Goal!

I have to confess, I'd never been a soccer fan. Watching it on TV always seemed marginally less interesting than watching laundry go round in the washing machine. In fact, I once said as much to a then-boyfriend who came out to ask why I was sitting by myself in the kitchen, rather than joining him and his flatmates watching Cameroon playing in the World Cup. (An incident that probably had a lot to do with the collapse of our relationship soon after.)

But being in Japan has converted me to the "beautiful game." It started with Japan's qualification for the World Cup finals. In 1994 Japan had lost out on a place in the finals when Iraq scored against them in the final minute of the last qualifying match, so when the winning goal went in in extra time in the final qualifier for 1998 the entire nation was on its feet. Watching the match on TV late at night with Kentaro (which for me at the time was genuine proof of love) it was impossible not to catch something of his joy and enthusiasm. And that of the other residents of his shaky old apartment building with its paper-thin walls - the cheering from the other apartments practically took the roof off.

Then in 2002 the World Cup was actually held in Japan. England held their training camp on Awaji Island, close to Osaka, and I was one of scores of translators dragooned into registering as temporary police interpreters because the prefectural police were terrified that the English would descend on the city and trash it. I remember being in an "international exchange" session that suumer with a group of high school students, who on being asked what their image was of England as a country chorused in unison "Hooligans!" In the event, there were almost no arrests at all, England supporters partied peacefully with Japanese in the streets, Japan made the second round (we always try to forget about arch-rival South Korea getting to the quarterfinals), and the future of soccer in this country was assured.

Kei and Dan both think of themselves as budding Beckhams or Nakamuras, and in April Kei started soccer school two weekends a month. Through the soccer school, we were given free tickets to see our local team, Gamba Osaka, playing FC Tokyo last weekend. It wasn't something I'd have thought of myself - but since we had the tickets, and Kei would have sulked for at least a year if we hadn't gone....

It was great!! I'd had no idea the atmosphere would be so good-natured. Families with two-year-olds dressed in Gamba jerseys that hung below their knees, young couples on dates, elderly women with orange-dyed hair chatting loudly in broad Osaka dialect, high school girls giggling and taking pictures of each other with their cellphones, men in their forties and fifties sitting quietly but erupting with the rest when Gamba had a chance at goal ... the crowd couldn't have been further removed from my 1980s British image of drunken yobs out for a fight. We were too late to find anywhere to sit, but even standing for the whole match didn't feel like a hardship.

Gamba Osaka is currently top of the J-League, and they went all out to show the home crowd a good time. FC Tokyo scored two early goals, but Gamba clawed one back just before half-time, and then came out again for a second-half goalfest that left the FC Tokyo defence looking as if they wanted to crawl off the pitch and hide. The final score was 6-2, and it would have been seven if another goal hadn't been disallowed for a dodgy offside call. The crowd was ecstatic, and so were we.

So I'm sure this won't be our last soccer match. Kei is already asking to go to a Gamba game as his birthday treat in September, and will be off to soccer school on Sunday with even more enthusiasm than before (if that's possible). Now the boys just have to choose whether they want to play for Japan or England when they grow up.

Wheeeeeeeeee

Now this beats the Wii hands down.

You know you've been in Japan too long when...

... you find it hard to take time off work for personal reasons like going to visit your parents or having babies.

... it seems strange to see a dog with no clothes on.

... you start to analyze everyone's personality according to blood type.

... your favorite beer snack has tentacles.

... you’re not surprised to have to sit in the bank for the whole of your lunch break just to pay one bill.

... you automatically make a peace sign when anyone points a camera at you.

... you bow at passing traffic when you want to thank them for letting you cut in front of them.

... you are no longer annoyed by people praising your chopsticks skills.

... you visit an aquarium and catch yourself thinking how good everything would taste as sashimi.

... you sniffle rather than blowing your nose.

... you can feel the cool breeze of autumn in early August.

... you think, "Those plastic drawers look nice!”

