Takarazuka Revue Poster

in Umeda Station, Osaka

WHAT'S THE OPPOSITE OF FLAGRANTE DELICTO?

According to the results of a sex survey of 2713 randomly selected individuals between the ages of 16-49 -- which survey of course took time away from whatever sex the respondents might have been on the verge of, thank you very much -- an unbelievable 39.7% of Japanese people between the ages of 16-49 (up 5% from 2 years ago!) have unbelievably not had sex unbelievably for over an unbelievable month. The survey was taken by the Japan Family Planning Association, which has a direct stake in the outcome.

As a member of the general public one must react to such stories largely from the perspective of one's own life history; thus it is that I stand in complete shock before such stark stats; indeed, in regard to sex I have never been so aghast in my life. Why, when I was 16-49-- on second thought, let's not get into that flagrante area (NSFW). But I have to ask a Japanese or two: if you're between the ages of 16-49 and haven't had sex for a month ("My research shows that if you don't have sex for a month, you probably won't for a year" Dr. Kunio Kitamura, Association director), what the hell are you doing (besides filling out this survey) that's more important, let alone more delightful? (An interesting side note is that this unnatural state of affairs and the resulting irritability and irrationality may go a long way, on an individual level, toward explaining Prime Minister Abe's irritable yo-yo-ing on the "comfort women" question, and the rightists' irrational refusal to even acknowledge the question.)

As to the scientific validity of this study, it must be pointed out that any 16-49 year-old who hasn't had sex in the eternity that is a celibate month is much more likely to have the time, to say nothing of the inclination, to drop whatever is the wan substitute and respond to a survey, wouldn't you say? Such folks are much more easily distracted than those who tend toward intense physical relations and are probably occupied at the moment.

On the other hand I must also mention that I recently saw, a few villages down the road, two classic love hotels being demolished that are not to be replaced. I take this neochasm to be even more ominous for the future of Japan than this survey, for I have never seen a love hotel demolished that was not replaced as quickly as possible with a larger, gaudier, more diversely erotic love hotel, in response to ardent demand. Those two lost love hotels, apart from locally manifesting a profound decline in national urgency, are likely to be replaced by gaudy establishments of the type where the dispassionate 40% of the populace can spend their vacant time playing pachinko.

In any case, less sex means a lowering population, which means many positive changes, from less crowded trains to more job opportunities, but as for me, I'd rather have sex than whatever less sex means.

SWEET STREET ART

Decades ago I remember seeing, only very occasionally in Tokyo - and only once during the eighties in Kyoto – the amezaiku street artists/vendors (even then rare) who, in front of the growing crowd would take hot taffylike sugar, handle it like rhythmic lightning with tongs now and then in flame like a glass blower, color the shapeless blob, twist it, mold it and cut it with well-worn shears until it was fashioned into a Doraemon on a stick, or dragon, pig, bunny rabbit, monkey, phoenix, whatever fanciful creature came to mind as the candyman cracked jokes, did tricks, told stories while teasing the sweet creature of his story out of the melting sugar before all those wide-eyed faces... or working as per customer order for one of the noisy crowd of mostly kids around his stand... I don't even see amezaiku at big festivals anymore...

There are a few young amezaiku-nin taking the art up again, but back then when an amezaiku artist had been at his craft for 60 years or more and was cracking up the crowd while crafting faster than the eye could follow, the results were breathtaking. Unfortunately, all those splendid works were purchased for just a few yen, then happily licked into oblivion...

So why
the big bang
and what
banged big?

Mick has just posted
Instant Karma Nearly Got Me, Part 2
on
The Blog Brothers

REAL WORK IN DEEP TIME

From early morning today I was up to my scalp in editing deadlines, one eye now and then glimpsing out the window at all those logs still lying there waiting to be sectioned and split and stacked to catch the southerly winds, and a freshly tilled row in the garden waiting to receive the various seeds I have in mind, until at about two this afternoon enough was enough, so I put on my work clothes and got the tools from the shed and went out into the spring snowstorm to get some real work done, and for a couple hours lost myself in the all there is, remotely reveling in the absence of self, and among other things learned, upon splitting sections of oak and finding the familiar woodboring grub hole (you always find them in these wild oaks up here), my axe informing me via the handle, that those holes perforce make the oak much stronger, much closer to iron as the grain compensates for the central weakness and girds against it, much as we are made stronger by weaknesses we've overcome…

Then later, after splitting a half-log into quarters, I saw that in one of the woodborer cul de sacs angling off into the grain of the wood, the inner reach of the hole had been stuffed with a variety of moss that, though long dried, was still green. Whatever insect had made its home there had gone out and from the deep knowledge selected that particular variety of moss, clipped off right-sized pieces of it and dragged them back along the dark hole into the depths of the tree to make itself some very comfy quarters, well aerated yet well shielded by the moss, in a home of solid, living oak. Savvy really has no limits, does it. And some hours later, around dinnertime, how I enjoy that real-work weariness in my shoulders, back and thighs, that well-earned wealth of tiredness that has more genuine value than money, that says my body and spirit have spent some deep time working together.

