1st January 2010
明けましておめでとうございます。今年もよろしくお願いいたします。
Okera mairi at Yasaka Jinja, a popular shrine in Gion.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
Bakumatsu arc: Progress report
26th December, 2009
Finally finished a 4,000-word epic on Sakamoto Ryoma. I now have to cut it down to about 1,000 words so it'll fit in the papers. But not tonight. It's past 3am so I shall just file away the sea of notes, excavate my bed out from under the history books and then fall into it.
Good night.
26th December, 2009
Finally finished a 4,000-word epic on Sakamoto Ryoma. I now have to cut it down to about 1,000 words so it'll fit in the papers. But not tonight. It's past 3am so I shall just file away the sea of notes, excavate my bed out from under the history books and then fall into it.
Good night.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Falling with grace
Christmas Eve, 2009
I wasn't going to post this but since this is the season of giving, here's a piece about a gift. And one more mystifying than three wise men popping up in a maternity ward. (The companion post is below.)
...
Mukai Kyorai was a poet with a plan.
In the garden of his cottage on the outskirts of Kyoto city were 40 persimmon trees. Their branches were hung with fruit ripening orange but he couldn’t possibly eat it all. And since fruit preserves had not been discovered in 17th century Japan, he couldn’t make jam either.
So he promised to sell the persimmons to a merchant from the city, receiving payment in advance. But that night, a storm blew up and in the darkness of his cottage, Kyorai heard things smacking the roof and plopping to the ground.
The next day, when the merchant returned, Kyorai was forced to give him his money back because most of the persimmons had fallen in the storm.
Kyorai does not seem to have been upset. He got a poem out of the experience and, because the storm had stripped the tree branches bare, a clear view of a nearby mountain. Some say he even achieved enlightenment.
In any case, he renamed his cottage Rakushisha – House of Fallen Persimmons – and an 18th century reconstruction still stands in the Saga district of Kyoto today. Many of those who visit are drawn by the connection with haiku giant Matsuo Basho: Kyorai was one of his chief disciples and played host to his teacher there.
But the story behind the hut’s name also catches at the mind because it overturns our expectations of how things should play out. The prospect of profit, a sudden storm and a destroyed crop: it should all end badly.
Underlying these expectations is the belief that nothing good can come from a fall. This belief is hardwired in the words we speak: ‘a fallen woman’, ‘fall into enemy hands’, ‘fall in battle’, ‘drop in sales’, ‘plummeting rankings’. To fall is to succumb to temptation or attack, to lose status, popularity or money. To fall is to become less.
Many of these expressions are found in Japanese and English. And they share another one: in both languages, you encounter love by falling in it. You don’t dance, skip or jump into love – you fall. Even if you land safely, the choice of words still betrays dismay at the powerlessness felt.
Our evolution – both as individuals and a species – is geared towards walking upright. If all goes well, we graduate from toddling to walking to running and to riding a bike. Falling is what happens when we fail. If we fall hard enough and in the wrong place, it ends in mud and blood.
This may explain our prejudice against the act, a prejudice revealed in yet another expression: fall from grace – a loss of someone’s good opinion.
Yet there is a different kind of grace though it also involves a fall. This is favour we have not earned, a gift that comes not because of something we have done or are expected to do but entirely because of the nature of the giver.
Landing like a fist in the gut, it knocks us off our feet. We build relationships and societies on ideas of reciprocity and contract. But to grace, our considered balances and agreements, spoken and unspoken, are a house of cards. It smiles – and blows.
So mystifying is grace that it is usually left to the divine. In human hands, giving is something that must be justified. If a present appears at an occasion other than a birthday or holiday, so will these words: ‘What’s this for?’
In human hands, giving must be explained, even if it’s with something as simple as ‘I saw this and thought of you’.
Gifts for no apparent reason terrify: like shopping with a credit card for things without price tags – you can’t relax until you’ve seen the size of the bill.
Not even charity comes close to grace. When you donate money, you expect it to be spent in certain ways rather than on, say, lap dancers. But grace gives much and asks nothing, not even a thank you.
How then to respond? You can always say, no thanks, and walk away. You can take grace for granted, which is accepting with your eyes closed. Or you can keep your eyes open and with hands held steady, receive.
But the last option is also the hardest because it means being prepared to fall. Like a storm that brings down promised persimmons, grace upsets expectations. Will you, like Kyorai the poet, then be able to step off the path of logical action and accustomed thought? Without knowing what lies at the bottom – it could be a poem, a view of a mountain, enlightenment or none of them – could you dive into the dark?
If your foot goes to the edge of the path then hesitates, it may be too soon for that final plunge. Practise with a less demanding tumble, a kind of Grace Lite.
It’s something easily found in the natural world and there’s a particularly nice example in the mountains northwest of Kyoto city. The Iwato Ochiba shrine is tiny, like the remote community it serves, but soaring gingko trees tower over it and in late autumn, they shower the shrine with yellow, fan-shaped leaves.
The moss and flagstones disappear under the gilt and the little wooden stage in the centre of the shrine floats in a sea of yellow.
I try to leave a donation but the access to the main building is closed off and the shrine deserted. Asked for nothing, giving nothing, I still walk on gold.
The wind breathes out and more gold leaf drifts down. It’s a fall that comes from grace – a fall, if you like, from grace.
Christmas Eve, 2009
I wasn't going to post this but since this is the season of giving, here's a piece about a gift. And one more mystifying than three wise men popping up in a maternity ward. (The companion post is below.)
...
Mukai Kyorai was a poet with a plan.
In the garden of his cottage on the outskirts of Kyoto city were 40 persimmon trees. Their branches were hung with fruit ripening orange but he couldn’t possibly eat it all. And since fruit preserves had not been discovered in 17th century Japan, he couldn’t make jam either.
So he promised to sell the persimmons to a merchant from the city, receiving payment in advance. But that night, a storm blew up and in the darkness of his cottage, Kyorai heard things smacking the roof and plopping to the ground.
The next day, when the merchant returned, Kyorai was forced to give him his money back because most of the persimmons had fallen in the storm.
Kyorai does not seem to have been upset. He got a poem out of the experience and, because the storm had stripped the tree branches bare, a clear view of a nearby mountain. Some say he even achieved enlightenment.
In any case, he renamed his cottage Rakushisha – House of Fallen Persimmons – and an 18th century reconstruction still stands in the Saga district of Kyoto today. Many of those who visit are drawn by the connection with haiku giant Matsuo Basho: Kyorai was one of his chief disciples and played host to his teacher there.
But the story behind the hut’s name also catches at the mind because it overturns our expectations of how things should play out. The prospect of profit, a sudden storm and a destroyed crop: it should all end badly.
Underlying these expectations is the belief that nothing good can come from a fall. This belief is hardwired in the words we speak: ‘a fallen woman’, ‘fall into enemy hands’, ‘fall in battle’, ‘drop in sales’, ‘plummeting rankings’. To fall is to succumb to temptation or attack, to lose status, popularity or money. To fall is to become less.
Many of these expressions are found in Japanese and English. And they share another one: in both languages, you encounter love by falling in it. You don’t dance, skip or jump into love – you fall. Even if you land safely, the choice of words still betrays dismay at the powerlessness felt.
Our evolution – both as individuals and a species – is geared towards walking upright. If all goes well, we graduate from toddling to walking to running and to riding a bike. Falling is what happens when we fail. If we fall hard enough and in the wrong place, it ends in mud and blood.
This may explain our prejudice against the act, a prejudice revealed in yet another expression: fall from grace – a loss of someone’s good opinion.
Yet there is a different kind of grace though it also involves a fall. This is favour we have not earned, a gift that comes not because of something we have done or are expected to do but entirely because of the nature of the giver.
Landing like a fist in the gut, it knocks us off our feet. We build relationships and societies on ideas of reciprocity and contract. But to grace, our considered balances and agreements, spoken and unspoken, are a house of cards. It smiles – and blows.
So mystifying is grace that it is usually left to the divine. In human hands, giving is something that must be justified. If a present appears at an occasion other than a birthday or holiday, so will these words: ‘What’s this for?’
In human hands, giving must be explained, even if it’s with something as simple as ‘I saw this and thought of you’.
Gifts for no apparent reason terrify: like shopping with a credit card for things without price tags – you can’t relax until you’ve seen the size of the bill.
Not even charity comes close to grace. When you donate money, you expect it to be spent in certain ways rather than on, say, lap dancers. But grace gives much and asks nothing, not even a thank you.
How then to respond? You can always say, no thanks, and walk away. You can take grace for granted, which is accepting with your eyes closed. Or you can keep your eyes open and with hands held steady, receive.
