Mike Lidgley

2011-04-21T12:19:00.002+09:00

Photos

https://sites.google.com/site/mikelidgleyphotos/home

2010-02-09T00:39:00.000+09:00

Messages

Sent for years, never read

2009-12-09T14:22:00.000+09:00

George

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysw_0NgumjU

2009-12-08T22:53:00.009+09:00

The Ringing Bell

I keep a cheap Russian pocket watch in my top drawer -
she kept herself there, unwound, before -
a 1917 replica, from a Norfolk country fair -

we camped

- A lunar sunset walk through a coastal stubbled field,
the windmill stood still, while the marsh reeds rustled,
and the salt sea air rumbled and thrummed -

A battleship on her flip-up cover lid,
a Commie call to prayer -
"All power to the Soviets!"
stamped on a red flag - but the red paint's gone,
thumbed, rubbed away, pocketed too quick

I found her the other day and wound her,
and now she ticks, these silent years undone.

Remembered Home Alone Tone - he'd hide away
the long ten weeks of our long work-stay,
self-deserted, sagging, needs must,

he'd phone, not speak, to his vacant UK home
just to hear the ringing bell,
to loosen dust from his hall handset -
the distant sea whispering from her shell

2009-11-18T22:02:00.003+09:00

Folded

You are old now
How suddenly you got old

So often there's space to the left -
so much left unsaid,
undone

- a rare flow to the right,
ahead,

And every now and then,
arms folded

There is no gate
that you pass through
but there comes a time
or times
when you realise
you're on the other side

The Blinds

Sometimes
I draw the blinds
when I don't want the world to see

the times when
I half-understand
the complex simplicities

What do you see
when the sun sets?
What is it that you see?

Is it freedom?
Is it knowledge?
Why don't you come down here to be with me?

Sometimes I wake up in the dark
and I wonder
I think about the little things you said

A new day dawns and like
the distant thunder
remind me who that man is in your bed

Sometimes
I draw the blinds
when I don't want the world to see

those times
when I half-understand
the complex reality

What do you see
when the sun sets?
What is it that you see?

Is it freedom?
Is it knowledge?
Why don't you come down here and be with me?

CGFG
CGFC

Why don't you come (down here)?
Why don't you come (down here)?
Why don't you come down here
and be with me?

FCGC

2009-11-14T17:28:00.007+09:00

Back home

I just walked down the road for my evening shop -
on my left the ocean laps the soft sand in the dark -
on my right, from the light of an open window -
(it's a warm November night in mid-Japan)
an unknown someone tinkles the piano keys, alone -
practising her piece until her lover gets back home?

The eternal on the one side, the ephemeral on the other -
rhythm and melodies merge in a melancholic flood:
Now I'm walking up the track in the early evening sun -
the end of a day out working in the woods -
to the sound of my loved one, playing from within,
waiting for her man to come back home.

She's gone

These quiet still moments of peace
when you spend more time than you need,
preparing, spreading, smoothing the sheets,
folding fresh towels - to be clean

I spoke yesterday about Yeats
and the love of his life - Maud Gonne
He asked her in vain again and again
Though she loved him more than some

'How selfish can you get!' the old man said
Yeats, not Gonne - not to let her go
to leave the life she half-wanted -
Love's not everything you know

Typhoon (unfinished)

The hatches are battened, but the boat’s gone
The road’s flooded and blocked
Drain’s suck and manholes spew
The warm wind whips bottles and branches
Scattered skimming through the streets

The sea's let loose a raging giant
Thrashing thin breakwaters with careless contempt
Three-storey waves crash over beach houses
I'm soaked in my tracks, my trousers drenched
And my socks are full of sand

The Beast

Staggering green waves roar like thunder,
spraying salt-sequined showers in the Sun -
Pulsing like heartbeats from the dark deep.

Ecstatic small children squeal in delight -
'Daddy, can't we stay a bit longer?
Can’t we please? Let’s not go home!’

While unexpectedly fast, predatory foam
Licks at their quick back-pedalling feet,
Chasing up the beach to their smiling Mum -

And the sea seethes back, taking its breath.

A tsunami went over the horizon last night -
This savage same sea hit Samoa and Tonga,
where, satiated, she dragged them under.

The tranquil life-giver can turn from the good
to an indiscriminate bringer of death.

The Bar

I spent my careless teenage years,
and later a full-grown man,
messing about in boats in Salcombe,
South Devon, the South Hams.

Where the river finally hits the sea,
there's a sand bar across the bay -
at low tide less than a human height.
Crossed it more times than I can say -

Hundreds, maybe more, in small boats,
with friends, brothers, or alone.
We went mackerel fishing in the evening sun
- one night came home with 60 or so

Or was it 80?
And sold them round the park for 10p each.
With our father.

Years later we poured his ashes over the bar.

The Autumn Equinox

The world turns
As the ferries glide
Through the fragile night

Kids on the beach
Throw cheap fireworks
And the young girls scream in delight

Their hand-held thrills
Passing for touch
And the boy turns his back to the light

My home is in the human race

How many lives can one man live?
How we long for the bonds of attachment!
We cling to hope like limpets to a rock
Battered by the random indifference

How easily we accept love!
How willingly we throw our hearts open
to the whims of quiet strangers
though we know the solid pain

We live a layered myriad of lives
One floats to the face and then another
Through the flickering shoal we see what we can
Catch a fleeting glimpse of the soul

A constant maybe, a might have been, a could be one day,
living only in this one, this space
peering into and from this face
these faces surround us, these dark eyes

on the train to Hiratsuka this Tuesday morning
September 8th 2009

The frog in the dark well
waiting for the cold echoing drip
to ripple through his film
gulping while his thin webbed feet
paddle the depths below

The roots of a tree cast no shadow

Touched down yesterday from my mountain home
Now I'm back by the sea
You wonder where you're going, and just where you belong
Take a long look back at where you've been

(A,E)

That's you

D-A-E
There's some guy on the street says the end of the world is nigh
Someone better tell him that you just came into my life
It won't end now, no matter what he's got to say
There's only one girl now can take my breath away

G-D-C

Oh, oh - that's you
Oh, oh - that's you
Won't you fly away with me?
I'm gonna fly back home to you

D-A-E

I'm coming down the track, riding on the shinkansen
Meet me at the station, we're gonna have a good time then
Well I can't wait, to get down there to the end of the line
You know that I'm yours, and I'm sure gonna make you mine

Notes

Sometimes find myself agreeing with the emperor in Amadeus, that sometimes there can be 'too many notes', that somehow saying less, using fewer, more carefully chosen words or notes, can open up spaces in our minds, for our imaginations - or that a few detailed examples can illustrate much wider and more universal truths. The other day, for example, I was lucky to be present at a talk by a world expert on Japan, who chose as his theme the 18 months that the Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg spent in Japan in 1775-6, most of them cooped up on Dejima, but he managed to get up to Edo for 3 weeks. "A fascinating, engaging and entertaining talk in the true tradition of British academic thought", in the words of the Swedish ambassador in his vote of thanks. A couple of days later I attempted to give a talk myself, and ridiculously had chosen to speak on 'A Brief History of London', and waffled away without managing to make a single coherent point, other than an awful lot of 'foreigners' had made London whatever it is. Too many notes, not enough points.

(Sometimes I think the complete opposite - talk all night - anything is better than nothing. When you are young you think you have all the time in the world. Life is so short - talk, talk, all night.)

He who seeks

I was 20, or 21
working on a farm in the West Country
driving tractors to the cliff's edge
humping hay bales high in the back of the barn

I drove 100 miles
late on a midsummer evening
to see her, blonde and beaming
fragile

the priest came in and asked me
What did I do?
I worked on a farm.
She scoffed.

Why did I come here?
To see her, I said.
I was more than welcome
he said

if I was seeking

I've been in love
I know what it means
Love as a target -
the missing link

But love
is accepting
Your love pulls out the good
in you both

Space

She gives me the space I need
to be a little boy,
to play with my toys -
so that I can become a man.

Tears

(Am, G)

All of the time
and every day
I miss you girl
in every way

This pain of mine
it won't go away
What can I do?
What can I say?

If I saw you now
the weight of the years
would drag me down
in a pool of my tears

We shared our love
we should've shared our fears
I'm drowning girl
in a pool of my tears

And it's so hard
to let you go
It's so hard
I still love you so

What you got
I don't know
but I got you
in my soul
.
C,F
C,G
C,F
C,G,C

Chorus C, Am, E, Am

Lie lie la lie ...

Fishing for compliments

Great sailing today - we took out both the dinghies and chased white horses across Isshiki bay, past Bird Island and down towards Akiya, where the sudden realisation that we were sailing over rocks forced a quick change of direction, back towards Morito and the tori on Najima. Nearly had a flying fish in the boat.

Thence to my favourite restaurant for a splendid suzuki teishoku. On leaving I am told by the waitress/cook that my ability to eat fish with chopsticks is sugoi jouzu, better than many Japanese. Rick suggests spinning for mackerel, from the dinghy, which I will do on Sunday.

Homage to Rumsfeld

Full moon on the water
Lights and lighthouses glimmer and flash
distant and close, across the bay
through our warm night space

The pacific swells roll like lovers
up the beach, then ripple back
spent, like lovers
feathered, they head back to the sea

Some of us know next to nothing
Just the drama and the news

Some know enough to know
they know nothing
They love their open minds

Some suppose they know it all
They have all the answers
and fear the unknown

Odawara

Every sunset, or most –
I look out across the bay
to Izu and Fuji-san, and
the lights coming on in Odawara,
so far far away
but still so very close

Dance

A few years ago now a great friend and I rushed across London, late for a farewell performance by a great Russian dancer, and his friends, at Covent Garden - we ran up the escalators to the gods, only to have the doors closed on us, and had to sit in the corridor watching this Russian great on the video screen for the first ten minutes. My friend wept.
We crept in and took our seats, and watched the rest of the performance - I think Sylvie Guillieme was part of it. At that time I had little or no interest in dance, and very little understanding or appreciation of the visual arts generally, or art even. But I did like music.
In the interval my friend asked me what I thought of the performance - my response was "I have to listen to more Stravinsky" - the accompanying music.

Beaches

Surprised myself today by going for a swim. I was walking along the beach, not 5 minutes from my door, somewhat overdressed, when it occurred to me that it was a glorious sunny day, extremely warm, and I was on a beautiful beach by the Pacific. So I spontaneously undressed and had a dip. Bit chilly at first but very worthwhile - will endeavour to make a habit of it from now on.I was in Iceland the other day. A huge beautiful country, with a small but very friendly and creative population of semi-bankrupt ex-Vikings, and among other things we visited the local imported beach in Reykjavik (Smokey Bay). There is a small geothermally heated paddling pool, in which the locals sit drinking beer with woolly hats on, and every now and then they have a quick dip in the almost freezing bay (3 degrees). Must be good for you.

For free

There's a sea wall at the end of my street, where I can sit and watch one of the greatest shows on Earth, every night, for free.

Mountain in the Sun

(C,G,D with a bit of Am here and there, and maybe F)

I met you on a mountain in the sun
You walked into my life and my heart began to run
The trigger in my soul somewhere in the songs we sung
My darling don't you know you're the one?

And while we sang the stars shone in our eyes
Happiness took our hands and led us to the skies
We made each other laugh as we tried to harmonise
Now we wonder can we do that with our lives?

But do you really want me?
and when will I see you again?
Are we friends and lovers?
Or are we only loving friends?

The sun was on the rise when we first kissed
Our feelings burning up with the early morning mist
And now I know what they mean when the poets talk of bliss
My girl, I wanna spend my life like this

Won't you take the time to tell me
is this love we have for real?
You had to leave before we
could work it out -
Come back girl and show me how you feel

When you fall in love everything they say comes true
Every minute of the day you know I think of you
My head 'n' heart 'n' soul, and my body's burning too
When can I hold you all night through?

You keep telling me it's imagination
But if that's true then why d'you feel it too?
You keep telling me to be patient
But I never met a girl like you

And I want you right here in my arms
I want to pull you close and know you're mine
I want to taste your tender loving charms
I want you forever girl - not just tonight

Not just tonight, I want you all the time
Not just tonight, I'll always be true
Not just tonight, I can see it in your eyes
Not just tonight, I know you want me too

And I understand the things you do
and I know just what it is you want to say
- that you're scared - well I am too
But this ain't tomorrow, this is today

I met you on a mountain in the sun
You and me we sang the whole night through
Don't you know my darling you're the one?
I never met a girl like you

2009-02-02T00:01:00.022+09:00

Kind of busy few days, depending on your definition of busy of course. Thursday we met up in Tokyo and had a look round Ueno Park, finally - scene of one of the last internecine battles in the 1860s or so.

Interesting buskers.

Shocking number of homeless old men and women scrunched up on cold benches, waiting for night to fall so they could wrap up in their plastic sheets in the undergrowth, where they lie tonight. Up until recently they had little hovels to keep out the elements, but the government decided to solve the ever-growing homeless problem by 'moving them on', or 'sweeping them under the carpet'. Not much of a policy. Although Mugabe might concur.

Then had a look round the Tokyo National Museum, in particular some Zen masterpieces from a temple in Kyoto - Myo-shin-ji - which we translated as 'strange-heart-temple', but they termed "Temple of the Wondrous Mind" .

http://www.tnm.go.jp/en/sert/Con?pageId=A01&processId=02&event_id=5930

http://www.myoshinji2009.jp/index.html

Favourite fish restaurant Thursday night.

Friday we walked a sailing dinghy up a long wet beach in the driving rain, and were rewarded by a great lunch.

In the afternoon/evening I managed to go to the same izakaya twice, and may have confused the same waitress. Ended up in a karaoke box - five gaijin men, one Japanese woman. Two of the gaijin men sang rather excellent Japanese enka.

Saturday we went mountain-biking - my first attempt, at the age of 48. We'd just had two days of rain so the 45 degree slopes, up and down, through sludgey mud and over greasy rocks and steps was ... omoshiroi. Useful word.

That evening we, the 3 Ms, went to one of the most - no, the most mournful jazz concert I have ever witnessed (after a very welcome stop in a small izakaya run by an octogenarian with an interest in the local arts and history - really must learn how to speak Japanese). The trumpet player in particular seemed on the point of bursting into tears. I was quite relieved to see him smiling once it was all over.

On the way, M1 and I paid a visit to a run-down and out ex-bar near my house, the sole occupant of which is a very lonely (and somewhat grubby) old woman whose husband ran the bar up to five years ago. We must have been the only visitors she'd had in those five years. The connection was the fact that the bar is called "Kenya", and M1 goes to Kenya regularly. She was clearly very happy to have customers, and to talk about her Kenya.

Today we were treated to an amazing lunch/dinner by some gourmet friends - a kind of Babette's feast. I have invited them back for a Great British Lunch, but wonder with Great Trepidation how I will live up to their standards.

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=czKniAYNjlo

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=IdLoDuU716M

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVGGmRfdx4

2009-01-16T19:13:00.002+09:00

The ships

Russian title: Proshchanie

They will stay for a while,

And then they'll take their course

But they will return

Breaking through winds wailing.

And it won't take six months

Till I'm back at my house.

Just to set out again,

To set out for six month's sailing.

Everybody returns

But the best of our friends,

And the best loving, and faithful,

The adorable women.

Everybody returns

But for those we need most

I believe not in fate

Nor myself do I believe in.

Yet how much do I want

To believe I am wrong,

And that burning my boats

Will soon have no meaning.

I am sure to return

Full of dreams, friends along,

And it won't take six months

Till I get back to singing.

http://vagalecs.narod.ru/Vysotsk.htm#the_ships

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=43gyJWDjOO4

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=dShmvFeZsAg&feature=related

2008-12-03T00:18:00.001+09:00

Artist: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=njG7p6CSbCU

plus

Performer: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=JK2hKzZss5Y

=

a little bit of magic

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea6ZcfJspcI

2008-12-02T23:23:00.004+09:00

Yours truly aboard the Endeavour last week. We nipped across from Enoshima to Isshiki Bay for lunch - my flat is a couple of minutes' walk along the beach behind to the left. Hayama Art Gallery at 12 o'clock.

Heading for home port as the Sun sets.

2008-11-30T18:46:00.002+09:00

I am told that the two bright stars in the western sky near the crescent moon just after sunset tonight and tomorrow are Jupiter and Venus, and that this is the astronomic and astrological event of the year. So if you're feeling a little unusual that will explain it.

http://www.thedaze.biz/coment.html

2008-11-24T11:38:00.006+09:00

Journal of Reginald Dan Weeks (my grandfather)
September 1914 to October 1918

1914

1st September Enlisted 2nd Battalion (Territorial) The London Regiment “The Rangers”.
Signed on for 4 years

21st October Went to camp in White City, Shepherds Bush (London)

1915

16th January Went to Brownknoll Hutments, Crowborough (Kent)

7th May Moved into billets (164 Felixstowe Road) at Ipswich (Suffolk)

4th August Moved to huts at Grove Farm, Woodbridge (Suffolk)

26th September Signalling course with Signal Service at Warren Heath, Ipswich
to 23rd October (got 1st Class certificate)

18th October Battalion moved to billets (21 Beaconsfield Road) at Woodbridge

1916

January Promoted Lance Corporal

29th April Moved under canvas on Bromeswell Heath, Melton (Norfolk)

12th July Moved to huts at Sandhill Camp, Longbridge Deverill, Warminster (Wiltshire)

1917

4th February Moved across to France (Southampton to Havre)

Havre Halloy Dainville
Auxi-le-chateau Pas ARRAS
Beaudricourt Laherliere Pommera
Bailleulmont Wailly Grosville
Bellacourt Ficheux Neuvillette
Riviere Blaireville Noeux
La Cauchie Doullens Bus-les-Artois

12th March Lost my stripe (once more one of the boys)

1st April Left Arras front and started trekking “Somme way” through

Bertrancourt Miraumont
Mailly-Maillet Bucquoy
Auchonvillers Irles
Beaumont-Hamel Achiet-le-Petit
Beaucourt Achiet-le-Grand
Grandcourt

Easter Sunday Railway making in snow at Achiet-le-Grand
& Monday

5th May Arrived on Bullecourt front 5th May 1917 after terrific march from Achiet-le-Petit, went into line same night and relieved Anzacs at Lagnicourt who had been terribly cut up. Stayed on this front all through the Bullecourt show. In and out of Bullecourt until about 8th July during which time visited

Bihucourt Vaulx-Vraucourt
Belagnies Noreuil
Sapignies Ecoust-St-Mein
Favreuil Bullecourt
Beugnatre

Arrived at Bapaume for so-called six weeks rest and went bang slap into line at Havrincourt Wood & there spent three of our six weeks. Went through

Etres Fremicourt
Ruyaulcourt Hermies
Bancourt Bertincourt

[At this point he appears to have been wounded? The diary stops and is not resumed until the end of July 1918 when he is about to leave for France again.

By this time he is in “C” Company 34th London Regiment the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC)]

1918

31.7.18 Left Bourley Camp 10:15 pm marched to Aldershot. Entrained and left there midnight.

1.8.18 Thoroughly tired out we arrived at Folkestone at 3 am where we remained in rest camp until 7:30 when we marched down to the docks and at 9:15 aboard the “Princess Victoria” of Stranraer. Bade “Au Revoir” to dear old Blighty. All the troops very cheerful. The “first timers” a little downhearted and rather pleased to see the strong escort which accompanied us.

After a glorious trip (the Channel just like a lake on a summer’s day) we arrived at Boulogne at 10:45 am and marched up the hill to the St Martins rest camp(1 Hamket Hill). Later I got a pass in to Boulogne where I visited the Sister & Doctor under whose care I was last September & October at Camiers. Arrived back in camp at 8:00 and after a makeshift supper settled down for the night only to be woken up by an air raid at 10:45 when Fritz very unsuccessfully tried to put the “wind up” us although he caught Base Hqtrs napping – 48 casualties – at 11:50 we all settled down again.

2.8.18 We left the rest camp at 11:15 en route for the railway stn Boulogne where we entrained and commenced the third stage of our journey at 1 o’clock. At 2:30 we arrived at SAMER from whence we marched about 9 kilos to our present billets at Le Turne.

The billets which we are in and look like being in for some time are quite the usual type of billet one gets in this country namely in a farm. Our particular farm is a good example of a French farm having a fair sized courtyard in the middle of which is a pond, the water in which is green with age. The whole being surrounded with stables, cowsheds and pigstys. In the latter we make our homes during our stay in the village. In the courtyard one can see at any time of the day a medley of pigs, cows, geese, ducks and chickens running about and of course the French farmer and his numerous family who get very excited and say things which nobody understands if any of the boys touch his precious animals.

Today is a lovely summer’s day and everybody seems contented with the new surroundings.

3.8.18 Nothing to report. Rather showery weather. We have had a busy day laying our signal line to Bn Hqrs in the next village.

4.8.18 Sunday. 4th Anniversary of the war and a beautiful summer’s day. Having had Church Service the boys are indulging in a good game of footer.
Being on duty in Signal Office I am unable to play so write up this diary and a few letters to Blighty. (home and N Burton)

[Nora Burton became my grandmother]

5.8.18 Proceeded at 1:30 to Frencq on signal course, arrived there about 5 pm.

To 17.8.18 Course. Instructing all the time. Nothing to report.

17.8.18 Returned to Battn at Le Turne.

18.8.18 Sunday. Spent best part of the day out on line strafing the old froggy with his chariot.

19.8.18 Preparations for the move – more trouble on the line.

20.8.18 Left Le Turne about 7:30 and with full kit marched to the buses. Arrived there nearly dead, embussed and departed about 9:30. Passed through Therouanne where got a letter off to Sonnie. Arrived at Dieval about 5 pm and marched to La Comte (hellish rotten march). Terribly hot. Had some good feeds that evening at Beugin.

21.8.18 On the move again. Marched back to buses at Dieval and bussed up to Barlin where we stayed the night. Wicked march each end and about the hottest day we’ve had so far. Rec’d letters from Sonnie and D Woodhead.

22.8.18 Moved up to reserve line. Took over from Sussex Regt about midday. Fritz strafing road outside billet a bit in the late afternoon.

23.8.18 Pretty quiet. Occasional strafes on both sides.

24.8.18 Stunt on left in morning came off. Hellish strafe for Fritz. He countered in the afternoon and evening. No luck.

25.8.18 Bit noisy in morning early otherwise very quiet morning (expect Fritz has gone to church being Sunday). Rest of day very quiet. Still no letter from home or Blighty.

