Peaceful village fills
with clacks and thuds and screams--
kendo in the school gym

***

Cognitive dissonance--
I just wrote my first
hyperlinked haiku

ASO HAS A FAKE-REMORSE FIASCO, KOIZUMI PLEADS FOR LOVE

Japan's ambitious but merely wealthy rightist Foreign Minister, whom I've mentioned before in similarly flaky circumstances, now has another political black hole to his credit. His recent and surprising appointment to office by Koizumi says much about the rightist aspect of the apparently folksy Prime Minister's political aims. I predict that as a result of these efforts, China and India will lead the way in the coming Asian world economy, leaving a strident and unrepentant Japan isolated in the rear. (Koizumi's "Hello American people... Love me tender..." from Graceland perhaps betrayed his increasing sense of isolation.)

"'This fiasco never had a great chance of succeeding,' said Robyn Lim, professor of international relations at Nanzan University, an Australian and a former acting head of current intelligence at the Office of National Assessments in Canberra. 'Mr Aso is still in denial that his own family company enslaved Australian POWs and that two of them died in his mine,' she said.

Earlier this week, The Age aired criticism of the planned ceremony from historians, political analysts and veterans' representatives. Central to their criticism were doubts that Mr Aso, an ambitious right-wing politician, lacked genuine remorse for Japan's war record and might manipulate the event in his campaign to be Japan's next prime minister.

The episode has cast new doubt on Mr Aso's political skills and appears certain to put another hole in his prime ministerial ambitions."

Couldn't happen to a flakier guy. Appointed by Koizumi to represent Japan to the world.

AS JAPAN AGES

"Japanese women had a life expectancy of 85.6 years in 2005, the world's highest for the 20th straight year. Japanese men live an average of 78.6 years, second only to Icelandic males.

The fertility rate is hitting rock-bottom _ 1.25 children per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to keep the population steady. The U.S. rate is 2.04 children per woman.

Those two trends converged at some point last year, when Japan silently marked a demographic watershed: The population started to drop, beginning a long decline that demographers predict will cut the number of Japanese from 127 million now to about 100 million by 2050. Three of every 10 will be over 65.

It's already visible in the gleaming nursing homes cropping up in every corner of the archipelago, while once-crowded schools are closing for lack of students. Some 4,000 have shut their doors in the past 20 years."

BASHO AND HANDWRITING MAKE A COMEBACK

"A book of his poems has caused sales of the traditional HB and 2H wooden pencils to soar by nearly a third in the past few months."

Elder wisdom is gaining...

MAYA'S GRANNY

"So, last week I posted a comment on a blog I enjoy a lot (Pureland Mountain) and Tabor asked who I was and why I didn't have a blogsite. I got to thinking about that. Why didn't I?

***

I come from a long line of strong women. My tenth great-grandmother was one of the first three arrested for witchcraft in Salem. My great-grandmother refused to promise to obey when she got married in the 1890s. One of my other great-grandmothers was raised by her widowed grandmother and her great-grandmother, who was born when Washington was president and died after the Civil War.

I live on the side of a mountain overlooking the Gastineau Channel, can watch bald eagles circling below my window, and sometimes knock on my own front door and yell before I open it from the inside because bears have been known to use my stairs.

I stopped being a hippy before the word was in the common vocabulary and am as opinionated as they come."

Some good reading and interesting perspectives ahead, looks like. Lives on a mountainside, too, does Maya's Granny. (And her granddaughter's name is very like 'Kaya'!)

AM I OR AM I NOT

The monkeys have been by, I noticed this morning, and bitten a few of my green tomatoes to check their progress since the last visit, see if the luscious goodies are nearing readiness for the big tomato fest the hairy marauders have planned, biting the greenies only lightly so as not to cause them to spoil before the big day, since the poor simians have put so much effort into coming back here again and again to check their tomatoes and it would be a shame if they went bad after all that buildup, to say nothing of some serious faceloss, tribewise.

