A dog's breakfast

No, the title doesn't refer to Abe's ridiculous response to the election results, though I'm amazed that he's still hanging on by his toenails despite leading the LDP to their second worst defeat ever. Three out of five of the major national Japanese dailies are now calling for his resignation, and it's hard to see how on earth he can keep going given the almost universal public rejection he now faces. But this is about something altogether sweeter than politics.




Fancy one of those delicious-looking desserts? Sorry, they aren't for you - unless you happen to have brought your pet. This photo was taken in an upscale pet shop in Osaka that makes cakes specially for dogs. Your pampered pooch can select from a range of cheesecakes, banana cake, and other treats, some shaped cutely like little bones, and they can even be decorated with a birthday message to show just how much you care.

I rarely experience "Only in Japan!" moments these days, but coming across this shop was definitely one.

Now, if they sold cakes for cats, that I could understand. I might even have brought one home for Ume-chan. Though it has to be said she's quite plump enough already.

Election night

I'm watching the results of the Upper House election as they come in on NHK this evening, and Abe's Liberal Democratic Party is losing badly. Abe is swearing he'll stay in office to "fulfill his mission to create a new country," but even the usually obsequious NHK commentators are asking him pointed questions about his unpopularity with the electorate and hinting less than subtly that he ought to resign. His eyes look hunted, and he's on the ropes.

I really hope he does go. He's a ideologue who cares more about his pet right-wing policies (teaching patriotism in schools, revising the Constitution to get rid of the pacifist Article 9, pushing North Korea over the abduction issue) than basic issues like the economy and Japan's greying society. And he's proved surprisingly inept in his Cabinet appointments - after one farm minister committed suicide rather than face corruption allegations, he appointed another who was immediately exposed as engaged in precisely the same kind of corruption, for example.

The problem is that the leader of the Democratic Party, Ichiro Ozawa, is himself a former Liberal Democrat politician who was heavily involved in that party's money politics before jumping ship when the faction to which he belonged became discredited by multiple corruption scandals. Ozawa is a very clever politician, but it's unlikely any opposition led by him will be motivated to clean up the corruption that's endemic to Japanese politics. Seeing Abe losing by such a landslide is exhilarating, but the lack of a decent alternative is thoroughly depressing.

But then I don't have a vote in Japan, so my opinion isn't worth the pixels it's appearing on your screen in anyway....

Forest escape

Now the rains have lifted, we open the curtains each morning to deep blue skies and the incessant metallic shrilling of cicadas. By eleven you could fry an egg on the balcony, and to open the front door in the afternoon is to step into the hot blast from a sauna. Most days the boys and I stay inside until early evening, but with the windows shut tight to keep the air conditioning in we all find ourselves getting a little frayed by the end of the day. So on Wednesday I drove them up to Mino Park, in the hills that bound Osaka to the north, for some forest therapy.

Mino is the closest summer getaway to Osaka, and one of the nicest for a day trip. A path winds up through deep woods along a swift-flowing river, with deep pools teeming with stippled brown fish, past an insect museum and onward to a high waterfall. Getting the boys out of the car and started up the path was hard - the first few hundred meters were punctuated by continual complaints that they were tired, their thermoses were too heavy, their fishing nets were too hard to carry, the monkeys who live in the forest were sure to attack us - but once we were a little way into the woods, their negativity fell away and the peace of the river carried us laughing and playing up the hill.


First stop was the insect museum. Though the boys enjoyed the tanks of beetles and scary-looking centipedes, their real aim was to get to the butterfly house, where hundreds of butterflies fly freely and the boys tried again and again to lift them gently up from flowers onto their outstretched fingers.














Then we trekked on up the hill to the waterfall. On the way up we'd passed a monkey, sitting high on a rock wall overlooking the path. The forest monkeys can sometimes be quite aggressive in trying to steal food, but if you're not openly holding something edible they generally leave people alone. This one followed us up the path a little way, before it decided that we weren't all that interesting and settled down at a corner to wait for the next group to come along.



