steepholm

There can be few of us who haven't been struck at one time or another by how much the titles of Thomas Hardy's novels sound like the names of sex aids from a Victorian dildo catalogue. Here, at last, I have attempted to do justice to this conceit.

It's been almost two months since my last post. In some ways that's not so very long - but still long enough for the USA to turn from a functioning democracy into a Fascist-adjacent authoritarian state.

These lines have been going through my head on repeat since January:

Though justice against fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain;
But those do hold or break
As men are strong or weak.

Marvell knew what he was talking about. Checks and balances can be toppled if there's no one to provide a counterweight. If a judge countermands an executive order in middle of the forest, but no one acts as if they heard it, did it really happen?

I do feel that this will be a temporary phenomenon, because Trump, Musk and Co. will fall on the sword of their own hubris and incompetence, and because forces of resistance will inevitably grow, if far too slowly. At the current rate of change, though, I think that those counselling "hanging on till the midterms" sound awfully naive. What midterms? We can't hold midterms in a National Emergency! (There is no National Emergency, you may object - but then, there is no war with Venezuala, and Trump still successfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act.) Laws, customs and institutions don't exist except in so far as people agree to act as if they do; to behave as if they had real force in their own right is magical thinking. Or, in the language of J.L. Austin, it's to ignore the contexts that give statements their performative power, or rob them of it.

A well known example is the sentence, "The constitution is suspended", the performative power of which is very different depending on whether it appears in a government proclamation or merely as the title of a blog post. For the moment it's the latter. In another two months, who knows?

I'm gradually sliding out of Facebook, ever since Mark Zuckerberg decided it would help his bottom line to make it open season on people like me. But a small haven has always been the Moss Appreciation Society, where I occasionally look at and even more occasionally upload pictures of that most calming plant - such as the one below, which I took in Oldbury Court Estate the other day while walking with Rei and Tani, who were in town for a visit.



The Moss Appreciation Society has never had much controversy. The nearest it came to fisticuffs was in the recurrent battle about whether or not to allow pictures of lichens. So, I was surprised on going there yesterday to find that it had become a hotbed of exhortations to follow Jesus, anti-vax nonsense and LGBTQ hatred.

One of the few remaining moss-orientated members told me that the admin had died (whether metaphorically or not I'm unclear) and the place had been invaded by bots, which is certainly how it looked. Seeing a dead Facebook group overtaken in this way was, oddly, not unlike watching the creep of moss over a rotting stump, and had its own fascination. But apparently alternative Moss Appreciation Societies had fruited elsewhere! There was Moss Appreciation Society 2.0, The Real Moss Appreciation Society, The Moss Appreciation Society with a little picture of a mushroom next to the name, etc. At least one of these is genuinely devoted to the appreciation of moss, but I don't have the heart to throw myself into any of them right now. The whole thing seems too much like a microcosm of what's recently happened to social media, and indeed society, as a whole.

I and my lodgers (Yuko and Moe) have been spending it very comfortably in Borth, with my brother and partner. Right now, Yuko is playing a Joe Hisaishi medley from (only slightly faulty) memory on the piano, and we're waiting for burritos to materialise.

This morning, to preemptively justify such indolence, we went for a very bracing walk on the dunes and beaches of Ynyslas, not far from the spot where Prince Elffin captured the baby Taliesin in his salmon nets, rather long ago.

In Welsh, English and Japanese, courtesy of Moe's stick in the sand:



See you in 2025!

I'll be leaving for the UK tomorrow, so here is the final instalment of my Japan blog for this time. There's a lot to pack in, though, so some may have to wait until I get back.

After Kanazawa, I spent some days working fairly uneventfully at the Prefectural Library. Perhaps my most interesting experience was cooking and eating sanma (the Pacific saury), a delicious fish that can't be bought in the UK and even in Japan is a strictly seasonal autumn treat, to the extent that its kanji - 秋刀魚 - mean "autumn blade fish". This one was gutted when I bought it, but when I went back for a second time I did the deed myself, using this gruesome but undeniably effective technique:



Anyway, last Friday I set off for the second time to Kyoto, where I met an old Cardiff PhD student (now a lecturer at one of the private universities there) for coffee, before walking to the Kyoto Railway Museum, by way of Umekoji park cafe, which sold a really tasty curry and rice for 1000 yen, should you ever be passing. This was all part of my Thomas the Tank Engine side project, and although all traces of the Thomas exhibition that had been held at the museum a few years ago were gone, they were still selling the Thomas Goes to Kyoto book that had been a spin-off:



Several scenes in the book take place in the Museum itself, so it was well worth the detour. In any case, though I can't pretend that I'm very interested in trains, the location of the museum at a kind of railway intersection, with commuter trains going in one direction, shinkansen in another, and tourist steam trains in a third, was undeniably cool.

