World Athletics Championships

We're going to the opening ceremony of the World Athletics Championships tomorrow night (Saturday), and again on Monday night for the final of the hammer competition. The hammer is the only discipline in which Japan has a remote chance of a medal, except perhaps the women's marathon, and Koji Murofushi, the Olympic champion, is biracial like my kids, son of a Japanese father and Romanian mother. (Though in his case both were Olympic athletes, father in the hammer and mother in the javelin.) It'll be good for the boys to see a biracial role model who isn't a TV talent, not to mention a once-in-a-lifetime chance - how often is a World Championships of any description held in Osaka?

Keep an eye out for us if you watch the ceremony!

Holiday snaps

There's nothing more boring than having to look through someone else's holiday snaps. We had such a good time, though, that I can't resist posting a few. Please forgive the self-indulgence....

Kentaro had three days of summer holiday this year. In Japan, for a doctor of his seniority, that's a reasonable amount. His first year after qualification, he asked his superior in the hospital where he was working at the time about holidays, only to be greeted with scornful laughter. "What does someone like you want with a holiday? Who do you think you are?" he was asked, rhetorically. OK, that was the hospital from hell, and where he is now is far better in every way - but holidays are still like gold dust. We treasure every tiny break from work: his unexpected return home before the boys are asleep, the rare Sunday when he doesn't go into the hospital at all, the one day a year it closes to commemorate its foundation.

Those three days, added to the weekend, were enough for us to embark on a 1,200-km road trip down to Yamaguchi Prefecture, at the southernmost tip of Japan's main island of Honshu, and back. On the way we took in caves, uplands, beaches, hills, rivers, and an old samurai town. The high spot for the boys was seeing so many stars - in Osaka they're all but obliterated from the night sky by the city lights, but in rural Yamaguchi the Milky Way spread out across the sky each night. On our final evening we visited an observatory with a 75-cm telescope, through which we gazed enrapt at the craters on the Moon, Jupiter surrounded by its moons, a star cluster, and a binary star. Those we couldn't photograph, but they're the part of the holiday that has engraved itself most deeply on our family's collective memory.



The entrance to the Akiyoshi-do cave system. I took lots of photographs inside, but it was too dark for them to come out properly. The caves themselves are spectacular, but the lighting and signs are desperately drab - they look as if they've been put in by some overworked bureaucrat with neither imagination nor business sense. The nicest thing about the caves was the temperature: 17 degrees, as opposed to the sweltering 35 degrees outside.



Akiyoshi-dai, Japan's largest limestone upland. This grassy landscape may look ordinary to Westerners, but to Japanese eyes it's rather exotic in comparison with the usual steep slopes wooded with cypress and bamboo.





Pony rides.



Kentaro on a sightseeing boat going round Omijima, on the northern coast of Yamaguchi.



The Omijima coastline.



Omijima was traditionally a whaling center, and the town still holds a yearly whaling festival. Kei is looking at a harpoon outside the Whale Museum (really a museum of whaling, exhibiting fearsome harpoons and whale skeletons), with the model whale used during the festival in the background. The shop behind sells whale meat, and will deliver nationwide, but doesn't seem to be doing very good business - a sign on the door announced 40% off all whale products.



Morning over a small harbor up the coast, from the balcony of our hotel.



Dan on the beach.



Kei discovered snorkeling this year. He could hardly bear to be parted from his mask and snorkel, even out of the water.



You can just see him swimming in the foreground. The water was wonderfully clear, with colorful small fish darting around the rocks.



Tsuwano, an old samurai town just across the border in Shimane Prefecture.




A path lined with torii gates climbs up to a shrine.



The ruins of Tsuwano Castle, perched on a hill overlooking the town.



Little samurai coming down from the castle.

Birthday boy

Dan turned four earlier this month. He's always trying to catch up with his older brother, so for his birthday presents he got a scooter (like Kei's, but a different color) from my parents and a remote-controlled racing car (like Kei's, but a different color) from us. He's so proud to be an oniichan, or big boy.

Cool water on a hot day

We came back from camp on Saturday night. Two leisurely days and nights on the shores of Lake Biwa with good friends, followed by an impromptu stay with Kentaro's parents, who came out to join us at the lake on the second afternoon and invited us to come by on the way home, have left both the boys and me brown and relaxed, ready again for all the city can throw at us.

