hand and headed back the hundred meters or so to the car through the narrow alley. On the way, I passed three young Japanese males heading for the beach, who, upon beholding way out here in the middle of nowhere - japanopublicly speaking - a tall, long-white-haired elder gaijin striding along in white pants, white shirt, orange NYC tee and conchoed straw cowboy hat, carrying... three big bags full of pine cones in each hand... it changed their worldview somewhat.

When I walked back the hundred yards or so to the beach to get the other bags of pine cones and carry them the hundred yards or so back to the car before coming back the hundred yards or so to the beach to gather up the girls and their stuff and walk the hundred yards or so back to the car to head home, I saw the young men still standing there on the sunset beach like the enigma in a De Chirico painting with some loud rap music drifting over the water, puzzled to have come to a long beautiful beach empty but for three little girls, and additionally puzzled at major pine cone haulage by a strange foreigner from NYC... It was an odd day, I could sense them concluding at their unsought insight into the inspirational sources of the surrealists. It got even more surreal when I took the three little girls away with me.

Life can get interesting on Little Pine Beach.

2011-06-08T08:27:00.003+09:00

Japan doubles initial estimate of nuclear radiation

A great many suspected the truth all along, but not Tesco and the government. In the light of their sudden wisdom, the authorities also pledged to make the country's nuclear regulator (Nisa) independent of the industry ministry, which, as it happens - who could have noticed - also promotes nuclear power. That should have been a no-brainer back then, when brains were as abundant as they are today. Wonder what they used instead...

Fukushima nuclear plant may have suffered 'melt-through', Japan admits

Fuel rods have probably breached containment vessels –

a more serious scenario than core meltdown –

2011-06-05T16:43:00.023+09:00

THE SPRAY BOTTLE OF MY MIND

Around 11 this morning I was working up in the loft while girlsitting for the grandies when from downstairs I heard a wsssh! wsssh! wsssh! sound that reminded me a lot of a spray bottle being sprayed all over the place, which, were it so, would mean whatever liquid all over the oak floor of the living room, the woodstove, the windows-- the sight in my minds eye was not a pleasant one, so I rushed over to the loft railing, ready to tell one of the Krew to stop spraying whatever hopefully merely water-based solution was in whatever the container was, but as usual when it comes to my mind’s eye vs. the Krew’s reality control, I was way off.

Down below I saw Kaya hunched over on the floor with a small yellow whisk broom and dust pan, going along whisking up the corpses of dead ants (a tale for perhaps another time), the wssshy broom sound conjuring the spray bottle of my mind, while beside Kaya, observing this detailed procedure and bouncing up and down while seated on the big red yoga ball, was Mitsuki, wearing a Groucho mask.

No surprise there actually, they're all a bit theatrical. I took a picture for those who might doubt such surreal tales of rural grandfatherhood in another land. Amidst the spray bottles of mere imagining I am slowly adapting to the big red bouncing ball of Groucho-masked surreality that is grandies growing.

After lunch, for a change of pace we all went up into the forest, maskless and without the big red ball, to clean the stream and then wade our way back home to build a house for the panda. All in a galactic day's work.

2011-06-04T20:10:00.000+09:00

LEFT FIELD LIVING

Not that I pondered the possibility all that much in my earlier years, but I never thought I'd actually ask anyone in all seriousness: "What does this banana say?"

2011-06-03T06:17:00.029+09:00

FROM PYRAMID TO PLATE

With a wedge of purple protein... Looks like about 2000+ calories... This is not the old US food pyramid, it's the new US food plate! Filled to the brim with a red fruit wedge, a green veg wedge, a beige grains wedge and a ... purple ... protein wedge. Name me a purple protein. No knife, spoon, napkin or drink... unless the Dairy disc is a glass of blue milk... Could be blue yogurt, blue ice cream or ... bleu cheese?

Looks like the dairy lobby still has some clout, though it's no longer in the inner circle... The meat lobby lost out big time on this one, merged into not a RED MEAT wedge (that would anyway conflict with the red fruit wedge) but a mysteriously purple protein wedge... (eggplant?), which would include legumes, nuts, eggs etc., plus purple meat (for all you manly guys afraid of soybeans and tofu)... But purple protein on a blue (or chartreuse?) placemat?

As for me, I try to avoid government restaurants...

2011-06-02T13:33:00.015+09:00

RAMEN RAMBLES

I'd like to think that this little ramen ramble of mine, posted on these ethereal pages so long ago, played some small part in the "Ramen Renaissance" now sweeping America's vibrant places, as per the link following...

RAMEN EMPIRE

If you're under 100 years of age and are interested at all in food, especially the finest oriental cuisine, then you probably saw the Japanese movie Tampopo, and if you saw Tampopo you know what it means to get a ramen craving, like you did after the movie.

As to the ideal venue for craving ramen, Japan is the Ramen Empire. The ideal ramen emporium (forget about making ramen at home; do you make truffles at home?) is the epitome of the greasy chopstick. One of my ramen parameters says that if the counters sparkle, the waitresses are radiant and you can see clearly out the windows, seek thy ramen elsewhere..

Whenever I've moved to a new neighborhood in Japan, one of my first priorities has always been to find the best ramen shop within a half-hour's walk (some urgencies are more pressing than others), which isn't easy, there are so many flashy imposters attempting to cash in on the rep of the one true noodle nirvana to be found in any town.

In such a quest, the best person to ask is a local college student if you can find one, because ramen may be excellent brain food, but it's also low in price. And the difference between run-of-the-mill ramen and ramen for the gods is about the same as the difference between here and heaven, which is reason enough to go looking.

For example, I right away found the best ramenya in this country neighborhood - it may even have an edge over the one I used to go to in Kyoto - but if you think I'm going to give you the name of either, you're out of luck; they're too crowded as it is. The one I go to now still has those sort of naugahyde seats and smeary plastic chandeliers, with greasy red pepper and garlic paste jars with long-handled spoons in them. Their tonkotsu is perfection, I always get the chashu (from the Chinese for 'roasted pork'; once you've found perfection, why change), in which the pork, roasted to near disappearance, is sliced even nearer disappearance until it's little more than a fragrant rumor residing atop the chewy deliciousness of the noodles swirling in the tonkotsu, with some garlic paste just here and some red pepper paste over here...

Back later, I'm going out to get some ramen. Tonkotsu chashu, kudasai...

--PLM, Feb. 2003

***

"Ramen is its own culture in Japan, with noodle shops that have rabid fan bases and their chefs drawing crowds waiting two hours in line when a new shop opens. It even has a distinct genre of books and movies dedicated to its lore."

2011-06-01T09:18:00.012+09:00

FUKUSHIMA UPDATE 6.1.11

Fukushima school limit: 1 millisievert

"The education ministry said Friday it has set a new nonbinding target to reduce radiation exposure of Fukushima Prefecture students while they are at school to 1 millisievert or less a year."