YEARNING EYES

You know how it is when you saw some hungry monkeys along the road while you were going down the mountain a few mornings ago, the day after seeing the new mushroom buds emerging from your shiitake logs, even harvesting a couple of the bigger ones before the monkeys got them, then looking at the same logs on your next morning off and seeing every single bud (and the surrounding bark) bitten away by obviously monkey teeth: you get a little anxious about your mushrooms.

So it is that each morning thereafter you look out the big kitchen window at around sunrise to check if any new mushrooms are emerging and each time you do, you see a big mushroom or two, but when later you go out to get them there aren't any, and you find out that it was only blendings of light, shadow and coloration that your hungry mind had eagerly transformed into what it desired. At which point you realize that your yearnings have always played such tricks on your mind, yearnings of whatever kind. You see what you desire, more than you see what is there. Each specific instance has its own particulars so you can't generalize much, other than to say that, transcendently speaking, yearning eyes are not reliable guides.

Damn I learn a lot from those monkeys.

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AN EXPERIENCE NEARLY FORGOTTEN

While gardening today I was pondering a sentence I'd come across describing a Japanese garden at an exhibition: "This garden gives visitors the experience of a day in the forest, an experience nearly forgotten." I never thought I would hear such a phrase in my own lifetime.

It sounds as though we have given up already, and believe soon we will have only videos of forests, photos from back when there were trees, even groves of trees. Before long, people will come to believe that there are no forests left (and by then it may be true, or nearly true) except for the few in forest zoos, i.e., parks - as it is with the endangered fauna - and so it will all come to pass by default.

Later, encountering one of those damply religious people who search for higher truth in the lower regions, seeking the source everywhere but in themselves, I reflect that each and every one of the cells and elements and ethers that comprise me (and him) are linked unbroken to the birth of the universe, and have a familial history beyond the boundaries of faith. What need have I to look elsewhere after reasons for my life, let alone in words written mere millennia ago? A hair follicle embodies more knowledge than all the creeds and holy books ever devised; think of the wisdom in eyes! Holier-than-thou is in fact a matter of astigmatism.

The more I am out here in the woods on the mountain in the cold and silent air amid living and imminent plants, birds on the wind and animal eyes in the night, the lonelier I get, and the more opens up to me of the secrets that are lost in the crowd. It is the kind of loneliness that leads to oneliness; it is an essential food, that nourishes the bones of the spirit for the long journey.

YOGA COMIC

A Yoga comic from The Yoga Institute in Mumbai

View individual pages at Flickr

"As this century is stepping into its twilight years there is a growing awareness that the family is the bedrock of personal growth. Members of a family, be they parents or children draw inspiration, strength and faith from the family as a whole. Yoga at Home will help to have light perception..."

via boingboing

Just posted

My Part in the Greatest Election Upset in American History

on The Blog Brothers

What Granny D is up to now...

Granny D speeches

THE COMMANDER CONTINUES THE MISSION

One of life's mini-supreme pleasures (MSP) is to emerge in fragments from the dreamy depths on a cold morning and, as the who-you-are falls slowly into place enough to realize at the very edge of consciousness that you don't have to go to work today - that this is one of your days off - the corpus thereof, eyes unopened and smiling contentedly at the delightful syrupyness of reality, pulls the covers about the toasty neck and begins to emit a soft, dozing sound, much like the one that issues from the moss-lined den of a bear beneath virgin mounds of snow.

I got to partake of this particular MSP myself this morning, having during the night's deep sleep forgotten completely who I was until the sergeant we all carry in the barracks suddenly gave the order to hit the deck and get to work, but the sergeant is unaware of actual realities, so as soon as the individual known in the waking world as yours truly had reassembled to a sufficient level from the self-y bits and pieces scattered like crumbs along the trail of dreams, as Commander of this operation I countermanded the order and, smiling contentedly at the syrupyness of reality, resumed my mission.

Dedication is the price of victory.