In this picture I of course am their nemesis, implausibly claiming the tomatoes as my own, but planning my red pepper retort when the time is right. Having monkeys as adversaries is oddly invigorating to my primitive nature. Quotidian struggles on the train or with bureaucrats or other nefarious humans do not reach those protean deeps in the human soul, as does contesting with our ancient amoral relatives for the wherewithal of existence.

I have looked into human eyes, such as those of my drill sergeant in boot camp, and seen mercy long absent there, but to look into eyes where mercy has never been is to gaze into the dark whence we have arisen, that appears also to be the source of many elected officials. Enjoyment in battling the primitively sapient elements... perhaps I'm subconsciously preparing to run for office...

HABIT

Receiving our water
from the mountain spring--
it fills our jars where it gushes
out of the rock till we're finished,
then comes the urge to turn it off...

MORE ABOUT GINGER

This was growing too long for comments, so...

I buy my ginger roots for growing at the local farmer store in May. (Often ginger root sold in food stores has been irradiated to lengthen its shelf life; check first, if buying to replant.) At the farm store I get planting roots for Oshoga ("big ginger"), the older, stronger, conventional ginger not eaten directly but used for flavoring, and Koshoga ("little ginger") the younger, smaller more delicate kind, used for pickling and garnish or cooking straight up. Both produce the second-growth ginger you see in the foto, with the reddish tops. That new ginger is what I mean. You get new ginger from either root type. In fact, the whole young new ginger plant can be cooked as a good vegetable.

I think that in temperate climates you could easily grow ginger in a window pot, or outdoors in a sunny/shady spot if you can keep the ground damp enough... In colder climates, maybe a window pot or small greenhouse. I live in a coldish temperate area, and I planted outdoors about a month ago. I soak the ginger patches a couple of times a week when there's been no rain for a while, which is not a problem this time of year. The first green shoots are spiking up now; will harvest as needed for cooking throughout the growing period; then from September, when the stems die down and all the energy goes into the root, we'll harvest whatever we want for pickles etc. and leave the rest in the ground, to dig up for use as spice, tea and whatnot throughout the winter.

Ginger is a versatile herb, excellent tonic for the body and a legendary Asian medicament, but another great feature of the magic root, that many unfortunate folks are not in a position to appreciate, is that monkeys don't like it at all.

HONEY GINGER

Great Echo idea: Get some quality fresh ginger root (not irradiated), slice it as close to paperthin as you can, as thinly slice half a lemon or more, lightly stuff all into a clean and big enough widemouth jar, fill jar to above ginger level with honey, cover and put in fridge for at least two weeks before use.

Over time the honey extracts the ginger and lemon juice, making an excellent eating pickle of the ginger and lemon while the honey, increasingly thinned by the ginger and lemon juices, grows richer with flavor and nutritionally valuable enzymes.

The result is a non-spoiling, ginger-lemon-flavored honey juice that's great as sweetener for herbal tea (or simply hot water) in winter, lemonade or cool-water tonic in summer...

SOLO PERFORMANCE THIS EVENING

Big-hearted barn swallow dressed in long-tail formals sittin' solo up there on the telephone wire, the voice of his generation, just singin' and clickin', scattin' with no holds barred, riffin' it all right out there for all to hear in the golden air of sunset, been rehearsin' all his life for this appearance, the whole world at his feet in rapt admiration of such native talent, he sings the sun all the way down in proof of his power...

YOU KNOW WHY THEY LEFT OUT JAPAN...

The Reader's Digest Global Courtesy Test, which ranks 35 world cities by degree of politeness (though suspiciously, their own article talks only about NYC), is certainly rankling some major metropolises, who feel they've been underrated, and are being rather unpolite about it; others, like No. 1 NYC (where many are saluting with a different finger today) are surprised and flattered, though the test is admittedly unscientific, so there's still some rudity wiggle room here. As to entire land masses, Asia turned out to be the rudest continent.