But the last option is also the hardest because it means being prepared to fall. Like a storm that brings down promised persimmons, grace upsets expectations. Will you, like Kyorai the poet, then be able to step off the path of logical action and accustomed thought? Without knowing what lies at the bottom – it could be a poem, a view of a mountain, enlightenment or none of them – could you dive into the dark?
If your foot goes to the edge of the path then hesitates, it may be too soon for that final plunge. Practise with a less demanding tumble, a kind of Grace Lite.
It’s something easily found in the natural world and there’s a particularly nice example in the mountains northwest of Kyoto city. The Iwato Ochiba shrine is tiny, like the remote community it serves, but soaring gingko trees tower over it and in late autumn, they shower the shrine with yellow, fan-shaped leaves.
The moss and flagstones disappear under the gilt and the little wooden stage in the centre of the shrine floats in a sea of yellow.
I try to leave a donation but the access to the main building is closed off and the shrine deserted. Asked for nothing, giving nothing, I still walk on gold.
The wind breathes out and more gold leaf drifts down. It’s a fall that comes from grace – a fall, if you like, from grace.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
極落、極落: House of fallen persimmons, shrine of fallen leaves
18th December 2009
Rakushisha (落柿舎) is one of those attractions where people hover at the threshold, wondering if the place will be worth the entrance fee.
This is what you can see of the hermitage from the outside in autumn: persimmon trees, maple leaves and a thatched roof.
Fans of Matsuo Basho don't hesitate. Even if the current Rakushisha is a reconstruction, the original was visited by the poet three times and that connection is enough for them.
You may not be able to read the poems on the wooden plaques hung in the garden or carved on the stones. But lines in wood need no translation.
And sunlight is a universal language.
If you feel like writing a haiku, there is paper for you.
The owner of Rakushisha, poet Mukai Kyorai, probably won't read it seeing as he died in 1704. But a raincoat and hat are hung from a wall to show that the owner is in.
So you never know.
On the other hand, there is no entrance fee for Iwato Ochiba Jinja (岩戸落葉神社), a tiny mountain shrine northwest of Kyoto city. Some say that the shrine used to be called Ochikawa shrine but became known as Ochiba Jinja - the fallen leaves shrine.
In late autumn, the gingko trees soaring over the shrine shed gold leaf all over the grounds.
The leaves fill the stone basin where worshippers purify their hands and mouth.
And among the gingko, some maple too. Autumn in Kyoto wouldn't be the same without it.
18th December 2009
Rakushisha (落柿舎) is one of those attractions where people hover at the threshold, wondering if the place will be worth the entrance fee.
This is what you can see of the hermitage from the outside in autumn: persimmon trees, maple leaves and a thatched roof.
Fans of Matsuo Basho don't hesitate. Even if the current Rakushisha is a reconstruction, the original was visited by the poet three times and that connection is enough for them.
You may not be able to read the poems on the wooden plaques hung in the garden or carved on the stones. But lines in wood need no translation.
And sunlight is a universal language.
If you feel like writing a haiku, there is paper for you.
The owner of Rakushisha, poet Mukai Kyorai, probably won't read it seeing as he died in 1704. But a raincoat and hat are hung from a wall to show that the owner is in.
So you never know.
On the other hand, there is no entrance fee for Iwato Ochiba Jinja (岩戸落葉神社), a tiny mountain shrine northwest of Kyoto city. Some say that the shrine used to be called Ochikawa shrine but became known as Ochiba Jinja - the fallen leaves shrine.
In late autumn, the gingko trees soaring over the shrine shed gold leaf all over the grounds.
The leaves fill the stone basin where worshippers purify their hands and mouth.
And among the gingko, some maple too. Autumn in Kyoto wouldn't be the same without it.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Photos for the Tooth Fairy crowd
15th December 2009
People may be coming to this site. I can't tell because the gnome whose job it is to track blog visitors has not showed up for work for a few days. I suspect that it's because I did Something Technological.
So the presence of site visitors has become hard to prove - rather like verifying the existence of the Tooth Fairy. But here are some photos for those who may or may not be here.
Before the Arashiyama Hanatouro light-up, I found a pyramid of turnip outside a pickle shop.
Then the lights came on in the bamboo forest.
It was cold enough to see my own breath, which meant that this hawker did a brisk trade in hot sweet potato snacks, mitarashi dango and other things on sticks. Cocoa, as the sign says, costs 200 yen a cup. There didn't seem to be any turnips on sticks though.
15th December 2009
People may be coming to this site. I can't tell because the gnome whose job it is to track blog visitors has not showed up for work for a few days. I suspect that it's because I did Something Technological.
So the presence of site visitors has become hard to prove - rather like verifying the existence of the Tooth Fairy. But here are some photos for those who may or may not be here.
Before the Arashiyama Hanatouro light-up, I found a pyramid of turnip outside a pickle shop.
Then the lights came on in the bamboo forest.
It was cold enough to see my own breath, which meant that this hawker did a brisk trade in hot sweet potato snacks, mitarashi dango and other things on sticks. Cocoa, as the sign says, costs 200 yen a cup. There didn't seem to be any turnips on sticks though.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Lights in the mountain, lights in the bamboo
7th December 2009
If you're in Kyoto this week or the next, don't miss the Arashiyama Hanatouro. The light-up in the west of the city covers about 5.2km of waterfront, bamboo forest and ikebana-lined trails.
The place will probably be heaving with people if you go on the weekends but at least the crowds will keep you warm.
7th December 2009
If you're in Kyoto this week or the next, don't miss the Arashiyama Hanatouro. The light-up in the west of the city covers about 5.2km of waterfront, bamboo forest and ikebana-lined trails.
The place will probably be heaving with people if you go on the weekends but at least the crowds will keep you warm.
Friday, December 04, 2009
A word from the blogger
4th December 2009
I, er, appear to have done Something Technological. Er.
You may notice that the blog is looking a little different. Believe me, I'm surprised too and I was the one doing the clicking.
And if you like to click on buttons, there's a new one here for you. Look for the word 'Follow' at the top of the blog then finger + mouse.
Good things may happen. If nothing else, there's safety in numbers.
4th December 2009
I, er, appear to have done Something Technological. Er.
You may notice that the blog is looking a little different. Believe me, I'm surprised too and I was the one doing the clicking.
And if you like to click on buttons, there's a new one here for you. Look for the word 'Follow' at the top of the blog then finger + mouse.
Good things may happen. If nothing else, there's safety in numbers.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
A walk in the woods
3rd December 2009
The road in to Shimogamo Jinja runs through a forest. It runs long and straight: long enough so you do not approach lightly and straight enough for you to gather arrow intent as you move to the shrine.
Through the gateway after the place of purification.
And inside:
Autumn left in glorious tatters.
3rd December 2009
The road in to Shimogamo Jinja runs through a forest. It runs long and straight: long enough so you do not approach lightly and straight enough for you to gather arrow intent as you move to the shrine.
Through the gateway after the place of purification.
And inside:
Autumn left in glorious tatters.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Autumn leaves and not-urinals
28th November 2009
Kyoto's November is lovely but Kyoto has been around for centuries and news of that loveliness has got out.
Kyoto's November is crowds and coach buses.
Still, there are a few spots left where you can find autumn colours and take a picture of them without the population of Greater Tokyo - last seen in your sakura photos - appearing as well.
Seiryo-ji, better known as Saga Shakado, in the west of Kyoto is not on the list of famous momiji temples so it doesn't have the profusion of maples that, say, Tofukuji does.
But it has a great garden, intriguing angles and enough quiet for you to think (or not think, if you practise Zen) even in the height of the fall frenzy.
An Edo-period stone garden (karesansui). Not, as you may first think, a urinal that fell over.
But some of the best sights are not to be found at your destination but along the way. Like this gentleman looking out at the world from the walls of his garden.
And these friendly faces near an Arashiyama bus stop.
28th November 2009
Kyoto's November is lovely but Kyoto has been around for centuries and news of that loveliness has got out.
Kyoto's November is crowds and coach buses.
Still, there are a few spots left where you can find autumn colours and take a picture of them without the population of Greater Tokyo - last seen in your sakura photos - appearing as well.
Seiryo-ji, better known as Saga Shakado, in the west of Kyoto is not on the list of famous momiji temples so it doesn't have the profusion of maples that, say, Tofukuji does.
But it has a great garden, intriguing angles and enough quiet for you to think (or not think, if you practise Zen) even in the height of the fall frenzy.
An Edo-period stone garden (karesansui). Not, as you may first think, a urinal that fell over.
But some of the best sights are not to be found at your destination but along the way. Like this gentleman looking out at the world from the walls of his garden.
And these friendly faces near an Arashiyama bus stop.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Land of the small and cute
19th November 2009
As I left a mall today, a man was wheeling his bike out to the road. In the child seat was a little girl in pink.