... potato salad in a sandwich doesn't seem odd anymore.

... long-grain rice tastes weird.

... green doughnuts and purple bread are normal.

... you buy an otohime for your own house because you can't physically use the toilet without one.

... you realize that in recent movies from your home country you have no idea what some of the slang means.

... if someone asks you to do something you don't want to do, you suck your teeth and say "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, soooooooooooo nanda," and then you say it again.

... you no longer feel like grabbing an air rifle every time the election trucks drive through the neighborhood.

... you’re disappointed if the ENT doesn't suck all the snot out of your nose with a suction wand.

... you’re rushed off to the hospital and overhear the paramedic inside the ambulance on the phone to the hospital saying “Nationality? I think she's a Japanese, but her face looks foreign....!”

(With grateful thanks to Kathy, Cath, Laura, NT, Jo, Janina, Jennifer, Linda, Christine, Bo, Mel, and all the other members of the wonderful MIJ community, who came up with the much longer list from which these are taken.)

Play dates

When I was a kid (starts the rant), we always seemed to be playing outside. Our street was a cul-de-sac of solid semidetacheds where the neighbors could always be relied to look out for our pack of kids as we bombed up and down on our bikes, pretending to be circus riders or racing drivers or whatever happened to catch the fancy of the group that day. Or climbing apple trees in the back garden, making show-jumping courses out of flower pots and bean poles, and swinging the rickety swing so hard we yanked the foot-long pegs that anchored it in the lawn clear out of the ground.



Life looks a bit different for city kids in Japan these days.

Kentaro and I wouldn't buy Kei a Nintendo DS, despite his pleas. We both instinctively dislike children spending all their time playing with them. But we did compromise by letting him save to buy one himself, and as he'd saved up all his pocket money for over a year and even earned extra by cleaning shoes and weeding, it didn't feel fair to tell him he couldn't use it to buy something he so desperately wanted.

In fact, in the end I even helped him mortgage a wobbly tooth to the Tooth Fairy for 500 yen so he would have enough money to buy Super Mario Cart software for his newly purchased DS, to play with on the 12-hour plane journey to England. (The tooth fell out the night we arrived, and he punctiliously paid me back the money from under his pillow the next day.) So when yet another little friend arrives after school and makes a beeline for the DS, or more frequently pulls out their own, I do realize it's not entirely Kei's own responsibility that so many of his play dates are spent on the sofa immersed in Pokemon or Super Mario Brothers over other children's shoulders.

It's not always like that. We do go to parks, and play baseball or soccer (occasionally both at once) in the street with neighborhood children. But as the rainy season drags on and the stifling heat of summer looms uncomfortably close, it seems likely Nintendo DS will be the play date occupation of choice at least until the autumn. Unless, of course, the boys can save up enough between them for a Wii.

Meme

Laura at Rehearsal Times Over (check it out!) has tagged me for this meme that's been going round lately. I have to start, she says, by posting the rules, so here they are:

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.

2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

OK, that's done, now what on earth can I tell you that (a) family and old friends don't already know, and (b) won't bore new visitors to tears and send them clicking straight back to Mad Priest or wherever else they've come from?

1. My first name is really Alison. My parents were cajoled into calling me that by my great-grandmother, whose own name was Alice and who reportedly had, let's say, quite a personality. They themselves really wanted to call me Claire, but to avoid my initials making me a "cad" they christened me Alison Claire instead. I'm always doing a double-take in places like driving-license centers and doctors' offices when people call me by a name that doesn't feel like mine.

2. When I was little I desperately wanted a pony. I was one of those horse-mad girls who read books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters endlessly under the bedclothes with a torch, and nagged my parents to paint my bedroom grass-green so I could plaster it with paper horses cut out of pony magazines. Even today I feel a faint stab of longing whenever I see a horse.

3. The Queen Mother once shook hands with me - by mistake. She'd come to open a new classroom block at our school, and was making her way down the line of prefects, saying distractedly "Isn't it exciting?" to about every third person without looking them in the eyes. I happened to be standing just past the final prefect, and she sailed right along and grasped my hand too before the headmaster hastily hustled her away.