TOP TEN
New York USA 80%
Zurich Switzerland 77
Toronto Canada 70
Berlin Germany 68
São Paulo Brazil 68
Zagreb Croatia 68
Auckland New Zealand 67
Warsaw Poland 67
Mexico City Mexico 65
Stockholm Sweden 63
Less polite cities

I noticed right away that the surveyors left Japan out of the picture altogether, likely because the entire country is so courteous it would skew the test right off the page.

FREE PAPER MODEL OF HENRY'S WALDEN CABIN

From Fiddler's Green

"To affect the quality of the day; that is the highest of arts."

INTERESTING US HEADLINE COMBO

GOP-Run Senate Kills Minimum Wage Increase

House passes bill to permanently reduce estate tax

Nice of the poor to help out the rich that way.

As a corollary:

U.S. Losing Its Middle-Class Neighborhoods

"Middle-class neighborhoods, long regarded as incubators for the American dream, are losing ground in cities across the country, shrinking at more than twice the rate of the middle class itself. In their place, poor and rich neighborhoods are both on the rise, as cities and suburbs have become increasingly segregated by income..."

Meanwhile, in the dark corridors of democracy...

And from the Beeb: US bosses earn an average salary 262 times the average worker's.

Also, Warren Buffett calls for retention of the Estate Tax
"Permanently repealing estate taxes is a long-sought Republican goal." Wonder why.
How you gonna vote on that in November? An honest result would be about 100,000,000 against to 1000 or so in favor of repeal...

THE LOOKING FOR A JAPANESE GIRLFRIEND SHIRT FORUM

PLM just got a hit for the search "looking for a japanese girlfriend shirt forum." I'd mentioned the Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend t-shirts in a post sometime ago simply as a cultural oddity; we didn't need them in my day.

Frankly, as a man of some experience in this lovely country I can way understand why Japanese girls get their own "Wanted" t-shirt nowadays, in the frothy international market that neocourting has become; but of the guys who wear such shirts, I ask: you need a t-shirt for this? Even worse, you need a Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend T-shirt Forum? Aren't you busy with your girlfriends?

What's happened to men in the last 20 years? Step out of the country for just a couple of decades... It was all much simpler back when we simply approached beautiful Japanese women in Japan and in the timeless way gave them our best lines, in Japanese. Somehow, reliance on a foreign language t-shirt doesn't bring out the fortitude in a courting man...

But soon, all that stuff may not matter anymore; I just read that "People are going to be having sex with robots within five years." I suppose not long after that we'll see human guys wearing Looking for an Android Girlfriend t-shirts...

THE EGG OF ALL TIME

Some weeks ago, Echo bought a nice solid-ceramic egg that, according to the manufacturer, had a special chemicomystico-catalyticomatrix property by which it could render our refrigerator a truly magical space. The egg was rather expensive, as eggs not meant for eating often are. Echo purchased it never suspecting that one day it would find a place in the local biomythos; after all, it looked just like an egg: pure white, the size of a chicken egg. That's why, when Echo put the pristine objet d’art refrigeratique outside to air and dry in the sun as per the manufacturer's recommendation, it was stolen by a monkey.

Monkeys steal eggs all the time, no big deal, from crows, hawks, whatever wild eggs they can get their snatchy little paws on when they're not wrapped around my onions, so the monkey that found this bright white baby just sitting there shining in the sun with no one around, the biggest egg he ever saw, didn't pause to ponder right and wrong, wonder whether he should actually commit the greatest egg heist of his nasty, brutish and short life. That egg was history.

Seldom in the humdrum of the everyday are any of us afforded the kind of opportunity that fell into that monkey's paws, when fate laid before him the egg of a lifetime, the egg that would make him the most famous and revered monkey on this whole monkey planet, the Hope Diamond of eggs, that would make him the Monkey King, his name ringing from tree to tree throughout the mountain forests of his domain... He could see it all now as, with the precious object clutched tightly in his paw, he took off with a new and elite speed to climb a far tree unto the heights he now deserved, where he could be alone for a while with his treasure...