After the steep walk, we ate lunch sitting in the cool spray from the waterfall before deciding we deserved ices. The shop where we bought Dan's chocolate icecream and Kei's strawberry kakigori (ice shavings topped with syrup) had something I've never seen before: a mineral-water foot spa below one of the tables, where you could sip your drink while cooling off your feet from the mountain climb. We ate our ices outside for fear of spilling, and then spent a happy ten minutes splashing our feet in the cool spring water.






























By the time the boys had played for an hour in the river, made friends with a half-Japanese, half-Russian boy they met there, and run with him all the way down the path to the bottom of the mountain again, they were both exhausted and deeply content. This is what summer holidays are meant to be like; the perfect antidote to the confinement of the city.

Money down the drain

A very pleasant repair guy came out from the manufacturers today and got the washing machine working again. Turns out it wasn't mainly the paper blocking it, but coins to the value of 210 yen, against which the paper had wadded up. Kentaro has been muttering that we've been wasting money recently, and I guess this proves his point - in our household it's literally going down the drain.

The 5,400 yen (a bit over 21 pounds, or 45 dollars) it cost to clean out the washing machine definitely falls into the "down the drain" category, too. Still, it's times like this I'm glad to live in Japan. I can't imagine a British plumber coming out the next working day and doing that sort of job for the same sort of price.

"Look, Mummy, Pokemon writing!"

What NOT to do at the start of the summer holidays...

.... decide your child's book bag looks a bit grubby and throw it in the washing machine while he's eating lunch, without checking first to see if there's anything inside.

(BIG mistake number 1.)

Kei finished school this morning for the summer holidays, and was invited to a friend's house for the afternoon. After lunch he came skipping up: "Where's my book bag, Mummy?"

I assumed he wanted it to carry his Nintendo and snacks to his friend's house.

"It's in the washing machine. You'll have to take your rucksack."

His face crumpled in shock.

"But my summer homework's in it! We're all going to Shinya's to get started on our homework together. Shinya told me specially to bring it."

He'd taken his satchel to school this morning as well as his book bag, and until today had always brought his homework home in that. In my hurry to get everything washed, I hadn't realized the book bag was heavier than it should be. I rushed frantically to the washing machine. Maybe I could somehow separate the pages and dry them out?

But the finished load at the bottom of the machine was smothered in small flakes of pink and grey paper. I fished out his book bag and opened it. Empty. I'd turned Kei's summer homework into papier mache, and the holidays hadn't even started yet.

Ooops. And I thought I'd been doing so well at this kindergarten/school mother thing lately.

I pacified Kei's floods of angry tears with abject apologies and the promise to go straight round to his school that afternoon to pick up another set, and took him over to his friend's house. Shinya's mother collapsed into uncontrollable giggles when I told her why Kei didn't have his homework with him. I left him playing Nintendo with five other first-graders, and went over to the school to tell them what had happened.

Kei's teacher had to try very hard to stifle her laughter too. Fortunately she had a spare set of homework prints, but then came the really embarrassing part.

"What else was in there? Is anything missing?"

"I have no idea," I confessed miserably. "The pieces are far too small to tell what they were. But there must have been a colored sheet in there, because a lot of them are pink ...."

"Ah, the health record. That's very important. You need to stamp your seal on it, and bring it back at the beginning of next term. I'll have to make out another one for you, and it'll take a little time."

Bowing repeatedly in shame, I promised to come back later and pick it up. The teacher saw me out, hand over mouth, her eyes dancing with mirth as she sympathetically assured me that everyone makes mistakes sometimes. I bet she can't wait to add this story to her "idiot parents" repertoire.

But my idiocy wasn't over yet. When I got home with Dan, I looked at the disgusting pile at the bottom of the machine, thought about how much work it would take to pick all the pieces off by hand, and decided to do what I usually do if I leave a tissue in the wash - run the washer repeatedly on the rinse cycle until all the paper is washed away.

(BIG mistake number 2.)

Half an hour later, as I was hard at work at an already overdue translation, the washing machine started beeping. I opened the lid with a feeling of foreboding. It was full of water heavily clouded with paper flakes. I stopped the cycle, set it to Drain, and pressed Start. Nothing happened.

Oooooooops.