26.8.18 Very quiet all morning. Had bath in afternoon. Plenty of iron flying around in the evening.

27.8.18 Very quiet day except for periodic strafes. Preparations for moving up.

28.8.18 Wednesday. Relieved 6 SLI in line (Cambrin) sector about 3 pm. They had fearful wind up. Fritz very quiet (hope it lasts).

29.8.18 Our Arty & TMB busy in the afternoon. Jerry sent the change in the evening. It made our corner a bit unpleasant with 5.9s. No casualties.

30.8.18 About same as yesterday.

31.8.18 Had a look round trenches & lines. Visited HQ A & D Coys. Nothing doing in the evening.

AT Last a letter from home.

1.9.18 Parcel and letters from home. Tres bien. Everything quiet on our front.

2.9.18 Wrote to Ma and K Read.

Fritz had his little game and our mob went after him (B & D Coys) but eventually retired on our old present positions having lost a platoon.

Completed 4 years in the army. Roll on 5.

3.9.18 Pen arrived tres bien. Pretty quiet up to 6:30 when we gassed him. At 8 he replied and strafed our corner mighty thick. At 10 we gassed him again properly and at 1 am (4th) he gassed us (mustard). Happily I have not got any although several of the boys have.

4.9.18 Relieved by D Coy in front line. Hooray, back to Sppt for a few days and may be a little sleep – what ‘opes.

5.9.18 Spent quiet day resting after tiring time up front.

6.9.18 A & B went over, we moved up to Wilsons Tunnel.

7.9.18 Jocks retired on right and B fell back but went out again to positions.

8.9.18 Relieved and went to Cambrin for ?rest?

9.9.18 Hot bath & pay day. Decent once more.

10.9.18 2 days rest & ease in fairly decent billet.

12.9.18 Rumours of going in again and preparations.

13.9.18 Returned to line at Railway Cottage (Fritz’s old line). Up to eyes in mud. Very nearly put out of mess [ie killed] going in by daylight. Trenches in terrible state. Got wire out to BHQ.

14.9.18 Fritz gassed us damn thick. Several of the boys gone back with it. D Coy caught it badly.

15.9.18 Relieved by A Coy and went to support at Mill Tunnel Somme. Relief too – own Arty bashing us.

16.9.18 Nice quiet easy day for us thank God. Bit of gas in the evening. Parcel from home. Cheers!!

17.9.18 Relieved by MAZI and returned to Village Lines (Reserve).

18.9.18 Vale sick, sent on to FAMB & CCS. Had a stroll round and saw Murrells at BHQ. Saw Fred for a few mins. 7 more of Coy gone down the line. NO LETTERS from home or Nora. Wrote home & D Woodhead.

19.9.18 Off phone 5 am slept until 11. Nothing doing afternoon and evening. Bit of strafe on left.

20.9.18 Had hot bath and change in morning. TRES BIEN. Big strafe on right and left. Fritz strafed us from 10 am to 12 trying to get the guns but got our trench instead. 6 wounded.

21.9.18 Fritz straffing again. No damage. Relieved MAPA at our old friend Railway Cottage for another 4. BON CHANCE. Went up in fine style with Jacks along La Bassee Road. In sppt A & B in front. At Auchy by La Bassee.

22.9.18 Occasional strafes but nothing important happened.

23.9.18 Same as yesterday. Glorious day and very quiet.

24.9.18 Somersets relieved us and we returned to Village Lines (Shaws Cut). Sat up all night.

25 & 26.9.18 Very quiet time at Shaws Cut. Had one morning out on D coy line.

27.9.18 Relieved by Scottish Rifles and came out off line to posh billets (huts & wire beds) at NOEUX LES MINES.

27.9.18 - 4.10.18 Had a very posh time at rest. Signalling parades every day. Did practically nothing. Had a good bath, pay day and generally enjoyed ourselves.

Had haircut on the 1st about an hour before a shell crashed into the barbers and smashed his show up completely.

During this period Fritz withdrew on the La Bassee front, which cut our posh holiday short.

4.10.18 Many happy returns. Thanks. What a fitting day. With full pack we marched up to dugouts in trenches – what were the old support line trenches but now miles back. (Fritz not yet found) Must have gone back to Germany (what ‘opes). Got my second stripe.

5.10.18 Out all morning laying line to D Coy. Went scrounging in the afternoon, Heaven be praised we got some cigs in the evening. Sent Green & wrote to home and Nora.

6.10.18 (Sunday) Took a stroll over to D Coy with Dick & Jacks, won a sack of oatmeal en route in the morning. Had inspection in afternoon. Immediately after tea with Lowe & Francis & Pope went for a stroll up to La Bassee, and as we approached what must have been a glorious town just like a city of dead, every house in ruins and the peaceful canal a mess of wreckage. But worst of all was the cemetery, all the tomb stones and monuments smashed, graves opened and coffins actually tipped open (obviously not by shells). The whole place was absolutely a heap of bricks. Got back about 7 thoroughly tired but very pleased I have been to see Fritz’s work before he evacuated.

7.10.18 (Officially) took section out to salve wire. (Unofficially) took them up to see what I saw yesterday at La Bassee. Saved a crucifix from the ruins which I hope to get home. In the afternoon we salved a mile of wire and sent them along to HQ. Visited boys at HQ in evening returned about 9:30 and turned in.

8.10.18 On the move again but the right way this time. Heaven be praised (packs carried on limbers) marched back in fighting order to camp (huts) at Drouvin a few kilos from NOEUX LES MINES. Well out of it. Devillish long march.

9.10.18 Coy inspected by Brigadier. The devil puts us through the hoop properly for about 2 hours after that. I took section off and did signalling for rest of morning. Lecture in afternoon. Strolled over to Church Army hut at Verquin in evening.

10.10.18 (Thursday) With Signals all morning (cushy). Baths in afternoon. Heard Div’nl Band play selection from Maid of the Mountains.

11.10.18 With Coy marched to Range after CO’s inspection. Dinner on range. Got back after 3 got to bed early. Nothing much doing.

12.10.18 Brigade parade. Gen Howard gave medals away. Usual inspection scream also usual inspection weather. Rained all afternoon and evening so stayed in and wrote letters.

13.10.18 Sunday. Usual Church Parade. Went for a stroll with Jacks down through Verquin. In the afternoon just after dinner camp went mad when news came through that “Germany had accepted Wilson’s terms and wanted Armistice to withdraw all troops from invaded territory”. It’s coming right enough and we’ll get it before Xmas now (Cheers).

Ends

Some abbreviations and signal codes:-

Coy Company – typically four companies in a Battalion (A,B,C&D)
Arty Artillery
Bn/Battn Battalion
BHQ Battalion Headquarters
CO Commanding Officer
Sppt Support
TMB Trench Mortar Battery

Codes:-
16 Div VOPA

47 Bde BAZI
14th Leics TEGU
18th Welsh TAKU
9th RH MUNU
47th TMB MAGU

48 Bde BAVA
22nd NF’s DUHA
18th SR’s NARO
11th RIR’s MASO
48th TMB WERO

49 Bde BAGU
6th SLI MAPA
18th Glos MAZI
34th Lond MAVA
49th TMB WESE

11th Hants FORO

16th MG Bn WEPA
A Coy WEMU
B Coy WENE
C Coy FEJE
D Coy FELI

Nominal Roll of “C” Coy Signal Section

Class’n Platoon Address
881388 Cpl Weeks R i/c 1st 11 35 Duke Street, London SW1
881656 Rfm Willson J C 1st 10 29 Legard Road, Highbury Park N9
881647 Rfm Eallett J 1st 9 31 Chaucer Road, Forest Gate E
881391 Rfm Cooper L 1st 12 Bourton End Cottage, Shrivenham, Berk
881383 Rfm Pope L W 2nd 9
881377 Rfm Vale A F 9 106 Killigrew Road, Falmouth, Cornwall
880747 Rfm Letch W 11 (transferred to HQ Coy 10.9.18)

Other addresses recorded include:-

C Weeks YMCA, APO S13, BEF
Miss N Burton 1 Dover Yard, Piccadilly

Photo: Two members of WAACs (Women's Army Auxiliary Corps) tending the graves of Allied soldiers, Abbeville, France, 1918.

My Boy Jack

(Rudyard Kipling)

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”

Not this tide.

“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”

Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”

Not this tide.

For what is sunk will hardly swim,

Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”

None this tide,

Nor any tide,

Except he did not shame his kind —

Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,

This tide,

And every tide;

Because he was the son you bore,

And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=FWI1Sk6_Siw&feature=related

Daniel Radcliffe in

My Boy Jack

(2007)

2008-10-29T21:41:00.001+09:00

Bit of an odd sail today - rocking and rolling all over the place but no wind at all. Then became the subject of a fashion shoot ....

2008-10-25T18:30:00.002+09:00

...the life on the ocean blue...

Good to see I am not alone: http://patriotsquestion911.com/professors.html

2008-10-09T11:12:00.000+09:00

Oh the life on the ocean wave...

2008-07-22T11:53:00.005+09:00

"This special exhibition presents "Myth of Tomorrow," the Taro Okamoto's masterwork, known as his largest painting and a counterpart of "Tower of the Sun," his most recognized work which was displayed at the Osaka Expo in 1970. During its first presentation to the public last year, this giant wall painting drew as many as 2 million people in 50 days, which raised a strong demand for another longer exhibition afterwards. Originally created from 1968 to 1969 in Mexico, the painting had been missing since then until it was finally located in September, 2003 by the now late Toshiko Okamoto, Taro's adopted daughter and secretary. Although it was considerably damaged when it was discovered, the painting was beautifully recovered after a restoration project organized by supporters of cultural figures. While the painting depicts a tragic moment of the explosion of an atomic bomb, it delivers a strong message from Taro who believed that the "myth of tomorrow" was born as humanity triumphed with dignity over the cruelest tragedy. "

http://www.tourism.metro.tokyo.jp/korean/tourists/topics_event/topics/070426/1.html

"Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the museum, this exhibition sheds light on Taro Okamoto's "Tower of the Sun," a monument created for the Japan World Exposition held in 1970. The work symbolizes "the progress and harmony of human beings." Okamoto wanted to build something extremely "absurd" that stood out in the expo crowded with modernist pavilions. This idea of a "festival" transcending any nationality, race, or language barriers was prominent in the monument. The tower contains "Tree of Life" which illustrates the growth of humanity. Also, the internal space is divided into parts, each of which represent the past, present, and future, unfolding the dynamism of life, which has always existed around us. The monument is an ultimate compilation of Okamoto's philosophy and theory of art."

http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2008/47C8.en

2008-06-03T23:52:00.005+09:00

Art is the language through which we learn about and talk about what it is to be human and pass this knowledge and experience on to those around us and following generations. We are inspired by nature, of which we are a part, and which provides us with a model of harmony, which is what we seek in life - we are drawn towards harmony as a natural process. Harmony is good for you. Harmony, which we call beauty when we recognise it, is a process of seeking peace amongst a chaos of differences, which we hope to reconcile, while also celebrating. Harmony is not about uniformity or conformity, but the celebration, understanding and reconciliation of diversity. Art is about trying to make sense of the world.

To make sense - never thought about that phrase before...

Isadora Duncan by Auguste Rodin

2008-05-15T14:52:00.004+09:00

We went to see the great artists Tokyo Chutei Iki again last night, playing in a retro-Hawaiian livehouse in Yokohama. Ten baritone saxs painting aural landscapes of the city in which they live. Was reminded oddly enough of Prince Charles sitting in the falling snow in a Norfolk field, painting South Creake church – I read his book ‘Watercolours’ when I was in Qatar. In it he talks about how the landscape is channelled through his eyes and out the end of his hand and brush onto the page. One function of art is perhaps to condense and simplify the rich and sometimes chaotic nature of the world around us into manageable chunks.

Keith Jarrett apparently manages to do this on the hoof, in flight – at a concert in Tokyo he evidently absorbed the energy around him to the extent that during one of his lengthy and brilliant piano improvisations he incorporated a Japanese folk song which he later claimed never to have heard before.

2008-05-12T14:55:00.002+09:00

Met up at the Mori Art Museum for a retrospective of the Turner Prize - Damien Hirst's Divided cow and calf, Gilbert & George, Grayson Perry's vases, Chris Ofili etc. Very enjoyable and thought-provoking. Perhaps the most impressive is the video by Saskia Olde Wolbers, Displaced (the photo is a still from the video).

Well worth a visit - www.mori.art.museum

The museum is on the 60-somethingth floor of the Roppongi Hills Tower, so you get a stupendous 360 degree view of Tokyo thrown in.

2008-05-10T12:19:00.000+09:00

An interesting link:

http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/previous.html

2008-03-30T19:08:00.004+09:00

We went up to Jinbo-cho today - the secondhandbook/university area of Tokyo - and visited an exhibition of Hiroshige's ukiyoe (woodblock prints) - the 53 stations on the Tokaido.

One of the 40 craftsmen left in the country who still produce these prints demonstrated how he made this one, of Hakone, which has a particularly soft spot in my heart, and which I bought.

2008-01-31T17:06:00.001+09:00

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Aesop (560 - 620 BC)

2008-01-23T02:30:00.000+09:00

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle
che tremano d'amore
e di speranza.

Ma’il mio mistero e chiuso in me,

il nome mio nessun sapra!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo diro
quando la luce splendera!
Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio
che ti fa mia!

(Il nome suo nessun sapra!...

e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)

Dilegua, o notte!

Tramontate, stelle!
Tramontate, stelle!

All'alba vincero!

vincero,

vincero!

No-one sleep!
No-one must sleep.

Even you, Princess,
in your cold room,
gaze at the stars
which tremble with love
and hope.

But my mystery is kept locked within me,
my name no-one shall know.
No, no,
I shall say it as my mouth
meets yours when the dawn breaks.

And my kiss will break the silence
which makes you mine!

(No-one shall know his name,
and we, alas, shall die!)

Vanish, night!

Set, o stars!

At sunrise
I shall overcome.
I shall overcome!

I shall overcome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDtcidMR_6I
The Three Tenors: Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Luciano Pavarotti

On the Water Front.
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Wuthering Heights.

2008-01-21T23:56:00.000+09:00

Shall we dance?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSpv-a-IRTs&feature=related

'When You Are Old'

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars."

William Butler Yeats

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Shall we dance? (1937)

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

Shall we dance?

Beryl Cook

Film stills and clip: Shall we Dansu?

(1996) Dir. Masayuki Suo

Woodblock print: Start of the Dance, by Tatsumi Shimura (1907 - 80)

http://www.ukiyoe-gallery.com/shimura.htm

'Of all human inventions, dance and music are the first and foremost of our pleasures'

(Adam Smith)

'The film begins with a close-up of the inscription above the stage in the ballroom of the Blackpool Tower:

"Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear",

from the poem Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare'

(Wikipedia)

2008-01-21T22:25:00.000+09:00

"It is a kernel, an embryo... it starts, it creates interest... even if it doesn't immediately bring about analysis or conviction or whatever - it creates, it is a spark, an acorn - to that extent I think it's worth it. I am convinced that in its form of entertainment, it should and must entertain, but unless that entertainment contains to some degree, a cry of compassion, or relevance to oppression, or a plea for tolerance, or something ... unless every now and again cinema can give that, to its audience, then it denies the genius of its invention..."

Richard Attenborough on cinema - saying something that might relate to teaching, or a number of other human activities, on the Film Programme, BBC Radio 4, the other day.

Mahatma Gandhi - On his way to prayer.

Casablanca - Round up the usual suspects.

Shadows at Nagasaki, August 1945.

'Climbing is mostly waiting'

MS, on mountaineering, on the occasion of MB's pre-departure party.

2008-01-17T12:28:00.000+09:00

"The human animal is not built to control their emotions - they're really not - that's not what's beautiful about us. What's beautiful about us is having access to our emotions."

Jodie Foster
The Film Programme
Radio 4

'Happy Time', by Kunio Kaneko

2008-01-14T23:12:00.000+09:00

Just been to see the Leningrad State Ballet in Yokohama performing Swan Lake - one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life. Almost unbearably so.

Beautiful people, beautiful music, beautiful set ...

I must have seen 4 or 5 performances since the first time with Rod et al c. 1980 in the Norwich Theatre Royal. I went there again 20 years later with my learned partner, who laughed at the size of the stage - so small that Odette ended up in the wings at one point.

Maybe it's my age, or present circumstances, but I was so moved by today's wonderful performance - can't wait for the next time.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bO4AMbM1xVc&feature=related
Guillem, Cope

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ykS1waEUrBw&feature=related
Fonteyn, Nureyev

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C5BSyJ_vlHo&feature=related
Billy Elliot

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5emTblCcD-c
Oksana Baiul -

We had supper in Yokohama Chinatown.

2007-12-31T14:58:00.000+09:00

The 1990 Three Tenors concert has apparently just been on Japanese TV. I remember switching on the TV that Saturday lunchtime in July 1990, presumably in order to watch the World Cup Final, and the concert coming on. I immediately called to my three young children and their friends to come and sit down and watch as three of the greatest voices of the late 20th century belted out Nessum Dorma et al: Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras and the late great Luciano Pavarotti. This was the first of these concerts.

I remember the mother of one of these children putting her head round the door and saying 'Why are you looking at that crap?', or words to that effect. This is from someone who apparently liked music; although I also recall the same person saying 'I hate 20th century classical music', thereby condemning a century of artistic endeavour to the wastebin in six short words.

It seems to me that such easy dismissal might be a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. She hated soccer, and all the pomp and ceremony associated with the world cup, so she dismissed the whole shebang in one fell swoop. Maybe we are all prone to do such things: we all have 'mental blocks' against various things for whatever reasons. It wasn't until about the time of the above incident that I started reading poetry, for example. I was at a friend's house, waiting for her to get ready, and pulled a collection of English poetry off her shelf. I started reading The Lady of Shalott, burst into tears and sobbed my way through the rest of it. It took me literally hours to read Auguries of Innocence for the same reason. It also took me a couple of decades to get into jazz, although I first fell in love with it in the mid-60s when I was taken to see The Jungle Book by my godmother.

I am not the world's greatest soccer fan - I tend to agree with Desmond Morris's suggestion that it is somehow based on primitive man's group hunting activities: a single man acting alone would have found it very difficult to down a large beast so they worked out how to band together, as chimpanzees still do, to deliver the killer blow. I also think there might be an element of pseudo-sexual ecstasy as the ball climactically hits the back of the net.

However, that doesn't detract, for me, from the power of the game - in fact, quite the reverse: it is indeed to a certain extent re-enacting some primal drama before our very eyes. What's wrong with that? And anyway, don't we all like to play games? There is also something somewhat wonderful about the fact that for those 90 minutes something like half the population of the planet (?) - whatever, several hundred million of us - are all bonded together doing the same thing, in real time - watching 22 men boot a piece of inflated leather up and down a field.

There have been a number of occasions in my life - in Turkey and the Middle East spring to mind - when I have had conversations with people with whom I share no common language apart from the names of soccer teams and players:

You England?

Yes

Manchester United? David Beckham?

No - Norwich.

Norwich City? Inter Milan?!

Oh yes - Bayern Munich...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDtcidMR_6I
The Three Tenors: Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Luciano Pavarotti

'The Three Tenors is a name given to a consort of singers who held concerts under this banner during the 1990s and early 2000s: Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. The trio began their collaboration with a concert at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome held on the eve of the 1990 FIFA World Cup final in Italy, on July 7, 1990, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra del Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. The idea of the concert was originally conceived by the Italian manager/producer Mario Dradi, to raise money for Carreras's foundation and also as a way for his contemporaries, Domingo and Pavarotti, to welcome their friend and colleague back to the world of opera after his successful treatment for leukemia.'

Wikipedia

'There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.'

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Photos: George Best, Three Tenors, Shizuka Arakawa

2007-12-30T16:47:00.000+09:00

I lived in Barcelona for three months a while ago, about ten minutes' walk from Gaudi's Palau de la Musica. They used to do early Sunday morning concerts, half-price, so I would occasionally succeed in getting down there somewhat bleary-eyed by 10.30, leaving my flatmates wrapped up in their duvets. (My flatmates, by the way, were three Australian girls called Liz, Jen and Lets - Elizabeth, Genevieve and Valletta).

I remember one sunny winter morning sitting at the back of the orchestra (cheapest seats), having just been trying to read El Pais, watching a virtuoso violinist sending showers of notes high up into the roofspace - you could almost see them flying up, almost touch them. I think it was a Russian violin concerto. We the audience were totally focussed on them, these delicately fragile pure notes floating up like bubbles till they popped way above our heads .

I was reminded of this the other day sitting in a Turkish restaurant here in Tokyo with a couple of friends, talking about music. We agreed, I think, that one of its functions is to focus the attention of a large group of people, a community, momentarily totally on the present, the here and now - and thus unify the group.

Sport, perhaps, does the same thing, in a different way - thousands, millions of us are completely focussed on the last serve of the tie-break in the 4th set of the Wimbledon final - the ball clips the net, bounces, but which side of the net will it fall? One way and we are elated, the other dismayed - everything else in our lives is temporarily suspended.

When Shizuka Arakawa launches herself into the air for a triple axel we all hold our breath until she lands safely, and impossibly gracefully back on the ice, to our great relief (I can barely watch!)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=etuXMmi2frg

Must go back to Barcelona one day - I worked at a language school right on La Rambla, on the top floor, so I could look out of the classroom window down onto the bustling street below, while flocks of pigeons wheeled through the tree tops outside.

Photos of the Palau de la Musica, La Rambla, and the Mercat de la Bouqueria, Barcelona, and Shizuka Arakawa, from Japan.

2007-12-30T00:38:00.001+09:00

A few years back I was exceedingly lucky to have the opportunity of leading a group of Japanese students on a 10-day 'literary tour' of England and Ireland. We flew to Dublin (Book of Kells, Oscar Wilde, ...) and Galway (Yeats..), then back to the Lake District (Wordsworth, Ruskin..) , Yorkshire (the Brontes..), and London.

On the way up to Dove Cottage in the Lakes I stood on a farmer's milk churn platform and gave an impromptu pontification on Wordsworth (about whom I confess I knew precious little), culminating in an attempt at 'I wandered lonely as a cloud...' (heavily prompted by my more knowledgeable assistant, Molly). The punters were suitably impressed though, and gave a little round of applause.