Our eyes met. Large eyes, rosy cheeks, runny nose. I smiled. Most toddlers take a little time to consider you - animal, vegetable or mineral? - before deciding whether or not to smile back but this kid just grinned.
Her father wheeled her away. In the front basket was stuffed a new pillow wrapped in plastic. It was as big as she was.
My smile lasted all the way to the supermarket, where I had to put it away because if you smile for no apparent reason, people look at you funny.
Though I bet they wouldn't if I had rosy cheeks and a runny nose and was no bigger than a pillow.
19th November 2009
As I left a mall today, a man was wheeling his bike out to the road. In the child seat was a little girl in pink.
Our eyes met. Large eyes, rosy cheeks, runny nose. I smiled. Most toddlers take a little time to consider you - animal, vegetable or mineral? - before deciding whether or not to smile back but this kid just grinned.
Her father wheeled her away. In the front basket was stuffed a new pillow wrapped in plastic. It was as big as she was.
My smile lasted all the way to the supermarket, where I had to put it away because if you smile for no apparent reason, people look at you funny.
Though I bet they wouldn't if I had rosy cheeks and a runny nose and was no bigger than a pillow.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
The Lazy Gaijin: Fairly Edible Meals Made With Ingredients From A Japanese Supermarket And A Minimum Of Fuss
Recipe No.1: Onion and sweet potato soup
8th November 2009
There are lots of things I'd like to do this lifetime. Some are one-off events, like seeing the Northern Lights, while others are more in the line of ongoing missions. This is one of the latter: making good soup without messing around with bones or resorting to stock cubes and powders.
I invented a fairly edible soup on Saturday which fulfils these two requirements. Here's the recipe. (The measurements will be approximate because life's an adventure and sometimes cooking is too.)
Makes 3 servings
Ingredients:
Water, 1 litre
Pasta water, around 250 cc (left over from cooking lunch. Probably doesn't make much difference if you leave it out)
Big onions, 3 (because they came in bags of 3)
Small Japanese sweet potatoes, 3 (ditto)
Konbu, 1 piece (Pronounced kombu but spelled konbu. I was aiming to use a 10 cm square piece but the one I pulled out of the bag was bigger and I couldn't be bothered to cut it so... I've been wondering why konbu is used so much in Japanese stocks. I believe it's added for umami. And perhaps for luck)
Tofu (however much you want to eat)
Chicken (As above. I got enough to cover my hand because a packet with that much was going for 30 per cent off at the supermarket)
Soya sauce or salt (I ended up using both)
Sake (Probably optional but I used it to marinade the chicken. You can also drink it if you get thirsty. No one will check if you're old enough to)
Here we go:
1. Wipe the konbu (pronounced kombu but spelled konbu) with a wet cloth. I'm not sure why this is necessary but Harumi Kurihara says to and I don't argue with her. At least, not very loudly).
2. Put the konbu in a pot with the water and pasta water that you may or may not be using. Leave for 10 minutes then light a fire under the lot. Harumi-sensei says to take the konbu out when the water becomes warm, whatever that means. I interpreted this to be that stage before serious bubbles appear in the water.
3. While the konbu was doing its 10 minutes in the pot, you should have cut the chicken up into pieces that will fit into your mouth and marinaded them with soya sauce and optional sake. I used however much came out when I poured in one circular motion over the bowl.
4. Cut up the onions. The smaller the pieces, the less boiling time but on the other hand, you'll suffer onion fumes for longer while dicing with death. If the water is boiling, dump in the onion as quickly as you can.
5. Cut up the sweet potatoes. Again, the smaller the better. And this time, there are no fumes, hurray!
6. Oh, and add the sweet potatoes to the pot.
7. Keep the boil going until the onions and sweet potatoes almost dissolve. If you've finished the washing-up and start to get bored, you can speed up the process by hitting them with a ladle or something.
8. When you add the chicken is up to you. I dumped it in when I couldn't stand the suspense any longer. And anyway, I wanted to wash the bowl it was in.
9. At some point, put in the tofu. You can dice it first or just toss it in and hit it with your ladle. Tofu rarely fights back.
10. The timing of the spinach addition - oh bugger, I forgot to put spinach in the ingredients list - is far more important. Spinach does not seem to be one of those things that take kindly to boiling so throw it in only when you're ready to serve.
11. When are you ready to serve? When the water level in the pot goes down, the onions and sweet potatoes have turned into a kind of sludge and your stomach starts to make socially unacceptable noises, it's time to add the spinach and wrap up this gig. First aid measures involving soya sauce or salt will probably be necessary. And a little prayer never hurts.
Verdict:
It doesn't taste half-bad. The yellowish-grey colour of the soup is regrettable but you can always close your eyes. It also explains why there are no photos in this post. The main thing is, the stuff is edible and the flavour didn't come from roasting bones or stuff that will make your hair fall out. This is an experiment I plan to repeat.
(I also posted this in the other blog but no one seems to go there. Which is fair enough, seeing as I hardly post in it.)
Recipe No.1: Onion and sweet potato soup
8th November 2009
There are lots of things I'd like to do this lifetime. Some are one-off events, like seeing the Northern Lights, while others are more in the line of ongoing missions. This is one of the latter: making good soup without messing around with bones or resorting to stock cubes and powders.
I invented a fairly edible soup on Saturday which fulfils these two requirements. Here's the recipe. (The measurements will be approximate because life's an adventure and sometimes cooking is too.)
Makes 3 servings
Ingredients:
Water, 1 litre
Pasta water, around 250 cc (left over from cooking lunch. Probably doesn't make much difference if you leave it out)
Big onions, 3 (because they came in bags of 3)
Small Japanese sweet potatoes, 3 (ditto)
Konbu, 1 piece (Pronounced kombu but spelled konbu. I was aiming to use a 10 cm square piece but the one I pulled out of the bag was bigger and I couldn't be bothered to cut it so... I've been wondering why konbu is used so much in Japanese stocks. I believe it's added for umami. And perhaps for luck)
Tofu (however much you want to eat)
Chicken (As above. I got enough to cover my hand because a packet with that much was going for 30 per cent off at the supermarket)
Soya sauce or salt (I ended up using both)
Sake (Probably optional but I used it to marinade the chicken. You can also drink it if you get thirsty. No one will check if you're old enough to)
Here we go:
1. Wipe the konbu (pronounced kombu but spelled konbu) with a wet cloth. I'm not sure why this is necessary but Harumi Kurihara says to and I don't argue with her. At least, not very loudly).
2. Put the konbu in a pot with the water and pasta water that you may or may not be using. Leave for 10 minutes then light a fire under the lot. Harumi-sensei says to take the konbu out when the water becomes warm, whatever that means. I interpreted this to be that stage before serious bubbles appear in the water.
3. While the konbu was doing its 10 minutes in the pot, you should have cut the chicken up into pieces that will fit into your mouth and marinaded them with soya sauce and optional sake. I used however much came out when I poured in one circular motion over the bowl.
4. Cut up the onions. The smaller the pieces, the less boiling time but on the other hand, you'll suffer onion fumes for longer while dicing with death. If the water is boiling, dump in the onion as quickly as you can.
5. Cut up the sweet potatoes. Again, the smaller the better. And this time, there are no fumes, hurray!
6. Oh, and add the sweet potatoes to the pot.
7. Keep the boil going until the onions and sweet potatoes almost dissolve. If you've finished the washing-up and start to get bored, you can speed up the process by hitting them with a ladle or something.
8. When you add the chicken is up to you. I dumped it in when I couldn't stand the suspense any longer. And anyway, I wanted to wash the bowl it was in.
9. At some point, put in the tofu. You can dice it first or just toss it in and hit it with your ladle. Tofu rarely fights back.
10. The timing of the spinach addition - oh bugger, I forgot to put spinach in the ingredients list - is far more important. Spinach does not seem to be one of those things that take kindly to boiling so throw it in only when you're ready to serve.
11. When are you ready to serve? When the water level in the pot goes down, the onions and sweet potatoes have turned into a kind of sludge and your stomach starts to make socially unacceptable noises, it's time to add the spinach and wrap up this gig. First aid measures involving soya sauce or salt will probably be necessary. And a little prayer never hurts.
Verdict:
It doesn't taste half-bad. The yellowish-grey colour of the soup is regrettable but you can always close your eyes. It also explains why there are no photos in this post. The main thing is, the stuff is edible and the flavour didn't come from roasting bones or stuff that will make your hair fall out. This is an experiment I plan to repeat.
(I also posted this in the other blog but no one seems to go there. Which is fair enough, seeing as I hardly post in it.)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
What I did during my vacation
Eve of All Hallows, 2009
I queued. I didn’t really mean to. When I packed to leave Kyoto for Singapore, I didn’t plan to do much more than catch up with people and books I hadn’t seen in months.
But avoiding crowds was high on my list of things to do. So was staying out of any kind of queue because there are only so many people you can go on holiday with.