So although Kei has another set of homework to keep him happy (and I even went back to pick up his reissued health record too), we now have a totally clogged-up washing machine. So far this evening I've fished out all the paper-covered clothes and rinsed them in the bath, bailed the water out of the washer with a bowl and poured it down the sink (through a fishing net to avoid blocking the drains as well!), and unscrewed the beater part at the bottom of the drum to see if I could clear the place where the water drains out. No luck at this point. Once the boys have gone to bed, I'll turn it on its side and unscrew the drain pipe from the bottom, to see if I can clear it out from that end. Watch this space and wish me luck....

Thank goodness, Kentaro is on night duty tonight, so with a bit of luck I can get it sorted out before he comes home tomorrow. He'll add it to his catalogue of proofs of my lack of common sense, and my inability to think about what I'm doing until it's too late. Days like this, I really think he might be right.


Update: We'll have to call out someone to repair the wretched thing. I did manage to unscrew the drain section from the bottom and remove a five-yen coin that had got stuck there, which I was hopeful would do the trick - but no, the water still isn't draining out. Rats.

A single strawberry

Finally, I made it to a kindergarten mothers' craft session this morning. It started at 9:30 a.m., but as the text message from the class representative said "Just coming for part of the time is fine," I finished off a translation before getting there at 11. All the others were already there, heads bent intently over their sewing.

"Do you do embroidery?" asked Haruhito's mother brightly.

"Uh ... no, not really, but I'll try ...."

Another woman handed me a small semicircle of red felt.

"Start out by sewing white seeds on, like this."

She showed me a sheet of paper covered in complicated patterns for what looked like different varieties of fruit.

Meekly I took a needle and some embroidery thread from the basket on the low table, and set to work. I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be making.

"It's a strawberry, look."

Hideaki's mother, quietly kneeling next to me, passed me a piece of delectable-looking sponge cake covered in whipped cream, strawberries, and pink flowers, made of felt and painstakingly sewn together with tiny embroidery stitches. I gulped and nodded.

"Are you all right? You're staring into space ..." giggled Haruhito's mother.

An hour later, after a few false starts and a lot of surreptitious glances at how the others were doing it, I'd managed to put together a passable strawberry. Next to me on one side, Hideaki's mother was finishing a luscious melon. Haruhito's mother was putting the final touches to a bunch of perfect tiny grapes on the other. The others had already finished their tasks and were endulging in some rather bawdy speculation about a woman whose twins had turned out to have different fathers.

My strawberry, the melon, and the grapes were added to the fruit basket, and our class bazar craft-making was finished for this year. The results were amazing. As if the cake and fruits weren't enough, there was also a hamburger with at least eight layers, and two different lunchboxes. My favorite is the tiny octopus. (In real life, mothers cut sausages so they look like octopuses to make their children's lunchboxes fun - it's a knack I've yet to master. The felt one is even cuter than the sausages!)






Lavender bags definitely wouldn't have made the grade. I'm so glad that's over for this year, but am wondering how on earth we can top this next time. When I'll definitely have to do better than a single measly strawberry.

To be honest, though, I enjoyed myself. No-one was annoyed that work and inexperience meant I couldn't manage more of a contribution, and now we've all got past our initial politeness with each other, the class mothers are turning into a friendly, lively group with a surprisingly down-to-earth sense of humor. Crafts and bazars notwithstanding, I think this year is going to be all right.

Tanabata

July 7 is when Japan celebrates the Tanabata festival. Branches of bamboo grass are festooned with paper decorations, and children write their wishes for the year on long strips of paper that they hang from the branches. This is the Tanabata branch at our local public library, which has been up for the past couple of weeks (a bit like Christmas trees going up early in the UK).


The festival itself dates from medieval times, when it was a ritual of the stately Heian court, but the story it celebrates is actually an old Chinese folk tale. There are many versions, of which this is one.

The Heavenly Emperor had a beautiful daughter, the Weaver Princess (Orihime, the star Vega). She wove such lovely clothes that her father was very proud of her. Because she worked so hard, however, she had never had the time to fall in love, and she became sad and lonely. When the Emperor became aware of her sadness he arranged her marriage with a cowherd (Hikoboshi, the star Altair). The two of them fell deeply in love and were blissfully happy - so happy that the Weaver Princess neglected her work, and the Emperor no longer had any beautiful clothes to wear. Angry with the lovers, he ordered them to be separated, and they were forced to live on either side of the River of Heaven (the Milky Way). But he agreed to allow them to meet just once a year, and on the seventh day of the seventh month the heavenly boatman of the moon)comes to ferry the Weaver Princess across the Milky Way to meet her beloved cowherd.