"Tintern Abbey"

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur. -- Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves

'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire

The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love.

Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on, --

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft --

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years.

And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved.

For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all.

I cannot paint

What then I was.

The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye. --

That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompence. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more

Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes.

Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings.

Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations!

Nor, perchance --

If I should be where I no more can hear

Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

Of past existence -- wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love -- oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
[Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,
On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye
During A Tour. July 13, 1798.]

Paintings by John Constable Landscape in the Lake District,

Joseph Wright of Derby Ullswater,

Thomas Kirkstall,

Thomas Fearnley.

Photos from BBC.

2007-12-17T00:10:00.000+09:00

'A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know. '

Laurence J. Peter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVGGmRfdx4&feature=related
Faithless - Bombs

Here's what some 20-year-olds are capable of: the bassist is only 17 (and he wrote the song).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htuxb-m4-ng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B2clFsLA3w

All right now

Calligraphy by Gaston Petit.

2007-12-14T09:05:00.000+09:00

It's true what they say about Mount Fuji - there are mornings when she seems to have crept forward about 50 miles overnight, like the Birnam Woods at Dunsinane, hoping that no-one will notice. Like this morning - luckily we have a perfect view of her from the roof of the language centre.

Yours truly with some of my great Odawaran 'students' from my friend Conrad's school.

2007-12-13T12:01:00.001+09:00

The afore-mentioned sensei also told me that she is going to a bo-nen-kai on Saturday. Literally it means forget-year-party, during which one drinks to forget the past year. This is followed in a couple of weeks' time by a shin-nen-kai, a new-year-party, to welcome the New Year.

The New Year is big in Japan - they have a lot of hatsu-this and hatsu-that; hatsu meaning 'first' - the first fish catch of the year, the first fruit and veg, etc. (hatsu-koi: first love).

At midnight on New Year's Eve the temple bells are rung 108 times - to remind us of the 108 sins that we are apparently capable of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/108_(number)

The turning of the year is always a significant time, but this year I feel it especially so. Somehow once we get past the shortest day, and longest night, what we did or didn't do, the things we said, for better or worse, are not exactly forgotten, but the page is turned, and we start again with a blank sheet - same book, same ongoing story, but a clean page.

I learned the other day that the 25th was chosen as Christ's birthday not by any random accident, by the way. The three stars ('Three kings') of Orion's belt point to the spot on the horizon where the Sun sinks on the shortest day - the winter solstice (22nd December). For three days (the period that Christ was 'dead') the Sun goes down at the same place, but on the third day it rises again slightly further back the other way - the Sun, the Lord, the year, is re-born, and we start to live again, in hope of a brighter future.

(This is a very ancient story that apparently was told many times before Christianity hi-jacked it, along with the virgin birth, etc.)

The Bennu Bird (Phoenix)
26th Dynasty (500 BC?)
Egypt
http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=13824

2007-12-12T20:37:00.000+09:00

The Asiatic Society of Japan lecture on Monday was, as is usually the case, an overwhelming, humbling and enriching experience. We were lucky to be at the Canadian Embassy, with the Canadian Embassador (who spoke, in three different languages - mostly in Japanese), and HIH Princess Takamada - and a whole range of highly intelligent, sensitive, caring, productive human beings. We were all, I think, somewhat gobsmacked by the speaker, Fr. Gaston Petit - an artist who has been in Japan (and Canada) since 1961 - painter, printmaker, sculptor, architect...

"Son oeuvre est une invitation à dépasser la condition humaine, pour participer au mystère du salut dans toute sa dimension cosmique".

http://petitgaston.iquebec.com/

After we had all been blown away by a presentation of a small part of his oeuvre, the voter of thanks said, among many others things, that we all continue developing all the time, become more understanding of ourselves and each other, more self-aware, better human beings - which rang a very large bell with me - a series of massive bells.

Artists express some of this process on our behalf, which is why we love them so much - just look at the adoration of eg. Amy Winehouse (me included). Just been looking at a DVD of her recent London concert and was struck not for the first time by the use of 'thank you' - she pours out her heart and soul, sometimes bringing up old sad stuff that no longer applies to her present feelings - but she does this not (only) for herself (she is driven to perform) - but for us. She is putting into song (in this case) what we want to say, but for whatever reason feel incapable of doing. Which is why we thank her with our applause, but she also thanks us for thanking her. We all share in being human through the song - the art.

I was with a 'student' today (a lovely young woman, who just wants to chat - during which I learn much more than she does - she is one of my sensei - teachers, or literally 'before people' - people born earlier, and therefore more experienced and wiser, in theory). We were in a cafe looking at 5 monks standing outside the station, doing takuhatsu (which is probably translated inadequately as 'begging for alms'). She explained that they were her family's sect (every family has a sect) and that therefore, if you go back long enough, they might actually be related - even so, they share a long history one way or another. We watched as people gave them money, and my student carefully noted how they bowed - she has never given money (ofuse), but decided to do so today - "because these monks give us the opportunity to give".

On another, related, topic, I was told the other day that it's one thing to be looking for someone who understands you, but you also have to want to help that person understand you, and vice versa.

As a new friend said the other day, we live our lives going forward, but we understand them looking back. Indeed.

I just worked out something that I've heard for years but not really understood: that by giving we receive. By being lucky enough to have people around us to give things to, we are being given the opportunity to take part in the human race. How come that took me so long to work such a simple thing out?

I always used to feel very uncomfortable with people helping me - awkward, embarrassed, ashamed even - I didn' t want to be helped, so I resisted, avoided, denied even that someone was daring to get close to me and help me - I suppose partly because that would oblige me to give something back in return, maybe, which for whatever reason I didn't feel capable of doing. So I preferred to be left alone, in splendid isolation - 'independent', and very lonely - like a less extreme version of the talented Mr Ripley.

That's all changed now - finally - I just want to join in the party - the global party that is never-ending and happening all around us : Life on Earth.

And as a very old friend told me a life-time ago, we do that by giving, one way or another.

How I envy those of you who have known and understood this. I am now reminded of my mother, with whom I stayed last summer. On the way to the station, to say goodbye, I wanted to thank her for the effort she had made to make us ... happy.

'Don't be ridiculous', she said .. the exact words escape me - something along the lines of 'I am just being your mother'.

We are all, perhaps, just being each other's friends.

Another friend, interested in psychology and neurology, told me the other day that our brains - more specifically, our frontal lobes - need a certain amount of stimulus (-li) - too little and we switch off; too much and we get overloaded. He says, and I believe him, that recent neurological research shows that in face to face conversation we get just the right amount.

2007-12-06T22:51:00.000+09:00

This girl is great.

"Forty-five minutes after Amy Winehouse is due on stage, there is still no sign of the singer, which offers an opportunity to ponder the latest headlines in a year of arrests, public scraps and drug busts. Winehouse was reportedly booed off stage in Birmingham, and her tour manager was reported to have quit due to the presence of heroin on the tour bus. Only hours before the gig, she was criticised by the United Nations' top drug enforcement official and advised to quit touring by Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis. Meanwhile, Andrew Lloyd Webber has joined a small but defiant chorus of defence, comparing Winehouse's real-life dramas to jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald's. What this means for Newcastle is that when the curtain finally rises, anything could happen.

Thankfully, the Winehouse that sashays on in a tiny cream dress is not the one of tabloid infamy, but the awesome voice behind this year's biggest selling album, Back to Black. Amazingly, as she reels off the album's songs, that voice has never sounded better, a roar of jazz and blues. A pattern ensues: every song is followed by a rapturous ovation. After much discussion of her mental state, the smiling singer is sharp enough to perform perfect choreographed dance moves and signal for more vocals in the sound mix. She delivers Back to Black's "I died 100 times", swoons and raises herself again; a brilliantly poignant move that seems spontaneous. Crucially, she seems to be reconnecting with the simple highs of performing before an audience who love her.

In fact, the performance is so eerily fantastic that you end up looking for telltale flaws. One song has to be restarted; she is prompted into the segue into Bad Thing; and exposing her bra while taking off a guitar prompts an ongoing obsession with covering her cleavage. But otherwise, this is an absorbing example of a singer living every lyric. Her recent troubles are addressed in Wake Up Alone's dedication to currently incarcerated husband Blake Fielder-Civil. But, sipping only once, she never loses focus on the show, whether apologising "from the depth of my heart" for lateness, delivering a note-perfect Rehab or handing a tiny present to a girl with a "fantastic" beehive. Given the torrent of negative interest, it is a miracle the 24-year-old pulls it off, but this is a powerful showing of grace under fire worthy of the outstanding female singer of her generation."

Amy Winehouse

Academy, Newcastle

Dave Simpson

Tuesday November 20, 2007

The Guardian

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqSKVv6YO8g&feature=related

Chalk and cheese? This one reminds me of something that I read by Malcolm Muggeridge when I was teenager. He mentioned a book called 'The Cloud of Unknowing', which I bought but couldn't understand at the time (probably time for another go), and a line which said something like we have to learn how to see through rather than with the eye (at life, presumably).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vfdl7-E80Q&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rakv-LKhdow&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFVM5pVTwkM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHQV-SuqNE&feature=related

There have been a lot of changes over the last few weeks, in my life - most of them internal - I finally took the lid off a lot of stuff and have managed for the first time in years to enable some kind of clear communication between my heart, soul and what's left of my mind - the knowing, understanding and loving aspects of ourselves (not necessarily in that order), and realised that for whatever reasons I have either run away from or pushed away people who get close to me, for pretty much my entire life. The good news is that I have finally understood that talking to people about our feelings is what we are meant to do - designed to - and secondarily, it also seems to me that this is one of the functions of art. Pretty obvious stuff, but it's taken me 47 years to really take these points on board. So, there is light at the end of the tunnel!

People who need people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-8gn6vGu_w

2007-12-06T21:26:00.000+09:00

He was a stranger to himself

A spy in his own camp

And his money was his health

All thrown to the dust by his very own hand

Yet his beauty lingered still

Beyond the draining of the sand

But greener was the other side of the hill

Richer was the other man's land

But we loved him, loved him just like brothers would

We loved him, loved him like no others could

And she loved him, loved him like a lover should

Take good care of an aching heart

You never can replace it

You know you are the master of your heart

You'll realise that when you think it fit

Those orbs of blue are jading away

No laughter from them dances

Yet you're bound to remember this one day

Hazards are risks and risks are chances

You can run for cover,

run for cover like a frightened hare

Till it's all over,

all over and there's no-one there

'Cos you daren't discover,

daren't discover that we really care

'Stranger to Himself'

Sandy Denny

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ObfBj76WlsM

John Peel and Sandy Denny

Sketch by Rodin (I think)

2007-11-22T23:40:00.000+09:00

'deipnosophist' \dyp-NOS-uh-fist\, noun:

'Someone who is skilled in table talk.'

'At the age of six his future as a deipnosophist seemed certain. Guzzling filched apples he loved to prattle. Hogging the pie he invariably piped up and rattled on.'

-- Ellis Sharp, "The Bloating of Nellcock"

'Deipnosophist comes from the title of a work written by the Greek Athenaeus in about 228 AD, Deipnosophistai, in which a number of wise men sit at a dinner table and discuss a wide range of topics. It is derived from deipnon, "dinner" + sophistas, "a clever or wise man."

dictionary.com

Ojalla.

http://www.wanttoknow.info/071121assassinationskennedykingjfkrfkmlk
JFK assassinated.

Etruscan sarcophagus lid
Museo Guarnacci
Pre-Roman

2007-11-20T22:02:00.000+09:00

Saw this lovely lady a couple of years ago at the Arezzo Wave free rock festival. George was there, and we were both bowled over by her incredible power and emotion, despite being such a wee lass.

Here are a couple of video links, which are great, but reinforce the point that music is meant to be heard live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrMHo6u5vQc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9PYBNt8aR4&feature=related

Rokia Traore

Chap on the radio today (Start the Week R4) was saying how music must be in our DNA as all humans everywhere, throughout time, and from an early age - play, appreciate and dance to it.

"Ever since the neurologist OLIVER SACKS first became aware of the profound effects of music on the brain in patients with Parkinson’s, he has been struck by the remarkable ways that music’s intrinsic qualities stimulate our auditory and nervous system and even alter the brain in complex and unpredictable ways. In his new book, Musicophilia, he explores the range of human responses to music through case studies of patients and musicians, to see what their experiences can tell us about the effect of music on the brain. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is published by Picador." (Start the Week website).

Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳 (1797 - 1861)

'Elephant catching a flying tengu'

Apparently one chap was struck by lightning and suddenly became musical to the extent that he now writes and plays his own Chopinesque music ('the Lightning Sonatas'), having previously been musically illiterate.

Can waste/spend a lot of time on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HOpYKnbXLs&feature=related
All I want is a room somewhere

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSgryyxp-cg
I think we should go mad …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6raF7kcJJs
The private life is dead…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDhKr1FEM4
Tradition!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zx0Ta0uAEk
BB and Manitas di Plata

Brigitte Bardot

Cannes

1956 (?)

2007-11-18T18:33:00.000+09:00

Just got back from a hike to see the 'koyo' - autumn colours - around the temple of Saijo-ji, not so far from here. Actually we are a little early as they still haven't hit their peak.

Ended up higher than expected and glimpsed a couple of vistas of the mountain ranges.

Saijo-ji gatehouse, surrounded by tall 'sugi' - Japanese cedar.

Fishpond at Saijo-ji.

This is Tengu, who scares off the evil spirits by threatening them with a fan and a scroll. (Better find out a bit more of him).

Went to a sake tasting charity lunch yesterday with some good friends. The charity is run by Janica and funds the education of poor children in the Philippines - http://www.sos-miracle.com/3/gallery.htm

We were given ten rare sake to try with a great however-many course lunch, and encouraged to take notes - not an easy task, especially as we were in the presence of a true connoisseuse, M.

My notes for the first: 'Salt, chlorine, ammonia, grass'.

Number 2: 'Pepper, sweet, complex, grain'.

3: Banana split

4: Classic

5: Dry bricks, nuts, smoke

6: Asparagus

7: Dry

8: "wild but domestic"

10:

which I thought not bad considering the amount of great alcohol and good food we'd had on a Saturday afternoon.

The food was great - from Akita http://namahage.hy-system.com/ginza.html and we were entertained by some dancing demon child-catchers, who terrified the few kids available under the table.

Ended up in the Dubliners in Shinjuku.

http://www.dubliners.jp/shinjuku/index.html

This chap is apparently a baku, whose role in life is to catch bad dreams - more power to his elbow.

Vote for change - what the hell are you waiting for?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_cC1Jvtn4o

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird - Old Grey Whistle Test 1975

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1140NzFo5A&feature=related

Free - Mr. Big - Isle of Wight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOvSozzjWOA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srHJ1B06r5c&feature=related
Mr. Jones - Isle of Wight 2007 – Amy Winehouse

2007-11-15T23:09:00.000+09:00

Photos from George at Casalino and thereabouts.

Picking olives.

George and crew, en famille.

The swamp looking less swamp-like having received an injection from the remains of the bakery, which collapsed.

Every cloud ...

Finally, 5 years on, the windmill is up and running!

Bravo George!

A new porch to prevent impalement from massive icicles.

Earthquakes in Japan:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7062128.stm

The US:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7307

Nakba:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=814874317042180338&hl=en-GB

Word of the day (courtesy of dictionary.com)

'Flaneur'

'One who strolls about aimlessly; a lounger; a loafer.'

'Burrows and Wallace show how New York embraced the idea of the flaneur - of the disinterested, artistically inclined wanderer in the city, of what they call "city watching." '

Jed Perl, "The Adolescent City", New Republic , January 22, 2001

'Flaneur comes from French, from flâner, "to saunter; to stroll; to lounge about." '

Might put that on my CV.

2007-11-13T20:32:00.000+09:00

Un bel dì, vedremo

levarsi un fil di fumo

sull'estremo confin del mare.

E poi la nave appare.

Poi la nave bianca entra nel porto,

romba il suo saluto.

Vedi? È venuto!

Io non gli scendo incontro. Io no.

Mi metto là sul ciglio del colle e aspetto,

e aspetto gran tempo e non mi pesa,

la lunga attesa.

E... uscito dalla folla cittadina un uomo,

un picciol punto s'avvia per la collina.

Chi sarà? chi sarà?

E come sarà giunto

che dirà? che dirà?

Chiamerà Butterfly dalla lontana.

Io senza dar risposta me ne starò nascosta

un po' per celia e un po' per non morire

al primo incontro, ed egli alquanto in pena

chiamerà, chiamerà:

Piccina mogliettina

olezzo di verbena, i nomi che mi dava al suo venire.

One fine day you'll see a thread of smoke arising on the sea on the far horizon, and then the ship appearing; Then the trim white vessel glides into the harbour, and thunders forth her cannon. Can't you see?

Now he is coming! I do not go to meet him. Not I! I stay up here on the hill, and wait here... for a long time, but never weary of the long waiting.

From out of the crowded city I can see a man coming, a little speck in the distance, climbing up the hill.

Can you guess who it is? And when he's reached the summit, what will he say?

He'll call: "Butterfly'' from the distance.

I, without answering, hold myself quietly conceal'd, partly to teaze him and partly so as not to die at our first meeting;

and then, a little troubled he will call, he will call:

"Dear baby wife of mine, Dear little orange blossom!''

The names he used to call me when he came here.

Puccini

Madame Butterfly

Nagasaki

Dresden

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P79j-293dQ
Bruce Springsteen – 14 September 2001

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26HEfAqiPEU
Drive all night

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go
Johnny Cash - Ghost

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5lyNdAjDyE
Bruce on war in 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DIp7ew_z8I
Bruce on war in 1985

2007-11-11T18:07:00.000+09:00

Visiting Nagasaki is unlike your regular tourist trip to an interesting city. You are hit, or thumped, on several levels simultaneously - and in my case, for personal, family reasons, there was even more going on - to become clear in due course.

As we entered the hypocenter park - the point immediately below the explosion of evil destructive force unleashed by the USAF on an innocent civilian population, the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly - I was overcome by an urge to pray - to what or whom, I have no idea, but I felt my knees weaken and something inside somewhere around the solarplexus said bow your head, crumple and pray that the love of humanity will prevail over this - that the power of simple individual human acts will somehow defeat the horror of the powerful technocratic idealogues making such evil decisions.
The US, with UK backing, spent more than the entire GDP of Japan on the 'Manhattan Project' - the development of the ultimate WMD - the 'Fatman' dropped on Nagasaki, which they were evidently determined to use as soon as possible on whoever: Germans, Japs, Arabs ... - and which was quickly outdated, in the 50s, by weapons 1000 times more deadly. Britain alone still has 180 of these. That's 180 x 1000 x Nagasaki. Surely we can ask why? Where are the 'axes of evil' on this planet?

Nagasaki, ironically, is one of the most 'Western' cities in Japan - and throughout the Edo period (1600 - 1870 ish) was the only port where direct contact with gaijin - outsiders - was allowed. Try it anywhere else and you'd lose your head (although the Ainu in Hokkaido remained a conduit to Russia, China and beyond, whilst being systematically 'ethnically cleansed' by the Japanese, no doubt for their own benefit).

Dejima, now being reconstructed, was an artificially constructed island built to house the gaijin, and keep them separated lest they contaminate the Japanese, intellectually or otherwise. Once an island, it's now surrounded by modern Nagasaki, built on land reclaimed from the sea.

Up on the hill, above the magnificent bay of Nagasaki, with huge and numerous ships plying its waters, foghorns sounding below at regular intervals, are the residences of the Westerners who came to Japan at the end of the Edo and during the Meiji and Taisho eras - in British terms Late Victorians/Edwardians, who made a packet, and inspired among others, Puccini's Madame Butterfly.

Walking through their houses was in itself an overwhelming experience - the foreigner abroad, weeks from home, the nostalgia, the self-doubts, the family connections, etc. The photographs still there on the sideboard.

And here we are, a century on, the gaijin, asking ourselves the same questions.

Went for hike on November 5th in Hakone, just up the road. In over 6 hours we covered a lot of ground, one way or another - I don't play golf but I imagine it must be something like a hike - the bantering being at least as significant as the physical exercise. For me there were two, no three, main points of banter:

language/culture (which influences which), imperialism ('wars' as battles in a long-term campaign) and marriage (ditto).

I'll come back to this later.

This is a photo by Joe O'Donnell. He was 23 and the first man to land on the mainland of Japan in 1945 - his role was to photograph the destruction. This photo is of a boy delivering his dead brother to a cremation site. The only sign of emotion was his quivering lip.

Went for a history hike round Odawara today with Hideki (who has lived here all his life) and Yoko (who has only lived here for 30 years) and was reassured by the number of times they said 'I have never been here' and 'I never knew that', that it wasn't a waste of their time. Certainly not for me.

The Peace Park in Nagasaki. He points to the bomb above, the peace below.

Christian Cathedral in Nagasaki, destroyed by the USAF, to save lives.

The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby. Natalie Wood

"If we do not change direction, we will end up where we areheaded." Lao Tsu

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-autopsy9nov09,0,1736588.story?coll=la-home-world

http://encarta.msn.com/media_461535633_761563737_-1_1/Truman_on_the_Bombing_of_Hiroshima.html

Listen to this, then tell me you don’t hear Bush justifying bombing Arabs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdYTQekf_2I
Gladys Knight – Can’t take my eyes off of you

An artist - is she singing for us, or about us, on our behalf, or to us?

"Contrary to conventional opinion today, many military leaders of the time -- including six out of seven wartime five-star officers -- criticized the use of the atomic bomb.Take, for example, Adm. William Leahy, White House chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Moreover, Leahy continued, "In being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. Iwas not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

President Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled in 1963, as he did on several other occasions, that he had opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan during a July 1945 meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."