Parent anger plays role in Japan's reversal of raised radiation limits at schools

"In the playground, in the sandbox, children put dirt into their mouths! They breathe in the dust! You should do the same! Lick the dirt!" she shouted to applause. "You wouldn't do this to your own kids!"

TEPCO's Flip-Flops Increase Confusion at Fukushima

“In a series of stunning flip-flops, officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) have reversed themselves on several important statements made recently.”

Radiation-linked cancer an intangible numbers game

“With contaminated produce continuing to be detected beyond Fukushima Prefecture, public concern over the health effects of radiation exposure continues to mount.
Experts agree that exposure to more than 100 millisieverts in total increases the risk of cancer. However, scientists have yet to achieve consensus about the degree of risk of contracting cancer below that level.”

Fukushima Risks Chernobyl ‘Dead Zone’ as Radiation Soars

“Soil samples in areas outside the 20-kilometer (12 miles) exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant measured more than 1.48 million becquerels a square meter, the standard used for evacuating residents after the Chernobyl accident...”

In Japan, a Culture That Promotes Nuclear Dependency

“When the Shimane nuclear plant was first proposed here more than 40 years ago, this rural port town put up such fierce resistance that the plant’s would-be operator, Chugoku Electric, almost scrapped the project. Angry fishermen vowed to defend areas where they had fished and harvested seaweed for generations.”

Minister: Germany to go nuke free by 2022

2011-05-29T22:07:00.005+09:00

FEET OUT IN THE RAIN

Out today into the wet, windy face of the lowering hurricane to get some water from the spring, stopped along the way at the country store for Echo to copy some documents on their old copier, and while I waited in the car all sealed up against the rocking wind and rolling rain I saw through my rain-jagged window an old farmer come out of the store with his purchase of a few packs of smokes, he must've been in his 80s, completely rain-garbed like farmers do when they harrow in the rain, but with his wife's shopping slippers on - men do that in Japan, put on whatever's handy in the genkan - and with a few weeks growth of beard, he shuffled along the storefront to the store ashtray, a smoke on his mind from the eager look of him, probably been out of cigs for a time, he slowly plumped himself right down onto the ground beneath the store eaves beside the ashtray, cracked a new pack of smokes, hung one between his lips and flamed it, took a big puff and breathed it away, relaxed back to the max, feet stuck out in the rain, wet slippers who cares, what the hell, rice is in the ground, everything's wet anyway except the cigarette, and that’s the thing right now, few pleasures remain at this age, during a hurricane...

Strange version of joy he was there in the blown rain, puffing away alone beneath the eaves, staring out into the storm, chillin' to the brim, both feet into the downpour.

2011-05-27T10:48:00.001+09:00

FUKUSHIMA UPDATE 5.27.11

Latest family news: Kasumi and the girls will be leaving Ibaraki and coming to live near us later this week! Yay!

Japanese superquake moved ocean floor 79 feet sideways and 10 feet up - and new data shows region is under more strain

Fukushima Station Considered as Site for Nuclear Graveyard

“Tokyo Electric would need five years to complete decontamination of the reactors [that's expensive too!], which includes removal of hydrogen to prevent explosions, he said.

Building storage for radioactive waste at Fukushima could take at least 10 years, said Morokuzu, one of 50 people on a cleanup panel that includes observers from Tokyo Electric and the Trade Ministry. Tokyo Electric would need five years to complete decontamination of the reactors, which includes removal of hydrogen to prevent explosions, he said.
Japan’s three storage facilities for highly radioactive waste are at Rokkasho, at the northern tip of the country’s largest island of Honshu, and a nearby site at Sekinehama. The third site is at Tokaimura in Ibaraki prefecture, near Tokyo.”

But... but... what about all those experts, green and other colors, telling us for all lately that nuclear power is so CLEAN! (You there, Sierra Club?) But it isn’t, is it it!! And so CHEAP!! But it isn’t, is it!!! (Did you guys include the kind of actual econophysicopsychocosts we're seeing here and will see for the next decade and beyond? (Did your cost projections include sickness, death, loss of homes, loss of livelihood, emotional stress etc?) And nuclear power is non-polluting!!! So why is it so expensive and toxic, deadly for children and everyone else, and why is it so what-the-hell-are-we-gonna-do-nowish? Why the silence?

SURPRISE, SURPRISE!

Nuclear plant workers suffer internal radiation exposure after visiting Fukushima

"The government has discovered thousands of cases of workers [nearly 5000 so far!] at nuclear power plants outside Fukushima Prefecture suffering from internal exposure to radiation after they visited the prefecture..."

This is the first public mention of INTERNAL RADIATION [pdf] (the far more important kind) that I've seen in the media here; external radiation is minor in comparison. You leave external radiation behind; internal radiation becomes part of you. No wonder the nuclear powers that be never mention it; whole nations of formerly trusting subjects might seek residence elsewhere...

Which makes the following all the more egregious:

Outrage as Japan lifts radiation limit for kids

"The new regulation means children can now be exposed to as much radiation as a German nuclear worker.
The government argues the change is essential to keeping schools open in the Fukushima region.
According to Nobel Prize-winning group Physicians for Social Responsibility, the new limits mean exposed children now have a one-in-200 risk of getting cancer, compared with a one-in-500 risk for adults.
The decision provoked outrage from within Japan's government, with the prime minister's chief scientific adviser resigning in protest.
The government says it had no choice but to raise the legal exposure limit, saying about three-quarters of the schools in Fukushima have radiation levels above the old safety level of one millisievert.
The vast majority of schools would have closed, putting the education of hundreds of thousands of children on hold."

Apparently the Japanocracy feels that for children, higher risk of cancer is better than lower exposure to institutionalized, age-segregated education.

In such a malignant situation, subjecting the helpless children of un/misinformed parents to no choice at all could turn out to be a crime against humanity.

Here's an alternative almost nonexistent in Japan, where authorities feel a more malignant future is better for the kids:

My top 16 tips for beginning homeschoolers

And why could not Japan, with all its hot springs and active volcanoes, make use of this on a large scale?

Five hot, rockin’ geothermal companies

The sun sets on Japan's nuclear age

"Furious parents from Fukushima Prefecture this month dumped irradiated soil from school playgrounds on the desks of government bureaucrats. More protests are planned in the sweltering summer months, when looming power cuts and leaking radiation from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi power plant will make life very uncomfortable for citizens in this densely populated, sprawling metropolis."

Hope this is true; be great never to set mind on Monju again...

2011-05-25T17:32:00.000+09:00

DEER GRAMMAR

Out in the garden this morning fiddling with the firewood, moving some last year's wood to the top of a less-old stack to consolidate my equity in more manageable form - energy is one commodity sector to go for in the foreseeable investment future-- where was I - oh yes, fiddling with the firewood, when I heard an odd rustling over in the far corner of our bonsai 40 acres. I looked up, focused into the shade over there and could finally make out the shape of the young scion of these parts, heir to the Baronial estates, the as-yet unnamed teenager who obviously doesn't yet know how things work around here like his father the Baron does (wonder where he is?)...