If the Weaver Princess neglects her work during the year, the Emperor may cause it to rain to prevent their meeting. If this happens, however, magpies may fly into the heavens and make a bridge for the Princess to cross for her assignation with her husband.

Clearly the Japanese work ethic hasn't changed much since medieval times! Career women working too hard to have time for romance is commonplace these days, and husband and wife being separated because of work sounds a lot like tanshin funin, though that generally involves the husband moving away to follow his job while wife and children stay put to ensure the stability of the children's education. I wonder how much work (and love as a once-yearly reward for work) was emphasized in the original Chinese legend, and how much is Japanese adaptation?

Dan's kindergarten festival last week was actually a Tanabata celebration. The kindergarten yard was bright with lanterns and decorations, and the children dressed up in yukata summer kimono to perform songs and dances in front of their watching families.



Kei got into the mood and wore his yukata too. This is the two boys looking rather bored, waiting for things to start. Dan has noticed someone else with a camera and is reflexively starting to make the peace sign.



The festival started with all the children singing the kindergarten song.



Then came the class performances. Boys and girls in Dan's year danced separately, with the girls doing a fetching flower dance to Okinawan music while the boys were fighting ninjas. Gender stereotyping? In a Japanese kindergarten? Whatever gave you that idea?





Next everyone danced the Soran Bushi bon odori dance together, with its memorable lyrics: "Yaren soran soran soran soran soran hai hai!", after which there were fireworks. Fireworks displays are another traditional Japanese summer event, and the large ones are spectacular, but as this was a kindergarten we just had a few Roman candles.



Then all the kindergarteners got a lantern to take home, and we trailed our way back to the car with the boys arguing the whole way about whose turn it was to hold it. (They were pretty tired by that stage.)



We now have our own little bamboo branch up at home, with decorations hand-made by Dan at kindergarten. His wish says "I want to be Geki Blue!" (one of the Gekiranger superheros on TV - we don't even watch it at home, but playing rangers is one ofthe most popular games for three-year-old boys). Kei's says "I want to be a soccer player."



My wish this year is for good health and no major upheavals. I think Ume-chan the cat's is to be left in peace to sleep! What's yours?

Various updates

It's a busy week translation-wise, so just time for a few quick updates on previous posts.

All our suzumushi this year have turned out to be females. That's probably because you're supposed to spray the earth holding the eggs with water once a month or so throughout the winter, but as I put the tank in the back of the cupboard and completely forgot about it the soil dried out completely. Usually we've had forty or fifty little crickets hatching - this year there's only six. And, as I said, they're all females. Those girls must be strong to have survived such neglect! Fortunately the pet shop near Kei's school sells suzumushi, so when they're old enough I'll buy a few males and arrange a matchmaking session, to be sure we have some eggs again in the autumn. This winter I'll put a note on the cupboard door to remind me to keep spraying...

The beetle larvae are still showing no signs of pupating, though they grow monstrously fatter by the day.

Two of the tadpoles have turned into frogs, though one died before we could get it to a pond. The last one is still stubbornly refusing to grow its front legs yet, lurking at the bottom of its tank like a teenager who's reluctant to grow up and leave home.

And I finally have an idea about what crafts I'm supposed to be making for the kindergarten bazar! Work deadlines meant I missed the last two class meetings, but at the boys' swimming lesson last week I ran into another mother who told me they'd spent several hours cutting out tiny cakes and lunchbox items out of felt. (Japanese lunchboxes are pieces of art in themselves, in case you're wondering just why anyone would bother making toy ones.) There's another craft-making session next week, and to try to redeem myself I'm going to really make an effort to get there. Not that I think I'm capable of cutting out beautiful little felt food items, but perhaps I can glue them into boxes or something.

Dan's kindergarten has some photographs up here of his summer festival, held last Thursday. This is one of the best ones of him, doing a ninja dance with the other boys in his class. I'll try and get some of my own photos up in the next few days.