steepholm

Why should method actors have all the fun? I'm a strong believer in what Merleau-Ponty called knowledge in the hands, so I try whenever I can to act out the more dramatic scenes in the history of children's literature. Here, then, combining my previous two entries, is my dramatic recreation of the scene in Ken Inukai's house on Christmas Eve 1933, when Momoko Ishii first discovered the joys of A. A. Milne, kickstarting her seventy-year career as a translator, author, editor, librarian and critic. Admittedly, my mother's copy of The House at Pooh Corner (pictured) is from 1934, but that's close enough.

When Ishii died, an admirer who was clearly familiar with the Gospel of St John wrote (in Japanese, but I hope my translation will serve):

What a blessed life!
However, there were also hard times and unknown adversities. She tasted the despair of losing everything.
‘If a grain of wheat dies…’ said the ancient writer. A tiny grain of wheat must fall into the earth and die, but thus it will in time bring forth a great harvest.
Every one of us lives in a vast wheat field called Momoko Ishii – and it is abundant with grain.

If I should ever happen to die myself, I'd be very happy with that obituary (obviously swapping my own name in for Ishii's, otherwise it would just be weird). Wouldn't you?

The first, from my current research.

In 1932, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Tsuyoshi Inukai, was assassinated by a group of young naval officers, an event seen as signalling the effective end of civilian rule and the ascendancy of the military. Inukai's son, Ken Inukai, needed someone to sort out his father's library, and a writer friend, Kan Kikuchi, recommended the young English Literature graduate Momoko Ishii, who had recently started working at his publishing firm. Ishii became a family friend, and was a firm favourite with the Inukai children, Michiko and Yasuhiko. Thus it was that, visiting on Christmas Eve 1933 and finding a copy of The House at Pooh Corner (a gift from another friend who had recently returned from studying at Oxford) under the tree, she began to translate it on the spot for the children's amusement. She was enchanted, and the event began an interest in children's literature that would last the rest of her long life (she lived to be 101, dying in 2008). During that time she not only wrote her own children's books, but translated many classics of twentieth-century British and American children's literature, and (as an editor) commissioned many more. Among the devotees of her work was a young Hayao Miyazaki.

Without the assassination of Tsuyoshi Inukai, none of it would have happened.

Meanwhile, in the northernmost part of Chiba Prefecture stands the city of Noda, about 30 miles from Tokyo. In the eighteenth century, the local soy sauce factory was particularly well placed to supply the city of Edo, having easy access via the Edo River. It prospered, and eventually became the world-famous Kikkoman soy sauce company, which is still the city's largest employer. With the paternalism typical of Japanese company culture, it used some of its profits to institute a number of scholarships for residents of the town. This year, one was won by a graduate with a keen interest in international politics, who decided to use the money to come to Bristol and study here. From January, she will be my new tenant, and it pleases me greatly to think that her rent will be paid (as it were) in soy sauce. With my new-found love of Japanese puns, I remarked that her shougakukin (scholarship) was really a shouyugakukin (soy sauce scholarship), only to learn that her father had made the same joke. I felt simultaneously humiliated and validated by this revelation.

Of course, none of this would have happened had Tokugawa Ieyasu not won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, leading to the establishment of Edo as Japan's de facto capital and creating the demand for soy sauce.

I feel tired, and I suppose a little lonely this evening - the cause of both conditions being that I drove Ayako to Bristol airport at 3.30am so that she could catch her plane back to Japan. It's been nice to have had her company since March, and I know she'd rather have stayed longer, but all good visas come to an end.

If, that is, they even begin. There was a flurry of excitement yesterday when I heard that the Japanese government had eased entry restrictions for people travelling for work. I thought I might be able to get over some time in early December and have my research trip during my actual research leave after all, but such was not to be. After much backing and forthing with Tokyo Joshi Dai it turns out that the required documents take between 1 and 3 months to obtain - and by that time of course I'll be teaching again. So, it looks like a summer visit, though at least I'm now fairly optimistic that that at least can take place, albeit in stifling heat.

Before Ayako left we had a few final treats, including a brief visit to Lyme Regis, during which I attempted to sketch out a fictional (but chronologically possible) encounter between Jane Austen and the infant Mary Anning, but didn't get very far. Also, exactly a week ago I had a visit from my brother and C, so we took the opportunity to set off explosions in the garden, much to everyone's atavistic delight:

Ayako looks rather as if she's caused one of those satisfying movie explosions, don't you think? Except that then of course she'd be walking away from it.