As the noble youngster strolled elegantly into the sunshine and my clear sight, still munching some of the mitsuba that he loves and that is wildly plentiful on our property, I was standing upwind of him so he could smell me, but to be sure there were no surprises at this proximity I clunked a couple of pieces of dry cherrywood together (great sound) to let him know I was in fact physically there and was looking at him so I knew he was there too. In response he raised his head and looked at me, his young punky horns still velvety-knobbly (a scientific term), but those eyes were not at all punky.

They were more like soft, dark and unreadable. The strong, silent type. Wild. So I raised my hand and waved goodbye at him as a hint that he should depart. My deerese is poor, plus deer grammar is so dense and the inflection so subtle, he'd probably just chuckle at my efforts in that subdued deery way. I just said "Sayonara!" in the polite Japanese version of humanese, and he - understood! He paused a moment - to assert his dignity, like any teenager - then headed down the stone stairs, out the gate and across the road, where his friend the German shepherd lives and the grass is excellent. No mitsuba there, though, so it is a step down from these royal gardens, where the gardener also raises lettuce and spinach just inside the fence that one time had an open gate...

2011-05-22T10:09:00.000+09:00

FUKUSHIMA UPDATE 5.22.11

Contamination: From Minamata to Fukushima

Since 11 March 2011, a different kind of toxin began making its way through the veins of common food sources after TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) completed a planned dumping of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean at the site of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Spinach and other green leafy vegetables, milk, and water have been found to have iodine-131. Fish, cows’ milk, and water have been contaminated with cesium-137.

Pensioners come forth for Fukushima

As the Japanese government and TEPCO struggle to bring the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant under control, a group of pensioners has decided to put their lives at risk to save younger people from radiation.

via reddit

Fukushima Update: A Very Bad Situation

TEPCO has finally admitted that Reactor #1 has experienced a meltdown event that may have breached the primary containment vessel. Further, truly alarming levels of radiation are now being reported in and around Tokyo.

Atmosphere Above Japan Heated Rapidly Before M9 Earthquake

Infrared emissions above the epicenter increased dramatically in the days before the devastating earthquake in Japan.

2011-05-21T11:35:00.003+09:00

APOCALYPSE NOT

I was going to go out and do some gardening this morning, maybe clean the rain gutters in anticipation of rainy season but then I remembered the world is going to end today.

Apocalypses happen here first of course, where the days begin, so I figured I might as well go buy a big soft couch and a few six packs, some cigars and potato chips, nachos, Oreos, ice cream, chocolate - my inner list is long - then make some pies and brownies, lots of different kinds of cookies as the end unfolds (cherry pie!), with some acid rock blasting to drown out the sound of the crumbling earth and the roar of the rising seas, not to mention the crackling of eternal fires drawing nearer and nearer for those not qualified to be raptured or whatever the silly term is; no, I would definitely (and gladly!) be among the folks left behind who always took care of their own damn raptures (dance on yr own 2 feet for godsake), so I'd just invite my friends and spend the final day porking out and getting wasted (apocalypses make you feel like you're 20 years old again).

But then I remembered that all this folderol had come from a topically insane individual who'd been wrong about the previous apocalypse because he'd forgotten to read Jeremiah among other things (fancy forgetting to read Jeremiah in this day and age!), so he recalculated the whole thing for several years, on a generous emolument, based on the length of Noah's nose and a few other cryptobiblical dimensions to which only those with that bovine look have access, so I looked in the mirror and didn't have that look, couldn't even dredge it up, really - not that I want to, who wants to betray their natural birthright this late in life - so I just went out into heaven and did some gardening; later, maybe tomorrow (inyerface, Harold), I'll clean the rain gutters here in paradise.

As for now, I'll just put my big list right where I can find it in case there ever is an apocalypse worth my time...

2011-05-19T11:35:00.003+09:00

BEANPOD CONVERSATIONS

Out in the garden this morning, pausing in my work to wipe the old brow and have a sip of water, I happened to be standing before the armspread profusion of the bean plants reaching, in all their white, pink and purple emotion, for what was out there. They were in love with the air, with being all there is to be, right now, just like we humans try to do in our better moments - reaching for the light - and I just had to hunker in their shade to admire.

As I did so, a green arm offered me a fresh beanpod so I took it, popped it into my mouth and we started talking together the old language of bean and tongue, a language we both know well, of nourishment and primal flavors, existential nuances that beans and bodies have worked out together over the eons that got us here, in great part on bean nourishment.

It was good, that little miracle right then, me and the bright plants hunkering there, sharing a delve into the deep history pertaining between that crisp green gift, stemmed from soil, rain and sun upon a seed, and this tongue, practiced middleman for the bean-body relationship.

It was rich in countless ways, our little get-together-- bean and tongue conversing in crunches and savorings of matters far older than either of us, bean becoming the man who plants the bean, when another kindly offered me a fresh beanpod, in which there were savors of the earth, and water, and growth - the past was there too, in summer mornings... and the hint of tomorrow...

So there we were for a time in the morning, ancient familiars, conversing once more on the Big Subject...

2011-05-18T10:17:00.003+09:00

FUKUSHIMA UPDATE 5.18.11

Two months later, whereabouts of 9,500 still unknown

A Fukushima Update

“The fact that reactor three used MOX fuel has prompted a Russian Chernobyl expert to even assert that ‘(the) release of plutonium will contaminate that area forever and…is impossible to clean up.” [emphasis mine - RB]

via reddit

Japanese Officials Ignored or Concealed Dangers

[Surely officials of other nations would never do the same??]

"Although the predictions sound eerily like the sequence of events at the Fukushima Daiichi plant following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the lawsuit was filed nearly a decade ago to shut down another plant, long considered the most dangerous in Japan...

The lawsuits reveal a disturbing pattern in which operators underestimated or hid seismic dangers to avoid costly upgrades and keep operating."

Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too

Jinzaburo Takagi

(In case you thought that this was all so unexpected:)
   In 1995 Jinzaburo Takagi (1938~1995), who received the Right Livelihood Award "...for serving to alert the world to the unparalleled dangers of plutonium to human life,”
“blasted the government and power companies for ‘refusing to consider emergency measures in the event of an earthquake because they assume nuclear power plants will not break down in an earthquake and have stopped taking further steps at all.’
   He also argued that the Great Hanshin Earthquake was a wakeup call for getting nuclear power facilities ready for emergencies, such as being ‘attacked by a tsunami along with a quake.’
   ‘Discussions on the safety of nuclear power plants or disaster preparedness measures on the assumption of those situations occurring have been shunned, on the grounds that it is inappropriate to make such assumptions or such discussions have some ulterior motive,’ he said.
   The paper [Nuclear Facilities and Emergencies - with Focus on Measures against Earthquakes, 1995] cited Fukushima Prefecture's Hamadori coastal region as one of the areas with a concentration of nuclear facilities that could face a situation ‘beyond what has been imagined’ if a major earthquake strikes. The region is home to the Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear power plants run by Tokyo Electric Power Co.
   Tsunami-hit Fukushima No. 1 is also referred to in the paper as an ‘obsolete [in 1995! - RB] nuclear power plant that raises the greatest concerns’ and requires holding concrete discussions on its decommissioning.”
[emphasis mine - RB]

Stated by an expert almost 20 years ago!