Then it was announced that Neil Gaiman would be appearing at the Singapore Writers Festival at the end of October.
Are introductions in order? Neil Gaiman: author of The Sandman, a fantasy series that has become so much of a hit that the comic books are now called graphic novels, and writer of short stories, novels, poems, film scripts and children’s books. Of these, The Graveyard Book has spent over a year on the children’s best-seller list of the New York Times though everyone I know who loves the work is old enough to drive.
It’s a reimagining of The Jungle Book; instead of a boy being brought up in a jungle by animals, he’s brought up in a cemetery by dead people. And a vampire.
The novel may well turn out to be one of those books you keep returning to and measuring yourself against, like standing beside a mark scratched on a wall to show how tall you were at nine because you want to see how much you’ve grown.
So great that the author would be coming to town, yes? There was only one snag: all the tickets for his three events were gone on the first day of distribution, even though it was announced only via Twitter.
To accommodate the demand from everyone not on the Twitter feed, the festival staff increased the venue capacity and announced that they would release a ‘VERY VERY LIMITED number of tickets’ on Sept 26.
When I read this on the festival website, I began to see visions of queues. There’s one thing I haven’t mentioned about Mr Gaiman. Yes, he’s versatile, yes, he’s prolific and yes, he wins all those awards but what he really is, is a queue-maker (like a rain dancer but more horizontal).
The mere hint of his presence is enough to draw previously unconnected people out of the great mass of humanity and assemble them into a line. This happens all over the world – at literary festivals, bookstores and conventions – and I knew it would happen on Sept 26 at The Arts House because of the promise of tickets to see He Who Brings Queues.
The question was, how early would I have to turn up before the distribution time of 11am if I wanted to be sure of a pair of those VERY VERY LIMITED tickets?
It didn’t help that I work late and go to bed even later. But after crashing out for five hours and hitting the alarm clock’s snooze button for half an hour more, I stumbled into the kitchen at 7.30am.
My mother was there. ‘You mean you haven’t gone to bed yet?’ she said.
Then again, she might not have been my mother. Since I’m technically not awake between the hours of 6am and 9am, anyone I see then must be a figment of my imagination.
The taxi-driver looked pretty real though. I asked him to take me to Parliament House – near The Arts House but not in the area closed off for the F1 races that weekend. He frowned. I held my breath: was he going to refuse to go anywhere near the barricades?
It turned out that he just didn’t know where Parliament was.
But between the both of us, we got there. It was almost 9.30am – one and a half hours before the box office’s opening time – when I made my way past the F1 barricades and security personnel to The Arts House.
Two girls in short shorts were approaching from the venue. ‘…queuing since 6.40!’ said one of them as she went past.
I stopped. What if the line had reached such epic proportions that those two had given up and were on their way home?
I kept on walking. Even if I didn’t get the tickets, there might be a story in it. To be a writer is to slink up to life with a scavenger’s optimism.
The queue began at the locked front door and snaked out of the portico. Since each person was eligible for two tickets, the line was actually twice as long as it appeared. Was I too late?
I left my bag at the end of the queue to stake a spot in that fine Singaporean tradition of chopeing and went to talk to the people up ahead. The first person in the line said she’d been there since 6.40am. She beamed at me, her smile and light green tudung unwilted despite the heat. No. 2 clocked in ‘just past 7’ and No.3 and No.4, at around 7.30am.
Humbled, I went back to do some proper queuing. I’d brought two books but a conversation was starting up in my neck of the queue, mainly about the tickets. One woman confessed that she was hoping that the F1 road closures would deter fans from coming. I had the same thought; devious minds think alike.
To pass the time, we reminisced about other occasions when Singaporeans had gotten into line and stayed there for hours. But the girl behind me was from the Philippines and knew nothing about the Great Hello Kitty Scuffles of 2000.
In the January of that year, McDonald’s launched a promotion offering customers Hello Kitty toys with each Extra Value Meal they bought. Lines sprang up, tempers grew short, fights broke out and people were arrested. At one outlet, a glass door broke against the press of the crowd, injuring seven.
You can think of a queue as a social microcosm. In one line, you’re told what a society values, how much it wants it, how much trust there is in the system to provide it and whether people will resist the urge to jump the queue.
Almost 10 years on from the Hello Kitty Scuffles, how was Singapore doing? The line outside The Arts House that Saturday morning presented the country as orderly and international.
But the nature of the queue might have had something to do with the fact that it was there for Neil Gaiman. For a start, more people were reading than fiddling with their phones.
Still, there was no guarantee of what would happen if there weren’t enough tickets to go round. Some of the books people were holding looked pretty heavy. If the situation turned Hello Kitty, things could get ugly.
For now though, everything was calm. A trio went past, wheeling a trolley of equipment – probably for an F1 event. They seemed surprised to see so many people sitting in a line on the ground and reading.
10.05am – an hour to go and the sun was weighing down. Anybody want to share life stories?
So I talked to the five people around me in the queue. There was Kim, a student from the Philippines, Xuemei, a civil servant, Eldred, who draws, Wanida, who works for Apple and had come with a laptop, and Pat, who handles administration at a polytechnic, has five children aged three to 14, takes all of them on holiday, teaches women to give birth and is on the fast track to a medal.
She said that if she got a pair of tickets, one would go to her 13-year-old son, also a fan.
‘And where is he?’ I asked.
‘At home,’ she said and laughed. ‘Sleeping.’
There was a collective intake of breath as we considered the likelihood of our mothers queuing up for Neil Gaiman tickets for us while we stayed in bed.
‘I don’t think my mother even knows who Neil Gaiman is,’ said one woman who will remain anonymous in case her parents read this.
On his blog, he describes himself as the ‘guy you’ve never heard of’ who ‘gets more people in his book-signing line than anyone else’. This line has been known to stretch to about 600 people.
Our queue was nothing along those lines but everyone in it was competing for a fixed number of tickets. The conversation flowed, snagging at times on the uneasiness underneath.
Two people ahead in the line stood up and shook out their groundsheet. ‘Do you think they’re giving up?’ someone asked hopefully.
‘They came with a mat – they’re not going to give up,’ someone else growled.
Sure enough, the two rearranged their sheet and sat down again.
I looked away to see an old man staring at us. A cap of flashing pink sequins on his head, he shuffled past, a smile crinkling his face. ‘Ni men hao!’ he bellowed. Hello to you too. Perhaps it takes a lunatic to acknowledge a whole line of them.
People were still arriving. They would do a double-take at the queue which now stretched along the front of the building and onto the grass at the other side. Then they would go to the end, their shoulders slumped.
11am – my queue buddies and I stood up. We paused only to get each other’s contact details then faced forward as if we could see through the bodies to the number of tickets left. Were people still talking? I don’t know; I couldn’t hear them any more.
And then I finally reached the table where the festival staff were handing out tickets from three dwindling stacks.
Maybe I was sunstroked out but I couldn’t quite believe it, not even when two tickets were in my (newly tanned) hand. The five who queued with me had their tickets too and all of us had picked the same event. ‘Let’s meet for lunch or something before that,’ said Kim.
Outside the portico, a burly, long-haired man in black was taking a photo of his tickets.
But not everyone was happy – about 20 people had to go away empty-handed. Amid the cries of disappointment, one young girl looked stricken. A few people exchanged words with the festival staff but as far as I could tell, they were polite. Perhaps we’d come out from under the shadow of Hello Kitty.
I couldn’t leave without seeing how it all ended because the conditions that give rise to a queue are also those that create a community: people with the same purpose come together, demanding attention through presence. But there is also envy of those ahead and a gnawing anxiety that you won’t get what they will. The factors are always the same yet the manner in which similar desires are balanced against competing interests is different each time.
So I stayed because I wanted to see what kind of queue, what kind of community we’d made. And when I left at last, I took more than tickets away with me.
When I got home, I headed straight for the shower, relieved that for this at least, I didn’t have to line up.
Because you know what I said about queues and community-building and all that stuff? When it comes to the bathroom, none of it applies.
Eve of All Hallows, 2009
I queued. I didn’t really mean to. When I packed to leave Kyoto for Singapore, I didn’t plan to do much more than catch up with people and books I hadn’t seen in months.
But avoiding crowds was high on my list of things to do. So was staying out of any kind of queue because there are only so many people you can go on holiday with.
Then it was announced that Neil Gaiman would be appearing at the Singapore Writers Festival at the end of October.
Are introductions in order? Neil Gaiman: author of The Sandman, a fantasy series that has become so much of a hit that the comic books are now called graphic novels, and writer of short stories, novels, poems, film scripts and children’s books. Of these, The Graveyard Book has spent over a year on the children’s best-seller list of the New York Times though everyone I know who loves the work is old enough to drive.