Then he would take it around and show it to the others - flaunt it, really; no fun being master of the universe if no one knows it - they would all want it and try to snatch it from him, but this was his baby, he'd enjoy it a while, casually; then, right in front of them all, he'd eat the greatest egg there ever was...

And so began that particular mountain forest legend, one that will live in monkey lore until the end of time, known by me as The Monkey Who Would Be King, a cautionary tale that ends something like: "...and so there he was, up on the high branch, about to lord it over all the other monkeys, when he bit proudly at the not-egg, and chewed, and chewed and bit, and gnawed and chomped and snarled and screeched and stomped, pounding the thing against the trunk of the tree while swearing like a trooper. He went on thus for hours, even through the night, and that was just the beginning of his madness. He never did let go of the not-egg, until finally he fell out of the tree, dead of the starving madness, when another monkey took the not-egg from him, and so the legend lives on..."

Maybe one day, when monkeys have refrigerators...

ABSURDISM AT THE OFFICE

One afternoon last week in the office as I half-mindedly searched my rucksack with one hand for the banana I was sure I'd brought, put it right about... here... in my bag this morning before leaving home, if I remember rightly... though 'remembering rightly' doesn't ring with the conviction it used to... as I say, I was searching - with waning certainty - for the banana with my left hand while keyboard-editing in diminishing certainty with my right...

I was in need of a quick shot of brain food, such as a banana, to overcome the incrementally mind-draining effects of late-afterlunch deep editing. I was locked in a downward syntactic spiral that continued descending, feeding on the hunger by which it plunged faster, because although I searched and searched again... must've been the day before yesterday I put that banana in the bag and if so I ate that on the same day, ergo yes, there is no banana...

So, back to steadily dimming two-fisted editing till the end of the work day, when with whatever intellect remained I went outside to go home and found that it was pouring rain in individually packaged macrodrenching units, so I expertly reached in to get my umbrella and pulled out the banana I always keep right at hand to open over my head in the event of sudden downpours.

Needless to say, the banana did not keep off the rain. I ignored the question that rose as hard as the rain fell upon my head: had I eaten my umbrella?

STILL LIFE

In a photo I just noticed again on the wall and took down to dust off and study with older eyes - a snapshot sent me years ago by my first wife, who was then cleaning out her past - beneath a clear blue sky I stand long-haired, headbanded with the US flag on a Fire Island beach back in the late 1960s, full-bearded, wearing my mirror shades that did wonders when we canoed the Adirondack lakes of all those summers...

It is morning in the photo - sun behind me as I gaze inland - sky looks like early autumn, probably not long before we newlyweds both resigned our post-college professional jobs and took off in our blue-and-white VW bus-cum-road-residence for what looked like forever, to find what awaited us in the greater world...

In the photo I'm not much more than a silhouette, but my hair is still dark and thick, glowing with the wildfires of youth... Far in the bright distance are two tiny figures of the only other people on that long curving beach, who came there that day as we did (maybe that was even the very weekend she and I went to our bank on the Island and got a letter affirming that we had 3500 dollars in our account, to demonstrate our solvency to world immigration authorities). We went from that day through years and countries all around the world - separated soon after our return - divorced not long after that. Years ago now, how their number grows, on the other side from here...

The small far-away couple stands close together, maybe a mile from where my wife was photographing me in loving close-up; the shorter of the pair appears to be throwing something into the ocean as the taller one stands straight and watches... They are tiny blurs, as we were to them, as then is to now...

I wonder who they were, and who we were, what they tried to do with their lives from that day onward, as we tried - the waves washing in, endless arcs over amber sands never the same - maybe those two also took a photo...