Reactor Vents That Failed in Japan Are Used in U.S.

I wonder if anyone else

thinks of this

profound infliction

from earth and sea

as partly a matter of

whale and dolphin

karma...

But there are new-old paths emerging...

(via Ken Elwood)

2011-05-17T14:42:00.007+09:00

ONIONS AND EVOLUTION

I've been having some rather unexpected success in my latest onion experiment, most of it due to the sudden extreme lack of monkeys for no reason I can think of-- maybe karma applies to hairy red-faced beasts? Maybe there is a just god? You take a guess, I'm busy. Anyway, of my couple dozen experimentally planted onions, all were bulbing, only a few had toppled and only one was about to flower; the others were looking good-- I might actually get to enjoy a full grown onion of my own nurturing!

It was in that general state of mind, onionwise, that on Sunday morning I was on my way to get some new goya plants to replace the now patently inferior ones I'd gotten under the old "a goya is a goya is a goya" fallacy, and was not thinking at all about monkeys (unusual for me) as I neutraled down the hill from the house toward the tunnel, where I saw two adult monkeys (there are always more in hiding) ambling out of the tunnel looking as they always do like they owned the place, scanning here and there the particulars of their realm, as though my garden and its onions were nowhere on the pinpoints of their minds.

Monkeys are terrible liars (lying takes intelligence!) and know nothing of nonchalance. I could see them looking upward out of the corners of their beady eyes and consulting their navigation tools saying Yeah, looks like the onion place, must be just up there, it's called the Brady Place on the map... must be a foreign name... So I speed-reversed the car back to the house a la any old US police procedural, yelled to Echo as I ran out back that there were monkeys on the way! Coming up the hill! (Direction is key) Keep an eye peeled!

Out in the garden, with ruthless tears (I've been burned before by the I'll Let Them Grow Until This Weekend Syndrome), pulled up the onions, put them in a basket and brought them into the house (Do not leave rescued onions on deck!), then took off on the goya mission. Came back later, goyaful, saw no signs of monkey frustration, asked Echo if she'd seen any monkeys, of course she hadn't. She hadn't because they knew-- the simians knew-- they'd seen me running out back, they'd smelled the scent of pulling onions and from their leafy vantages they'd seen the smirk on my face as moments later I whizzed by in pursuit of goya, at which point they said: too late; let's forget the Brady Place, he's been burned too often-- maybe next year -- let's go visit the neighbors' nice dog, he likes monkeys, maybe he has onions, do dogs have onions? He didn't last year, according to the Onion Hunters Guide, but these lesser species do evolve; look how far these humans have come...

2011-05-16T09:13:00.008+09:00

THERE ARE SO MANY TUESDAYS... +

IT'S TWO MONTHS TOO LATE,

BUT TEPCO IS CONFIDENT IT CAN...

come up with a new plan by Tuesday!

Japan nuclear: Tepco halts Fukushima cooling plan

Japan's thin, white security blanket

Japan evacuates villages outside nuclear zone

One month earlier...[1:16 video clip in English]

Iitate Village Farmers Demand More Radiation Info

+

Nuclear collapse looms?
Fukushima No. 4 reactor 'leaning'

2011-05-13T07:07:00.006+09:00

NUCLEAR MELTDOWNS CAN BE HARD TO NOTICE... + +

Nuclear meltdown at Fukushima plant

"One of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant did suffer a nuclear meltdown, Japanese officials admitted for the first time today, describing a pool of molten fuel at the bottom of the reactor's containment vessel."

Fukushima village on way to becoming ghost town

America's Worst Nukes
Poorly regulated nuclear power plants had 14 'near-misses' in 2010

Japan nuclear plant hit by more problems
[video clip]

+

Fukushima - One Step Forward and Four Steps Back
as Each Unit Challenged by New Problems
[video clip]

via Reddit

2011-05-10T12:01:00.006+09:00

A GOOD MOVE--

Japan to Shut Nuclear Plant on Quake Fears;

Another Leaks Radiation

+
Japan Earthquake: Two Months Later

via reddit

2011-05-09T10:45:00.006+09:00

FIVE MINUTES AS A TURTLE GOD

Caring about everything except monkeys can be a pain. But even excluding monkeys, 'everything' is a large category. It naturally includes turtles, who carry their houses wherever they go, so they don't care about much other than sandbagging until the next meal comes around. And under the Big Law of caring about almost everything, it goes without saying that sooner or later a turtle will show up.

In keeping with the Fine Print, I was driving up the mountain road when I came around a curve and there in the middle of the way was a big old turtle, named Shelby as it happens - must be some international history there - enjoying a sandbagging interlude on his way to a session of heavy sandbagging somewhere before and after some regular sandbagging. He was just sitting there like a -- sandbag. Midroad was a good clear spot, warm, in the sun, lotta space around, kick back,, chill,,, hang loose,,,, why not,,,,, what’s the hurry......

His naturally selfish location forced me to pull over to the side of the road to get around him, which I was doing when I thought: if he just stays there, some car or even worse truck is gonna come along in meteoric human time, so I'd better get him to move. I pulled up and stopped with my window right above him, rolled down the glass and gave him a few considered words about how he should hightail his molasses before somebody heedless comes racing up the road in a big turtle squasher.

Shelby turned his head to look up at me with a reptilian onyx eye, in a "What the..." kind of look. I'll bet it was the first time in his long, slow life that he'd ever seen a talking human head sticking out of a big red turtleshell, so far up in the sky above him that it must be a turtle god. He seemed to take my words to heart, for in turtle haste he began to maybe lift one leg with the distant intent of perhaps one day arriving at the other side of the road. Since at that speed he would likely never arrive alive, in a louder voice I told him to hotfoot it and he did, in a coldfooted way.

He reached the roadside in what must be a Turtle Olympic record of just a few minutes. While he panted his way across with my encouragement, I stayed in place so that any car coming up behind me would have to wait, but none came. None came because somebody up there cares about caring about almost everything, though you never know this until you join the club. To say nothing of the chance to become part of turtle mythology... They've been around way longer than we have, so we're talking Big Time here.

2011-05-05T11:46:00.006+09:00

BULBUL GETS OUTPLAYED

I was outdoors just now hanging some CDs over my strawberries. I do this because of the hiyodori. That's the brown-eared bulbul, who with his small tribe has been ravaging the tsubaki flowers for the past couple weeks there beside the garden, where he can keep a good beady black eye on my strawberries as they flower and swell into the sweet redness that he so loves.