Then, two days ago Ayako invited some of her Japanese friends over for a takoyaki party. (Bristol has a very small Japanese community, most of whom I know by now - and pretty much all of whom know each other. A kind of 和フィア,* if you will. I suppose it's the same in most cities?) I provided the octopus, but left the rest to Yuu-san and her Kansai octopus cleaning and cooking skills. The result was very good, anyway. I'm not really a party person, but as long as they involve fireworks and/or cephalopod molluscs, it turns out that my tolerance can be quite high.

* I'm stupidly proud of this joke, with which I managed to set the takoyaki party in a roar, but it's difficult to explain briefly here, and really not worth it!

I met her on a house party in Norfolk.
Very flat, Norfolk.
There's no need to be unpleasant.
That was no reflection on her, unless of course she made it flatter.

I took both Urn Burial and When Marnie Was There with me on my overnight trip to Norfolk this weekend - my first ever foray into that county. I turns out that they are set in pretty much the same place on the north Norfolk coast, and it was quite interesting to overlay Browne's 17th century meditations on death and memorialising with Joan G. Robinson's twentieth century ones. It was Marnie that was the main pull, though. Having recently both reread the book and rewatched the Ghibli film (albeit that's relocated to Hokkaido, where I also hope to go at some point) I realised I would have visit the spot, to shake hands with its genius loci and to take my own photographs at the minimum 300dpi required by the publisher.

Haruka came to keep me company, and the night before we stayed in King's Lynn, about 25 miles away (i.e. 90 minutes by bus). I had little idea what to expect of King's Lynn, but it was an interesting place in itself, with plenty of history from its time in the Hanseatic League and earlier, though also a degree of barely papered-over poverty. We took a ferry across the River Great Ouse and got this rather lovely view in exchange:

Perhaps the most striking things, though, were the great Seahenge inverted oak (now in the Lynn Museum next to the bus station) - which I'd entirely forgotten was there - and the illuminations at night, which seem to be in aid of nothing but fun. For example, the central tower of the old Greyfriars monastery church is a ruin by day, but by night becomes a retro video game than can be played via pedals in the adjoining park...

Yesterday morning we went to Burnham Overy Staithe, where we found the original of Marnie's Marsh House and windmill. I hope you'll agree that comparing them with the Marsh House and silo of the film is instructive:

Of course, the missing link between these pairs of pictures is Robinson's prose, which does at least some of the transformative work.

After, we walked to Burnham Overy Town and Burnham Market - nor did we by any means thereby exhaust the store of local Burnhams. There were many farms called Marsh Farm, too, and as many pubs devoted to the memory of Nelson, a local lad - all rather dizzying. Burnham Market I particularly recommend for a visit, if you're round those parts - it's really quite lovely. Nowhere, though, could we find anyone who had heard of Marnie - whether in the pub, or the second-hand bookshop, or any other shop, or in the taxi back to King's Lynn. The one exception was the man who lives in Marnie's house, but he definitely didn't want to talk about her. I feel somehow that this is as it should be, though.

Afterwards we went back to London and ate a bao bun in the spectacular Coal Drops Yard, which has mushroomed up since I was last in the King's Cross area.

Did I made Norfolk flatter? I hope not... but perhaps I flatter myself.

This morning I should have been travelling to Heathrow, there to board a plane that would have taken me to Tokyo for the next six weeks. It would have been my first taste of autumn in Japan, a season that's normally inaccessible because of my teaching duties, but which a semester's research leave had prised opened like an oyster. Alas, in the words of the poet:

O moul, thou marres a myry juele,
My privy perle wythouten spotte.

So anyway, yesterday I showed Ayako Stanton Drew, which she really liked - perhaps because, unlike some other stone circles we could mention, it lacks any vestige of commercialisation. Whenever I go there there's always at least one person hanging about (yesterday a middle-aged American in Lycra), and we have the statutory conversation about what a fine circle it is, and how it's strange that no one much comes to see it, considering how close it is to Bristol. Then, quite a party of young men and women came walking among the stones, and we were forced to lament Stanton Drew's relative abandonment in a large huddle. The sky was romantic in a smudgy, watercolourish way.

In the evening I watched the Diana Wynne Jones crowdcast event, which I'd had a small part in organising. Colin (Diana's youngest), his colleague the children's writer Katherine Rundell, and Neil Gaiman all spoke very well and warmly. Gaiman mentioned that DWJ was always honest in her appraisal of his books, and gave him both praise and constructive criticism. I can vouch for this myself, but in particular it brought back the time when she read my Death of a Ghost and told me that she'd written me a long email about it. That email I never received, so I asked her to resend it, but she never did, or at least it never reached me.