4. My favorite chocolates are made by Leonidas. Godiva comes a close second, followed by Thorntons, followed by ... well, pretty much any company that makes sweets consisting of cocoa butter, milk, and sugar, basically.

5. I once traveled from the UK to Japan by train, bus, minivan, and ferry. It took a leisurely month in all and was one of the best times I've ever spent travelling, though nearly falling off a crumbling bit of the Great Wall of China on the way was a bit unnerving.

6. I'm feminist enough to hate it when men try to hold doors open for me or carry my bags in the UK, but Western enough to resent it when Japanese men don't even offer.

7. I don't like mayonnaise. Can't stand anything with it in, which is a bit of a problem when you're trying to buy a sandwich in a Japanese convenience store as it seems to be an ingredient in absolutely everything. This sometimes freaks out Japanese friends, who assume that because mayonnaise is a "western" food I should automatically love it. I get round that one by asking them "Do you like natto*?"

8. I don't like natto either. But then everyone thinks that's normal.

*Sticky, stinky, fermented soybeans. Foreigners are generally believed not to be able to stomach natto, and in fact many Japanese people (especially in Osaka) hate it too. Kentaro and the boys just love it, though.

Now the big problem: as I've only been blogging for a couple of months I don't know many people well enough to tag, and all of the ones I do know have already done this meme. So I'm going to go out on a limb and tag a couple of people on the Married in Japan list who I know have blogs: Kathy at Mikan Days and Jojoebi at A Bit of This & A Bit of That. Girls, I hope you don't mind....

Four Stories

Last night I went to the regular Four Stories literary event in Osaka, organized by the dynamic Tracy Slater. Four authors read excerpts from their work for 15 minutes each, while the listeners enjoyed good Portuguese wine and food and the chance for relaxed, grown-up conversation with interesting people. That's a rare opportunity for a translator working from home whose main everyday human contact comes through two young boys and the Internet, and it was exhilarating to have the brief chance to enjoy an atmosphere Tracy describes as "like a 19th-Century salon, only 150 years later―same socializing, same witty banter, but no corsets."

One of the readers was Jessica Goodfellow, an amazing Kobe-based poet who is also a friend. Her work interweaves imagery from mathematics, the Bible, and nature in fresh and thought-provoking ways. Two of her poems were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac earlier this year, including this one, The Invention of Fractions.

The Invention of Fractions
by Jessica Goodfellow

God himself made the whole numbers: everything else
is the work of man.
—Leopold Kronnecker

God created the whole numbers:
the first born, the seventh seal,
Ten Commandments etched in stone,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel —
Ten we’ve already lost —
forty days and forty nights,
Saul’s ten thousand and David’s ten thousand.
‘Be of one heart and one mind’ —
the whole numbers, the counting numbers.

It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals.
Only humankind could need the concepts
of splintering and dividing,
of things lost or broken,
of settling for the part instead of the whole.

Only humankind could find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting;
though given a limitless supply,
we still had no way
to measure what we keep
in our many-chambered hearts.


(Copyright © 2006 Jessica Goodfellow. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.)

You can find more of Jessica's poetry at Verse Daily here and here, or buy her chapbook A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland from Amazon.

I'd been half expecting that the boys would still be up when I got home late in the evening, but they were actually asleep - on our bed. I was able to carry Dan back to his own room, but had to lean over Kei and growl gently "Who's been sleeping in MY bed?" to rouse him so he could climb into his top bunk.

Metamorphosis

Both Kei and Dan, like virtually all Japanese boys their age, are into bugs. All types of bugs, but particularly beetles. Keeping beetles and other insects has a long tradition in Japan, and recently the Mushi King animated game fad has transformed interest into addiction on the part of all males aged between two and six. (At six they graduate to Pokemon, according to Kei, who passed over all his jealously guarded Mushi King cards to Dan his first week after starting school.)