He got squawkingly upset when he saw me doing something near his strawberries: I was putting up some old CD copies to dangle spinning and flashing in the breeze above the deluxe fruity enjoyments that are in fact as mine as anything can be that does not involve monkeys (regarding whom all bets are off when it comes to outdoor mineness), but this was the hi-tech, teachable me vs. a one-track bird who, working on this small portion of my vast ignorance, last year got my strawberries.

This year will be different. He can't read worth a damn of course, so for all he knew this could be anybody from Dylan to Beethoven to Miles Davis to Frank Zappa to Lou Reed; this could be Fiddy Cent, this could be Lady Gaga. Take that, bird. Boy did he screech, so clearly not knowing which was what.

My strawberries look sweeter already...

2011-05-03T17:39:00.006+09:00

The Japanese government is about to begin releasing data projecting the spread of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that it initially withheld for fear of causing panic.

Fukushima parents dish the dirtin protest over radiation levels

Parents in Fukushima are angry over rule changes which mean that school children
can be exposed to 20 times more radiation than was previously permissible.

via reddit

The lack of thought and care at the bottom of this is beyond words.
"Cold blooded" falls far short.
"Crimes against humanity" comes to mind...

+

Physicians for Social Responsibility

2011-05-02T19:12:00.010+09:00

What They're Covering Up at Fukushima

By HIROSE TAKASHI

" ...if you are so sure that they're safe, why not build them in the center of [Tokyo],
instead of hundreds of miles away where you lose half the electricity in the wires?"

+

Government Adviser Quits Post to Protest Japan's Policy

on Radiation Exposure for Fukushima Schools
+

Unsafe at Any Dose

"Nuclear accidents never cease. We’re decades if not generations
away from seeing the full effects of the radioactive emissions from Chernobyl."
+
she makes a VERY important point [emphasis mine]:

"Still, physicists talk convincingly about 'permissible doses' of radiation. They consistently ignore
internal emitters — radioactive elements from nuclear power plants or weapons tests
that are ingested or inhaled into the body, giving very high doses to small volumes of cells.
They focus instead on generally less harmful external radiation from sources outside the body,
whether from isotopes emitted from nuclear power plants, medical X-rays,
cosmic radiation or background radiation that is naturally present in our environment."

2011-04-26T17:12:00.005+09:00

WIMPY CUKES

Do you think I'm abusing my tomatoes? I don't mean to, I'm a nice guy most of the time, pretty much of the alternative school when it comes to plant discipline; there's just something in the way they seem to look at you with those flowery eyes, but sometimes you have to put your green thumb down...

A couple of evenings ago I put my tomato seedlings outside on the deck to acclimate them to the kind of weather they’re going to grow up in, and its been so cold these evenings - even in late April - that before going off to the big city, when I went outside into a morning just short of frost to water them they were hunched over like skinny green orphans, clutching a few raggedy leaves about their stemmy frames, straight out of Dickens, Olivers hoping for another portion, a brighter sun, a warmer day... Is this plant abuse? If I don't bring them in tonight... but once they begin living with me, where will it all end? Can you evict succulents? Orphan tomatoes? Are there homeless vegetables?

And my goya plants too, which are most at home in sunny and toasty Okinawa and have only recently become available here in seedling form-- I got two of those in pots the other day and perhaps there's nothing more pathetic in the plant world than a couple of goya seedlings huddling together and shivering in the cold of a northerly mountain spring morning; even the tomatoes aren't as bad, hunched out there now out on the deck as they are, together with the quivering cukes, all hunkered together in the merciless chill wind; will it make them stronger or will it make them compost?

I believe that plants should be allowed to live their own lives as they see fit, within the gardening parameters. We get along; some of my best friends are spinach. But at some point, unless you want wimpy cucumbers you have to assert yourself, no more mister nice guy, say Stop your whining and buck up, stand tall, spread those leaves, let's see some green pride! But then you can get too militaristic about it and that old drill regimen clicks its heels once more in a new guise, like it has so often in the past, catching whole generations of humans by surprise and it can do so again, starting right here with tomatoes, and who knows where it will end.

So I finally gave in and brought the tomatoes and their fellow malcontents inside, where I can’t help but feel they're smirking over there in that warm corner. I just hope I'll be running things this year, gardenwise. Today the garden, tomorrow you just never know.

2011-04-24T10:59:00.004+09:00

GETTING LETTUCE

The biggest difference between getting into an expensive SUV with expensive tires, expensive fuel and costly insurance (to say nothing of loan interest and depreciation) to spend an hour or so driving there and back through a smog of hazardous traffic salted with road rage to find a parking space in the vast lot of the megamall with the airplane-hangar supermarket where with money I earn at a job in an office I commute to daily I can purchase some expensive, inorganic, agribusiness-grown, Monsanto Roundup^®ped and irradiated lettuce picked 4 or more days ago by a city block of a machine on the other side of the continent and shipped 3 or more days ago in refrigerated containers filled with antiripening gases and antifungal whatevers via expensive train and expensive truck also using expensive fuel and operated 24/7 by sleepless guys day and night across the nation to get the lettuce near where I can buy it and so support the vast vegetable infrastructure by having some salad for lunch, and just going right now, on my own two legs, out into the sunny afternoon of my organic garden that I have nurtured with my own two hands and getting some lettuce whenever I want it, is, apart from the sheer simplicity, untampered flavor, freshness, beauty and natural satisfaction of it all (to say nothing of the non-toxicity), is the refreshing absence of the madness so deeply ingrained in the former approach.

2011-04-20T07:16:00.001+09:00

UPDATE Day 40

So K+Kids have gone back north, having been assured by Tepco, the government and others (excepting E and I) that it is safe as far as radiation goes, and the coming year of aftershocks as well. She does not like being there though, despite assurances, especially with the daily/nightly earth tremors. Turns out also, amidst all this truthy talk, that K and the girls were there for the "Chernobyl" days, during which clueless Tepco and the gagagovernment assured the public that everything was ok and would soon be under control, much as they're doing now... pay no attention to that dark cloud rising and drifting your way, nothing to see here; you people over there better evacuate, the rest of you can stay where you are...

More on this as it unfolds and discretion allows...

Japanese Government Faction Wants To Bankrupt TEPCO, Break It Up, And Take Away Its Executives Pay and give it to earthquake victims
Sounds like a good idea, but I bet they'll tax it somehow. Windfall perhaps. The execs likely won't know it's missing for years... "No problem. Everything's perfectly ok. According to my expert measurements I have at least 100,000 trillion yen in my account..."

Radioactivity rises in sea off Japan nuclear plant

New Photos of Damaged Reactors

Nuclear crisis could last 2 to 3 more months, expert says

--

Kamaboko maker delivering free kamaboko to all the shelters... how grateful the people are, to have some homely food... how they enjoy the warm kamaboko, smiling their thanks as they eat... how happy he is to help, driving his truck among the mountains of debris to the next shelter...