To this day, I don't know whether the email was full of praise or criticism. I'd like to think the former, but the latter seems more likely, given that it never found its way to me. Perhaps it's better that way round, but not knowing is (like so many things) a little frustrating.

I had a little adventure from Wednesday to Thursday, travelling into the debatable Welsh marches, and the even more debatable borderlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire, to check out the setting of the 2017 anime, Mary and the Witch's Flower. The film was based on Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) - which I saw in Kichijouji shortly after its release. I'd suspected from the beginning that it was based on a real place, but had been unable to track it down until recently, when a colleague who happens to be a Shropshire lad gave me a clue.

So, off I went to spend the night in the same house where Mary was staying in the film - which in real life is a B&B and country farmhouse. Back in 2015 the director and crew stayed there too, taking lots of pictures of the owner's furniture and fittings, many of which reappeared in cartoon form in the film. I showed the owner the DVD, and she was surprised to see the coffee mug from which she was drinking appear on the screen in front of her, among many other things.

Normally at this point I'd entertain you (or at least myself) with lots of side-by-side pictures of real-vs-anime versions of various views, but since most are interiors of someone else's home I'm a bit shy about doing that today. For what it's worth though, here is the wood where the witch's flower is found in the film, and alongside it Coxall Knoll, which the filmmakers used as a model. You'll have to take my word for it.

When I was last in Tokyo I went to a Winnie-the-Pooh exhibition that had recently transferred from the V&A. There, I photographed a reproduction of the Pooh Sticks bridge, or プーさんの棒投げ橋 (Pooh's-stick-throwing-bridge) as they call it thereabouts. As I wrote at the time, I hadn't realised that W-t-P was big in Japan, although I'd known that Miho, my friend from Tokyo Joshidai, was wont to take groups of students to the Ashdown Forest.

I'd never been there myself, though, until the other day. It turns out that Ashdown was on Ayako's literary to-do list, and so we set off to Sussex, picking up Haruka (who had a day off from her London job) at East Grinstead station en route. It had been raining hard for several days, but we were hoping that we'd get lucky, and so we did, overall, although we couldn't do much about the resulting mud.

Anyway, here is the Pooh Corner tea room in Hartfield, where we visited a small Pooh museum. We called there first, hoping to get a map showing the locations of the various places in the Hundred Aker Wood, but they'd run out of information sheets in English. All they had, instead, was a large pile in Japanese! Thanks to COVID, Japanese tourists have disappeared from the scene, if we exclude our own party and the Anglo-Japanese family that happened to be there at the same time - hence the surplus, which was lucky for us, of course. We found throughout the visit that signs were in English and Japanese (but no other languages), much as is the case in parts of the Cotswolds.

Anyway, after various adventures executed in the medium of mud, we won through to the Pooh Sticks bridge, and of course had a game with sticks collected on the way. Unfortunately, the river was in spate and churned up from the recent rain, which made Pooh-sticks a less leisurely affair than I'd been anticipating and more like white-water-rafting for twigs. I got my photo taken with my mother's well-thumbed 1934 copy of The House at Pooh Corner.

That was followed up with a nice cream tea from a Tigger teapot, back at Pooh Corner.

And now I feel I have Pooh under my belt.

I'm so not an actor. Nevertheless, I've been trying to learn a 'kobanashi' for a competition that I will certainly not win, nor come close in, but for which there is a nice participation prize in the form of a specially designed tenugui (hand-towel). Reader, I covet it.

So, here I am trying to tell a story about a monk who enrols in a temple with a vow of silence. The monks are only allowed to say two words every ten years. At the end of the first decade, he says, 'Food, disgusting!' At the end of the second, it's 'Futon, thin!' At the end of thirty years he tells the chief monk, 'I quit!'

The chief monk shakes his head and says, 'I'm not surprised - you've been complaining ever since you got here.' (This is not a Japanese joke - I swiped it from an English-language site - but it's the kind of joke they tell in kobanashi.)

Hopefully you could tell all that anyway, from my body language, etc., as well as my expert use of chopsticks and tenugui - the kobanashi artist's traditional props.

Cathy kobanashi - chinmoku no seiyaku ga aru otera

(Once again, I know this is not good, but I put it here as a matter of record, and because this is my way of taking breaks from marking.)

Drama is conflict, so the saying goes; by the same token, intellectual argument is powered by misunderstanding - one of Earth's few truly renewable resources.

Just this morning I saw not one but two misinterpretations of things Japanese by Westerners. I mention this not to be smug, for I've done as bad and worse on many, many occasions, but because misinterpretation is productive in a way that pure understanding is not. Could anything be more fatal to conversation than complete agreement?