TELL ME ABOUT IT

The devil is in the details. I've taught English here for years (though I ceased as soon as possible), as have so many other English-natives (and non-natives) here; the article linked to below excellently captures the problems and frustrations involved. My favorite anecdote is "When I visited an English class in Japan, I was advised to bring along an interpreter. That puzzled me initially but once I sat in the class, I understood why."

My son Keech, who went to Japanese schools from mid-grammar school to junior high, after which he finished up in the US, was always getting in trouble for correcting his Japanese English teachers' pronunciation, and frustrated by the fact that the English was being taught in Japanese!

How English is taught in Japan

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Kaya in rain, with smiling cat

When I go out
to ask the night
it takes my question away

COMFORT WOMEN WERE WHORES, IMPLIES ABE

No one's ever accused the LDP [Liberal Democratic machine Party] of being high on humanitarianism, but even that dim rep went down a notch when Prime Minister Abe said there was no proof that so-called "comfort women" had been forced into prostitution during the war-- in other words that they were all in fact whores, and all their complaints lies. The LDP is more like a party in big denial, running a country that claims to be democratic.

Abe asserted his wishfully gossamer belief before addressing an LDP group of about 120 rightist lawmakers who were meeting to plan a retraction of Japan's 1993 apology to the comfort women. The group's position was clarified by its chairman Nariaki Nakayama, another LDP master of tact, who clarified the wartime government's involvement in the brothels by comparing it to a kind of simple business situation, say like when a school hires a company to run its cafeteria, no big deal.

"Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs, and set prices," he said, probably smiling and jingling the change in his pocket. Interesting reference to 'foodstuffs'.

"Where there's demand, businesses crop up... but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark," he said [that "into service" says a lot more]. "This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth... for the sake of Japanese honor."

What type of honor is he talking about? What type of honor is blind to base wrongdoing? Ah yes: honor among thieves.

This all flies in the faces of the hundreds of thousands of women who, even in their old age, often bringing shame on themselves and their families through their public quests for justice, nevertheless go to court in Japan year after year for decades, are turned away unacknowledged and now are even scorned by alleged lawmakers in quest of the same dark honor under which those unrepented crimes were perpetrated.

+

As to changes of the heart...

Japanese denial of WWII military brothels shocks former professor

Japanese PM Provokes Fury over Sex Slaves

"Japan, having failed to integrate Asia by force of arms,
has remained largely alienated from its own continent,
clinging out of misplaced pride to a distorted and self-defeating picture of the past."

+

'Comfort women' military rape victims: Schieffer

Hear the story of a 'comfort woman'

STOP TAKING YOUR MONEY OUT OF THEIR POCKETS!

Boy do the medication spinners love this dubious news fragment! They're all over it like green on a dollar. I haven't seen this much coverage since Thalidomide. In obviating the need for pharmaceutics, vitamin supplements (when used intelligently) must've cost the medical industry a fortune in potential patients over the years. Not to imply that there aren't big scams going on in the supplement business, but that's another (and newer) story, in a similar vein.

However, I must admit that, even when taken wisely, supplements can be dangerous; as a 66-year-old who lives and moves like a much younger person (and hasn't been in a hospital for 61 years), I am put at greater risk in a way by such things as lumberjacking, partying and motorcycle speed, thanks largely to judicious vitamin supplement use blended with only occasionally extreme dietary and otherwise hedonistic behavior.

On the other hand, I doubt if I'd be this way if I'd taken just about any prescription drug every day for the past 40 years. As to the ardent anti-vite spin on this, note these new headlines from among the over 400 today, with another take at the end (all emphases mine):

Research questions vitamins' usefulness

Vitamins 'could shorten lifespan'

Antioxidants Don't Help You Live Longer

Antioxidant Vitamins May Not Prolong Life

Antioxidants Flunk Big Test

Use Of Some Antioxidant Supplements May Increase Mortality Risk

Caution urged in use of antioxidant supplements

Vitamins could increase risk of death, study says

Antioxidant supplements tied to death risk

Study says antioxidant pills can kill

JAMA Says Antioxidant Supplements May Increase Mortality

Researchers Say Some Vitamin Supplements Increase Risk of Death

Docs Warn on Vitamins A and E


But there were some rays of skeptically clear light:

Antioxidant study ignores scientific evidence

Researchers water down vitamin fear

***

And as a little actual-factual sidelight to all this maybe, could and death:

"A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics.

"The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown in the following table is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251."

Death by Medicine, Part I
(this free newsletter - by an MD -
well worth subscribing to,
via only an email address.)