It’s a reimagining of The Jungle Book; instead of a boy being brought up in a jungle by animals, he’s brought up in a cemetery by dead people. And a vampire.
The novel may well turn out to be one of those books you keep returning to and measuring yourself against, like standing beside a mark scratched on a wall to show how tall you were at nine because you want to see how much you’ve grown.
So great that the author would be coming to town, yes? There was only one snag: all the tickets for his three events were gone on the first day of distribution, even though it was announced only via Twitter.
To accommodate the demand from everyone not on the Twitter feed, the festival staff increased the venue capacity and announced that they would release a ‘VERY VERY LIMITED number of tickets’ on Sept 26.
When I read this on the festival website, I began to see visions of queues. There’s one thing I haven’t mentioned about Mr Gaiman. Yes, he’s versatile, yes, he’s prolific and yes, he wins all those awards but what he really is, is a queue-maker (like a rain dancer but more horizontal).
The mere hint of his presence is enough to draw previously unconnected people out of the great mass of humanity and assemble them into a line. This happens all over the world – at literary festivals, bookstores and conventions – and I knew it would happen on Sept 26 at The Arts House because of the promise of tickets to see He Who Brings Queues.
The question was, how early would I have to turn up before the distribution time of 11am if I wanted to be sure of a pair of those VERY VERY LIMITED tickets?
It didn’t help that I work late and go to bed even later. But after crashing out for five hours and hitting the alarm clock’s snooze button for half an hour more, I stumbled into the kitchen at 7.30am.
My mother was there. ‘You mean you haven’t gone to bed yet?’ she said.
Then again, she might not have been my mother. Since I’m technically not awake between the hours of 6am and 9am, anyone I see then must be a figment of my imagination.
The taxi-driver looked pretty real though. I asked him to take me to Parliament House – near The Arts House but not in the area closed off for the F1 races that weekend. He frowned. I held my breath: was he going to refuse to go anywhere near the barricades?
It turned out that he just didn’t know where Parliament was.
But between the both of us, we got there. It was almost 9.30am – one and a half hours before the box office’s opening time – when I made my way past the F1 barricades and security personnel to The Arts House.
Two girls in short shorts were approaching from the venue. ‘…queuing since 6.40!’ said one of them as she went past.
I stopped. What if the line had reached such epic proportions that those two had given up and were on their way home?
I kept on walking. Even if I didn’t get the tickets, there might be a story in it. To be a writer is to slink up to life with a scavenger’s optimism.
The queue began at the locked front door and snaked out of the portico. Since each person was eligible for two tickets, the line was actually twice as long as it appeared. Was I too late?
I left my bag at the end of the queue to stake a spot in that fine Singaporean tradition of chopeing and went to talk to the people up ahead. The first person in the line said she’d been there since 6.40am. She beamed at me, her smile and light green tudung unwilted despite the heat. No. 2 clocked in ‘just past 7’ and No.3 and No.4, at around 7.30am.
Humbled, I went back to do some proper queuing. I’d brought two books but a conversation was starting up in my neck of the queue, mainly about the tickets. One woman confessed that she was hoping that the F1 road closures would deter fans from coming. I had the same thought; devious minds think alike.
To pass the time, we reminisced about other occasions when Singaporeans had gotten into line and stayed there for hours. But the girl behind me was from the Philippines and knew nothing about the Great Hello Kitty Scuffles of 2000.
In the January of that year, McDonald’s launched a promotion offering customers Hello Kitty toys with each Extra Value Meal they bought. Lines sprang up, tempers grew short, fights broke out and people were arrested. At one outlet, a glass door broke against the press of the crowd, injuring seven.
You can think of a queue as a social microcosm. In one line, you’re told what a society values, how much it wants it, how much trust there is in the system to provide it and whether people will resist the urge to jump the queue.
Almost 10 years on from the Hello Kitty Scuffles, how was Singapore doing? The line outside The Arts House that Saturday morning presented the country as orderly and international.
But the nature of the queue might have had something to do with the fact that it was there for Neil Gaiman. For a start, more people were reading than fiddling with their phones.
Still, there was no guarantee of what would happen if there weren’t enough tickets to go round. Some of the books people were holding looked pretty heavy. If the situation turned Hello Kitty, things could get ugly.
For now though, everything was calm. A trio went past, wheeling a trolley of equipment – probably for an F1 event. They seemed surprised to see so many people sitting in a line on the ground and reading.
10.05am – an hour to go and the sun was weighing down. Anybody want to share life stories?
So I talked to the five people around me in the queue. There was Kim, a student from the Philippines, Xuemei, a civil servant, Eldred, who draws, Wanida, who works for Apple and had come with a laptop, and Pat, who handles administration at a polytechnic, has five children aged three to 14, takes all of them on holiday, teaches women to give birth and is on the fast track to a medal.
She said that if she got a pair of tickets, one would go to her 13-year-old son, also a fan.
‘And where is he?’ I asked.
‘At home,’ she said and laughed. ‘Sleeping.’
There was a collective intake of breath as we considered the likelihood of our mothers queuing up for Neil Gaiman tickets for us while we stayed in bed.
‘I don’t think my mother even knows who Neil Gaiman is,’ said one woman who will remain anonymous in case her parents read this.
On his blog, he describes himself as the ‘guy you’ve never heard of’ who ‘gets more people in his book-signing line than anyone else’. This line has been known to stretch to about 600 people.
Our queue was nothing along those lines but everyone in it was competing for a fixed number of tickets. The conversation flowed, snagging at times on the uneasiness underneath.
Two people ahead in the line stood up and shook out their groundsheet. ‘Do you think they’re giving up?’ someone asked hopefully.
‘They came with a mat – they’re not going to give up,’ someone else growled.
Sure enough, the two rearranged their sheet and sat down again.
I looked away to see an old man staring at us. A cap of flashing pink sequins on his head, he shuffled past, a smile crinkling his face. ‘Ni men hao!’ he bellowed. Hello to you too. Perhaps it takes a lunatic to acknowledge a whole line of them.
People were still arriving. They would do a double-take at the queue which now stretched along the front of the building and onto the grass at the other side. Then they would go to the end, their shoulders slumped.
11am – my queue buddies and I stood up. We paused only to get each other’s contact details then faced forward as if we could see through the bodies to the number of tickets left. Were people still talking? I don’t know; I couldn’t hear them any more.
And then I finally reached the table where the festival staff were handing out tickets from three dwindling stacks.
Maybe I was sunstroked out but I couldn’t quite believe it, not even when two tickets were in my (newly tanned) hand. The five who queued with me had their tickets too and all of us had picked the same event. ‘Let’s meet for lunch or something before that,’ said Kim.
Outside the portico, a burly, long-haired man in black was taking a photo of his tickets.
But not everyone was happy – about 20 people had to go away empty-handed. Amid the cries of disappointment, one young girl looked stricken. A few people exchanged words with the festival staff but as far as I could tell, they were polite. Perhaps we’d come out from under the shadow of Hello Kitty.
I couldn’t leave without seeing how it all ended because the conditions that give rise to a queue are also those that create a community: people with the same purpose come together, demanding attention through presence. But there is also envy of those ahead and a gnawing anxiety that you won’t get what they will. The factors are always the same yet the manner in which similar desires are balanced against competing interests is different each time.
So I stayed because I wanted to see what kind of queue, what kind of community we’d made. And when I left at last, I took more than tickets away with me.
When I got home, I headed straight for the shower, relieved that for this at least, I didn’t have to line up.
Because you know what I said about queues and community-building and all that stuff? When it comes to the bathroom, none of it applies.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Egmont and the seventh
20th October 2009
A concert again after so long away and the NY Philharmonic after even longer. This time, Beethoven was the one singing in the dark.
The brass was a little...startling but the strings alone were worth the (nosebleed) price of admission.
I'd have heard more of them if the audience hadn't been so quick to clap. An orchestra doesn't stop playing even after the fingers lift away and the bow leaves the strings. When the sound is gone, sound remains - an echo encore drifting in a space where no wind blows.
But applause slaps the sound away.
Wait, won't you wait a little longer? Only the first of the snowflake sound has fallen on my tongue.
20th October 2009
A concert again after so long away and the NY Philharmonic after even longer. This time, Beethoven was the one singing in the dark.
The brass was a little...startling but the strings alone were worth the (nosebleed) price of admission.
I'd have heard more of them if the audience hadn't been so quick to clap. An orchestra doesn't stop playing even after the fingers lift away and the bow leaves the strings. When the sound is gone, sound remains - an echo encore drifting in a space where no wind blows.
But applause slaps the sound away.
Wait, won't you wait a little longer? Only the first of the snowflake sound has fallen on my tongue.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Undead 101
13th October 2009
So I was working on a column today and for reasons I'll make up later, it suddenly veered off into the subject of zombie killing.