Adm. William "Bull" Halsey, the tough and outspoken commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, which participated in the American offensive against the Japanese home islands in the final months of the war, publicly stated in 1946 that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment."7

The Japanese, he noted, had "put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before" the bomb was used. Nor do all Pacific war veterans agree with Tibbets's defense of the atomic bomb. To give but one example: Responding to a journalist's question in 1995 about what he would have done had he been in Truman's shoes,J oseph O'Donnell, a retired Marine Corps sergeant whos erved in the Pacific, answered that "we should have went after the military in Japan. They were bad. But to drop a bomb on women and children and the elderly, I draw a line there, and I still hold it."

http://www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2007/110207a.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_HV0Vq5Big

Shizuka Arakawa: Madame Butterfly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLaY2VcIEqo
Callas – Un bel di vedremo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uut6X4E-Kgk
Angela GHEORGHIU

2007-11-02T14:13:00.000+09:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8cdaUgXbrU
Jimi

"The uniform made me feel incredibly sharp. Once I put it on, I was convinced Japan would triumph," recalled the wartime surgeon, who was deployed to Changzhi (then Luan) in Shanxi Province in February 1942.
His fervor, and the nationalist indoctrination of his schooling, quickly subordinated any sense of conscience. By his second month at Luan's army hospital, Yuasa was aggressively performing vivisections on live Chinese prisoners...

"I was in denial of the things I did in Luan until the war was over. It was because I had no sense of remorse while I was doing it," Yuasa, 90, told The Japan Times in a recent interview.

"We believed that the orders from the top were absolute. We performed the vivisections as ordered. We erased any sense of culpability by doing so, even though what we did was horrendous.

In the six decades since the end of the war, Japan as a whole still has not come to grips with its responsibility

But Yuasa, who has confessed his inhumane acts and in so doing suffered condemnation at home, believes the only way for Japan to avoid war in the future is to accept the misdeeds committed by the Imperial army.

Born Oct. 23, 1916, in Saitama Prefecture, Yuasa grew up in Tokyo and attended a high school near Yasukuni Shrine in Chiyoda Ward. The students often were lectured by army officers, who portrayed the emperor as a "living god" and said the Japanese, as a superior people, had an obligation to rule Asia.

Students were compelled to bow toward Yasukuni on their way to school, Yuasa said, recalling that the Hinomaru flag and "Kimigayo" anthem symbolized the wartime zeal.

"And back then, we had no choice but to blindly follow what we were being taught," he said...

Once in China, it took only six weeks for Yuasa to become a coldblooded vivisectionist, murdering live prisoners.

The army placed great importance on the operations performed on live Chinese prisoners. It was considered an ideal way to learn how to care for casualties, as there were few wounded Japanese troops making it back from the front. Surgeons were encouraged to conduct improvised operations in the most authentic battlefield circumstances available, using prisoners as guinea pigs. ...

"Many of the Japanese were chatting pleasantly as they prepared," Yuasa said, noting the occasional cries from the older prisoner was the only sign of discomfort. ...

Although the farmer was lifeless by the end of the procedures, the young prisoner was still breathing. Yuasa injected anesthetic into his vein and executed him. The two victims were then dumped in a hole near the hospital.

"I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to do it," Yuasa said.
Over the next three years, Yuasa said he participated in 14 prisoner vivisections. Calling it "practical training," he once operated on a Chinese prisoner who a Japanese soldier deliberately shot twice in the stomach just for the surgery. To accurately re-create battlefield conditions, doctors were ordered not to use anesthesia.

..."I felt no self-reproach at first. I was convinced that compared with what troops must have done at the front, what I did at Luan hospital was of little significance. But facing the paper with a pencil in my hand, I realized the magnitude of what I had committed," said Yuasa, who was allowed to return to Japan in 1956.

... Yuasa now believes at least 1,000 people, including surgeons, nurses and servicemen, were involved in similar atrocities all over mainland China. Only a handful have stepped forward to confess their misdeeds.
"It is difficult for anyone, including myself, to admit having done something evil," Yuasa acknowledged.

... After he was released from the Chinese prison and returned to Japan, Yuasa embarked on a path of redemption by publicly detailing the army's atrocities. His lectures were sometimes met with jeers and scowls from rightwing nationalists. One time, firecrackers were thrown to disrupt his speech.
"After an appearance on TV in 1981, I received a letter with no return address. It was a threat written by a rightwing activist," he said. The writer told him to feel shame for making such revelations and warned him to "be careful when choosing what to say."

[Andy Warhol - Etruscan Dancers]

Even a former colleague at Luan hospital contacted Yuasa and urged him to "go easy" on the revelations.

But Yuasa, who practiced medicine until he was 84, has been active to this day in exposing some of the darkest secrets of the Imperial army. He is propelled by a sense of guilt, as well as the fear that Japan is on a path toward committing the same mistakes again.

"It is painful to talk of my sins, and the sins committed by my country. But concealing the atrocities will only cause more problems," he said.
Yuasa says that by covering up the wartime atrocities, the government has succeeded not only in justifying a war of aggression but also leading the Japanese people on the path to war again. One example is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's 2003 directive calling for any public school teacher who refuses to sing the national anthem during ceremonies to be reprimanded.
"Such orders are identical to the wartime schooling I received," Yuasa said.

"The atmosphere in which we cannot freely express our opinions and challenge government orders is eerily similar to that of my time. And back then, before we knew it, we were heading into a wrongful war," the doctor warned...

The Japan Times: Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007

Etruscan Dancer
Dancer
Italic, Etruscan, Late Archaic Period, about 500 B.C. BMFA

Husband and wife
Sarcophagus and lid with portraits of husband and wife
Italic, Etruscan, Late Classical or early Hellenistic Period, Late 4th–early 3rd century B.C.
Place of Manufacture: Vulci, Lazio, Italy

Museen in Munchen
Dionysos Amphora by the Cleophrades Painter 500-490 BC

http://www.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ355/choi/sig.htm
World trade

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20071024w1.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG3Z_R9wJ-w
Sonny Boy – Lonesome Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XCYHQBn5Lo
Pissed up Sonny Boy

WORLD AGAINST WAR CONFERENCE LONDON, SATURDAY 1 DECEMBER WESTMINSTER CENTRAL HALL

“The conference is open to all and is clearly urgent, given George Bush's insistence that we face "the spectre of World War III, if Iran gains even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon" -wild talk clearly aimed at preparing the ground for an attack. Dr El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says there is no evidence of a nuclear weaponisation programme in Iran and that Bush should stop "hyping the issue that could mean a major conflagration, and not only regionally but globally." The Russian President puts it more colourfully. George Bush, he says, is like "a madman running around with a razor"….”

“The idea that Iran -- which has an economy the size of Finland and which has not invaded another country since the late 18th century -- is intent on provoking World War III is preposterous. That doesn't stop the mainstream media yet again acting as willing dupes for George Bush's war policies, dutifully helping to prepare the ground for an attack on Iran, just as it did for the invasion of Iraq. The country which truly has the potential to start World War III is the United States, with an economy 68 times larger than Iran's, defence spending 110 times greater and a long history of intervening in other countries - having invaded or bombed over 20 since 1945. A new book and film by the US author Norman Solomon, titled WAR MADE EASY, shows how the same methods of "threat inflation" have been used time and again to soften up ...

(See http://tinyurl.com/yu85tx ) Pointing out how the warmongers are once again using lies and deception to justify another illegal war in no way implies support for the Iranian regime, any more than the anti-war movement supported Saddam Hussein's brutal tyranny when we opposed the Iraq war. It is for the Iranian people -- and certainly not George Bush -- to decide how they are to be governed. What is undeniable - as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show -- is that the freedom to make that choice becomes impossible in a country which has been devastated by mass carnage and "shock and awe" bombing.

You would think that Gordon Brown, having seen how disastrous the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out, would be wary about supporting another illegal war provoked by George Bush. Not a chance. He has already indicated that his support will be unconditional. We opposed the Iraq war because it was illegal and we predicted it would bring horrific levels of death and suffering to the Iraqi people. In this we have been proved tragically correct. The same fate awaits the Iranian people unless we mobilise the largest possible opposition to the war policies of our leaders."

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5CF5pfVzLI

"Why do we not stop this incredible slaughter and waste and destruction, this sordid, interminable, and expanding war? I believe it boils down to one central reason. As a country we cannot bear to say that we have made a horrible, massive mistake. We cannot bear, in short, to lose face. What a reason for continuing. The one thing we might learn from this incredible tragedy is to gain a clear view of the enemy. If we peer closely through the blood and death and awful ruin we can see the enemy clearly. '

"He is us."

Psychologist Carl Rogers commenting on the Vietnam War> From Empire to Community

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rasEJPI6Fw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6yXxvKtnEY

Norman Mailer - "Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

2007-10-31T21:05:00.000+09:00

I now know a little more about Noh, having been privileged to see a performance over the lake at our university, surrounded by the keyaki trees, with their colours coming on strong - the whole scene fire-lit. I certainly felt a powerful and direct connection with an ancient people.

"By tradition, Noh actors and musicians never rehearse for performances together. Instead, each actor, musician, and choral chanter practices his or her fundamental movements, songs, and dances independently or under the tutelage of a senior member of the school. Thus, the tempo of a given performance is not set by any single performer but established by the interactions of all the performers together. In this way, Noh exemplifies the traditional Japanese aesthetic of transience, called by Sen no Rikyu ichi-go ichi-e ... (一期一会), literally "one time, one meeting".

[wikipedia]

Jazz?

Which brings to mind the first time I went to Shuzenji, in Izu, a couple of years back. We were sitting outside a tea shop, where an onsen comes up in the middle of a fast flowing river. Over tea, mid-afternoon, Mark asks whether we should head off back - but I had an urge to explore a little further, and we ended up in the workshop of an artist who earnt his crust by etching names and so on onto blacked strips of bamboo - he decided on ichi-go, ichi-e for me - and I have never forgotten it.

"fondo, noun

end; bottom

'Fondo has two main meanings, end and bottom, so it’s another interesting case where Spanish uses one word, and English two.

'El fondo de la cazuela estaba todo quemada.The bottom of the pan was all burnt.'

From its idea of being at the bottom of something, en el fondo is used to say how you really think or feel:

'Mayormente, en el fondo, los divorciados son siempre grandes románticos.'

Generally, divorced people are great romantics deep down, or 'great romantics at heart'."

Dictionary.com

I'll go along with that.

Dictionary.com also reveals that 'diferente' in Spanish covers 'different' as well as 'various' in English. On the other hand 'different' in English translates into Japanese as 'chigau' [correct me if I'm wrong], which also covers 'wrong'.

Should we read anything into this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csmZKXQ_Z_8
Kansas City

2007-10-29T20:42:00.000+09:00

Joni Mitchell:

'Is it entirely hopeless?

Rationally I have to say there's no hope...

Irrationally, I believe in miracles...

Do you do what Nero did?...

In order to be optimistic you have to be irrational...'

Which kind of sums up my life, so far (apologies for the maudlinism), along with the history of the human race - 200 or 300,000 years.

Good timing.

http://mickey.tv/r/Video.aspx?v=xGa4spIe1-E&key=Joni+Mitchell
Shine

Said it before but it's worth repeating - thank god for artists - not the vacuous celebrities, but those dealing in 'the currency of human imagination'.

Gertude Bass Warner

Criminals in Shanghai

c. 1905

2007-10-27T22:01:00.001+09:00

It's been raining for 24 hours and looks set for another day - there's a tropical storm going up the coast 100 miles or so offshore. So for the first time in many years, I found myself in a cinema on a rainy Saturday morning. Hiro had recommended La Vie en Rose (the English title), La Mome, in French, and Editto Piafu, here in Japanese. What a woman, what a great film, what a life story, and what a performance by Marion Cotillard. Highly recommended, but take a supply of tissues. Died at the age of 47 from liver cancer - an alcoholic drug addict.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxl9x_la-mome
http://www.dailymotion.com/related/1567221/video/x1itoy_la-mome_shortfilms

Hiro invited me out for a mid-week sail on Endeavour - so I spent my 'research day' afloat in Sagami Bay. The aim had been to cross the bay from Hayama in the east (part-way down Miura peninsula) to Ito in the west (half-way down Izu peninsula), reaching Ito by nightfall. So we had a relatively early start at 7.30 and with a brisk NE wind pushing us along at a respectable 6 knots we made very good time - by one we were somewhere between Oshima island, Ito, and Hatsushima island, and about 3 hours to port. Hiro called up the Ito harbour master around 1.30 to let them know we were arriving, only to be told that the visitor pontoon had been destroyed in a typhoon back in July and wouldn't be ready till November 1st. Oops. Nothing for it but to tack back to Enoshima, with the wind dropping and the sun going down over Izu. Soon we were becalmed in the yunagi - the time around dusk when the wind drops completely and thoughts turn to dropping anchor and splicing the main brace. (I believe this time of day, my favourite, is referred to as 'brillig' in the Jabberwocky - 'twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gire and gimble in the wabe ...).We motored back, the last hour in the dark, and arrived at Enoshima around 6.30.

Hiro suggested going for a bite to eat and a snifter or two at his favourite oden shop, which turned out to be a pavement 'cafe' (a hand cart and a few rickety stools under a sheet of tarpaulin on the bridge) run by an alcoholic friend of his who apparently charges 1,500 yen every time and for everything, as he can't remember who's had what or how many.

Unfortunately it was shut, to the extent that a hand cart covered in a piece of tarpaulin can be considered closed, but I was nonetheless impressed by Hiro's openness to all people, no matter their social position. Earlier on that day I had mentioned that I went to the Asiatic Society of Japan meeting on Monday where four 'young Japanese scholars' had presented papers - an inititaive of Princess Takamado, the ASJ patron - who wanted to give such scholars the opportunity to present and handle questions in an English-speaking 'international' environment. Hiro mentioned that he had met the Princess and her husband the Prince a while back, and praised the pair of them for their varied good works.

We had four quite different presentations. The first was on pre-natal testing for Down's syndrome, by an earnest and enthusiastic trainee doctor, who pointed out that while in the UK and the US 60% of pregnant mothers are screened, in Japan the figure is around 1% - something of which he approves, as 'screening' suggests abortion if positive. Mothers aged 35 face a 1/338 risk of bearing a child with Down's syndrome. For mothers aged 45 the figure is 1/32.

[Marion Cotillard]

Another chap talked of the role of the Japanese military (or 'self-defense forces') and of the fact that the Japanese government has been trying to 'raise their profile' by getting them involved in UN peacekeeping operations

since 1958, when the fall of the Iraqi Hashimite kingdom (a king installed by the British, following RAF bombing of Iraqi villages in the 1920s) led to the US invading Lebanon with the aim of preventing an Iranian-Shia takeover of the wider Middle East. Japan evidently feared that aggressive US military action would be counterproductive and lead to an increase in communism in Asia.

A woman then spoke of suicide in Japanese and English discourse, the upshot of which was (it seemed to me) that there weren't so many differences, but if pushed, Japanese focuses more on the surviving relatives as victims: in Japanese it's possible to say something like 'I was suicided' - meaning that my relative committed suicide (and left me). Japan has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world, around 30,000 a year. The school kids and other dysfunctional youngsters get most of the headlines, especially those that meet up for group suicides in cars via the internet. You can get 'suicide kits' - basically a small barbecue lit in the sealed-up car, leading to asphyxiation. But the majority are the late middle-aged. However, suicide among dysfunctional university-age kids is something that we teachers are very aware of - getting them to interact socially in class (through English, as it happens) seems to me to be by far the most important aspect of our work.

The 4th speaker talked about the history of the US-Japan Student Association, both before and after the war, and was delighted to receive a question from a former member.

The Princess then spoke for a while, congratulating each in turn and drawing eminently sensible and sensitive conclusions. I was particularly touched when she referred to her late husband - died at the age of 47 in his prime playing squash at the Canadian Embassy. The Princess speaks perfect pukka English, being a Cambridge alumnus, but chose 'My husband has always said that war signals the failure of diplomacy...' despite his dying 5 years ago, or so.

On a related theme, the following letter appeared in the Japan Times this week - a defence of the indefensible, on several levels:

'Don't judge marines too fast'
By MANUEL SANDOVAL
Anaheim, Calif.

"Regarding the Oct. 20 article "Four (U.S.) marines investigated for rape": What does one expect from a woman who is working in a bar? Has anyone asked if she was paid for services? Why would any woman leave with four men from a bar? She must have known what kind of situation she was in from the get-go. Why did she wait to make the report to the police?

When I was assigned to Tachikawa Air Base, there was a saying that "you can take the girl out of the bar, but you can't take the bar out of the girl." I know what type of people work in these places, so please don't make a hasty judgment about these four defenders of your country. Give this some thought: If the U.S. military were to leave Japan, who would keep China and maybe the North Koreans from coming in to take your country.
I'm starting to think that the United States should remove its military from all overseas locations and let all those countries fend for themselves. Maybe then everyone would see just how important we really are. The U.S. should take care of its highest priority -- the defense of its own homeland. Have we baby-sat the Japanese too long?"

An important reminder, it seems to me, of the level of widespread ignorance that exists regarding the nature of imperialism.

It was in the same batch as this one, referring to the most successful (in monetary terms) language school chain in Japan (now bankrupt), employing 5,000 or so staff, paid in peanuts, and ripping off the punters to the extent that the legal system finally caught up with them:

'Teaching staff needs diversity'
By REGGIE CORNEJO
Porterville, Calif.

"Regarding the Oct. 13 article "Aussie Nova teachers to be helped by consulates": It's interesting to hear of (English-conversation school) Nova's problems due to management. I taught in Japan from 1999 to 2004 for various companies and as an independent teacher. I applied twice to Nova (once in Japan and once in San Francisco) and found the staff members and hiring personnel stuffy, confrontational and overloaded with British-sounding (or Aussie) managers. I turned down the job offers both times and decided to go with other companies.

If Nova does fold, I am sure the blame cannot be laid solely with the Japanese managers/owners/leaders. Maybe it's time that Japanese schools/companies started hiring more English-speaking people of color and non-British-sounding English speakers, and become more diversified so that Japanese students/customers get their yen's worth. This is just my opinion and I'm sure I'll get blasted for it, but as they say in America, "The nut does not fall too far from the tree."

You said it mate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP5QYNrZpPI
Japanese clock

http://www.geocities.com/aka994555/photos.htm
Sun sets behind Mt Fuji 27 August 1945

The President speaks:
http://weeklyradioaddress.com/WRA20071006.htm

A propos of nothing at all, when I was 12 I covered an entire bedroom wall, floor to ceiling, with pictures of this lot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_X4AyZW6LM
Coz I love you

Just imagine having a quiet cuppa with this lady:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEK9yi3KS4I
Night ride home

Once in a while, in a big blue moon

There comes a night like this

Like some surrealist invented this 4th of July

Night ride home

Hula girl and caterpillar tractors in the sand

The ukulele man, the fireworks

This 4th of July night ride home

I love the man beside me

We love the open road

No phones till Friday - far from the overkill

Far from the overload

Back at the bar the band tears down

But out here in the headlight beams

The silver powerlines gleam

On this 4th of July night ride home...

Photo of Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash

Just imagine this guy turning up at your party:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VblDwX67dS8
Hound Dog

2007-10-21T20:45:00.000+09:00

'Ainu chieftain and his wife'

Greatly enjoying 'The Wild Coasts of Nipon' (Pub. 1880) - one of many gems tucked away in the basement of the university library. A Victorian sea-captain, passionate about the beauty of wild nature, and very much dismayed by the encroaching Western 'civilization' even in the 1860s and 70s; but at the same time happy to blast away and slaughter anything that moved:

'Wild coasts of Nipon' by Capt. H. C. St. John, 1880)

'Returning from my walk, I exchanged an old pair of trousers for a [bear] cub about as large as a big spaniel. The little beast was brought down to the beach by an Aino woman, who, tying it to a post, squatted beside it and began to weep most profusely. Inquiring the reason for such grief, I was told she had brought it up from a very small thing, when its mother was caught and killed in the spring, and that she had suckled it as one of her own children until it was able to manage for itse1f. This mode of rearing the cub when quite young I afterwards found was quite a common occurrence.
[Photo by Gertrude Bass Warner, c. 1905]

It took four of my blue-jackets to secure and carry the cub to the boat, which was not done without many scratches and bites. For two days I kept her tied up, then allowed her to go loose, with a short piece of rope round her neck. For a week or so she took every opportunity of slipping overboard and swimming for the shore. Afterwards she never attempted to do so, but became perfectly happy and playful. On hot summer days she regularly enjoyed a swim round the ship, and would then remain in the screw well, stretched on the bango frame, during the heat of the day. In a year’s time she was so large and powerful that I feared mischief might happen, and I therefore gave her a dose of strychnine. '

Went up to Shimo-kita-zawa again on Wednesday to see the inimitable Tokyo-chutei-iki, the 11-piece baritone sax band that Mark and I saw in the same place a year ago (the 440 Club). They have kept their quirky lightheartedness but have added more complex textures to some of their extended pieces - aural city-scapes. I look forward to seeing them again.

http://www.eqcd.net/iki/extra.html
Tokyo-chutei-iki

Friday night was a barbie organised by Lance at work for the fulltimers - great - Miki ended up playing the piano with Charles on penny whistle, while ping-pong balls pinged and ponged all around.

The in-laws joined us at the allotment yesterday and we picked rocket, mizuna (feathery salad), nira (kind of garlic grass) and dug up the taro (sato-imo).

[Mrs S inspects]

Went up to the Ichiyajo festival today, Sunday, and admired people lauding the Hojo, while others displayed their considerable prowess at a distinctly Japanese form of cheerleading.

['Come over here and I'll fan you to death']

Ate 'battle nabe' (meat and veg stew boiled in an enormous cauldron), and mochi (gooey rice stodge) that had been pulverised spectacularly.

[Pounding mochi - watch your fingers!]

Phoned mother, who is entertaining a very old friend (Dudley) from her youth, who emigrated to Canada after the war, and with whom brother Paul and I stayed in 1974 in their fantastic old wooden house in Unionville, Ontario. We exchanged a few words on the phone and Dudley mentioned his admiration for Japanese craftsmen, especially their woodworking skills. Turns out Dudley co-authored a book on North American woodworking tools, and another on barns.

I have many happy memories of the short time we spent in Canada, particularly driving up to Georgian Bay off Lake Huron in Dudley's VW camper, and Paul, Sarah and I camping on a small island to which we had arrived by canoe. Always thought I'd get back to Canada one day ...

Other news - the pine cone seeds that I picked up in the summer at our camp on Orosei beach have come up! They're in the pots at the front.