Spending time with other bicultural families is really important to me. Partly it's for the boys' sake - if they are to grow up confident in their double Japanese/English identities they need to be around people who look and think like them, other children who see understanding two languages as neither strange nor particularly cool and who don't see their round eyes and brown hair as a cue to yell Eigo de hanashite! ("say something in English!"). Although Japanese society is becoming more open, marriage between Japanese and Westerners is still relatively rare, and our children (known as haafu, meaning "half") do stand out. When they are little, strangers exclaim how cute they are; but as they grow older, they become aware that they are different from their friends, in an environment where for the most part conformity equals correctness. So I take every opportunity to find multicultural friends and role models for Kei and Dan, in an attempt to counteract the ambivalence of the mainstream message that they are exotically attractive the one hand, and potential outsiders on the other.

It's also a treat for me, though. Being in an intercultural marriage is one situation that carries particular stresses and issues which are hard for people who haven't experienced them to understand, and being a foreigner in Japan is another. So to spend time with other people, particularly women, who are in the same circumstances and who empathise without the need for everything to be spelled out, is like taking a dip in a cool lake on a long, hot day. Groups such as the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ) and the Married in Japan mailing list, which has to be one of the most supportive Internet groups ever, are real sanity savers. Any worry is lightened when you share it with people who not only understand, but have been through exactly the same thing and can offer a variety of solutions you'd never have thought of for yourself. Not to mention laughing wryly with you, hugging you, rejoicing with you, and on occasion crying with you, rekindling the spark of your own humanity so you can start to laugh again in turn.

I've officially been the Kansai AFWJ camp coordinator for the past couple of years, and previous camps have had up to eight or nine families with over a dozen kids participating. This summer, though, many people seem to have either gone back to their home countries, moved away, or had new babies, and this time we were camping with Margarite from Holland, her sons Kai and Dylan, who are slightly older than my two, and Reina, an American whose elementary-school daughter was away visiting relatives in the US. Sandra from Hong Kong joined us for a barbecue on the first night, and my in-laws came swimming the second afternoon and brought fireworks with them. Having fewer people than usual actually meant a lot less stress, and after swimming most of the day we sang and chatted the evenings away with a small amount of wine and a good deal of laughter.

The last night, another multicultural family came and camped on the same beach: a German mother with her two half-Japanese daughters (one married to a Chilean guy and with her own Japanese/German/Chilean daughter) and her young German/American son. They'd been touring Japan in the van for two weeks, camping here and there and enjoying the country as they found it. It was refreshing to meet them, and to feel even more strongly the openness some international families possess simply because of who they are.



The morning after we arrived, I was awakened before dawn by a group of three (Japanese) teenagers cavorting noisily about the beach. Though I crawled out of the tent to shush them so they wouldn't wake the children (who were actually so tired after the previous day's swimming that they probably wouldn't have opened their eyes for anything less than a major earthquake), I couldn't be angry. The sunrise was quiet and certain, pine trees painted black against the rosy gold of the clouds. It was the perfect way to start another day of both being foreign and belonging here, bringing up children whose bicultural experience of the world will be totally different from my own but who are linked to me by both heritage and love. I'm sure that as they grow they will find their own ways of coping, their own cool water to refresh their spirits. But for now, a lakeside camp with friends will do all of us just fine.

Jinxed?

I'm starting to worry about the rate at which my electrical devices are biting the dust. After the washing machine fiasco, I managed to kill my mobile phone on Sunday night with a flask of tea, which leaked inside my bag on the way to yet another local summer festival. No sooner had I invested in a new phone than my webcam started playing up, turning itself off within three seconds every time I connected it. Our internet connection suddenly went on the blink on Sunday too, necessitating some frantic rooting among the detritus of empty computer peripheral boxes for a manual with the NTT technical support number on the back.

It's a good job the boys and I are off camping tomorrow with another international family for a couple of days, to give the jinx or whatever it is time to lift before something really vital packs up. Though I think Kentaro would forgive me anything except the dishwasher. Clearing up after meals is his job on those evenings when he's home in time to eat, so if I did anything to that particular machine we'd be in big trouble.

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....