Meteorological Agency underestimated height of tsunami

Japan's food crisis goes beyond recent panic buying

"To Work at Fukushima, You Have to Be Ready to Die"

What does 'safe' mean in a nuclear disaster?

“There are indications that Fukushima has more than 20 times the amount of nuclear fuel than Chernobyl had. Does this mean that the potential threat from Fukushima could exceed that of Chernobyl?
Absolutely there is much more radioactive material in play here. There are some important differences. There was a huge fire at Chernobyl and it was hard to disperse the radioactivity, and there has not been that kind of fire so far at Fukushima. But there's an enormous amount of radioactive material there, which is not under control at this point and which could enter the environment and potentially travel large distances.”

TEPCO announces plan to end Japan nuclear crisis

2011-04-18T07:53:00.001+09:00

Got a Quake Update coming up

but too many things requiring my immediate attention at the moment

for me to cobble it all together in reasonable form--

several aspects to deal with,

some diplomatically -

will try to post it - or at least some of it -

later today...

(Runs off into thick forest of words and deeds)

2011-04-17T08:11:00.000+09:00

REVERSE PAVLOV

Been having a strange anti-Pavlovian feeling recently, like the absence of a severe headache; I'm not figuratively screaming on a bridge in Norway as I do at this time of year. Couldn't figure out what was causing this ongoing lack of pain in the nethers, until it struck me that I had not received my always-right-on-time Nixon Phonebook this year... Wonder what's up over there; taxes are usually the last thing titular authorities surrender. Is there no one still smirking in those halls of authority?

2011-04-15T11:52:00.005+09:00

THE SHIGA CHAPTER

The Crow Association of the World (Shiga Chapter) kicked off the Big Spring Crow Conclave of 2011 at first light this morning, in the forest not far from my sleeping head. This major event on the corvine calendar began with a few simultaneous keynote squawks (one at a time? forget it; every crow is the most important crow that ever existed) of basic invective amidst a lot of sharp, dark complaints about the damned long winter.

Initially, there seemed to be a few focused attempts to address specific issues in the manner of a tolerably organized species, which lasted for about 20 seconds, until the individual calls of the beaked mob crescendoed into the usual mass of croaks like where's the food, what the hell you talkin' about, who's got the eats, anybody seen my husband and scattered campaign promises, it was difficult to follow a thread for any length of time. The crows have a long, loud list of ancient queries and complaints they have compressed into the wedge that is their language, which loses none of its sharpness even when grumbled to the air atop a telephone pole or other solo podium.

There was scattered mention of unemployment, natural taxes, scarcity of decent carrion, procedures in the event of earthquake, the long-term effect of radiation on exquisite ebony plumage etc., though I could be wrong about some of the specifics, there were so many sharp bits flying about, and my Crow is not all that it could be, I admit. I was surprised to learn that many of the participants were empty-nesters (a term humans like to use); they were cawing among themselves about how they never hear from the kids, health, careers, pensions, grandchildren etc. - all living elsewhere now, I gather, big topics from what I could glean.

I was also able to catch bits of rambly diatribes here and there on favorite crow subjects-- all dark though, not a witty remark in a cawload, but what can you expect when you convene a major mass of not-really-flockable birds? Like every other corvine activity, they just couldn't keep it orderly, couldn't take turns talking, couldn't arrange a hierarchy, the way most other species around here do, and before long it sounded like all the attendees were complaining at the same time, which ranks high among the noxious noises of the world.

The massive thread of negativity held few bright spots that I could make out, but what's new when it comes to crows-- coherence never really has a chance. They never get anything done, I don't why they even bother trying to discuss the concept. Usually not far from my bedroom. At least it lets off major crow steam, which can build up during a winter world of unadulterated whiteness.

This years' Conclave was a dark experience that made the rest of my morning so much brighter (crows are good at that), for soon a sun like pink amber lit from within was rising away the night above a silver ribbon of clouds along the mountains across the Lake, a sight so beautiful that even the crows shut up eventuallier than usual, ended the Conclave and went about their solitary grumbly business, now and then a loud Bah! sounding here and there in the tops of the forest.

I could sympathize.

2011-04-12T11:58:00.005+09:00

ONE MONTH, ONE DAY

From the time Echo told me on Sunday morning that Kasumi and family had already left to head back up north, I started having this strange feeling, a feeling I've never had before. It was in the realm of the plunging heart, but it wasn't sadness or disappointment, nor was it depression, frustration or any of those emotional shadows that one can overcome by simply standing fast.

When your aims are sufficiently in your charge, you have the emotional buttress of being in control; but when, inevitably, time and the vectors of events slip around you, edge you to the side, advice is all you can give, and fear lays its arm across your shoulders.

At least 6 killed in new Japan earthquake

Japan Raises Nuke Accident Severity Level To Highest 7 From 5

But one thing hasn't changed...

Japanese citizens turning in cash found in tsunami zone

"Here was my boat and here was the wave," he says, holding one hand low and the other stretched high above his head. "I climbed the wave like a mountain. When I thought I had got to the top, the wave got even bigger."

2011-04-11T18:05:00.005+09:00

ONE MONTH +

One month since the quake-tsunami-reactor failure, and looks like they’re gonna Chernobyl the whole tangled, steaming, leaking, glowing mess, bury it under concrete, let it melt down if it wants to, isolate the whole area for whatever half-life has the most public appeal, because they haven’t got it under control, likely never will. Also they’re running out of technicians at minimum wage. Folks up there seem to think it’s safe though, as the govt keeps reassuring everybody. To add weight to their conviction, they've doubled the minimum acceptable radiation dosages and are expanding the forced evacuation zone to 30 km. Personally I’ve always found government reassurances to be a rich source of healthful inner laughter.

Tatsuya came down by train on Saturday evening for a big two-family confab, at which the majority felt that it really was safe up there: there was water, electricity, gas etc. all restored; Tatsuya swore it was all back to normal and anyway he had to work there, he missed his family, the girls were missing school there, which was back in session, so they all left Sunday morning and headed back up into only time will tell; I hope my own misgivings are wrong... Will feedback here any news from the intrepid quintet...

Another aftershock up there last night, powerful winds from the north all day...

Kasumi called from her apartment up north just now (Mon PM) at 5:15 and at 5:16 while on the phone she all at once stopped talking to Echo and yelled in panic to the trio: "Earthquake! Earthquake! Outside! Get outside! Fast! Hurry! Open the door and go outside! Out! Get out!" and the phone went dead. We turned on the tv at once and heard it was a 6+ magnitude, with tsunami warning announcements “...tsunami are expected in the following areas... waves up to two meters high, everyone near the coast must move to higher ground...” recycling over and over even now, for the first time in English, Chinese, Korean and Portuguese. Kasumi called back a few minutes later, is still on the phone. Will update later.

Later: There have been tremors happening ever since they arrived back up there. Looks pretty severe on the webcams. Also they can’t buy bottled water anywhere around there and K doesn't want to drink the tap water until she is fully satisfied it's safe. We’ll send some from our stored stock to tide them over.