Or is the smaller person turning away from the other? In fact, are they even together there, in that fading snapshot of 40 years ago?

Distances can be deceiving...

OK, RUB IT IN, I DESERVE IT

Out in the morning sun the small patch of dokudami that grows atop one of the compost heaps is now sending up those crisp white blossoms from its dusky elegance of green, reminding me with the precision of blossoms, taunting me with that beauty in the face of my lunkheaded, sweaty weedwhacking frenzy of Wednesday, in which for some feverish reason I whacked clear the classy patch of actually medicinal dokudami that was growing with soft lushness in the shadows beneath the weeping cherry, jinchoge and forsythia (and growing there harmlessly, it must be said, in my non-delirious, sunny Saturday state of mind)...

So there in the soft breeze they twinkle tortuously, those few ivory teasers, going inyerface... inyerface... humbling me as I should be humbled for what I have done, the beauty I have lost...

SCORE ONE FOR THE WHALES

"Japan suffered a resounding defeat on Friday at the International Whaling Commission..."

For some reason a few Japanese really want to kill whales, but no one wants to eat them...

*

[Update: Japan will kill even more whales anyway.

"Over the next two years Japan plans to kill similar numbers of minkes plus 40 more fin whales and 50 humpbacks. Fin and humpbacks are classified as endangered by the commission.

Japanese inshore fishermen also kill thousands of dolphins and porpoises — including an estimated 10,000 Dalls dolphins alone — each year."

Japan to kill more whales for ‘science’

PLUM TREE ORATORIO

At evening the plum tree, green as it is in the fullness of its being, rich with new leaves and laden with ripening fruit, spreading out its limbs in verdant splendor beneath this breadth of sky, can do no more for today than begin to sing, sing at growing volume with all the tree frogs at its command, that live in its branches and in this way, as in others, pay rent.

All day long the tree stands as silently as trees do - apart from occasional whispers of conspiracy with the passing air - when abruptly and for no discernable reason other than some deep vegetative joy the tree begins to sing in a sort of froggy obbligato, back and forth, from leaf to leaf, in growing a cappella volume, until the overall tree is enticingly loud to one who happens to be seated in its shade sipping some chilled wine and is tempted to join in, using one's best chirping basso, at which point the tree falls embarrassingly silent.

Note to self: If you’re not a frog yet, shut up and listen.

Mick just posted Edifice Rex on TheBlog Brothers
--Stirs up some deep memories I'll be getting to anon...

I FEEL CUTER ALREADY

Some modern cultures are struggling with movie star childcare practices and bizarre political realities; other cultures couldn't care less, as long as they own the name of the cheese.

Japan too is embroiled in a cultural life and death struggle, as usual uniquely its own, at understanding the deep and growing hunger among the young and not so young, male and female alike, for... for... cuteness, something cute, anything, any old cute thing, even grotesquely cute, just find it, make it up if you have to, but fast, bring it here, popularize it quick, hurry up we're running out -- ahhh: that's cute.

And now it seems the nation itself is beginning to look analytically at the phenomenon.

It's always nice to be prescient. I did a little ramble about 20 years ago on a certain aspect of Japan I found even in its early stages to be somewhat pathological in its intensity:

“This terminal cuteness, that is eating at the vitals of the country, sapping its very lifeblood, is nothing like the vacant Western cuteness of anguished clowns painted on velvet, or weeping ragamuffins with stylized cowlicks and eyes as big as dinner plates; it is even more relentless than the corrosive kitschy cuteness that is burying mad collectors in matching salt and pepper shakers; it supersedes the Disney cuteness of sexless animals yearning for their mothers, it is cute with a big C, a big U, a big T, a big E, in bold and throbbing hi-glo pink neon letters underlined in red and gold, with heart-shaped fireworks going off behind it and a background medley of the cutest melodies of the decade...”

Since then it's been getting relentlessly cuter around here...