The Dalai Lama is coming to Japan for 3 days next month - must try to see him.

http://www.dalailama.com/news.htm

[Mature pines on the right, Orosei beach, Sardinia - 'Lively Lady' to the left]

'... The visit, planned for Nov. 14 to 23, might be affected by the recent dispute between the United States and China about his much publicized trip to Washington, where he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday at a ceremony attended by U.S. President George W. Bush.
China criticized the move as "a violent interference in China's internal affairs" that gravely undermined relations between the two countries...

During his upcoming visit, the Dalai Lama is expected to give lectures in Yokohama and other cities.

China opposes the Dalai Lama's visits to Japan and claim he is leading a secessionist movement. The Japanese government allows him to enter on condition that avoids engaging in political activities.'

The Japan Times: Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007

'Sect restores honor of pacifist monk'

'Priests and followers of a Buddhist sect gathered at a temple in Gifu Prefecture on Friday to posthumously restore the honor of a priest who was severely demoted for denouncing war as "sin" in 1937 and stripped of his missionary license.

According to historical documents, Shogen Takenaka (1867-1945), a priest from the Shinshu Otani Buddhist sect, said in 1937, "War is a sin and an enemy of mankind and has to be stopped," while he was seeing off soldiers heading to combat in China.

Takenaka, who was once chief priest of the temple, was subsequently convicted of violating the military penal code in 1939 and also punished by the sect...

Kumagai also said the sect at the time had urged all its members to support the war.

Shinsho Takenaka, Myosenji's chief priest and a great-grandson of Shogen's younger sister, said he hoped the meeting would also serve "as an opportunity to promote peace."

The Japan Times: Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007

'It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.'

Albert Einstein .

'Military glory - that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood - that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy...'

Abraham Lincoln

'Force always attracts men of low morality.'

Albert Einstein

'Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deemit necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose and you allow him to make war at pleasure.'

Abraham Lincoln

"There is a poignant passage in Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five where he imagines a devastating bombing scene as a movie being run backward on a projector. The fires on the ground disappear as the bombs are sucked up into the bombers, which fly backward and land on a military base. There, the bombs are removed from the planes and taken to a factory, where they are dismantled. Perhaps this wishful fantasy was inspired by Vonnegut's own experience watching the fire bombing of Dresden.

If and when our bombs begin falling on Iran, given our current limitations in navigating space and time, we will not be able to run the movie backward. The dead will still be dead, the destroyed will still be destroyed, and among the casualties will be our own open society. The damage will be irreversible, and in fact will have reversed 230 years of forward progress towards a just society, and a sane world. But there is something we can and must "run backward" at this time. We must stand together to face the dark forces that have taken us from freedom to fascism, and reverse the momentum back to sanity and freedom."

Steve Bhaerman

Taken from FROM FASCISM TO FREEDOM: Stirring the Winds of Political Climate Change

2007-10-17T15:06:00.000+09:00

Went to a symposium yesterday organised at my university around the theme of multiculturalism - tabunka kyosei - 'many cultures living together', and nationalism - nashunalizumu.

The last speaker of the day talked about the 'Yasukuni [Shrine] and the Culture of Death', most interestingly. Regrettably I only have his name in kanji, Chinese characters, which I am unfortunately unable to transcribe/decipher. Unusually amongst literate societies, this inability by even the most educated people to read the written form of their own language seems to be quite common here, so I don't feel so inadequate. (Which is why the exchanging of meishi - business greeting cards - is so important).

He suggested that in traditional Japanese culture the dead coexist with the living to a greater degree than they do in other cultures, eg. 'the West'. Many if not most houses have small shrines in the house somewhere dedicated to grandparents and beyond; offerings of sake etc. are frequently made, along with a chiming of a bell, a clap of hands (?), and a prayer. Consider how often we British, for example, attend to the graves of our grandparents, or even parents.

Next week I am to attend a family get-together in Kyushu - an hour flight away - to commemorate the passing of Mina's paternal grandparents - 5 years ago. A ceremony/get-together is held to remember one's ancestors or family members gone before after 49 days, one year, two years, 3 years, 7 years, 13 years, 17, 23, 27, 33, 50 and 100 years (most of these are indivisble by 2, one notes). One of the first additions to this blog recalls a student who apologised for not coming to class the previous week as his grandfather had died - 7 years ago.

The dead continue to look over the living, while the living have to take care/pay respect to the dead.

The speaker's thesis was that traditionally the dead/living relationship was a personal and familiar one, carried out within homes - until Meiji (1870s) when there was a conscious and highly successful effort made to build a nation under one leader, with one standard language, one culture, one race, etc. via the media, the education system, the military, and so on (which is in full swing today).

The creation of the Yasukuni Shrine did at least two things: those poor bastards sent off to war to die 'for the Emperor' were to be venerated to the extent of becoming deities at Yasukuni. This simultaneously made fighting, killing and dying somehow honorable to the point of achieving a religious nirvana - getting to heaven, or whatever, 'falling like cherry blossom' - while usurping the family's role in commemorating their dead.

A couple of days ago I attended a language teaching conference, which was again very interesting in a number of ways. The final speaker was Tim Murphey, who is a lovely chap - one of the things he does is to tell stories - which the students have to retell to each other - without giving away the punch line, which he leaves to the end of the class.

For example, he told a highly simplified version of Candide : A young prince is brought up in a castle, and finds himself one of the most powerful emperors around. He has two teachers: one is an optimist, who tells him that we live 'in the best of all possible worlds'; the other is a pessimist, who tells him that disaster is on its way; that human life is nothing but a series of disillusionments, disappointments and failure.

A long series of such failures takes place, and the book ends with Candide finding himself in a simple farm, tending his garden. The two teachers appear and the optimist says 'Well, it's not so bad - life has its good points', while the pessimist says 'See. I told you. Life is an endless disappointment.'

Candide's last line is ....

[students repeat what they have heard so far]

"Gentlemen, excuse me. I have to take care of my garden".

Which might be interpreted as meaning we have to do what we can, here and now, with whatever we have available. Philosophy aside about the meaning of life, we have to get on with what we are faced with - from a teaching point of view, one might complain that one's students are this or that - but this is the garden we have to look after - not some idealised form which may or may not exist.

Another story he told was that of two twin sisters who are always asking why? Why is the sky blue? etc. Their parents finally get fed up and send their daughters up the mountain for the summer to stay with an old woman who knows everything. At first all goes well, but after a while the girls get fed up with the old woman always being right so they decide to think up a question that she will not be able to answer correctly. They find a beautiful blue butterfly which one of them clasps in her hands - they decide to ask the old woman 'Is the butterfly dead or alive?'. If she says 'Dead', the girl will open her hands and let it fly away: if she says 'Alive' the girl will crush the butterfly, then open her hands to reveal it dead.

The girls approach the old woman, ask the question, and the old woman thinks a while before saying.....

'The butterfly is in your hands'

ie. what you do with the butterfly, your study, your life in general, is up to you.

Change topic: Richard Thompson comments on the recent tiff between Pat Metheny and Kenny G:

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/audio/I_Agree_With_Pat_Metheny.mp3

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/audio/banks_of_the_nile.mp3

A traditional song, Sandy Denny's rendering of which is firmly within the top ten Desert Island discs:

Banks Of The Nile

Oh hark! The drums do beat, my love, no longer can we stay!

The bugle-horns are sounding clear, and we must march away.

We're ordered down to Portsmouth, and it's many’s the weary mile.

To join the British army on the banks of the Nile.

Oh Willie, dearest Willie! Don't leave me here to mourn.

Don't make me curse and rue the day that ever I was born.

For the parting of our love would be like parting with my life.

So stay at home, my dearest love, and I will be your wife.

Oh my Nancy, dearest Nancy! Sure that will never do.

The Government has ordered, and we are bound to go.

The Government has ordered, and the Queen she gives command.

And I am bound on oath, my love, to serve in a foreign land.

Oh, but I'll cut off my yellow hair, and I'll go along with you.

I'll dress myself in uniform, and I'll see Egypt too.

I'll march beneath your banner while fortune it do smile,

And we'll comfort one another on the banks of the Nile.

But your waist it is too slender, and your fingers they are too small.

And the sultry suns of Egypt your rosy cheeks would spoil.

Where the cannons they do rattle, when the bullets they do fly,

And the silver trumpets sound so loud to hide the dismal cries.

Oh, cursed be those cruel wars, that ever they began!

For they have robbed our country of many’s the handsome man.

They've robbed us of our sweethearts, while their bodies they feed the lions,

On the dry and sandy deserts which are the banks of the Nile.

NOTES AND SKETCHES
FROM THE
WILD COASTS
OF NIPON
B CAPTAIN H. C. ST. JOHN, R.N.
EDINBURGH: DAVID DOUGLAS
MDCCCLXXX
WITH CHAPTERS ON CRUISING AFTER PIRATES IN CHINESE WA TERS

‘A different kind of travel account began to be written during the Tokugawa period. The authors described their experiences in a resolutely prosaic style, showed little interest in religious matters, and, skeptical of old legends, were at pains to debunk them. Kaibara Ekiken (1630 – 1714) was typical of this new breed of diarists. His inquiries into the true nature of things led him to investigate the waves at Wakanoura, a bay celebrated in poetry because there were said to be ‘male waves’ (onami) but no ‘female waves’ menami). Ekiken explained, “By ‘male waves’ is meant big waves, and by ‘female waves’ is meant small waves, I have never believed this story.” Accordingly, he spent time at the bay carefully observing the waves and reached the conclusion that just as at every other beach, Wakanoura had both male and female waves.’

Kazan’s early travel accounts, written in kan bun, were at first in much the same prosaic mode as Ekiken’s, but after he shifted to writing in Japanese, they became more literary and even at times deeply moving. Although Kazan enjoyed sightseeing, he traveled surprisingly little. Apart from four journeys to and from Tahara, he did not go beyond the bounds of the Kanto region. in part, this was because as a samurai on active duty, Kazan was not at liberty to leave his post at the domain residence in Edo whenever it pleased him. His journeys almost always had some justification (at least nominal) involving domain business; but this did not prevent him from describing the people he met or the scenery he admired on his journey.’

From ‘Frog in the well: Portraits of Japan by Watanebe Kazan, 1793 – 1841’ by Donald Keene (2006)

Rather like a language teacher getting his university to pay for attending conferences, and then writing a blog …

'Between 1820 and 1920, approximately 34 million persons immigrated to the United States, three-fourths of them staying permanently. For many of these newcomers, their first glimpse of America was the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

The statue, sculpted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had been conceived of as a gift of friendship from the people of France marking the two nations' commitment to liberty. France provided $400,000 for the 151 ft 1 in. (46.05 m) statue, and a fundraising drive in the United States netted $270,000 for the 89-foot pedestal.

... she wrote to help raise money for the pedestal, and which is carved on that pedestal, captured what the statue came to mean to the millions who migrated to the United States seeking freedom, and who have continued to come unto this day.'

The U.S. Department of State

“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

Inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty:

"...From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.“

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

2007-10-17T11:09:00.000+09:00

This is a painting by Yue Minjun, whose painting 'Execution' (1995) has just broken the record for contemporary Chinese art:

'Billed by Sotheby's as "among the most historically important paintings of the Chinese avant-garde ever to appear at auction," "Execution" had been tucked away from sight until now. Its owner bought it from a gallery in Hong Kong a decade ago under condition that the painting not be shown in public because of its subject matter, according to Sotheby's.

"Execution" would become the most expensive work of Chinese contemporary art at auction, selling for 2.9 million British pounds ($5.9 million). ...

Stretching across "Execution" is a long red building, suggesting Tiananmen's gate outside the Forbidden City. Is the painting of Tiananmen?

"I want the audience not to think of one thing or one place or one event," he said from his Beijing home. "The whole world's the background." The red building, he explains, is simply something that's familiar to him as a Chinese artist. "As I said, the viewer should not link this painting to Tiananmen. But Tiananmen is the catalyst for conceiving of this painting."

The background may make people think of Tiananmen because he is a Chinese artist. "But it should not be," he said....

The big picture, he said, "it's on the whole world's human conflict that is worth laughing about."

Drawing references to Francisco de Goya's "The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid" and Edouard Manet's "The Execution of the Emperor Maximilien of Mexico," the painting depicts a mock execution.

Manet, it must be pointed out, modeled his painting after Goya's; and Yue's "Execution" mirrors both of those -- but with his trademark grinning clones, all likenesses of Yue himself.

And the men in the position of being shot are shown in their underwear. "People feel freedom, most themselves, at home in their underpants," Yue said. And whereas in Goya's painting, the man's hands are up in resistance, the men's hands in "Execution" are down. "They are not fearing death," Yue said.

"The laughs illustrate my deep feelings," he said. The viewer will feel happiness but also fear toward the future and the unknown, a universal sentiment, he said. "One might be very happy now but always unsure of what's going to happen next.

"I think Chinese and the world have similar feelings in this respect," he said.

As for the main figures that dominate the right-half of the painting, they assume the position of holding the guns, but without the guns themselves. "In my painting, they're pretending to hold guns, as if playing a game." The man on the far right, holding one hand to his chest and another by his waist, is a direct reference to the man on the far right-hand side of Manet's painting: In that, he is cocking a gun.

Yue disagrees with the notion that his paintings are a veiled criticism of his government or of Chinese society, and he does not believe that this work will bring him trouble. "I think the painting expresses my feelings. It's not a criticism," he said, describing himself as not having strong political leanings. "I was trying to express my confusion over what I see."
The world has similar problems, he said.

Yue said he does not agree with being tagged a "Cynical Realist," a term coined by leading art critic Li Xianting to describe China's post-Tiananmen generation of disillusioned artists. At the same time, he doesn't concern himself about what people call him, he said.

That his painting has political undertones is inevitable, he said. "I cannot recall any event that has shaped my political views, but politics is everywhere in Chinese life, like the meal you eat every day," he said.
Of China, he said, "I think it is full of hope, but there are a lot of difficulties, too. China has a long cultural history and also faces a lot of problems right now. Right now, people are not satisfied, but we can find our way out."

Yue sold "Execution" to Hong Kong art dealer Manfred Schoeni shortly after painting it. "It sold for about $5,000," Yue said. "Probably not any cent would come back to me," he said of the millions his paintings now garner at auctions.

Now 45, Yue said he learned about other artists through reading books after 1978, when China had begun to open itself up under new leader Deng Xiaoping's "Open Door policy." The decade-long Cultural Revolution that had preceded made reading books an impossibility.

And what is the meaning behind the cloned figures that bear his likeness in all his paintings?

"Because I want to be famous."

Elizabeth Yuan

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/11/china.artist/index.html

"Manet's response to modern life included works devoted to war, in subjects that may be seen as an updated interpretations of the genre of "history painting". The first such work was the Battle of the Kearsage and Alabama (1864), a sea skirmish from the American Civil War which took place off the French coast, and may have been witnessed by the artist.
Of interest next was the French intervention in Mexico; from 1867 to 1869 Manet painted three versions of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, an event which raised concerns regarding French foreign and domestic policy.

The several versions of the Execution are among Manet's largest paintings, which suggests that the theme was one which the painter regarded as most important. Its subject is the execution by Mexican firing squad of a Hapsburg emperor, who had been installed by Napoleon III. Neither the paintings nor a lithograph of the subject were permitted to be shown in France. As an indictment of formalized slaughter the paintings look back to Goya, and anticipate Picasso's Guernica."

Wikipedia

Yoko Ono opened the John Lennon Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik last week (along with Ringo Starr). She's performing in Tokyo on December 8th along with a load of other people, at the Budokan, where the Beatles played in 1963 (?). A chance to see a living legend.

'Bottoms Before The Beatles'

"This bizarre film consisted of a seemingly endless parade of naked buttocks in motion, belonging to people who had been induced into a studio and be photographed from the rear as they walked a revolving platform, during which process they discussed various trivial matters with the studio operatives. Apparently several well-known people had let themselves be talked into appearing, who subsequently claimed they were "tricked" as they feared their backsides might be a source of eventual identification! The film was rejected by the UK film censors, but given a local "X" by the London Council, which enabled the film to be seen in London cinemas.

'I went to the opening night, and when the film had finished, a somewhat forlorn and intense Yoko was in the foyer canvassing public opinion. The film really was a one-joke item which went on for far too long, but compassion compelled me to give her a few words of encouragement, and I told her I thought it was "interesting" and, after the first hour, became quite surreal. I also added my view that the censors were stupid to reject such a harmless and innocent experimental film.

'This of course was all before she had met The Beatles and John Lennon, after which of course she no longer needed any compassion or encouragement from me. One UK critic writing about the film very wittily said that the tedium was only relieved by the occasional glimpse of scrotum! I think that about says it all! "

http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001523.php

'Only where there was a "defiance," a "refusal to truckle," a "distrust of all authority," they believed, would institutions "express human aspirations, not crush them."

Pauline Maier, "A More Perfect Union", New York Times, October 31, 1999

'The son struggled to be obedient to the conventional, commercial values of the father and, at the same time, to maintain his own playful, creative innocence. This conflict could make him truckle in the face of power.'

Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, quoted in "Theater Friends Recall Life and Works of Odets," by Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, October 30, 1981

'I am convinced that, broadly speaking, the audience must accept the piece on my own terms; that it is fatal to truckle to what one conceives to be popular taste.'

Sidney Joseph Perelman, quoted in "The Perelman Papers," by Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, March 15, 1981

"Truckle is from truckle in truckle bed (a low bed on wheels that may be pushed under another bed; also called a trundle bed), in reference to the fact that the truckle bed on which the pupil slept was rolled under the large bed of the master. The ultimate source of the word is Greek trokhos, "a wheel."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for truckle

2007-10-13T22:21:00.000+09:00

Kano Eitoko (1543 - 1590)

'Chinese Lions'

WARLORDS, ARTISTS, AND COMMONERS (eds Elison & Smith)

‘Nobunaga’s realm was built by military might and functioned through the reorganized allegiances of the military class; but it was the compelling power of his will which breathed life into it, and his prowess that held it together. This was a prince who identified the realm with himself and ordered his vassals to revere (if not to adore) him. His castle’s magnificence had its purpose: it served the cult of his personality.

The architectural bravura must have impressed anyone who approached Azuchi. But the tower’s internal decoration is perhaps even more illustrative of Momoyama tastes than the brilliant external display, especially since Nobunaga commissioned Kano Eitoku, the greatest painter of the age, to execute it...

Tawaraya Sōtatsu (俵屋宗達) (fl. early 1600s)

'Wind God and Thunder God'

'Pictorial profusion is not the word for it; this was extravagance. Surely the surfeit of decorative splendor sated even Nobunaga, who was not a man of simple tastes. We note that only one or two of the paintings were in ink wash; the rest were done in polychrome, a ripe medium for ostentation. The modern observer laments the loss of this riot of color and gold to the fire; some contemporaries implied that it was fated, or sneered at the hegemon’s vain pretensions. The irreverent Kyoto townsman’s lampoon, posted in the streets of the capital in 1591, perhaps is the best summary of the view from below:

Ishibushin
Shirogoshirae mo
Iranu mono
Azuchi Odawara
Miru ni tsuketemo

So what’s the use
Of hauling rocks
And building Castles? –
Just look at
Azuchi or at Odawara!

Little remains of these two, reputedly the period’s stoutest castles: and little remains of the fortresses and pleasure domes which symbolized Hideyoshi’s power and glory in the same way that Azuchi stood for Nobunaga and Odawara for the Later Hojo. …- We can only guess at the sumptuous artistry of the grandees’ residential interiors from scattered ensembles. But this does not mean that the “heroes” efforts were futile… '

Hikone

Quite. The sailing was good on Wednesday, aboard Hiro's 'Endeavour', named after Captain Cook's flagship.

Last night found me in the company of three Canadians in a Canadian wooden house, which was somewhat disorienting, and today we were up early and off snorkelling in Izu. The water temperature is now higher than the air temperature, at around 23 degrees, but today was rather blowy and choppy so we were glad to get out and into the very hot boat onsen on the quay, which turned us pink and shrivelled. However, among the several dozen snorkellers and divers there were myriads of tropical and temperate fish. Hiro explained that the warm current coming up from Okinawa allows a rare mixture of fish that is only found in similar profusion in the Galapagos Islands. Why are tropical fish so much more colourful than their temperate cousins?

Choju Jinbutsu, 12th Century

'Laughing frogs and rabbit'

2007-10-10T12:23:00.000+09:00

To return momentarily to an earlier theme, it seems one cannot begin to understand Japan without some knowledge of what happened here in the 16th century, which means knowing a bit about the stories of Oda Nobunaga (1534 - 1582), his underling Hideyoshi Toyotomi and their sometime rival, later ally, and final usurper Ieyasu Tokugawa - whose clan controlled, led, dominated Japanese life, culture, society and even language from 1600 to 1867. Odawara, my 'hometown' features in this, in that it was the scene of the last big battle (in fact a quiet even enjoyable siege, for those outside) in the 'unification' of Japan under Hideyoshi Toyotomi and then Tokugawa. As I have been asked to take my students round Odawara and waffle on this topic while pointing out the few bits of the old castle walls, ditches etc. that still exist (the largest castle in extent from the medieval civil war, 'sengoku' period - 100 years or more of internecine murder, betrayal, assassination, broken promises, lies, deceit, brutality and enforced servitude) I read up a bit here and there; the latest being 'Warlords, Artists, and Commoners: Japan in the 16th century', edited by Elison and Smith, which I just discovered in the library at the university.

Hang on ... gotta go sailing - more anon

2007-10-08T21:36:00.000+09:00

"Deciduous oak (Quercus serrata) forest is a major vegetation type of temperate broad-leaved forests in the north Kanto Region, Japan. ... Until the 1960s more than 70% of local broad-leaved forests were used as fuelwood in the areas studied. After the revolutionary change in the forms of energy used in the 1960s, oak forests turned to being used mainly for shiitake cultivation in many rural areas. Most oak logs for shiitake have been provided within the shiitake-producing area, but in recent years the number of logs brought from other areas is increasing in fresh shiitake cultivation. Because of the rapid expansion of shiitake imports, aging of the domestic cultivators and labor shortage, domestic shiitake cultivation has declined conspicuously for the last 15 years. In addition, many forest owners and cultivators have already stopped managing the forests as they used to. As a result, if the shiitake cultivation continues to shrink, it is estimated that around 90% of the local broad-leaved forests will be abandoned by the year of 2,015 even in shiitake-producing areas."