At which point I realised that I had no idea what to do if a zombie came through the door. I didn't think that the Internet, wide and Wikified as it is, would have any information on it either but I typed "zombie kill" into the Google search field anyway and hit enter.
Oh me of little faith.
Pages and pages of information. Whether the suggestions have been field-tested is another question but at least they're there - with brain diagrams and everything. There's even a game where you can kill zombie squirrels.
I wonder if virtual undead rodents come under the SPCA's purview.
13th October 2009
So I was working on a column today and for reasons I'll make up later, it suddenly veered off into the subject of zombie killing.
At which point I realised that I had no idea what to do if a zombie came through the door. I didn't think that the Internet, wide and Wikified as it is, would have any information on it either but I typed "zombie kill" into the Google search field anyway and hit enter.
Oh me of little faith.
Pages and pages of information. Whether the suggestions have been field-tested is another question but at least they're there - with brain diagrams and everything. There's even a game where you can kill zombie squirrels.
I wonder if virtual undead rodents come under the SPCA's purview.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Paths we have not known
21st September 2009
Sometimes, it is the road more travelled that haunts us.
'Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension...
'Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating...
'Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.'
- Tim Kreider, The New York Times' Happy Days blog
Then there is novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, writing in Tigana: 'There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.'
A comforting belief but one which - and I know this from long years of trying - takes work.
21st September 2009
Sometimes, it is the road more travelled that haunts us.
'Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension...
'Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating...
'Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.'
- Tim Kreider, The New York Times' Happy Days blog
Then there is novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, writing in Tigana: 'There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.'
A comforting belief but one which - and I know this from long years of trying - takes work.
Friday, September 04, 2009
For all you kids who want to be writers...
4th September 2009
...I should disclose the amount on my latest royalty cheque. After a year of sales, the figure came to a grand total of $3.95.
Well, that should give the taxman heart palpitations.
So...time for a commercial?
Time for a commercial.
"Singapore. Malaysia. Brunei. We share a region and now we share a book. Punched Lines: Sit-down Comedy From Southeast Asia - already at a bookshop near you!"*
I wrote this in 2001: "In a country with four major races, English has become the neutral linguistic ground and that neutrality has crystallised in the form of the acronym. Other countries use it too of course - for companies, transport systems, rebel groups - but Singapore is umbilically attached to it. Hospitals, schools, banks, expressways - we are born in collections of letters to travel on them, study in them and give them our money."
It's still true. And thanks to Punched Lines, I'll be giving my bank $3.95 this year.
Let's shoot for $4.95 in 2010!
*Assuming that you're near Select Books in Tanglin Shopping Centre.
4th September 2009
...I should disclose the amount on my latest royalty cheque. After a year of sales, the figure came to a grand total of $3.95.
Well, that should give the taxman heart palpitations.
So...time for a commercial?
Time for a commercial.
"Singapore. Malaysia. Brunei. We share a region and now we share a book. Punched Lines: Sit-down Comedy From Southeast Asia - already at a bookshop near you!"*
I wrote this in 2001: "In a country with four major races, English has become the neutral linguistic ground and that neutrality has crystallised in the form of the acronym. Other countries use it too of course - for companies, transport systems, rebel groups - but Singapore is umbilically attached to it. Hospitals, schools, banks, expressways - we are born in collections of letters to travel on them, study in them and give them our money."
It's still true. And thanks to Punched Lines, I'll be giving my bank $3.95 this year.
Let's shoot for $4.95 in 2010!
*Assuming that you're near Select Books in Tanglin Shopping Centre.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The universe next door
23rd August 2009
From Ingram my American neighbour, I learned that the bathroom really is a dangerous place.
In Kyoto to research the Japanese legal system, he once went to a public bath. He knew the ritual involved – shower before you get into the bath – but he wasn’t expecting what would happen with the two old men in it.
They’d never seen a naked Jew before and proceeded to ask very probing questions. At his most vulnerable and unable to speak much Japanese, he did his best to explain circumcision anyway. The old men were astonished and kept on asking questions. He soldiered on with the explanations and emerged from his bath with his composure a little dented but his sense of humour intact.
From Klaus my German neighbour, I learned how to open jars with stubborn caps. Slip the point of a knife into that thin space between the edge of the lid and the jar and lever up. Once you hear a pop, the lid will come off without a fuss.
Open a jar for someone and he’ll have an open jar. Teach him how to open it and he’ll be able to eat from jars for life.
The jar Klaus taught me to open was one of rotkohl, pickled red cabbage from Germany. He taught me that rotkohl is better hot than cold.
A retired maths teacher, he spends half the year in Japan with his Japanese wife and the other half in Hamburg. They met at an English school in South Africa.
But he also spent time studying the language in Malta – ‘it’s cheaper than in England’ – and on the Maltese island of Gozo, he met an old man with a thousand books.
When he was young, the man left for the United States to look for work. Once he found it, he crammed it into his life, working for as much as 20 hours a day. He had no time for the books he loved so he collected them, intending to read them when he retired.
In time he grew rich and when he retired, he had a printing company to pass on to his children. He moved back to Malta, built a splendid house and began to read.
All had gone according to plan except for one thing: he was losing his sight.
My neighbour spoke of him as an old man in a room full of books he would never be able to read. He told Klaus, don’t wait.
A year later, Klaus retired. He was 49. Since then, he’s spent his time travelling and learning languages: first English because he wanted to read more about politics and now, Japanese.
His wife Kimiko said he could spend as much as 10 hours a day studying. They don’t have much but, as Klaus said, 'we don’t need much'.
From Maripass, I learned that when a Mexican says a chilli pepper is harmless, to take her words with a sea of salt.
And if the same Mexican tells you a chilli is hot, there’s no need to check for yourself unless you’re interested in near-death experiences.
From Lars the guitar-strumming Swede and Peter the Norwegian, who cross-dressed as a fairy one Halloween, I learned that the image of Scandinavians as a sober, reserved folk does not give the entire picture.
From Kim the South Korean, I learned that you can play Celine Dion on a bamboo flute.
Whenever he started warming up, I would open my door to hear him better. After he was done with the traditional tunes, he would move on to the Titanic song.
He introduced himself as a businessman when we first met but after we got to know each other better, he told me that he was a political refugee.
His exact words: ‘I write on Internet, I hate (name of politician). And police catch me.’
My first thought: is this guy for real?
He spoke little English and less Japanese and I didn’t know Korean so conversations took time. But when he showed me pictures of his wife and children, the look on his face said enough.
After a few months in Japan, he told me that his legal adviser in Seoul had called to say that it was safe to return.
I still don’t know what to make of his political dissident story but I can believe in the shochu he shared, in his parting gifts of pine nuts and ginseng snacks, and in his music – even the Celine Dion.
From the family of northern Chinese whose names I never found out, I learned nothing but received handmade dumplings, so many I ran out of vinegar.
From the Australian who might have been called Becky, I learned that when the Internet disappeared, I should go into the mysterious room under the stairs, insinuate my hands into the nest of wires, pull out all the plugs I could find then put them back.
On occasions like this, residents, including those I’d never met, would pour out of their rooms saying, ‘Is it just my computer or…?’
Then as we stood around, waiting to be connected, that would be the time to start learning about the neighbours, and from them.
23rd August 2009
From Ingram my American neighbour, I learned that the bathroom really is a dangerous place.
In Kyoto to research the Japanese legal system, he once went to a public bath. He knew the ritual involved – shower before you get into the bath – but he wasn’t expecting what would happen with the two old men in it.
They’d never seen a naked Jew before and proceeded to ask very probing questions. At his most vulnerable and unable to speak much Japanese, he did his best to explain circumcision anyway. The old men were astonished and kept on asking questions. He soldiered on with the explanations and emerged from his bath with his composure a little dented but his sense of humour intact.
From Klaus my German neighbour, I learned how to open jars with stubborn caps. Slip the point of a knife into that thin space between the edge of the lid and the jar and lever up. Once you hear a pop, the lid will come off without a fuss.
Open a jar for someone and he’ll have an open jar. Teach him how to open it and he’ll be able to eat from jars for life.
The jar Klaus taught me to open was one of rotkohl, pickled red cabbage from Germany. He taught me that rotkohl is better hot than cold.
A retired maths teacher, he spends half the year in Japan with his Japanese wife and the other half in Hamburg. They met at an English school in South Africa.
But he also spent time studying the language in Malta – ‘it’s cheaper than in England’ – and on the Maltese island of Gozo, he met an old man with a thousand books.
When he was young, the man left for the United States to look for work. Once he found it, he crammed it into his life, working for as much as 20 hours a day. He had no time for the books he loved so he collected them, intending to read them when he retired.
In time he grew rich and when he retired, he had a printing company to pass on to his children. He moved back to Malta, built a splendid house and began to read.