--

“A week before becoming ground zero for the world’s biggest nuclear crisis since 1986, the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant offered $11 an hour for full-time maintenance work in an area of Japan that was lagging even before last month’s earthquake and tsunami struck.”

2011-04-09T11:28:00.004+09:00

LITTLE WOMEN

From one of the upstairs bedrooms these early mornings I hear the voices of little girls singing songs they have made up. The songs are good, from what I can hear and understand-- fun-themed, cutely melodic, harmoniously performed with a native expertise, and all sui generis. A delightful augmentation of the country silence.

All those biggity surprises grandchildren bring... Back in late winter when we were building the new deck I noticed that numerous bits and scraps, odds and ends of the fine hard wood were piled up next to the stone wall in the garden where the carpenters kept their warming fire; I later learned that they were planning to burn those scraps! I requested that they save it all for me to use in various ways around the garden and in the house, and instead use some old firewood.

I had no idea what I actually might do with all those oddly shaped pieces, but when you live in the country, it's frugal city: you never throw anything away. You have to at least think about it for a few years. No casually tossing bits of wire, lengths of pipe and such-- and especially not oddly shaped scraps of wood, which given enough time will one day fit perfectly into that one-of-a-kind needspace that has arisen spontaneously (and if you have a woodstove, every bit of new wood has a bottom-line importance anyway).

Yes, to me -- he says as he begins to wax poetic right in the middle of this ongoing thought, wandering away from the apparent point as fancy takes him, as though this were a Japanese essay or something -- who over the years has frequently searched for just the odd shape of wood to fit here or there, something strong and long lasting, something with the integrity for the task, here were bushels of the very stuff! Except for the ruinated pieces, it was just too good for burning. So over the next weeks of days I now and then spent a few moments stacking the wood up in a place out of the weather in anticipation of finding a big strong box in which to store it all until each perfect need came down time's highway.

But my handyman foresight did not include the Trio of Brio, who on their first day in the garden spotted my rough mounds of wood and began gathering it in their arms and in boxes, in baskets and buckets, bringing it all into the house where they spent all that day, all that evening and well into a few tomorrows building houses into cities with streets and railroads (Bob can I have a pencil - What for - I want to draw railroad tracks), homes with lots of rooms and all kinds of furniture for their little dolls. When I bent way down to look inside the rooms I saw for example on the face of one block a small window with flames inside-- a woodstove, with a stovepipe of wood leading upward to the playsky!

The Trio were natural living-space designers! They were, in fact, what they really are: little women!

2011-04-07T11:19:00.009+09:00

QUAKE UPDATE Day 27 ++++

Domestically, things get ratcheted up and most interesting when you suddenly go from being a couple to a family of 6, the little ones enjoying no school and the big ones debating how best to react to the new national reality... Setting up plans B and C as we speak... Red pill or Blue pill... Green pill might be good...

Heard from Tatsuya up north, outside the evaluation zone, that things appear to be getting closer to normal in his vicinity, he has both water and electricity now, still no trains running though, tells of the weird thing he saw when walking back home along the coast for 7 hours through the tsunami area in the dark of that first night after the quake, no houselights no street lights suddenly saw, as best he could tell, out there in the dark dozens of clusters of people in white carrying other people in white out from a big building and setting them on the ground-- he was puzzled at first but as he walked by and heard the talk he realized it was a hospital being evacuated in the dark... the staff was moving all the patients who could be moved outside to safety from the aftershocks... those who could not be moved or needed electricity for various equipment had to be left to their fate...

Another tale I saw on the news was of an elderly energetic man who all his life had been a maker of kokeshi dolls, until his house, shop and supplies had been destroyed; he had decided to give up, he was over 80 and all was gone and that was it, but then because he was apparently well known for his dolls he started getting requests from people who wanted dolls from him for various festive occasions in their own lives, who urged him to keep on making the dolls and not be defeated, the requests kept coming so he took up doll making again, became one of the many icons of recovery that are emerging here and there...

And now for your modern living convenience, here’s a Handy Radiation Dose Chart - Good to know the relative values of what we’re dealing with here in this radiant reality... Keep it on your fridge, but don't stand too close for too long!

Truthiness is good for business

“Visiting General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt said Monday that the nuclear power plants it sells worldwide are safe despite the crisis the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant [using a Mark 1] GE built more than 40 years ago is going through.”

but

“Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing -- the Mark 1 -- was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.

Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power... ”

and

Fukushima GE-Made Reactor's Safety Doubted Since 70s

“The warnings were stark and issued repeatedly as far back as 1972:

If the cooling systems ever failed at a Mark 1 nuclear reactor — developed in the 1960s by General Electric — the primary containment vessel surrounding the reactor would probably burst as the fuel rods inside overheated. Dangerous radiation would spew into the environment.

Most nuclear reactors around the world are of this type.

But the type of containment vessel and pressure suppression system used in the failing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant — and in 23 American reactors at 16 plants — is physically less robust...”

Tepco is still wearing those short boots...

"On March 31, in the third week of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, owner TEPCO submitted a plan to add a seventh and eighth reactor at the stricken site to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. TEPCO is required to submit yearly reports, which include future development plans.

The company claims that due to the confusion brought about by earthquake and tsunami, they did not have an opportunity to revise the plan and, faced with a strict deadline, simply chose to submit it."

The Japanese people are getting angry, the decisions of career bureaucrats hanging over their heads...

Communities Struggle to Rebuild Shattered Lives on Japan’s Coast

Aftershock shakes Japan's ruined northeast coast

+

Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors

"High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants...
Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis.
Do not build any homes below this point."

--
"Always be prepared for unexpected tsunamis.
Choose lifeover your possessions and valuables."
--
"It takes about three generations for people to forget..."

+

Japan Aftershock Leaves Two Dead, Millions Without Electricity

"Aftershocks will continue for a year or so..."

2011-04-04T20:29:00.003+09:00

THE TRIO OF BRIO

So there I was, up at the house on Saturday afternoon, out in the garden digging a second potato trench (I’m experimenting with a new potato method) with a friend from the big city when suddenly out from the kitchen door into the garden burst a rainbow of shouts and laughter made up of 8-year-old twins and their 10-year old sister, the Trio of Brio, come from way up north - by way of a spell in their other grandparents’ house across the Lake - to stay with us for a while.

My friend and I and our shovels were soon caught up in a whirlwind of whatareyoudoings? and Iwannadoits! We took on the new crew and soon enough finished the trench for tomorrow’s planting, after which our small mob gathered some firewood for evening, then the trio took turns watering all the here-and-there shiitake, which are now doing their Spring task of swelling into deliciousness. After the tools were put away the trio got to work gathering mitsuba (Cryptotaenia japonica) Japan’s wild parsley, just now springing up. No one gathers mitsuba with the intensity of a trio of little girls, once they’ve learned what mitsuba is, and that our southern corner is full of it this time of year.