日本林學會誌
Journal of the Japanese Forestry Society
Vol.86, No.1(20040216)

北関東におけるシイタケ生産のためのコナラ林利用の変遷と今後の見通し
'Human-use Changes and Future Prospects of Deciduous Oak Forest for Shiitake Mushroom Cultivation in the North Kanto Region, Japan'
Saito O.
Faculty of Liberal Arts, Chukyo University

http://seijoishiiblog.com/images/shiitake2.JPG

2007-10-07T19:44:00.000+09:00

Couple of humorous yet informative blogs re English teaching in Japan:

http://presentsimple.blogspot.com/

http://nagoya-esl-adventures.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_nagoya-esl-adventures_archive.html

Photo by Mark Shrosbree

2007-10-07T10:46:00.000+09:00

Went for a great sail yesterday in a friend's dinghy in Hayama - there was a decent wind, and a couple of typhoons a long way offshore brought in a huge swell one way and wind-blown waves the other, crashing onto the beach, creating havoc among the hundreds of university racing dinghies coming in.

Ended up in La Chaya and were entertained by a tap-dancing 4-piece jazz band/circus troupe - the most entertaining though was H, who is a natural comedian. Better learn Japanese...

La Chaya, Hayama

What a world cup it's been, and last night the first two quarter finals brought unexpected results - Australia v. England in a re-run of the last final 4 years ago when England beat Australia at home with the final kick from Jonny Wilkinson. This time England were the firm underdogs having been losing everything up to now - but come through 12 - 10. And then France v. the overwhelming favourites New Zealand, who everyone expected to win - and this should have been the final had France come top of their group as predicted - but France, having lost the opening match to Argentina, beat NZ in another very close game. So Australia and the All Blacks are out! http://www.rugbyworldcup.com/

Meanwhile, I see in today's Japan Times that the Japanese government has initiated a drive to promote Japan and Japanese studies in Britain by providing half a million pounds to fund 13 university posts, including

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/eo20071007hc.html

“ a lectureship in contemporary Japanese visual media at the University of East Anglia, with which the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures is affiliated.”

and Hugh Cortazzi further informs that

“more than 10,000 secondary schools in Britain where Japanese language courses are available.”

This follows on the recent news that from November all foreigners visiting Japan, including long-term residents such as myself, will be photographed and fingerprinted like common criminals on arrival at the airport - a move which is unlikely to promote much respect for Japan or increase tourism to the country. But then it would seem that most Japanese aren't so keen on foreigners visiting or staying here anyway:

“According to Masashi Ichikawa, of the Committee On Human Rights of the Bar Association, "the proposal says the information will be used for criminal investigations as well so the authorities can match footage from CCTV cameras to digitized pictures to work out exactly where an individual has been on a particular day.

"We don't think that should happen to people just because they are foreign -- Japanese people do bad things too."

The Justice Ministry is now seeking input from the foreign community on how the law might be implemented, and seems sensitive to the idea of "reciprocity," whereby Japanese who live overseas are treated the same as foreign residents here.

The United States, while it does have a policy on fingerprinting at airports, does not apply it to permanent and long-term residents.

Meanwhile, Joanna Roper of the British Embassy said: "No Japanese nationals are fingerprinted before or upon arrival at entry clearance stage at the Embassy. Japanese nationals are not routinely fingerprinted on arrival in the United Kingdom."

And Sylvia Koffler of the European Commission confirms that there are no fingerprinting or photographing systems in place for Japanese entering the EU and no plans to do so.

The new law does not cover "special" permanent residents, ie. Koreans and Chinese, which for some throws into question the whole basis of the fingerprinting requirement -- preventing terrorist attacks -- since Japan's nearest threat is neighboring North Korea.

[Ohio Kent State University 1970 - the US military deal with a peaceful anti-war demonstration (4 students shot dead) - listen to Neil Young's 'Ohio' http://www.neilyoung.com/

http://www.thrasherswheat.org/fot/ohio.htm]

Exempting the very large North Korean community in Japan is an area of the law that some legal experts see as problematic.

[nor does it apply to the tens of thousands of US troops stationed here. Cases of rape appear occasionally, while it appears that regular attacks by US troops on local women are usually unreported. A small price to pay, however, for the protection they afford against the much talked about imminent attack on Japan, the second largest eceonomy in the world with the 4th largest military budget, by the poverty stricken North Korea, with a population of 17 million, cf. 125 million in Japan]

One lawyer, who asked not to be identified, said: "While there is a limited move in the U.S. to fingerprint some visitors to the country, there is no country that fingerprints and photographs permanent residents and long-term residents.

"With the way the law would be applied here, with nearly 90 percent of the foreign community exempted, it does not make much sense. The right thing to do would be to not apply the law to anyone with a visa over one year."

'Lawmakers prefer 1% cap on foreigners in Japan'

LDP ruling party members prefer a 1 percent cap on Japan's foreign population, according to Senior Vice Justice Minister Taro Kono, whose recommendation last month that Japan set a 3 percent target for its foreign population drew criticism from immigration advocates.

Drawn up in LDP committee, Kono's action plan for immigration, entitled "Regarding Future Acceptance of Foreigners," and publicized in June, suggested limiting foreigners to 3 percent of the population, excluding "zainichi" Japan-born generational foreigners.

[eg. 'Koreans' who were born here, sometimes to 'Korean' parents also born here, whose parents may have been brought here against their will when Korea was a part of the Japanese empire before the war. These 'zainichi' cannot get Japanese passports]

[US troops bring western democracy to Vietnam, 1972]

"The 3 percent cap was actually a positive," he says. "My fellow Liberal Democratic Party Diet members think 1 percent is too much -- the 3 percent was a way to assure them that this could be a goal and would in fact be good for Japan.

"It is too bad that it was taken the other way to say I was in favor of limiting the foreign population of Japan when in fact I am in favor of the exact opposite -- the expanding of Japan to invite as many foreigners as possible," he says.

However, Kono, 42, the son of former LDP stalwart Yohei, believes that foreign residents and visitors to Japan should be fingerprinted upon arrival -- unless they become citizens. "If people want to live in Japan for a long time they should become Japanese citizens," he argues.

He does believe in the principle of reciprocity, though is yet to be convinced that Japanese overseas are not fingerprinted and photographed when entering the countries of their residence.

"They should become Japanese. Even permanent residency is not permanent. It can be withdrawn. Unless somebody can demonstrate to me that Japanese are not treated the same way overseas we will go forward with fingerprinting."

[US troops bring democracy to Korea, 1871]

The Ministry of Justice welcomes comments at http://www.moj.go.jp;/ The American Chamber of Commerce is at http://www.accj.or.jp/

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20060822zg.html

Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006

THE ZEIT GIST
Japan's fingerprinting law is dumb . . . (and that's just what the government thinks)
Campaign against immigration law begins

By KEN JOSEPH JR.

"It's becoming remarkably hard to escape the feeling we're ruled by people who are basically paranoid authoritarian incompetents."

IAIN BANKS, author

"It is depressing that our democratic rights are being whittled away bit by bit. We will look back and wonder how this happened. They wouldn't get away with this in one go. First an arrest for reading names, then a ban on marches. What will be next?"

BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH, poet

"The stop the war demonstration on 15 February 2003 was arguably the most politically influential march in Britain since the 1970s, so it's no surprise that politicians are immobilising anti-war demonstrations now. At a time when the political debate at Westminster occupies ever narrower ground, it's vital that voices from outside are heard."

DAVID EDGAR, playwright

‘Robert Bowman, a retired USAF Lt.Colonel who holds a Ph.D. in physics, was director of Advanced Space Program Development for the USAF in the Ford and Carter administrations. Here’s a part of what he had to say as a speaker at the DC Emergency Truth Convergence organized by the
9/11 Truth Movement in Washington, DC in July, 2005:'

“You know, our freedoms are not under attack from the remnants
of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party. They’re under attack by the likes
of John Ashcroft, they’re trampled by Donald Rumsfeld, they’re
disdained by Dick Cheney, and they’re not even understood by George W. Bush. The battle to preserve our freedoms is not taking place in Baghdad and Tikrit and Fallujah. It’s taking place in peace marches and demonstrations ...

"And when we speak, this is the truth that we proclaim. This war in
Iraq has nothing to do with national security, or freedom or democracy
or human rights or protecting our allies or weapons of mass
destruction or defeating terrorism or disarming Iraq. It has to do with
money, it has to do with oil, and it has to do with raw imperial power.

And it’s based totally on lies. Those who forced this war on an
unwilling world are guilty of violating the US Constitution, the UN
Charter, the Nuremberg principles, and international law. What they
have done is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, and treason. [….]

This cabal of neoconservatives from PNAC who planned this
war—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Jeb Bush—even before
W. became president, they told us why they had to do it. They said we
need to occupy Iraq permanently in order to dominate Iran, Syria,
Saudi Arabia, and the southern Russian republics around the Caspian
Sea. We need to control the entire Middle East and all its oil. […]

[T]hey knew the American people wouldn’t stand for it, and they
said so in their documents—and they said, unless there’s that new
Pearl Harbor. Well, 9/11 did supply that—and we’ve been lied to not
only about the war, but about 9/11 itself. They ignored the warnings:
more than that, we have mounting evidence that—at least—they made
it impossible for those planes to be intercepted.

If our government had merely [done] nothing, and I say that as an old interceptor pilot—I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they were, and I know what they’ve changed them to—if our government had merely done
nothing, and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of
9/11, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead
Americans would still be alive. My sisters and brothers, that is treason!

As a combat veteran, I will not stand idly by and watch our
security destroyed by a president who went AWOL rather than serve
in Vietnam. As one who’s devoted his life to the security of this
country, I will not stand by and watch an appointed president send our
sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs for the oil
companies. [….] I joined the air force a long time ago to protect our
borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita
Banana, Exxon, and Halliburton. We’ve had enough corporate wars!

No more Iraqs, no more Kosovos, no more El Salvadors, no more
Colombias! These are not isolated incidents of stupidity; they’re part
of a long, bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the
financial interests of the wealthy few. [….]

As a pilot who flew a hundred and one combat missions in
Vietnam, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States
against all enemies, foreign and domestic—and that includes a
renegade president! It’s time for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and the whole oil mafia to be
removed from office and indicted for treason…”

[Felice Beato - Postman with a cleft stick]

http://journalof911studies.com/letters/e/ProfKeeferRepliesToCockburnCounterpunch.pdf
"I’ve admired Cockburn’s own political essays for many years: he’s
written movingly, sometimes brilliantly, on a wide range of subjects1—even if his flashes of brilliance sometimes alternate with breathtaking pratfalls: among them his dismissal, as recently as March 2001, of the evidence for global warming; his scoffing, in November 2004, at the rapidly gathering indications that the US presidential election of 2004 had been stolen; and a year later, his mockery of the well-established theory of peak
oil and his adherence to the genuinely daft notion that the earth produces limitlessquantities of abiotic oil. One can forgive a journalist’s slender grasp of the rudiments of scientific understanding. But given his self-appointed role as defender of the progressive left against a horde of fools, it’s dismaying to find him sliding as frequently as he does into positions that seem not just quirky but—dare I say it—unprogressive..."

http://journalof911studies.com/letters/e/ProfKeeferRepliesToCockburnCounterpunch.pdf

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie ... The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state."

Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

"...The Bush administration endlessly recites its mantra of deceit:
The War on Terror was launched in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is intended to enhance our national security at home and to spread democracy in the Middle East. This is the struggle of our lifetime; we are defending our way of life from an enemy intent on destroying our freedoms. We must fight the enemy in the Middle East, or we will fight him in our cities.

This is classic propaganda. In Goebbels' terms, it is the "state" speaking its lie, but the political, economic, and military consequences of the Bush administration lie are coming into view, and they are all catastrophic.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/63632/?page=1

2007-10-05T22:28:00.000+09:00

Not so long ago I was living in a house built in c.1640 in Norwich, in what is apparently the oldest street in England - the London Road from Norwich. On the other side of the road is an adult education centre built into what in the 19th century was one of the many breweries in Norwich, and part of which dates back to the 11th century - being 'the oldest dwelling house' in Norwich - at that time a considerably bigger place than London. In the 11th century crypt/cellar, every Friday night they run an allcomers music night, to which I would invariably go when the kids were over. One Friday night, instead of the usual eclectic mix of blues/folk/etc local talent, Kate Rusby had a set (this was about ten years ago) - I had fallen in love with her in Qatar - I mean I was in Qatar, listening to her CD with Kathryn Roberts and wherever else I could find her - and then, that Friday night, there I was in the crypt 10 yards across the road from my front door, the only person in the bar apart from the sound engineer, quivering while she warmed up - a personal private concert just for me. In the interval she came and sat beside me, while I seriously contemplated suggesting some kind of semi-permanent liason.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=No5FkAmTaJY&mode=related&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zkfV16Qgpeo

2007-10-05T15:58:00.000+09:00

"Here Comes the Card features the photography of Kathleen Kendrick and Maura Kendrick Allen, two sisters from a family of eight who share a passion for photography and travel.

Kathleen lives in San Francisco; Maura in Seattle. Kathy shoots with a Nikon, Maura a Canon. We travel to all parts of the world together. We’re close in age, close in life, but we’re amazed at how we see the same things differently.

What we do see the same is the need to give back. We donate 50% of Here Comes the Card membership fees to charity. It’s our way of following our father’s advice: Use your strengths to help others."

'Lantau Big Buddha Gift Ladies'
https://www.herecomesthecard.com/

2007-10-04T23:29:00.000+09:00

"The Government has decided to ban a peaceful march called by the Stop the War Coalition on 8 October..."

Tony Benn's letter to the Home Secretary :

TO: The Right Hon Jacqui Smith MP
Home Secretary
House of Commons
London
SW1A OAA
Monday October 1st 2007

"Dear Home Secretary

I am writing to you as President of the STOP THE WAR COALITION, to give you advance notice that there will be a demonstration in Trafalgar Square the day Parliament meets calling for the immediate withdrawal of all British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan at which I shall be speaking along with others. Afterwards many of those present – including myself – will be marching along Whitehall to the House of Commons to meet MPs and urge them to support this call for a withdrawal, as I shall be doing in approaching Malcolm Rifkind my own local MP.

We shall be doing this in an orderly manner and I am making available to those who wish to have one, a postcard over my printed signature as a Privy Councillor, asking the police, and others to assist them. I enclose a copy of this postcard.

The authority for this march derives from our ancient right to free speech and assembly enshrined in our history, of which we often boast and which we vigorously defended in two world wars.

I am copying this letter, and its enclosure, to Jack Straw, the Commissioner of the Metropolis, and as a courtesy, to the Prime Minister’s office.

I hope that you will be able to re-assure me that those who demonstrate and march down Whitehall will enjoy your full support and the support of the police. But it is only fair to tell you that the march will go ahead, in any case, and I will be among those marching.

Yours in peace
TONY BENN"

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

2007-10-01T20:39:00.000+09:00

I have described the earthquakes so far as being like sitting in a station while a heavy goods train goes through - but then a couple of months ago there was my first building swaying motion (rather than rumbling up and down), which for me is much scarier - although we were 200 miles or so from the epicentre. Last night the epicentre was right under our flat - and it wasn't a goods train going through - more like the QE2, or worse, the Starship Enterprise scraping right across our roof, and taking its time, perhaps 30 seconds - enough for books, ornaments, crockery, bathroom bits and bobs to shake rattle and roll off the shelves. A Richter scale 5+. I was dragged out into the street at 2.30 a.m. in the rain, anticipating the aftershock, which so far, touchwood, has not come.
Apparently a big one is expected every 70 years - the last one was the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923...

"Of course there are conspiracies. I think there is strong evidence that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the north Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. It's quite possible Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to get the US into the war.

Indeed it's very probable that the FBI or US military intelligence, even the CIA, had penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 attacks; that intelligence reports--some are already known--piled up in various Washington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught and even the manner in which it might be carried out."

...but, according to Cockburn, the rest is just coincidence. I hope he's right.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html
November 28, 2006
The Age of Irrationality
The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

2007-09-26T14:07:00.001+09:00

“Her themes are familiar - peace, love, freedom, social justice, and - dare we say it? - saving the world. That stuff became fodder for jokes at Republican cocktail parties decades ago, but cynicism can't touch Ms. Thomsen. Her music is simply too beautiful.”

Richard Thomas, The Reader Weekly, Duluth, MN

Listen to ‘Freedom Song’ at:
http://cdbaby.com/cd/sarathomsen

and ‘Is it for freedom?’ at:
http://cdbaby.com/cd/sarat

‘… there are still people who say, "Oh, we could have won the Vietnam War," as if the question was, you know, "Can we win or can we lose?" instead of, "What are we doing to these people?" And, yes -- and Noam said yes -- we could win in Iraq by destroying all of Iraq. The Russians could have won in Afghanistan by destroying all of Afghanistan. We could have won in Vietnam by dropping nuclear bombs and killing -- instead of killing two million people in Vietnam, killing ten million people in Vietnam. And if that would be considered victory, you know, then who would take satisfaction in that?
What we saw in Vietnam is I think what people are seeing in Iraq, and that is, huge numbers of people dying for no reason at all. And what we saw in Vietnam was the American army being sent halfway around the world to a country which was not threatening us, and we were destroying the people in the country. And here in Iraq, we’re going the other way, also going halfway around the world to do the same thing to them.

And our experience in Iraq contradicted, as I think the experiences of people who are on the ground in Iraq contradicted again and again, the statements of American officials, the statements of the high military, statements like, "Oh, we're only bombing military targets," "Oh, these are accidents when so many civilians are killed," and, yes, as Cheney said, "Victory is around the corner."

What we saw in Vietnam was horrifying, and obviously it was horrifying even to GIs in Vietnam, because they began to come back from Vietnam and to oppose the war and to form Vietnam Veterans Against the War. So, you know, we saw villages, as far away from any military target as you can imagine, absolutely destroyed, and children killed -- and their graves still fresh -- by American jet planes coming over in the middle of the night.

You know, when I hear them talk about John McCain as a hero, I say to myself, oh, yes, he was a prisoner, and prisoners are maltreated everywhere, and this is terrible, but John McCain, like the other American fliers, what were they doing? They were bombing defenseless people.
And so, yes, Vietnam is something that, by the way, is still not taught very well in American schools. I spoke to a group of people in an advanced history class not long ago, a hundred kids, asked them, "How many people here have heard of the My Lai Massacre?" No hand was raised. We are not teaching Vietnam. If we were teaching the history of Vietnam as it should be taught, then the American people, from the start, would have opposed the war, instead of waiting three or four years for a majority of the American people to declare their opposition to the war. '

Howard Zinn 2006

… there's an interesting study being done right now by a former Russian soldier in Afghanistan in the late 1980s -- he's now a student in Toronto -- who's comparing the Russian press and Russian political figures and military leaders, what they were saying about Afghanistan, comparing it with what Cheney, others and the press are saying about Iraq. And not to your great surprise, change a few names and it comes out about the same.

Yeah, they were also saying the war in Afghanistan could be won, and they were right. If they had increased the level of violence sufficiently, they could have won the war in Afghanistan. They were also pointing out -- of course, they describe correctly, you know, the heroism of the Russian troops, their efforts to bring assistance to the poor people of Afghanistan, to protect them from US-run Islamic fundamentalist terrorist forces, their dedication, the rights they have won for people in Afghanistan, and the warning that if they pull out there will be total disaster, mayhem, they must stay and win. Unfortunately, they were right about that, too: when they did pull out, it was a total disaster. The US-backed forces tore the places to shreds, so terrible that the population even welcomed the Taliban when they came in. So, yes, those arguments can always be given.

The Germans could have argued, if they had the force that they didn’t, that they could have won the war, the Second World War. I mean, the question is not, can you win? The question is, should you be there?’ '

Chomsky 2006

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/16/1338223&mode=thread&tid=25

2007-09-26T11:34:00.001+09:00

This looks good:

RHYTHMS OF PEACE CONCERT

FRIDAY 30 NOVEMBER 2007 7PM
ST JAMES’S CHURCH, PICCADILLY

Compere: ANDREW MURRAY, introducing:
TONY BENN;
actors JULIE CHRISTIE, PRUNELLA SCALES and TIMOTHY WEST;
campaigning journalist JOHN PILGER; South African percussionist EUGENE SKEEF;
novelists IAIN BANKS, AHDAF SOUEIF and HAIFA ZANGANA;
Ex-Ambassador CRAIG MURRAY; mezzo soprano JANET SHELL and pianist KEITH BURSTEIN;
poet TONY HARRISON;
musician DAVE RANDALL (Slovo and Faithless)...

plus surprise guests

TICKETS: £15 FROM STOP THE WAR COALITION To pay by credit card call 020 7278 6694or send a cheque to Stop the War Coalition 27 Britannia Street London WC1X 9JP"

Wish I could go. My grandparents were married in St James Piccadilly.

'Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report'
By Alan Miller

"Seven CIA veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and have called for a new investigation. “I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke,” said Raymond McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates during the seventies. “There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions. And the reason they’re unanswered is because this administration will not answer the questions,” he said. McGovern, who is also the founder of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), is one of many signers of a petition to reinvestigate 9/11.

During his 27-year CIA career, McGovern personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. Upon retirement in 1990, McGovern was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medallion and received a letter of appreciation from then President George H. W. Bush. However, McGovern returned the award in 2006 in protest of the current George W. Bush Administration’s advocacy and use of torture.

In his blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, McGovern wrote:

“It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole “war on terror” was based on a prior deception. This book hence confronts the American people---indeed the people of the world as a whole---with an issue second to none in importance and urgency. I give this book, which in no way can be dismissed as the ravings of ‘paranoid conspiracy theorists,’ my highest possible recommendation.”…

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alan_mil_070922_seven_cia_veterans_c.htm

“Together with William Rodriguez, the Jersey Girls were instrumental in the creation of the 9/11 Commission. Matthew Purdy noted that "The commission grew largely out of pressure from families of victims, including four New Jersey widows who call themselves 'the Jersey Girls.' It's no mistake that the White House put New Jersey's most popular politician [Tom Kean] in charge." Kean became the Commission's Chairman after Henry Kissinger resigned the position; according to Peter Lance, "The Jersey Girls could take some of the credit for his hasty departure."