I met my friend Mitsuko later, and she drove me to her home in the depths of the Hyogo countryside (by way of a rather nice tonkatsu place in Kameoka), where I spent the night. The next day Mitsuko had booked a washi-making session not far from her house, which I admit made me nervous, because when it comes to crafts I a) am hopeless and b) get frustrated with people's expectation that I not be hopeless. But actually this was not a very onerous task at all. One begins by repeatedly dipping a rectangular sieve in a bath that contains the not-quite-dissolved bark of a tree, until you have a layer of sludge that serves as the background to your creation - then add various colours, motifs, leaves and like, as you wish. After that, the sopping masterpiece is handed over and you go off for an hour while it is pressed and/or dried. Simples.



By my standards, this is an artistic triumph.

While we were waiting, we visited a nearby temple, and I caught my first sight of 紅葉 (kouyou), or the turning of the autumn leaves, which is as big a thing in Japan as in New England, but has been rather delayed this year. Between the leaves, the moss and the mist, Hyogo showed itself to advantage.



At the temple there was a place where those who had died infancy were commemorated by rows and rows of small baby statues, some with bibs reading (in English) "Pretty baby", and toys slowly fading and cracking in the mountain weather.

I didn't photograph it.

I met up with Yuka later that day in Osaka, then made my way home. Sunday saw me having lunch with Irina in Fuse, and on Monday, the destination was the National Ethnographic Museum in the north of the city, just next to the park where the 1970 Expo was held - presided over the the Tower of the Sun, which was apparently inspired by both Jomon and South American forms. I was lucky enough to meet it when the sun was casting a rainbow at its back:



I was there to see my friend Eriko, who now works at the Museum. What a wonderful place for an anthropologist to find herself! I met several of her colleagues, and they seem like a great bunch. The museum itself took a global perpsective, and was divided by continent. Here I am in the Japanese section, for example:



Those of you who have pored over British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture will no doubt remember the passage describing the anthropological exhibition known as the Human Pavilion, held at the Fifth National Industrial Exposition in Ōsaka in 1903, where Okinawans, Ainu, Koreans, Taiwanese and Chinese were to have been displayed. (The Chinese, slated to have been represented by a woman with bound feet and a man smoking opium, succeeded in removing themselves after an official protest.) Significantly, no
mainland Japanese or Western nations were considered for inclusion. The modern museum, though I'm sure the researchers working there spread their nets much more widely, partly reproduces this approach in its selection of exhibits. The Ainu and Okinawans still get disproportionate exposure, while the American section - heavy as it is on Latin American and Native American culture - is notable for the virtual absence of any hint that the United States exists, and may even have a culture of potential interest to anthropologists. It seems that, as far as museums are concerned, you are still more visible if you're poor rather than rich, brown rather than white, rural rather than urban, traditional rather than contemporary.

I put in a final day at the Prefectural Library on Tuesday to bid farewell to Yasuko and her colleagues, then had dinner in the Korean quarter of Tsuruhashi with Saeko, a friend of my old Japanese teacher, Yuko - and quite a feast it was.

Today I devoted to mooching around, buying souvenirs and packing. I'd thought of visiting Osaka Castle, having watched Shogun only a few months ago, but after I accidentally got out at the wrong stop I took it as a sign that this was not meant to be, and walked instead to Tennoji, with its pleasant park and zoo, and touristy Shinsekai (New World) quarter, dominated by the Hitachi Tower.



Altogether this has been a very enjoyable trip - I seem to have packed in far more than a month's worth! Tomorrow and the next day will be taken up by a rather arduous journey home with an eight-hour stopover in Shanghai, so wish me luck. I hope to see you safely back in Bristol!

After a couple of quiet days (spent looking at early translations of Tom Brown's Schooldays, since you ask), today I went to Kyoto to meet my old PhD supervisor and his wife, who happened to be visiting as well. They lived for a year or two in the city (and before that in Kobe) during the 1990s, rather after I'd finished my PhD and more immediately after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. This was their first time back since those days, and they reported that the place really hadn't changed much in essentials.

Anyway, we had a lovely few hours hanging out in Kyoto, walking around the garden at Heian Jingu (where, despite the many headlines about overtourism in Kyoto, there were very few tourists to be seen, Western or otherwise) and then at a soba restaurant.

Afterwards I had tea with Shino Hishida, a doctoral student whom I'd met at the Diana Wynne Jones conference in August, and we ate parfait together.

I don't have any adventures to relate, but check out the pretty pictures!

This has been a rather train-orientated couple of days. On Saturday I made my way to the other side of the city and the Katano branch of the Keihan line, where (following a tip from my colleague at the Prefectural Library) I had heard that there was a Thomas the Tank Engine promotion ongoing - connected tangentially, I believe, with the forthcoming 2025 Osaka Expo.

I wasn't sure what it would entail, but I had reason to hope that there would be a 'wrapped' train running the line, decked out with characters from the Thomas franchise. And so there was: here was my first glimpse of the Thomas train pulling in to Miya no Saka station:



The decorations were pretty extensive, inside and out:



The sign showing tHe name of each station on the line was dedicated to a different member of Thomas's intimate circle, with the terminus at Kisaichi representing Thomas himself. There were various other Thomas-themed displays there too, including a floral Thomas Halloween tribute.