So, we keep beetles. Beetle larvae, to be precise. Two white, squirming things the length and diameter of my index finger, with uncountable legs and great chomping jaws. They were a present from the boy next door, who to his mother's consternation now has about 40. At some point during June they are supposed to pupate, after which we should hopefully have two Giant Atlas Rhinoceros Beetles nosing around in their tankful of earth. They are going to stay there, too - I'm trying hard to see the charms of giant rhinoceros beetles as opposed to, say, cockroaches, and one of them is definitely that I know where they are at all times...

We also have a tank of suzumushi, Japanese bell crickets. When they're fully grown they look a bit like little black grasshoppers, but in the nymph stage they resemble nothing so much as silverfish. They chirp appealingly in late summer evenings, which is traditionally supposed to make you feel cooler. I rather like them, and they're easy to look after - spray with water once a day and stick in a bit of cucumber or aubergine for them to munch on, and they're happy.

Next to them are the tadpoles. They only arrived a couple of days ago, when I managed to get to the wonderful iris gardens at Shirakita Park and noticed them wriggling in the muddy water around the roots of the flowers. Kei has seen it all before, but Dan is fascinated by the idea that they'll turn into frogs and is looking for their legs to appear at least six times a day. We also have a large tank of goldfish and a black-and-white cat whose name translates as Plum Blossom, but they provide much less excitement.

Today's real thrill, though, has been the butterfly. Citrus trees are a magnet for swallowtail butterfly caterpillars, and I'm constantly brushing the tiny brown ones off our little lemon tree before they chomp their way through it wholesale. A couple of weeks ago we found one I'd missed, which had grown green and huge - a dead ringer for Eric Carle's hungry caterpillar. We brought it inside and fed it (sparingly) with lemon sprigs, and it duly spun itself into a chrysalis attached to the top of the tank. Then this morning Kei came rushing upstairs to tell us the butterfly had emerged. Fortunately it was still unfolding and drying its wings when we woke up, and hadn't had time to damage itself against the sides of the tank. We took it outside as the boys left for school and kindergarten, and left it on the porch to find its way out into the world.

We've kept caterpillars before, and daycares and kindergartens have them in virtually every classroom. But no matter how many times I see it happen, metamorphosis is a miracle every time.

Driving license ... yawn

I had to renew my driving license a couple of weeks ago. In Japan that involves first a trip to the police station to fill out forms, followed a week or so later by attendance at a driving safety lecture. "Gold drivers" with no points on their license get out after 30 minutes, "regular drivers" with a single violation have to stay an hour, and "violators" with multiple or serious violations have to sit through a two-hour talk. Unfortunately, thanks to a parking ticket and a failure to come to a complete halt at a stop sign (I was too distracted by wondering what the police were pulling people over for to notice the wretched sign until I was halfway across it), I currently fall into the latter category.

The elderly volunteer teacher spent ages wittering on about how the points violation system works, traffic accident statistics in Osaka, and recent revisions to the Road Traffic Law. The last time I renewed my license I had the first-time version for "novice drivers," which told us about how to approach crossroads safely, how to tell if you're going too fast at night, and other information that was actually useful in becoming a safer driver. But this guy seemed to actually want to bore the pants off us.

It wasn't an entire waste of time. I discovered that seatbelt and drink-driving laws have been tightened up since my last license renewal - you're now liable for prosecution if you sit in the passenger seat beside a drunk driver, regardless of whether or not you've been drinking yourself, or if you lend a car to someone who then drives it drunk. But as everyone seems to ignore the laws anyway - e.g. no Japanese families I know use child seats, although they're legally required - it all seemed rather academic. I'm pretty sure the people in the back row alongside me thought the same, as by 30 minutes into the lecture they were all fast asleep.

I'm utterly determined that next time I renew my license I won't have any new violations on it, so I can be classed as a gold driver and never have to sit through something like this again. Hmm, so maybe the system does work after all...