Van Auken told Lance, "We were shocked. Kissinger had huge conflicts of interest -- major dealings with the Saudis... The day before he resigned, we had a meeting with him in his office in Manhattan. Kristen [Breitweiser] had done impeccable research. She'd looked up all of his companies. So I asked him, 'Mr. Kissinger, do you have any Saudi clients?' He mumbled something. And then he asked if someone would pour him some coffee. So then I said, 'Do you happen to have any clients by the name of bin Laden? He almost fell off the couch."

wikipedia

http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=3865048042993700360

“Mr. Ayres is a nationally recognized expert in building air conditioning design and analysis, energy conservation, thermal energy storage, commissioning of HVAC systems, and earthquake damage to building mechanical systems, with over 55 years of experience. Co-founder of one of the largest building engineering firms in Los Angeles, Mr. Ayres has been in responsible charge of the design of hundreds of major building projects, including high rise offices, commercial centers, hospitals and laboratories, hotels and residential buildings, universities and colleges, schools, theaters and entertainment centers, jails and correctional facilities, TV and sound studios, governmental buildings and industrial facilities.

In his statement, Mr. Ayres wrote, “I support the work of Dr. Steven Jones. He has provided a scientific foundation for the collapse of the three World Trade Center (WTC) towers. I read the FEMA September, 2002 report, prepared by the American Society of Civil Engineers, and initially accepted their theory of the collapse of WTC 1 and 2. As more information became available on the web, I was motivated to research the subject in a more rigorous manner. I have carefully studied the Jones 2006 paper, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse? ” and concluded that it is a rational step-by-step study that meets the accepted standards for scientific building research. His critical reviews of the FEMA, NIST, and 9/11 Commission reports are correct.”

…Dr. Steven Jones is in the forefront of independent scientific researchers investigating the events of 9/11. A former professor of physics at Brigham Young University, his research indicates that the World Trade Center skyscrapers were destroyed not as a result of the impact of airplanes, but rather the result of intentional, controlled demolitions using precisely timed detonations of pre-planted explosives. In fact, one of the skyscrapers, 610 foot tall, 47-story, WTC Building 7, was not even hit by an airplane, yet it disintegrated and fell into a pile of rubble in less than 7 seconds. It is of interest to note that Building 7 was not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission’s "full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.” And in the almost six years since 9/11, the Federal government has yet to publish its promised final report that explains the cause of Building 7’s collapse.

…Mr. Gage, Mr. Ayres, and over 120 other architecture and engineering professionals, have signed a petition posted on the group’s website which questions the official reports of the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) Twin Towers and Building 7 in New York City on 9/11/01, and calls for a new investigation. The group does not speculate as to who and why, Gage says, but instead calls for a new investigation by Congress with subpoena power. He believes a new investigation is the only hope of "fully answering these questions and bringing those responsible to justice."

To read Mr. Ayres’s full statement and to learn more about Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, please visit the organization’s website at: http://ae911truth.org/

http://www.911blogger.com/node/10009

“Eye-rolling. Weight-shifting. Body language ranging from anxiety to anger.

Bloomington city councilman Dave Rollo and local chemist Kevin Ryan acknowledge that they see it all when they broach the subject of Sept. 11 and tell people that the purported facts as have been presented to the public just don’t add up.

“They don’t want to hear it,” says Ryan, a quality control manager for a local pharmaceutical company. “And I feel for them on that. If the official story is as false as it appears to be, we’re so far down the wrong road in this country it’s breathtaking.”

Rollo says he was a bit of an eye-roller himself at one point. “I was skeptical about any alternative theories about what happened on 9/11, but the more I learned, the more I became convinced that further investigation is absolutely necessary. The studies that have been done fail to answer some very important questions, and there are so many anomalies and contradictions and flaws and obfuscations. Well, obfuscations would be a kind word. The studies are totally inadequate.

“But,” he emphasizes, “9/11 was no trivial event. It redirected the country in very fundamental ways. That is not debatable.”

…When [Ryan] read reports from the 9/11 Commission and other sources to the contrary, he wrote to the investigating National Institute of Standards and Technology questioning such conclusions and was fired. “The reason I was given was that I was fired for harming their relationship with NIST and the government, and for using poor judgment in writing the letter,” he said. “Personally, I think they were taken off-guard, and the idea of someone questioning the government so straighforwardly, even if polite and professional. It didn’t settle well.”

…Rollo, Ryan and virtually everyone else involved in what is a growing national movement point to the rarely discussed fate of Building 7 of the WTC. “It was not hit by an airplane. It was a massive, 47-story building, taller than the tallest building in 33 states,” Rollo said. “It fell, and there is no explanation for that at all. Absolutely none. Even the fullest and most complete accounting of 9/11 doesn’t even mention the collapse of Building 7.”

"The issue transcends science to Rollo and many of the people involved with programs such as Monday’s (speakers Gage and Jones were involved in a New York City forum this weekend). “Everything did change after 9/11,” Rollo said. “It launched massive defense spending and huge deficits. It redirected national priorities from things like infrastructure, and Minneapolis is just one recent example. It also paved the way for some radical reinterpretations of the Constitution, to say it kindly. Our civil liberties are being deconstructed.”

'Rollo hesitates to ascribe a motivation or conspiracy theory to Sept. 11 and says it’s abundantly clear that more study is necessary. Ryan hesitates as well and observes that it’s easy for people to describe you as a crazy conspiracy theorist if you venture into hypothesis. But, he noted, it’s hard to knock down the arguments made, especially with regard to Building 7, that nothing short of a controlled demolition could have caused the building to collapse so quickly or neatly into its own footprint…

… “You know,” Ryan said, “(former) Sen. Max Cleland was also a member of that commission, and he quit in protest. When they claim the commission reached unanimous conclusions, they conveniently forget that Cleland said the investigation was a scam and he was not going to be a part of another Warren Commission (which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy).

“I just want people to look at the evidence with an open mind,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s possible to read the official explanations and then hear what highly credentialed scientists have said and not come to the conclusion we don’t know a lot about what happened that day.”

Indiana Daily Student
Group questions 9/11 truth
Kasey Hawrysz, 9/11/2007

… “It is important to understand it because it was a pretext for the invasion of two countries in which almost a million people have perished,” Gage said.

The group, along with others who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were part of a broad conspiracy, have often been questioned and criticized by others.
“If it is a conspiracy, it is hard to believe they could pull it off,” said Spencer resident Scott Ackerman, who attended the conference. However, he added that getting to the truth was important, especially on the eve of the tragedy’s anniversary.

“I don’t think truth is ever disrespectful,” he said.

…Neither Ryan or Gage cared to speculate as to who might have orchestrated a demolition of the towers, instead preferring to talk about the inconsistencies of the government reports.

“Tonight we are concerned with science,” Gage said.”

The greatest threat now is “a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities.”-

Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, CBS, April 15, 2007

9/11 - the big cover-up?
Peter Tatchell
September 12, 2007

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_tatchell/2007/09/911_the_big_coverup.html

"Six years after 9/11, the American public have still not been provided with a full and truthful account of the single greatest terror attack in US history.
What they got was a turkey. The 9/11 Commission was hamstrung by official obstruction. It never managed to ascertain the whole truth of what happened on September 11 2001.

The chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, respectively Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, assert in their book, Without Precedent, that they were "set up to fail" and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also confirm that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority; and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges.

Despite the many public statements by 9/11 commissioners and staff members acknowledging they were repeatedly lied to, not a single person has ever been charged, tried, or even reprimanded, for lying to the 9/11 Commission.

From the outset, the commission seemed to be hobbled. It did not start work until over a year after the attacks. Even then, its terms of reference were suspiciously narrow, its powers of investigation curiously limited and its time-frame for producing a report unhelpfully short - barely a year to sift through millions of pages of evidence and to interview hundreds of key witnesses.

The final report did not examine key evidence, and neglected serious anomalies in the various accounts of what happened. The commissioners admit their report was incomplete and flawed, and that many questions about the terror attacks remain unanswered. Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission was swiftly closed down on August 21 2004.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories. I prefer rigorous, evidence-based analysis that sifts through the known facts and utilises expert opinion to draw conclusions that stand up to critical scrutiny. In other words, I believe in everything the 9/11 Commission was not.

The failings of the official investigation have fuelled too many half-baked conspiracy theories. Some of the 9/11 "truth" groups promote speculative hypotheses, ignore innocent explanations, cite non-expert sources and jump to conclusions that are not proven by the known facts. They convert mere coincidence and circumstantial evidence into cast-iron proof. This is no way to debunk the obfuscations and evasions of the 9/11 report.
But even amid the hype, some of these 9/11 groups raise valid and important questions that were never even considered, let alone answered, by the official investigation. The American public has not been told the complete truth about the events of that fateful autumn morning six years ago.

What happened on 9/11 is fundamentally important in its own right. But equally important is the way the 9/11 cover-up signifies an absence of democratic, transparent and accountable government. Establishing the truth is, in part, about restoring honesty, trust and confidence in American politics.

There are dozens of 9/11 "truth" websites and campaign groups. I cannot vouch for the veracity or credibility of any of them. But what I can say is that as well as making plenty of seemingly outrageous claims; a few of them raise legitimate questions that demand answers.

Four of these well known "tell the truth" 9/11 websites are:

1) Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes academics and intellectuals from many disciplines.

2) 250+ 9/11 'Smoking Guns' a website that cites over 250 pieces of evidence that allegedly contradict, or were omitted from, the 9/11 Commission report.

3) The 911 Truth Campaign that, as well as offering its own evidence and theories, includes links to more than 20 similar websites.

4) Patriots Question 9/11, perhaps the most plausible array of distinguished US citizens who question the official account of 9/11, including General Wesley Clark, former Nato commander in Europe, and seven members and staffers of the official 9/11 Commission, including the chair and vice chair. In all, this website documents the doubts of 110+ senior military, intelligence service, law enforcement and government officials; 200+ engineers and architects; 50+ pilots and aviation professionals; 150+ professors; 90+ entertainment and media people; and 190+ 9/11 survivors and family members. Although this is an impressive roll call, it doesn't necessarily mean that these expert professionals are right. Nevertheless, their scepticism of the official version of events is reason to pause and reflect.

More and more US citizens are critical of the official account. The respected Zogby polling organisation last week found that 51% of Americans want Congress to probe President Bush and Vice-President Cheney regarding the truth about the 9/11 attacks; 67% are also critical of the 9/11 Commission for not investigating the bizarre, unexplained collapse of the 47-storey World Trade Centre building 7 (WTC7). .."

Tatchell, Guardian.

“As conservatives, [we] Patriots oppose a closed, manipulative, and secretive government, and demand the truth from our elected officials. We will not tolerate " Gulf of Tonkin " incidents as excuses for war. We reject the deceptions which involved us in the first Gulf War under George H. W. Bush and in the rape of Yugoslavia under Clinton . We abhor the lies about WMD, "yellow cake," and "mushroom clouds over New York " which got us into the 2nd Iraq War and its interminable and disastrous occupation.

As conservatives, we call for a "Sunshine Law" which will make conspiratorial meetings like that between Dick Cheney and Ken Lay on energy policy impossible (or at least illegal). We reject as totally inadequate the Kean-Hamilton-Zelikow 9/11 Commission Report which admittedly contains perjured testimony, refrains from assigning responsibility and accountability for our defense's failures, and fails to even address dozens of unanswered questions and obvious flaws in the Bush Administration's official story. We therefore demand a new and truly independent investigation of 9/11. We demand an investigation of the cover-up which followed 9/11 involving the confiscation and destruction of evidence, lying to investigators, and obstruction of justice. Finally, we demand an investigation of the exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy to launch unnecessary wars against Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretenses.

As conservatives, we reject the misnamed Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, the loss of "habeas corpus," and all other attacks on our God-given freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. We will not tolerate infringement of our first amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and redress of grievances. We agree with Teddy Roosevelt and others who insist that dissent is often the height of patriotism, and we will not stand for dissenters being interred as "enemy combatants."

Dr. Bob Bowman , Lt. Col., USAF, ret. is President of the Institute for Space and Security Studies, Executive Vice President of Millennium III Corporation, and retired Presiding Archbishop of the United Catholic Church. The recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President's Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Republic Aviation Airpower Award, the Society of American Military Engineers' ROTC Medal of Merit (twice), the Air Medal with five oak leaf clusters, and numerous other awards, he is one of the country's foremost authorities on national security. Dr. Bowman spent several years as an unpaid "People's Lobbyist" to Congress. Colonel Bowman flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam and directed all the DoD "Star Wars" programs under presidents Ford and Carter. He has been an executive in both government and industry, and has chaired 8 major international conferences. Professor Bowman taught at 5 colleges and universities, serving as Department Head and Assistant Dean. His Ph.D. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Cal tech. He has lectured at the National War College, the United Nations, Congressional Caucuses, the Academies of Science of six nations, and the House of Lords."

http://thepatriots.us/

[Binoche in 'The English Patient', where she dangles on a bell rope singeing the 15th C frescoes of Piero della Francesca in the Church of San Francesco, Arezzo]

'A Few Days in September' is witty and clever, but there is a serious point behind it - with which Binoche is more than a little obsessed. She describes it as a dramatised version of the events depicted in Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. It alleges that various vested interests - including state security services around the world - knew what was about to happen on September 11, 2001.

While preparing for the role Binoche had long conversations with a secret agent, who consulted on the film and on whom she modelled her character. 'Of course he could not reveal everything to me, but he said a lot,' she says. 'Some things I forgot because it was just too much. Certain things I was very amazed by and when I told people close to me about them they just wouldn't believe it. Everything in there is true,' she adds, her eyes blazing with the fervour of a conspiracy theorist.

So is she saying the film is a dramatisation of real events? 'Absolutely,' she says. 'I went to see the Iranian ambassador at the time and he said of course it's true. Things that I thought were hidden and private… they were very open about it.' So she means the CIA and other agencies knew 9/11 was going to happen? 'Of course.' So is she saying it was an inside job? Or that al-Qa'eda was responsible? 'Everybody is responsible for it. If you only knew more, it's even more depressing.' ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/01/sm_juliettebinoche01.xml

"Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said the U.S. government misinformed Americans and the world about 9/11, echoing conspiracy theories about the terror attacks against the United States six years ago.

In an essay read by a Cuban television presenter on Tuesday night, Castro said the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers.

"Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation," wrote Castro...

"Studying the impact of planes, similar to those that hit the Twin Towers, that had accidentally fallen on densely populated cities, one concludes that it was not a plane that crashed into the Pentagon," Castro said.

"Only a projectile could have caused the geometrically round hole that allegedly was made by the plane," he said.

"We were fooled like the rest of the planet's inhabitants," he wrote.
Castro said the truth behind the September 11 attacks with hijacked planes that killed nearly 3,000 people will probably never be known...

[Castro and Che Guevara]
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=41169

2007-09-23T09:29:00.000+09:00

Mark's video and photo links here:

http://shros.org/video.html

2007-09-21T13:26:00.000+09:00

Just got back from a three-day 'hike' with Mark over the roof of Japan - or what felt like it: the Yatsu-ga-dake in the Japanese Alps, peaking at Aka Dake (Red Mountain) at 2899 metres.

Handy and reassuring cairns mark the way along a high ridge.

We camped for two nights, although there are several 'huts' - more like small hotels - even on the peak of Aka Dake, with extraordinary views.

There's one clinging to the lee-side of the ridge up to Aka Dake (click on photo to enlarge).

This seems to be an emergency shelter.

'I think we go that way...'

A kamoshika joined us for breakfast.

Unlike European deer that emit a deep barking eructation, Japanese deer honk like a trombone.

Looking back at Aka Dake - quite a climb. We came down the gulley on the left.

Fuji-san, on the last morning as the cloud dispersed.

Fuji-san at dawn from our camp.

My first time up a mountain that high - but not my last!

2007-09-21T13:06:00.001+09:00

Went snorkelling last weekend in the Izu peninsula, an hour or so from here, on a trip highly organised by Hiro, in very great detail. We went to a somewhat unpromising looking bay near Izu-Kogen. My previous snorkelling experience amounted to very little in Devon 30 or 40 years ago, when I peered short-sightedly at wads of bladder wrack and limpets, so the stupendous revelation once we finally got into the water was surprising, if not amazing - an extraordinary array of tropical and sub-tropical species of brightly coloured fish of all shapes and sizes, as well as bright red coral and orange sea anenomes, and all these despite the several hundred snorkellers and sub-acqua divers queueing up to peer at them all.
An 'onsen' has a fairly wide definition - basically a hot, public bath, usually thermally heated.

The hot water is sprinkled on twigs, to create a mist.

I can see!

Izu-Kogen station has its own foot onsen on the platform. It's also made like a log cabin.

2007-09-10T23:26:00.000+09:00

Spent a lot of the weekend digging our new veggie garden, then had a splendid barbie at Mark and Miki's.

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11
Published: 25 August 2007 :

"Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view...

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs."

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece

More ‘ravers’here:

http://www.wanttoknow.info/officialsquestion911commissionreport
http://www.wanttoknow.info/070618professorsquestion911

For example:

Col. Robert Bowman, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under Presidents Ford and Carter. Air Force fighter pilot, over 100 combat missions. PhD in Aeronautics, Nuclear Engineering.

Video: "A lot of these pieces of information, taken together, prove that the official story, the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is a bunch of hogwash. It’s impossible. … There’s a second group of facts having to do with the cover up. Taken together these things prove that high levels of our government don’t want us to know what happened and who’s responsible. Who gained from 9/11? Who covered up crucial information? And who put out the patently false stories about 9/11 in the first place? I think the case is pretty clear that it’s highly placed individuals in the administration with all roads passing through Dick Cheney. I think the very kindest thing that we can say about George W. Bush and all the people in the U.S. Government that have been involved in this massive cover-up ... is that they were aware of impending attacks and let them happen. However even that is high treason and conspiracy to commit murder."

"Kansas City, MO (PRWEB) September 6, 2007 -- As America nears the sixth anniversary of the world-churning events of September 11, 2001, a new Zogby International poll finds a majority of Americans still await a Congressional investigation of President Bush' and Vice President Cheney's actions before, during and after the 9/11 attacks. Over 30% also believe Bush and/or Cheney should be immediately impeached by the House of Representatives.

The 911truth.org-sponsored poll also found that over two-thirds of Americans say the 9/11 Commission should have investigated the still unexplained collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001.

WTC 7 housed the mayor's emergency bunker and offices of the SEC, IRS, CIA and Secret Service and was not hit by any planes but still completely collapsed into its own footprint nearly eight hours after the Twin Tower attacks. FEMA did not explain this collapse, the 911 Commission ignored it, and the promised official study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is now two years overdue.

Janice Matthews, executive director of poll sponsor 911truth.org, observes: "The supermajority response to the WTC Building 7 question signals an increasing public concern about this remarkable event -- up from 38% last year. We can perhaps credit this rising awareness to the millions who have recently witnessed videos or Youtube clips of this skyscraper's descent and the outspoken demands for a new WTC inquiry from over 150 architects and engineering professionals, including NIST's own former Fire Science Division Chief, Dr. James Quintiere. Another contributory factor is the increased questioning among Hispanics, Blacks and Asians whose responses appear significantly more critical of the 9/11 Commission than Whites, sometimes twice as critical."

Strategy aide W. David Kubiak adds, "While only 32% seek immediate Bush and/or Cheney impeachment based on their current personal knowledge, a clear majority of citizens still seems hungry for a full exposure of the facts. The results suggest widespread public support for legislators like Rep. Dennis Kucinich who pledge to investigate unanswered 9/11 questions in the relevant congressional committees this fall. We hope more of our representatives find the spine to respond to this escalating dissatisfaction with the dubious accounting we have received thus far."

9/11 family member and 911truth.org advisor Donna Marsh O'Connor notes, "I'm not sure this poll is at all surprising. Over half of those polled want more answers from Congress, from those they hired to represent them. One quarter of the country knows enough to want to impeach both. Doesn't it just mean people need figures they consider credible to tell them whether key details add up or not? Truth advocates need to press their case in Congress, on college campuses, in church groups with reason and absolute discipline regarding what can and cannot be proven. The strongest evidence needs to reach the people-including people who hate computers. We must present it calmly. Like whispering so that people reach in to hear."

The poll was conceived and commissioned by 911truth.org and paid for with generous assistance from individual project donors and Visibility911.com. 911truth.org is a national information clearing house and grassroots resource center for the US 9/11 truth movement. The group is dedicated to investigation, education, organizing, and accountability regarding the recent criminal misuse of government to promote fear, repression and endless war..."

For the full poll and demographic breakdown of results, see: http://www.911truth.org/images/ZogbyPoll2007.pdf

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/9/prweb551899.php

‘They’ attacked us...
http://infowars.net/articles/august2007/230807ads.htm

2007-09-06T15:29:00.000+09:00

'Banditi di Orosei' (1961) is being shown at the BFI on November 11th as part of the London Film Festival, directed by De Seta - "an anthropologist who spoke with the voice of a poet" (Scorcese).

As part of my being processed (procession?) for my new position at the university ('Junior Associate Professor' - JAP?), I had to have a medical yesterday, a rare occurence since my Middle East days. I don't like blood, especially my own - since childhood I have been known to faint in its presence, even artificial stuff on screen (in Exeter - the opening scene of the great 'Amadeus', and in Madrid, the sudden murder in 'Caravaggio'), or on stage (in the Norwich Arts Centre - the hand-slicing in the 'Caucasian Chalk Circle' - when I collapsed onto my father-in-law's lap, he thinking I was drunk).

My height was measured (182 cm), and my weight (70kg), and I was then given a paper cup and asked to produce 50 ml. After 10 minutes not a drop, so never mind - we'll come back to that one. I was then given a sight test, without my glasses (why?) and could hardly see the screen (but did much better with my glasses on, unsurprisingly), and my ears were tested in a thoroughly unscientific manner as I could both see and hear the nurse clicking the button sending a signal to my headphones.

I then had an ECG during which the nurse had problems sticking her greased up suckers to my chest, virtue of the hair thereon (few Japanese men have hairy chests), and thence to the blood extraction. In order to attempt to take my mind off things I tried furiously reciting poetry to myself but didn't get very far:

'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,

or bends with the remover to remove,

Oh no! something about a wandering bark and an ever-fixed mark,

rosy lips and cheeks, and a bending sickle's compass come, what the hell comes next? I give up - start again...'

"Is he all right?" the nurse askes Mina, "Is he in pain? ... or angry?"

"Oh no - he's fine".