They have been out of school for a couple of weeks now, and no knowing when they’ll be going back, as the news from up north seems to get more and more truthful, so it’s time to learn more about homeschooling, which we'll do at least for a while, and which is even better than all day classrooms in my opinion, even moreso out here in the unwalled countryside where learning is fun even when it’s work. The Trio is more than eager to join the labor force when it involves raking, digging, planting, harvesting, firewooding, herb gathering, all kinds of real fun to fill a day, real information in a few sprinkled seeds, the secrets of acorns, fragrance of cherry wood, tiny green words coming up from the ground...

2011-04-02T08:09:00.004+09:00

QUAKE UPDATE Day 22 ++

Modelisation de la dispersion des rejets radioactifs dans l’atmosphere a l’echelle globale...

--

Japan's Nuclear Rescuers: 'Inevitable Some of Them May Die Within Weeks'

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency says that workers were only eating two basic meals of crackers and dried rice a day, and sleeping in conference rooms and hallways in the building.

According to Kaieda, not all of the workers had apparently been provided with lead sheeting to shield themselves from potentially radiation-contaminated floors while sleeping.

“My son has been sleeping on a desk because he is afraid to lie on the floor. But they say high radioactivity is everywhere and I think this will not save him,” said the mother of the worker...

Rescue trucks inch

along narrow winding roads

footing steep canyons

of home fragments

+

TEPCO Confirms That Groundwater Radiation Is So Bad,
Everyone Thought It Had To Be An Error

(Follow link in short article for further details)

2011-04-01T14:13:00.004+09:00

QUAKE UPDATE Day 21

No news from Tatsuya, at work trying to get his quake-wrecked office back in shape... Our son Keech is busy and safe in Seattle, haven't been able to get in touch with him yet by phone, will try again this weekend...

Cherries are starting to blossom down on the flatlands; it'll be a week or so before they bloom up here, but the traditional celebratory mood just didn't arise this year... there won't be much of the usual happy cherry blossom revelries in the fragrant evenings while the blooms last, acknowledging the brevity of life with sake and music, dancing on straw mats beneath a sky of blossoms-- no one can fully celebrate the turning of this year into seeding time, growing time, greening, warming, golden time, because no one has a whole heart. How can they be joyous beneath all that beauty without thinking of places not far away, where there is no joy and beauty has fled?

Cherry Blossoms Bloom Alone as Japanese Mourn Tsunami Victims

One good at least comes from all this, and that is the growing awareness - throughout this country and the world - of the importance of power conservation, which should have been promoted in schools and societies every minute of every day for the past 50 years. Having every service at your fingertips is spiritually and physically debilitating. Where's the #$%@#$%*# remote?! Not to say there should be no power, but that it should be the essential part, judiciously meted and gratefully valued. No man is free who has an invisible, ubiquitous, all-powerful, instant slave.

Tokyo tower is not lit (I've never seen that) and daily electricity demand in Tokyo (the e-hungriest city in the world) has fallen by as much as 28 percent since the earthquake, compared with year-earlier levels. Well done.

Sarkozy is visiting Japan for a bit of radioactive PR. Last time Kan tried that and went to see the radiating reactors to get some macho press wearing the unsullied worker’s uniform politicians here put on in times of disaster, his vast entourage arrived just as the reactor guys were about to conduct a critical procedure that would release radiation, which isn't even healthy for elected officials, let alone Prime Ministers, so they had to postpone the procedure until the PM had helicoptered off, leaving things worse than when he came... Gives me a thought though... perhaps a radiation shield comprising layer upon layer of responsible politicians might be of some satisfaction...

As to the stark reality of it all...

High radiation found outside no-go zone

Hundreds of corpses believed irradiated, inaccessible

"Measurement networks showing how radiation plumes moveglobally, along with commercial satellite imagery and Internetcommunication, mean the public has more information than everbefore [who let that happen?] about the consequences of nuclear breakdowns. Policymakers will have to adapt..."

Guess this means that the International Atomic Energy Agency is gonna have to tell the public something more fundamental about what is going on. They meet next week at a "10 day closed-door event." We are not invited.

2011-03-31T14:08:00.000+09:00

STRONG STUFF

Freewheeling down the winding road this morning into the rising sun of an enlightening day - the edgy kind, with an early bonechill but already intriguing aspects to it, even in the scent of the air - as I came to the open portion of the paddied slope just below the last curve through the forest and out into the open, I could see ahead of me, below the Lake - as odd as that is to describe - the earliest farmer this year out readying his paddy for Spring tilling.

He alone of all the village rice farmers was out there at first light with his long-handled shovel, clearing the irrigation trenches, inlets and outlets all around his paddy, soon to be filled by the water that would gravitate down from the mountain by way of his neighbor's paddy above, and then from his own would flow down to fill that of his neighbor below. An important task to be done each year by each farmer, and so to be done well, to sustain this whole mountainside of good will.

He was working at the corner of the paddy above the road along which newbie I would pass on my motorcycle. Hearing then seeing me coming, he paused in his labors, leaned on his shovel with the sun at his back, we shouted good morning to each other and I passed on by, leaving him in the kind of deep, nature-fed silence you can only get out in the countryside, as opposed to city silence, the merely welcome absence of sound.

As I rolled on down the road, although he turned again to his labors he remained imprinted on my retina in silhouette, burned there by the sun like an icon of some kind, which I suppose he is-- perhaps of responsibility that goes back 20 generations or more, has made it this far, and naturally plans to continue.

Strong stuff.

2011-03-30T20:27:00.000+09:00

QUAKE UPDATE Day 19

Kasumi and the girls will be moving in with us for a time... This should be interesting...

--

Looks like they’re gonna go all Chernobyl on it... hints at abandoning the reactor site altogether and smothering the whole thing in some sort of substance...

"I think maybe the situation is much more serious than we were led to believe," said one expert, Najmedin Meshkati, of the University of Southern California, adding it may take weeks to stabilise the situation and the United Nations should step in.
"This is far beyond what one nation can handle - it needs to be bumped up to the U.N. Security Council."

The isotope "most useful for nuclear weapons..."

Interesting little tidbit for all of us currently on this planet [emphasis mine]:
"If plutonium enters the blood it can do a lot of damage to our cells, leading to cancer of the bones or liver. ... Plutonium-239, a byproduct of fission, was found in soil samples taken on the plant site March 21 and March 22, according to Tepco. Two of the five samples contained more plutonium than known to have been deposited by atmospheric nuclear-bomb fallout and probably came from the damaged plant.”

I.e., all soil in Japan and around the world now (and since the sixties) contains plutonium - half life 24,000 years -... You'd think that was important, but funnily enough they never mentioned Plutonium-239 during the long fallout of atmospheric nuclear bomb testing... they only mentioned Strontium-90...

And "Duck-and-Cover"...

Malignant-looking stuff, plutonium...