All had gone according to plan except for one thing: he was losing his sight.
My neighbour spoke of him as an old man in a room full of books he would never be able to read. He told Klaus, don’t wait.
A year later, Klaus retired. He was 49. Since then, he’s spent his time travelling and learning languages: first English because he wanted to read more about politics and now, Japanese.
His wife Kimiko said he could spend as much as 10 hours a day studying. They don’t have much but, as Klaus said, 'we don’t need much'.
From Maripass, I learned that when a Mexican says a chilli pepper is harmless, to take her words with a sea of salt.
And if the same Mexican tells you a chilli is hot, there’s no need to check for yourself unless you’re interested in near-death experiences.
From Lars the guitar-strumming Swede and Peter the Norwegian, who cross-dressed as a fairy one Halloween, I learned that the image of Scandinavians as a sober, reserved folk does not give the entire picture.
From Kim the South Korean, I learned that you can play Celine Dion on a bamboo flute.
Whenever he started warming up, I would open my door to hear him better. After he was done with the traditional tunes, he would move on to the Titanic song.
He introduced himself as a businessman when we first met but after we got to know each other better, he told me that he was a political refugee.
His exact words: ‘I write on Internet, I hate (name of politician). And police catch me.’
My first thought: is this guy for real?
He spoke little English and less Japanese and I didn’t know Korean so conversations took time. But when he showed me pictures of his wife and children, the look on his face said enough.
After a few months in Japan, he told me that his legal adviser in Seoul had called to say that it was safe to return.
I still don’t know what to make of his political dissident story but I can believe in the shochu he shared, in his parting gifts of pine nuts and ginseng snacks, and in his music – even the Celine Dion.
From the family of northern Chinese whose names I never found out, I learned nothing but received handmade dumplings, so many I ran out of vinegar.
From the Australian who might have been called Becky, I learned that when the Internet disappeared, I should go into the mysterious room under the stairs, insinuate my hands into the nest of wires, pull out all the plugs I could find then put them back.
On occasions like this, residents, including those I’d never met, would pour out of their rooms saying, ‘Is it just my computer or…?’
Then as we stood around, waiting to be connected, that would be the time to start learning about the neighbours, and from them.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Summer faces
18th August 2009
If you say hello, they'll say hello back. It's all rather friendly at the Kyoto Botanical Garden.
18th August 2009
If you say hello, they'll say hello back. It's all rather friendly at the Kyoto Botanical Garden.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Listening to a people hear
13th August 2009
This tells you a bit more about cicadas than the published version.
And for those interested in finding out more about Japanese onomatopoeia, here are the grammatical terms:
- 擬声語 giseigo or 擬音語 giongo (words that mimic sounds that actually exist in nature)
- 擬態語 gitaigo (mimetic words used to convey actions, non-auditory senses, bodily feelings or mental states. The last two are sometimes classified as 擬情語 gijougo).
...
If dogs go woof and pigs go oink, what do cicadas say?
Now that it’s summer, they sing through the long days and short nights but I still don’t have the exact word to pin down their chirring.
When muffled by a closed window, the sound falls on the ear like a maracas chorus but when heard under trees shrilling with cicadas, it bares jagged teeth. Listen long enough and it could saw your head in half.
If dogs in Japan go wan-wan and pigs go buu-buu, what do cicadas say?
It depends partly on the species. There’s jiii-jiii, miii-miii while another kind has been named tsuku tsuku boushi because that is, apparently, what part of its call sounds like.
Many races have listened to the world and tried to capture its sounds as exactly as possible. Wan-wan is not one of a kind when there’s woof woof, ouaf ouaf and arf arf.
But Japanese is particularly rich in soundtracks of things that have none – things such as sight, sensation and emotion. These ideas in sound cut across the usual categories so an omelette, a towel and a balloon can all be fuwa-fuwa if soft and light.
The lines between mental and physical states, between animate and inanimate, disappear. A messy room, like a cluttered mind, is gocha-gocha and the mysterious residue on the dining table that left your fingers sticky is as beta-beta as a couple plastered all over each other.
These words pitch a narrative out of a monotone. They are the words you reach for when telling a story, when you want people to know how ira-ira irritated you became when waiting for a friend for over an hour.
At first, you waited with nothing much on your mind, bon yari staring off into space. But then a quarter of an hour became half and half became a full hour. Then thunder began to goro-goro and the rain raged down zaa-zaa.
Splashing to the nearest bus-stop, you called your friend, only to learn that she was still at home. You snapped at her to stop guzu-guzu dawdling and sassa get there at once. But before she could, a car zoomed by, straight through a puddle, and left you bisshori drenched.
By the time your friend arrived, you were kan-kan furious.
Comics and novels make full use of this aural drama of clashing consonants and colluding vowels because they too are in the business of telling stories.
But as a situation becomes more formal, these words often end up being shoved behind curtains and into closets. Chances are, you won’t find them in a thesis because they smell too human and we like to pretend that academic papers are written, not by people, but by brains on legs.
To some ears, the repetition in words like jiro-jiro (to stare) and kira-kira (twinkle) sounds childish.
Childlike may be a better term. This is language wide-eyed and inventive, filling its tiny fists with clay. It clumps syllables together, moulding sound as it tries to show you that thing, you know, that thing that goes hurdurdurdur.
But clay hardens and the child’s world grows focused by growing narrower. The more choices he makes, the more he has to give up because to go through one door is to close five.
The world of Japanese idea sounds has matured beyond the days when it still sparkled pika-pika new. That there are dictionaries cataloguing these sounds suggests that they are no longer instinctive and obvious, even to native speakers.
For foreigners, they represent another set of lists to be remembered and puzzled over. It’s easy to see how thunder and heavy things rolling down would both go goro-goro but why would someone lazing at home be assigned the same sound?
And what’s the connection between leaves drifting hara-hara to the ground and someone being hara-hara nervous?
Yet in the process of linking experiences I share with sounds I don’t, memories are accreting, making the words easier to see and recall.
Waku-waku: a state of excitement or happy anticipation.
My waku-waku: an orchestra tuning up, setting off flares of sound in the dark of a concert hall.
Kichin-to: Neatly, precisely, properly.
My kichin-to: Approval when I see something done neatly, precisely and properly. Tinged with the laughing despair that comes from knowing my folds, whether in paper or cloth, will never be as crisp or aligned as the Japanese ideal and that my knots will always have the unsteadiness of the yoro-yoro drunkard.
These ideas in sound ask you to use your ears in a different way: not just listening to the thing described but also to how a people have decided to hear it and in going through the door they picked over others, find a world you might have missed on your own.
So though the cicadas outside my window seem to be saying schwiiiing, I shall try hearing as the Japanese hear and see if that takes me to the summers they’ve stored on the other side of the door that swings open on cicada trills: Miiiiin. Miiiiin. Miiiiin.
...
感謝コーナー：Many thanks to Chizu-san and Iuchi-kun for help with cicadas.
13th August 2009
This tells you a bit more about cicadas than the published version.
And for those interested in finding out more about Japanese onomatopoeia, here are the grammatical terms:
- 擬声語 giseigo or 擬音語 giongo (words that mimic sounds that actually exist in nature)
- 擬態語 gitaigo (mimetic words used to convey actions, non-auditory senses, bodily feelings or mental states. The last two are sometimes classified as 擬情語 gijougo).
...
If dogs go woof and pigs go oink, what do cicadas say?
Now that it’s summer, they sing through the long days and short nights but I still don’t have the exact word to pin down their chirring.
When muffled by a closed window, the sound falls on the ear like a maracas chorus but when heard under trees shrilling with cicadas, it bares jagged teeth. Listen long enough and it could saw your head in half.
If dogs in Japan go wan-wan and pigs go buu-buu, what do cicadas say?
It depends partly on the species. There’s jiii-jiii, miii-miii while another kind has been named tsuku tsuku boushi because that is, apparently, what part of its call sounds like.
Many races have listened to the world and tried to capture its sounds as exactly as possible. Wan-wan is not one of a kind when there’s woof woof, ouaf ouaf and arf arf.
But Japanese is particularly rich in soundtracks of things that have none – things such as sight, sensation and emotion. These ideas in sound cut across the usual categories so an omelette, a towel and a balloon can all be fuwa-fuwa if soft and light.
The lines between mental and physical states, between animate and inanimate, disappear. A messy room, like a cluttered mind, is gocha-gocha and the mysterious residue on the dining table that left your fingers sticky is as beta-beta as a couple plastered all over each other.
These words pitch a narrative out of a monotone. They are the words you reach for when telling a story, when you want people to know how ira-ira irritated you became when waiting for a friend for over an hour.
