Unboxing the Compass

[steepholm]

My friend Chiho told me a story today about how she'd gone with her mother recently to watch Deep Water Horizon at the cinema. During a sequence with a lot of explosions, an earthquake happened to strike Kagoshima (4 on the Richter Scale, which isn't so unusual, but certainly feelable). Afterwards she mentioned the earthquake to her mother, who was surprised, and said, "I just assumed the film was in 4DX!"

It made me laugh - and only afterwards did I realise that I hadn't even been thinking about the fact that she was speaking Japanese. I count this as progress.

This is as an aide memoire. When I visit the places in Japan that have been inspired by Britain (detailed in this recent post), as I surely will, I mustn't forget to include these two additions to my list:

a) Brockhampton Church. Brockhampton is a village in Herefordshire, with a nice Arts-and-Crafts-inspired Church. But it's also (copied at full scale) a place you can get married on the 20th floor of an Osaka hotel.

b) At least they left the original Brockhampton Church in situ. Not so with "Lockheart Castle" (formerly Lockhart House, near Edinburgh) which in the 1990s was transplanted stone by stone from Scotland to Gunma Prefecture and re-erected, much as that American bloke did with London Bridge back in the 1960s. The new Lockheart Castle has been rebranded as a paradise for lovers, although it also hosts a museum of Santa Clauses. Obviously.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I know what you mean- French is the only language other than my own where I don't have to think about the language the person is using. With Italian I still have to internally translate!

[steepholm]

It's definitely a step along the way. When I tell the same story in Japanese myself without having to think about it, that will be another matter!

(It pleases me, by the way, that the words for "earthquake" and "confidence" are homophones in Japanese.)