Fine. Perfect. Still we made it without passing out - but then came the blood pressure thing round my arm. I stayed compos mentis enough to note what she wrote down - 116 and 170.

Back at home, waiting for the results of the blood test, I looked up blood pressure on the internet and was shocked to find that 116/170 means I am dangerously over the top, almost off the scale, and likely to suffer cardiac failure imminently. I immediately give up salt, meat and alcohol and plan to eat fruit and veg as aften as possible and take up non-strenuous exercise on a daily basis (strenuous exercise would finish me off, it seems). Very worried.

Two hours later I'm sitting with the doctor prepared for the worst, but before he can get going I note that it's 116/70, not 170, and I am therefore well within the limits of a normal healthy active adult male. Relief! Joy!

But what's this? Why's he taking so long staring at my X-ray? He's preparing to give me the really bad news - "Almost perfect", he says. "Slightly too much cholesterol, but nothing to worry about".

[The view of the piazza in Bibbiena from Giovanni's balcony - scene of the Bibbiena Summer Festival (the piazza, not the balcony), which this year included George's circus, taking them to a higher level, with an audience of 1000 plus.]

By the way, and tangential to 'Caravaggio', I learnt today from the great Mark Lawson (Front Row, BBC Radio 4) that the 'homo' in 'homosexual' is from the Greek 'homos' meaning the same, and not from the Latin 'homo' meaning man, and should therefore be pronounced 'hom' as in 'Tom' and not 'home'.

And finally, there's been a bit of a hiatus sports-wise since the greatest annual sporting event in the world, Wimbledon, finished in July - what a fantastic sport tennis is, combining power, athleticism, grace, beauty, intelligence, endurance, will-power, and decent sportsmanship - so unlike the ugly stupidity and violence of football or boxing, or the low-down drug-taking of people desperate to go slightly faster than the rest in running or cycling.

However, the void has been filled by the start of the Rugby World Cup on Saturday - the 'ultimate team game' - available here (and elsewhere):

http://www.tv3.co.nz/VideoBrowseAll/SportsVideo/tabid/317/Default.aspx

The New Zealand All Blacks perform the traditional Maori 'haka' at the start of their matches.

Late news: Pavarotti died. What a marvellous voice he had.

2007-09-05T23:32:00.000+09:00

Yours truly outside the Museum of Ethnography, Orgosolo, Sardinia, regrettably closed (I liked the colours).

On the way back to Alghero from Orosei the bus suddenly pulled over in a lay-by to let this calvalcade through (at least 50 horses and donkeys) - as they were shooting into the air, nobody was arguing.

Another topical mural at Orgosolo - this one asks 'How many innocents must be massacred to end a tyranny?'

Silver Lady under a silvery full moon.

Another couple of Sardinian titbits - sardines are named after Sardinia, and a 'sardonic grin' refers to the ancient practice of euthanasia of the elderly by administering a poison which evidently caused them to die with a fixed grin.

2007-09-05T22:27:00.000+09:00

The beach at Orosei and our boat, Silver Lady, a.k.a. Good Vibes.

Alison and her two daughters then turned up from Nice, en voiture. I hadn't seen Alison for 23 years, and amazingly she hasn't changed at all! Apart that is from blending another accent (French) into her existing RP/Dorset - she could form the basis of a linguistics paper, having the rare knack shared by eg. Kenneth Williams, of segueing seamlessly and charmingly from one of her accents into the other and back again within a single sentence, followed up by her surely unique laugh.

Mark and Jaime arrived the following day by bicycle (sort of) and confirmed Alison's unchangement (they hadn't seen her for 23 years either). Curiously, her delightful daughters speak either pure RP or pure French, despite having rarely visited Britain and only speaking English with their mum. (See the link to Mark's photos below).

Did a bit of work on the road, the drains, the roof etc. with Henry, Mark and Jaime's welcome help, and managed to see the owners to talk about the house, and Giovanni to talk about future possibilities re alternative tourism based in Bibbiena (watch this space) (link to Giovanni below).

George was immersed into the circus all summer, which we were fortunate to see in action in Chiusi della Verna - looking forward to more of the same next year.

[George's circus - see link below]

The two weeks went by far too quickly, but then we were back to Princes Risborough to meet up with the brothers and their families for a splendid lunch at our mum's, with musical accompaniment from Jack and Harry.

Meanwhile Sam and George had moved to Sardinia and taken the boat with them, which got loads of use. We even caught some fish. Antonio was there and as usual was amazingly generous with his home-grown and home-made food, cheese, wine etc, and helped us repair the broken rudder that had snapped in two on her first outing - luckily I'd learned how to sail without one!

We went up to the mountain town of Orgosolo one day to admire the murals.

Towns in Sardinia tend to be up in the mountains away from the coast, apparently as a result of the Sards having been repeatedly invaded over the centuries, but also to get away from the malaria endemic on the island till 1946 when the US Army got rid of it with DDT.

Sardinia has an ancient history - human remains have recently been found going back an incredible 250,000 years. One account suggests that the name Sardinia comes from the city of Sardis in Lydia (western Turkey) and that some of the migrants who may have left Turkey to settle in Etruria (Tuscany) in c. 1000 BC, might have split off and settled in Sardinia - which was apparently called Ichnusa by the Nuraghic people of that time (there are several thousand 'nuraghe' still dotted over the countryside - stone castles).

[I will look for linguistic evidence for any connection between Sard, Etruscan and Turkish. All originally non Indo-european languages it seems - Etruscan was killed off by Roman/Latin, while Sard was apparently so Romanised as to lose its original structure. I might point out that this connection is all highly debatable, despite recent DNA evidence connecting the people - Giovanni asserts, for example, that Etruscan developed in situ (like Basque), and any DNA evidence might indicate later migrations in either direction].

Mural in Orgosolo - this one says 'The rights of the people are not achieved through barbarities'.

(By the way, while in London we went to the British Museum and after admiring Norman Foster's Great Court we visited the Etruscan room and looked at the contents of the Etruscan tombs in Tuscany - which I have yet to visit).

Ichnusa is the name of the local beer in Sardinia and sports the 'Four Moors' flag as its label. It seems that these Moors' heads and the cross of the Christian St George were used from the 15th century by the Kings of Aragon in their 'reconquest' on Muslim-occupied lands of southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, Corsica, southern Italy...). The Corsican flag is of a single such Moor's head, but with the head bandana over the forehead. It seems the Sardinian Moors' bandanas slipped down over their eyes after the French Revolution (1792) in some kind of protest against the way the Sardinian islanders had been mistreated/betrayed by the court of the 'Kingdom of Sardinia' based in Turin. Since 1999 the official version of the flag features the four heads turned to the right with the bandana back up over their foreheads, but most flags we saw don't follow this pattern., eg. the above Picasso-esque mural at Orgosolo. (By the way, some Spanish Muslims are campaigning to have the severed Muslim heads airbrushed out of European history and culture).

[George retrieving the main halyard by standing on Sam's back, on her first dip since leaving Hickling Broad 5 years ago.]

2007-09-05T22:02:00.000+09:00

While in London, en route to Stansted, we had a few hours to walk down to the Tower from Liverpool Street and along the South Bank to the Tate Modern, and back over Norman Foster's Millenium footbridge.

Next to Norman Foster's 'gherkin' (above) near Liverpool Street was this tower block being demolished from the ground up. Couldn't help thinking of WTC7's mysterious spontaneous collapse on 9/11 - no fire, no plane ...

Back in the Casentino, Katrin, Mina and I walked up through the 'Enchanted Forest' (photo from November 2003) to the Monastery of Saint Francis, where we had a good look around at the rock 'bed' he slept on, the spot where he received the stigmata, and so on.

The monastery at La Verna.

Below is the view from the small chapel built at the very top of the mountain (1213m) looking down from which you can just make out Casalino in the trees down to the left (photo also from November 2003).

2007-09-05T20:22:00.000+09:00

The yew/beech/whatever hedge in my mother's garden last week - in a rainy white sunset. The signpost points over the stile and up across the sheep field to the beech woods at the top of the hill overlooking the Princes Risborough gap in the Chilterns.

We stayed at my mum's three times last month - beginning, middle and end.

The hols started on August 1st and on the way to the airport we diverted to the hospital to inspect Mina's sister's first child, newborn that morning - Yota, his name is, and a fine little chap. On the way there we had a call to say Mina's grandmother had died two hours after the birth, so Mina's mum became a grandmother and lost her mother on the same morning. She took it very philosophically though - her mother had been bed-ridden in Kyushu for the last 4 years but in her lucid moments talked of her desire to come to Kanagawa to see her grandchildren. Mina's mum reckoned that by dying she was finally able to be with them all, in spirit.

Mina had bought some cheap tickets, which involved our flying to Kansai airport, Osaka (photo) then Doha (Qatar), then London. We arrived in Doha just before dawn and the temperature was already 93 degrees. As I had lived in Doha for two and a half years in the mid-90s it was almost a sentimental journey, although the people I knew then had all gone by now, and judging by the in-flight magazine the city had been busy transforming itself into an ultra-modern poor man's Dubai, so I had little desire to leave the cool confines of the air-conditioned airport in the two hours we had available.

Got to my Mum's by the afternoon and had a nice cuppa tea and pottered about cleaning gutters and admiring her veggie garden - 82 and she still grows beans, tomatoes, courgettes and so on. Got three new jackets, two ties, and a pair of new zip-off-at-the-knee trousers in her charity shop for 10 pounds - what a bargain!

Off to Casalino where George and Sam were already set up with a bunch of Sam's friends. Henry soon arrived with a bunch of his too, so we were all cooking for 14, and kicked off with a mega-barbie, counting the shooting stars, followed by a mega-paella the following night (courtesy of Sam).

Katrin soon arrived on the overnight train from Munich (with a basket of wonderful German beer and sausages), and we went up to the monastery of Saint Francis at the top of the mountain one day, through the 'enchanted forest'.

2007-09-03T18:47:00.000+09:00

Just back from our hols and trying to stick a video of George and me singing on the beach in Orosei...

2007-07-30T20:15:00.001+09:00

' In a 70th birthday tribute in 1988, Woody Allen said Bergman was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera". '

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6921960.stm

'Ingmar Bergman, who has died aged 89, was known as "the poet of the cinema".
One of his most acclaimed films, Fanny and Alexander, evoked the joys and terrors of the childhood which shaped his imagination.

He said it summed up his life as a film-maker, with its young hero discovering a love of the arts from a toy theatre, as the director himself had done. '

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/235714.stm

2007-07-30T18:39:00.000+09:00

"The world owes a debt to the United States for its leadership in the fight against international terrorism, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6920877.stm

God help us all.

Photo by Felice Beato

2007-07-29T11:28:00.000+09:00

Steve organised and compered a great beach party at Hayama last night - jazz/blues band, fireworks, fun and games. Well done mate!

Sunset over Fuji (it's there somewhere) with Enoshima Island below, from the 'Endeavour' the other night.

'Discussing the recent debate during which he said Democratic presidential candidates were "all talking about global warming," Fox News Radio 600 KCOL guest co-host Jesse Herron asserted, "It's a proven fact global warming doesn't exist."'

http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200707260003

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290942,00.html

'One of the young filmmakers behind a controversial 9/11 conspiracy documentary was arrested this week on charges that he deserted the Army, even though ... he received an honorable discharge. Korey Rowe, 24, who served with the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan and Iraq, told FOX News.
that he was honorably discharged from the military 18 months ago — which he said he explained to sheriffs when they pounded on his door late Monday night. “When they came to my house, I showed them my paperwork,” Rowe said. “The cops said, 'You’re still in the system.'”

Rowe is one of the producers of "Loose Change," a cult hit on the Internet espousing the theory that the U.S. government and specifically the Bush administration orchestrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The movie is set to be released in about 40 British theaters in late August,..

Police arrested Rowe at his house in Oneonta, N.Y., about 10:45 p.m. on Monday and took him to the Otsego County jail, where he spent a day-and-a-half before he was released, he said. Rowe was turned over to officials at Fort Drum — the closest military base — who then booked him on a flight to Fort Campbell, Ky., where his unit is based, to try to straighten out why the military issued a warrant for his arrest.“A warrant for my arrest came down and showed up on the sheriff’s desk,” Rowe said. “Where it came from and why it showed up all of a sudden is a mystery to me.” There were at least five sheriffs on hand for his arrest, Rowe said. “They pulled a whole operation. They cut my phone lines. They came from the woods. It was crazy — it was ridiculous,” he said.

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."

Albert Einstein

'As the Charlie Company's 3rd platoon moved into My Lai, it was followed by Ronald Haeberle, there to document what was supposed to be a significant encounter with a crack Viet Cong battalion. Haeberle took many pictures and later testified he saw about thirty different American soldiers kill about 100 civilians.

"Guys were about to shoot these people. I yelled, 'hold it', and shot my picture. As I walked away, I heard M16s open up. From the corner of my eye I saw bodies falling, but I didn't turn to look."

...The Army photographer, Ronald Haeberle, assigned to Charlie Company on March 16th, 1968 had two cameras. One was an Army standard; one was his personal camera. The film on the Army-owned camera, i.e., the official camera of the State, showed standard operations that is “authorized” and “official” operations including interrogating villagers and burning “insurgent” huts.

What the film on the personal camera showed, however, was different. When turned over to the press and Government by the photographer, those “unofficial” photographs provided the grounds for a court martial. Haeberle's personal images (owned by himself and not the US Government) showed hundreds of villagers who had been killed by U.S. troops. More significantly, they showed that the dead were primarily women and children, including infants.'

(Camilla Benolirao Griggers, “War and the Politics of Perception,” chapter 1 from the essay Visualizing War.)

'When I first traveled to Warsaw, nearly 30 years ago, when it was still under communist rule, I chanced upon a monk in Saint Antony’s Church who led me round, pointing out memorial tablets indicating that the person had died at Katyn in 1940—killed, that is, by the Soviets, a fact flatly denied by official communist propaganda. Since I did not then speak Polish and he apparently spoke no other living language, communication was difficult. But finally I found a way. “Fortis est veritas,” I said, “et praevalebit!” (“Truth is strong and will prevail!”).

I will never forget his grin of sheer delight. It was a good motto for Poland then, and I think it’s still a good motto for Poland now. And not just for Poland.'

This essay appeared in the Guardian (U.K.) on January 11, 2007.
Timothy Garton Ash

'Since 9-11 a number of tenured and untenured faculty have been persecuted for questioning The Official Story. In these attacks, when the academic is tenured, the attempt is to revoke the tenure based on the academics' viewpoint, which of course is an attack on the concept of tenure itself, which is given to protect unpopular views such as Socrates maintained.

At Roosevelt University last year, untenured adjunct professor Douglas Giles was fired for allowing discussion of Zionism...in a World Religion class, where it is relevant ...

Academics who get tenure have learned since the Red Scare of 1920s America...since the McCarthyism of the 1950s...since post 9-11 hysteria to consistently moderate their views.

http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/2006/05/how_the_other_s.html

2007-07-27T11:18:00.000+09:00

Yours truly and Kintoki-no Musume in her cafe at the summit of Kintoki Yama on Wednesday.

Captain Hiro of the 'Endeavour' in Hayama Bay on Tuesday.

Just had a great couple of active days: On Tuesday I was lucky enough to meet up with Hiro, Mark, Steve et al at Enoshima Island (the harbour was built for the 1964 Olympics) and we sailed across to Hayama, swam a bit and generally frollicked, and ended up in a beach bar, which was like being, well, in a beach bar in Australia or Thailand or wherever.

[Enoshima Island c.1870, by Felice Beato ('Happy Blessed')]

Then on Wednesday Mark and I went up to Hakone and hiked for about 8 hours from one peak to the next, some of it in the clouds, with views of clouds below.

Remarkably there is a small cafe at the top of one of these peaks (1213 metres 金時山'Kintoki-yama' or 'Money-Time-Mountain') which is only accessible by a 2-hour climb, so everything in the cafe, including the solar-powered freezers, is brought up on someone's back.

For the last 60 years a woman known as 金時の娘　'kintoki-no musume' 'Kintoki's daughter' has been going up in the early hours of the morning to open up shop and get everything ready for the evident stream of customers, including many TV personalities, sports-people etc judging by the photos on the wall - going back to the 50s.

The cafe has been there for 100 years, and was originally run by her father. She's now 75 and fit as a fiddle and full of beans. We bought some ice-cream, and she gave us tea and cake, refusing payment, but repeating 又来て下さい 'matakite kudasai' 'please come again' (Again-come-please).

I shall!

Visitor books going back 50 years or more.

Looking back up at Kintoki Yama. In the winter Kintoki-no musume goes up in crampons.

2007-07-23T12:25:00.000+09:00

Fuji, Hakone and the Shinkansen (I think), with Odawara off to the left.

Photo: T. Kumazawa

Had a great day yesterday - took part in my first tennis tournament, organised by Conrad, and managed to get the ball back across the net more than once. Nice bunch of people too.

Then Keita came down from Tokyo for lunch and we finally went inside the Odawara Castle and got some great maps of the city as it was in the mid-19th century (pretty much as it had been in the 16th century) compared to now - more fuel for my gaijin-guided tour of the city, which I'm hoping to do in October.

Great BBQ on the balcony, including complete squid and some Japanese wine that Keita brought. Splendid!

"We are not retreating - we are advancing in another direction."

"Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."

"I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within."

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."

"One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda."

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency."

"The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war."

"The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It's the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other."

"A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding."

"You are remembered for the rules you break."

Douglas MacArthur
(1880 – 1964)
General, Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (Japan), ‘Gaijin Shogun’.

2007-07-21T13:08:00.000+09:00

If you only watch one film on 911, I recommend this one:

'The Ripple Effect'

http://elequity.com/?p=1228

'Thug journalism' and 'one of the biggest crimes ever perpetrated in American history'.

'Let's be brave;
Let's get involved;
Lift your voice'.

[Poster by Mad Magazine]

2007-07-21T10:48:00.000+09:00

Mark and I came across this little chap washed up on the rocks in Manazuru bay the other day, after the typhoon. I couldn't resist taking him home on the train, via an izakaya (bar/restaurant), and Mina immediately welcomed him into the family, giving him pride of place by the telly. Where did he come from, and how long did he spend at sea?

"Something's in the works":

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Oldline_Republican_warns_somethings_in_works_0719.html

"Thom Hartmann began his program on Thursday by reading from a new Executive Order which allows the government to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies.

He then introduced old-line conservative Paul Craig Roberts -- a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan who has recently become known for his strong opposition to the Bush administration and the Iraq War -- by quoting the "strong words" which open Roberts' latest column:

"Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran."

"I don't actually think they're very strong," said Roberts of his words. "I get a lot of flak that they're understated and the situation is worse than I say. ... When Bush exercises this authority [under the new Executive Order] ... there's no check to it. It doesn't have to be ratified by Congress. The people who bear the brunt of these dictatorial police state actions have no recourse to the judiciary. So it really is a form of total, absolute, one-man rule. ... The American people don't really understand the danger that they face."

Roberts said that because of Bush's unpopularity, the Republicans face a total wipeout in 2008, and this may be why "the Democrats have not brought a halt to Bush's follies or the war, because they expect his unpopular policies to provide them with a landslide victory in next year's election."

However, Roberts emphasized, "the problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that Cheney and Rove and the Republicans are ignorant of these facts, or it assumes that they are content for the Republican Party to be destroyed after Bush has his fling." Roberts believes instead that Cheney and Rove intend to use a renewal of the War on Terror to rally the American people around the Republican Party. "Something's in the works," he said, adding that the Executive Orders need to create a police state are already in place.

"The administration figures themselves and prominent Republican propagandists ... are preparing us for another 9/11 event or series of events," Roberts continued. "Chertoff has predicted them. ... The National Intelligence Estimate is saying that al Qaeda has regrouped. ... You have to count on the fact that if al Qaeda's not going to do it, it's going to be orchestrated. ... The Republicans are praying for another 9/11."

Hartmann asked what we as the people can do if impeachment isn't about to happen. "If enough people were suspicious and alert, it would be harder for the administration to get away with it," Roberts replied. However, he added, "I don't think these wake-up calls are likely to be effective," pointing out the dominance of the mainstream media.

"Americans think their danger is terrorists," said Roberts. "They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. ... The terrorists are not anything like the threat that we face to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism. Americans just aren't able to perceive that."

Roberts pointed out that it's old-line Republicans like himself, former Reagan associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein, and Pat Buchanan who are the diehards in warning of the danger. "It's so obvious to people like us who have long been associated in the corridors of power," he said. "There's no belief in the people or anything like that. They have agendas. The people are in the way. The Constitution is in the way. ... Americans need to comprehend and look at how ruthless Cheney is. ... A person like that would do anything."

Roberts final suggestion was that, in the absence of a massive popular outcry, "the only constraints on what's going to happen will come from the federal bureaucracy and perhaps the military. They may have had enough. They may not go along with it."

2007-07-20T18:19:00.000+09:00

T-Man

(1952)

http://youwillanyway.blogspot.com/2007/07/pnacs-inspiration.html

2007-07-17T13:26:00.001+09:00

I was teaching yesterday at 10.13 when a sizeable earthquake hit the north-west coast, 200 miles away. So far I've experienced half a dozen or so minor quakes, which have been of the trembling up-and-down variety - rather like being in a railway station when a large goods train trundles through. However, this one was a side-to-side type, so that the 4-storey building I was in was clearly swaying, a couple of inches - but enough to cause a little disquietude.

It was 6.8 and led to the collapse of 500 or so buildings in Niigata, nearly all of which were the old wooden bungalow type - more evidence for the Japanese preference for modern buildings (ours is quite old - at 20 years).

This followed on the heels of the first typhoon of the season, which blew in over the weekend and caused widespread damage in Okinawa and the main southern island of Kyushu, before veering off into the Pacific before it got to us - rather disappointingly actually. However, it caused a 24-hour downpour which led to the rivers becoming raging brown torrents, so we went down to the port and enjoyed one such competing with the crashing waves.

Went for a walk in the afternoon to Manazuru with Mark - Manazuru being the local fishing port, 15 minutes by train, and a small wooded peninsula. The locals are getting ready for their festival next weekend, when highly decorated boats are rowed out into the harbour to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing, rehearsals of which were evidently going on. Someone had also driven a car into the harbour, perhaps drunk, so we spent an enjoyable 20 minutes observing its return to dry land.