At first, you waited with nothing much on your mind, bon yari staring off into space. But then a quarter of an hour became half and half became a full hour. Then thunder began to goro-goro and the rain raged down zaa-zaa.
Splashing to the nearest bus-stop, you called your friend, only to learn that she was still at home. You snapped at her to stop guzu-guzu dawdling and sassa get there at once. But before she could, a car zoomed by, straight through a puddle, and left you bisshori drenched.
By the time your friend arrived, you were kan-kan furious.
Comics and novels make full use of this aural drama of clashing consonants and colluding vowels because they too are in the business of telling stories.
But as a situation becomes more formal, these words often end up being shoved behind curtains and into closets. Chances are, you won’t find them in a thesis because they smell too human and we like to pretend that academic papers are written, not by people, but by brains on legs.
To some ears, the repetition in words like jiro-jiro (to stare) and kira-kira (twinkle) sounds childish.
Childlike may be a better term. This is language wide-eyed and inventive, filling its tiny fists with clay. It clumps syllables together, moulding sound as it tries to show you that thing, you know, that thing that goes hurdurdurdur.
But clay hardens and the child’s world grows focused by growing narrower. The more choices he makes, the more he has to give up because to go through one door is to close five.
The world of Japanese idea sounds has matured beyond the days when it still sparkled pika-pika new. That there are dictionaries cataloguing these sounds suggests that they are no longer instinctive and obvious, even to native speakers.
For foreigners, they represent another set of lists to be remembered and puzzled over. It’s easy to see how thunder and heavy things rolling down would both go goro-goro but why would someone lazing at home be assigned the same sound?
And what’s the connection between leaves drifting hara-hara to the ground and someone being hara-hara nervous?
Yet in the process of linking experiences I share with sounds I don’t, memories are accreting, making the words easier to see and recall.
Waku-waku: a state of excitement or happy anticipation.
My waku-waku: an orchestra tuning up, setting off flares of sound in the dark of a concert hall.
Kichin-to: Neatly, precisely, properly.
My kichin-to: Approval when I see something done neatly, precisely and properly. Tinged with the laughing despair that comes from knowing my folds, whether in paper or cloth, will never be as crisp or aligned as the Japanese ideal and that my knots will always have the unsteadiness of the yoro-yoro drunkard.
These ideas in sound ask you to use your ears in a different way: not just listening to the thing described but also to how a people have decided to hear it and in going through the door they picked over others, find a world you might have missed on your own.
So though the cicadas outside my window seem to be saying schwiiiing, I shall try hearing as the Japanese hear and see if that takes me to the summers they’ve stored on the other side of the door that swings open on cicada trills: Miiiiin. Miiiiin. Miiiiin.
...
感謝コーナー：Many thanks to Chizu-san and Iuchi-kun for help with cicadas.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Columns mean legwork
6th August 2009
Today was a big day for my legs. First, I visited a cemetery (up a hill!), then a museum (up a hill!) and a shrine (deep inside a forest!), where I watched a Shinto rite (standing for over an hour!).
I have to walk to the supermarket tomorrow. I hope nothing falls off on the way.
6th August 2009
Today was a big day for my legs. First, I visited a cemetery (up a hill!), then a museum (up a hill!) and a shrine (deep inside a forest!), where I watched a Shinto rite (standing for over an hour!).
I have to walk to the supermarket tomorrow. I hope nothing falls off on the way.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
If you don't recognise it, it's probably where you were born
5th August 2009
So you spend some time away from Singapore - about three months should do it - and when you return, a building you know will have vanished while another you don't will have appeared. Or a tunnel will gape where a library used to be.
On one occasion, I returned to find a water-slide amusement park had gone. I never visited Big Splash but as a child, I passed it on my way to school almost every day. So - Big Splash gone while down the road, a big wheel had popped up.
I've no complaints about the Singapore Flyer but I didn't pass it every weekday morning for years, wondering if I'd forgotten anything when I packed my schoolbag.
For a spot-on picture of this and what else it means to be Singaporean, take a look at Troy Chin's The Resident Tourist. Click before he moves, gets upgraded or turns into a shopping centre.
5th August 2009
So you spend some time away from Singapore - about three months should do it - and when you return, a building you know will have vanished while another you don't will have appeared. Or a tunnel will gape where a library used to be.
On one occasion, I returned to find a water-slide amusement park had gone. I never visited Big Splash but as a child, I passed it on my way to school almost every day. So - Big Splash gone while down the road, a big wheel had popped up.
I've no complaints about the Singapore Flyer but I didn't pass it every weekday morning for years, wondering if I'd forgotten anything when I packed my schoolbag.
For a spot-on picture of this and what else it means to be Singaporean, take a look at Troy Chin's The Resident Tourist. Click before he moves, gets upgraded or turns into a shopping centre.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
You were saying?
18th June 2006
I told myself it was just cloth. I told myself they were just colours. I told myself it was crazy to spend so much on a scarf, however it had been dyed.
I may have told myself other things.
I'm not sure because by that time, I'd stopped listening.
If you're interested, they take commissions, I think.
18th June 2006
I told myself it was just cloth. I told myself they were just colours. I told myself it was crazy to spend so much on a scarf, however it had been dyed.
I may have told myself other things.
I'm not sure because by that time, I'd stopped listening.
If you're interested, they take commissions, I think.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Bear with me
15th June 2009
More than two years after getting my present camera, I have finally worked out how to take black and white photos with it.
I'd forgotten the rainbow in those two colours. So I'm afraid there's going to be a deluge of black and white shots for the next little while. Bear with me.
These two are from Heian Jingu, a shrine usually associated with colour.
The bridge that ends the garden tour for most visitors.
Another bridge but, this time, a dragon.
15th June 2009
More than two years after getting my present camera, I have finally worked out how to take black and white photos with it.
I'd forgotten the rainbow in those two colours. So I'm afraid there's going to be a deluge of black and white shots for the next little while. Bear with me.
These two are from Heian Jingu, a shrine usually associated with colour.
The bridge that ends the garden tour for most visitors.
Another bridge but, this time, a dragon.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Chotto Edo made (Just stepping out to Edo)
10th June 2009
I went to Edo, or Tokyo as I must remember to call it, on business for a few days. I rode on a lot of trains.
Though perhaps not this one.
What did I see? People, lots of people, many of them in black suits.
Here is a picture of crowds at Shinbashi.
Here is a picture of crowds at Nihonbashi.
How does anyone find anyone else in this mess, I wondered. Perhaps it starts with a cup of coffee...
...then an outing to the theatre...
...and a spot of Edo-mae sushi after the show.
Then the next thing you know, there's another (maybe bigger) pair of footwear in your foyer...
...and your laundry load has increased exponentially.
It could happen. After all, anything can happen in a country where the prime minister is a mini star. And I know he is because the map outside the station closest to him told me so.
10th June 2009
I went to Edo, or Tokyo as I must remember to call it, on business for a few days. I rode on a lot of trains.
Though perhaps not this one.
What did I see? People, lots of people, many of them in black suits.
Here is a picture of crowds at Shinbashi.
Here is a picture of crowds at Nihonbashi.
How does anyone find anyone else in this mess, I wondered. Perhaps it starts with a cup of coffee...
...then an outing to the theatre...
...and a spot of Edo-mae sushi after the show.
Then the next thing you know, there's another (maybe bigger) pair of footwear in your foyer...
...and your laundry load has increased exponentially.
It could happen. After all, anything can happen in a country where the prime minister is a mini star. And I know he is because the map outside the station closest to him told me so.
Friday, June 05, 2009
A rainy day in Gion
5th June 2009
My umbrella has declared that the rainy season of tsuyu has reached Kyoto. It issued this statement after a wet day in Gion, where we inspected the rain-slick road.
Still, it wasn't as grey a day as my camera's black-and-white function would have you believe.
And there was colour at the cafe we went to check out.
There were other things inside. Like quality sugar sent out by the kitchen staff.
I didn't order this but I helped to finish it.
And a customer at the next table also brought quality sweet.
This is Akari-chan. When she wasn't in the sling, she sat in her mother's big black bag and threw things to the floor. Not in a tantrum but just because it was interesting to see other people scramble.
Perhaps this is why the sky lets rain fall.
5th June 2009
My umbrella has declared that the rainy season of tsuyu has reached Kyoto. It issued this statement after a wet day in Gion, where we inspected the rain-slick road.
Still, it wasn't as grey a day as my camera's black-and-white function would have you believe.
And there was colour at the cafe we went to check out.
There were other things inside. Like quality sugar sent out by the kitchen staff.
I didn't order this but I helped to finish it.
And a customer at the next table also brought quality sweet.
This is Akari-chan. When she wasn't in the sling, she sat in her mother's big black bag and threw things to the floor. Not in a tantrum but just because it was interesting to see other people scramble.
Perhaps this is why the sky lets rain fall.
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