PEACH BLOSSOMS AND SCIATICA

I know, right off the bat you're wondering whatever could be the connection between peach blossoms and sciatica, well, I'm getting around to it, just give me a minute to gather my thoughts, get a word in here, put these tools away...

It all started about 10 ten years ago I'd say, back when I planted a peach tree over by the inner road and not long after got sciatica, or maybe before, I don't remember which. I could go find out, but then you'd just be left sitting here waiting in this age of instant media; anyway whatever else may or may not be true, the sciatica had nothing to do with the peach tree. Bet those are words you never heard before.

Speaking of which, because unfortunately at the time I was a newbie at planting trees I didn't pick the right planting spot or prep the peachling properly-- global warming may have been a factor too, depending on whether you endorse the scripturally enlightened Jerry Falwell or the scientifically endarkened Al Gore.

In any case, the tree wound up undernourished, at least because of poor prep and overshadowment by the big old oak that wanted to spread overhead, forcing the peach to reach for whatever sun it could, so it grew fast and sideways like a ghetto kid (been there, done that), in time bending to force its way through the hedge to the road, making an unpleasant sight, gardenically speaking, and though it produced delicious peaches (I actually got to taste one the monkeys missed!) that deliciousness also made it a popular simian hangout and, being spindly, the tree did not react well to all the ruthless vandalism, which bent it even more and bedraggled its few skinny branches. Old before its time, ravaged every Summer, after a few years the peach began to give up what little ghost it had, hunching up even more when monkeys came by.

So a couple of weeks ago, while we were pre-Spring clearing away the under and overgrowth on that roadside and around the kinmokuse hedge I cut the peach tree down, ending its misery (though we may get new shoots from the trunk, which I'll treat right). We stacked the wood and trimmings on the kindling pile next to the firewood splitting block.

Then the other day while splitting some wild cherry I noticed that all the new branches of the peach had plump furry buds on them, like mini-pussywillows, and were clearly viable, lying there right in front of me where they kept on forlornly yearning sideways until I couldn't stand it any longer. I'm a sucker for grandkids and peach buds. So I clipped off all the new growth I could find, a good armful - some of the cuttings up to a meter long - took them into the house, put them all in a wide-mouthed vase, filled it with water, added two aspirin and placed the vase in the big kitchen window right above the sink where it was light and warm.

Now if you've ever spent enough time in Japan to need an aspirin, you'll think right away: God what a waste of aspirin that is... aspirin are ridiculously expensive in Japan! Well it just so happens that because of the eponymous sciatica and the attendant need for aspirin, I wrote a ramble on sciatica and the cost of aspirin in Japan, which ramble was published in Kyoto Journal, where it was read by my best friend Marty back home in NY, who immediately went out and bought half a dozen megabottles of aspirin dirt-cheap at the local drugstore and airmailed them to me, thereby saving me a bunch of unnecessary physicoeconomic pain and anguish, for which I and my lumbar vertebrae shall be forever grateful. However, because there was enough aspirin for a hundred cases of sciatica and I had only one, I got over my singular symptoms before I'd used up even one of those giant bottles. The result is, that as an aspirin nouveau riche I can now share my largesse with one and all, so I do. And aspirin is a very effective plant booster.

The other morning I woke up, went downstairs to make tea and there beheld a frosty kitchen window full of pink peach blossoms, thanks to my sciatica.

FINDING MY MARBLES

The first scent of Spring, that blended earth-perfume so pleasantly borne on a chill wind, of imminent buddings and primal seed-stirrings, always wistfully reminds me that it's time to get out my marbles and dig a hole in the ground. Correlatively it reminds me that I lost my marbles years ago-- but anyway each Spring I get to recall them with fondness.

As a marble substitute I get out the tools and start prepping the earth of my garden, in good time venturing to the farm store to buy some seeds of whatever monkeys hate, which is an odd way to plan one's garden, but in Japan means lots of exotic greens, and anyway adaptability is an indication that marbles of some kind are still operative. This year it will be a couple kinds of spinach, radishes, various of those greens, hot peppers and herbs.

I'm doing it this way because I just can't (yet) get myself to put up a stalag out there around my vegetables, but one day I'll have to, if I want to grow tomatoes, carrots, onions, pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers watermelons—well, whatever I'm not growing this year, and didn't grow last year. But as I dig and plant, I am as always rewarded. Surrounded by that heady scent, I realize that I haven't lost my marbles at all, they were just one bright talisman in the steady parade of delights that is a growing life, an early excuse to dig in the constant earth and learn where beauty can always be found.