Altogether they'd put in an impressive amount of effort - I've certainly never seen anything this elaborate in the UK, even when visiting a Thomas-themed steam weekend. And it paid dividends, at least in the sense that when I visited there were several small children who were clearly making a pilgrimage, even though the theme has been in place since April.

Kisaichi was virtually countryside, and there wasn't much within walking distance except a cafe that was already full, so in the end I got back on the train and returned to downtown Osaka. However, I was intrigued to read about the nearby Iwafune Shrine, with its cave system and tight squeezes between boulders to reach the sanctuary. It's somewhere I would very much like to visit, though it's not easy to get to if you don't have a car, and even then the cave seems to be closed more often than not. English-speaking YouTubers appear not to have discovered it yet, but here's a walk-through video. There's also a 12-metre boat-shaped rock (Iwafune means "boulder boat"), which was apparently used by a kami to descend from heaven back in the day.

Otherwise, I've done a little light souvenir hunting, but basically had a quiet time. Only, returning to my apartment via the Kintetsu Line earlier, I found an even more elaborately 'wrapped' train, this one advertising the charms of nearby Nara and its bowing deer:



Pretty as the outside was, the detailing of the interior was still more impressive, going as far as deer-patterened upholstery:



And - wait - what's that on the strap-handles???



Yes, each handle is being nibbled, as if it were one of the senbei used by tourists to feed the animals in Nara, by a little plastic deer.

This is very "extra", I know - no one would have complained if the little plastic deer had been absent - but the extraness is the point.

A few weeks ago I began to give a potted version of my trip to Japan last March-April, with my daughter and her boyfriend. I didn't get very far, because Flickr (where I keep my pictures for importing to LJ) was playing up - and still is, as far as my main computer is concerned. However, I'm now on a laptop, so I'm going to put just a few highlights here. Just a few because I'm now actually back in Japan again, and will be blogging properly (i.e. in something more approaching real time) from hereon out, d.v.

So, we left you just as we were about to leave Tokyo for Hakone, and thence Kyoto. I had booked - not quite a ryokan but an onsen hotel, situated on the old Tokaido in Hakone, for daughter and boyfriend (D&B) and the next day we made an attempt to take the funiculuar railway (which they call a cable car) and the cable car (which they call a ropeway) to Ashinoko, with the hopes of catching a glimpse of Fuji. Alas, we were prevented by a thunderstorm, so had to go back by the same route, thence to Odawara Castle, where many young boys were pretending to be ninjas (a ninja TV series partly filmed there having been recently broadast (House of Ninjas, if you have Netflix). Fuji did peep out in time to be spotted from the Shinkansen, however.

( Photos Beneath )

Back when your granny was a wee lass, there was a small railway station at Ashley Hill in Bristol, just where Ashley Down meets Purdown, and in the shadow of the Muller orphanages. It looked like this:



Later, Dr Beeching (or a similar functionary, but let him stand for all, a la Judge Jeffreys) closed the station, and so it remained for many a year. The orphanages were by this time part of Brunel College, and were then converted to flats, while in their grounds had little houses built on them, in one of which I lived from 2006 until 2020. For much of that time, there was talk of re-opening the station under the name Ashley Down, and whenever it came up we were a little excited and a little nervous, but only a little because we never thought it would actually happen.

It did happen, yesterday. To celebrate the event, I took a two-minute journey from Stapleton Rd to visit the new, clean, yet untagged station. Not railway station, as in old-fashioned British English, not train station, as in US English, but "rail station". This is the shining new world we live in.










I felt a little self-conscious, I admit, photographing train things like an otaku in an anorak, but I was far from alone. The only depressing bit was this bench-cum-misericord, presumably designed like this to deter homeless people (because if only we didn't encourage them they wouldn't insist on being homeless?), but equally deterrent of passengers, I imagine.

For years, I've been meaning to go Pywll Mawr, aka the Big Pit - a coal-mine-turned-heritage centre, not far from Pontypool. I see the sign for it every time I drive to work in Cardiff, and my daughter even went on a school trip about 13 years ago, but I haven't had the motivation to follow in her footsteps until Monday, when I took Yuko and Moe. The main spur was Moe's wish to soak in the background to the Ghibli film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which was partly based on Miyazaki's visit to the South Welsh coalfields in 1984, at the time of the miners' strike - which inspired the feisty spirit of the miners in his film, but also its landscape.

Anyway, partly due to the weather, but mostly the place itself, we had a great time. We started off with a visit to the nearby Blaenavon Ironworks, or what's left of them, with their furnaces, workers' cottages, balance tower and the rest.



The coal mine did not allow cameras - or indeed anything with a battery - underground. This is because it's still legally classed as a working mine, even though it's 44 years since any methane-releasing mining went on down there. But believe me when I tell you that it was quite an experience, going down long tunnels that wholly justified the necessity of helmets in terms of their height. I had a strange, Baudrillardesque sense that this must be a real mine because it so strongly resembled all the fake mines I've seen in various films and TV programmes over the years - my only point of reference.

Certainly, the landscape round about did seem quite Laputa-esque (with just a hint of Ivor the Engine). And this point-by-point comparison backs up that impression.