First, we have the Welsh YouTuber (now resident in Japan) CDawgVA (aka Conor) visiting Dreamton with Chris 'Abroad in Japan' Broad. If you want to know about Dreamton, then by all means check out the blog I made when I visited three years ago. It's a 'Cotswold village,' based in part on Castle Combe in Wiltshire. What was interesting was that Conor had somehow got the impression that it was meant to be a Welsh village, and thus judged everything he saw by whether it felt authentically Welsh or not. Interestingly, quite a lot did - although he was a bit bemused by the absence of Welsh dragons amid the superabundance of Union flags. A clincher seemed to be the name of the restaurant, the Pont Oak. 'Pont' of course is Welsh for bridge - but, as the owner of Dreamton explained to me three years ago, she called it that to mimic onomatopoeically the satisfying sound of something being placed (plonked, if you will) precisely in its correct position.

Then, this morning on the Facebook M R James Appreciation Group (where I am a keen follower) someone posted this ad, with the caption: "Ghosts for the Garden." What the ad shows, of course, are luminous versions (why??) of kodama, or tree spirits, as imagined in the Ghibli film Princess Mononoke. But yes, it's not hard to see how they could look like (cute) ghosts, if squinted at down the wrong end of a cultural telescope...

I've now chosen and received, in roll form, my statement wallpaper. In the end, I decided to square my love of trees and my love of moss by getting a picture of moss-covered trees. What I may not have mentioned here is that my garden, being basically north facing and surrounded on all sides by fences, only gets sunlight on one half, so I'm hoping to make use of that fact to introduce moss there too. Even now, a local company is coming up with designs (which I never could) to transform my square of astroturf into a bird-and-insect-friendly haven of shivering long grasses, moss, culinary herbs and water, with tubes of bamboo that occasionally go bonk. That was the brief I gave them, anyway, but looking over it now, I think it may be hard to turn into a cohesive vision. It's perhaps a bit more like this picture, which hangs at the foot of the stairs to my room:

Meanwhile, I had my AstraZeneca jab, felt ill for a day, recovered, and am busily turning myself into an antibody factory. Bish bash bosh. Now all I need do is avoid catching COVID in the next week or two, by which time the resistance should have built up. I'm not sure I could stand the irony.

I've been reading about The Mikado, and also Gilbert's children's book based on the same, The Story of the Mikado, published in 1921 but written some time between 1907 and his death in 1911, when he was clearly smarting from the temporary banning of all productions during the visit to the UK of Prince Fushimi.

Obviously, the names and so on in The Mikado (Pish Tush, Pooh Bah, Nanki-Poo, etc.) are not making any attempt to sound Japanese, but oddly there are a few snatches of Japanese verse in there, such as the lines Yum-Yum's bridesmaids sing to prevent Kati-sha revealing Nanki-Poo's true identity:

O ni, bikkuri shakkuri to!
O sa, bikkuri shakkuri to!

"O," "ni" and "to" have multiple meanings in Japanese, and it's difficult to pin down just what they're up to here, if anything. But "bikkuri shakkuri" make a sort of sense, being the words for "surprise[d] hiccough." A G&S site I consulted said that no one had been able to make sense of the lines, but I wondered whether "bikkuri shakkuri" might indeed be a set phrase, and duly Googled it. It turns out that "Bikkuri Shakkuri" is at any rate a song from 1980, which can be heard sung by many a Japanese school choir of that time, and perhaps since.

Watch on YouTube

( Japanese lyrics under the cut )

( Dodgy English translation under this cut )

As you can see, in the 1980 version the song is about the importance of retaining a sense of childlike wonder, a project on which I am continually working, even by writing this post. Now, my question is, was Akira Ito (who wrote the lyrics) a) drawing on a well-known Japanese phrase, b) making a sly allusion to Gilbert and Sullivan? Might it even be a coincidence?

Child-like minds want to know.

Things are sometimes lost in translation - I understand that. Cultural references can't always easily be preserved. Quite a lot of anime titles in English are not exact translations of the Japanese original, and that's fine.

But there are some cases where they seem to have gone out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot before sticking it in their mouths. And I want to take a moment to rant about a couple here.

Attack on Titan. When I first saw this title, I assumed that it was an about an attack on Titan, the moon of Saturn immortalised by Kurt Vonnegut. Or, if not that, an attack on a titan from Greek mythology. Or just on something very big.

In fact, it's about giants (many of them) attacking a small remnant of humanity. Japanese doesn't have plurals, so there is indeed an ambiguity in the title Shingeki no kyojin (進撃の巨人), but the natural translation is surely "Attack (or Charge) of the Titans"?

Then there's Weathering With You, about a girl who is able to control the weather. In Japanese, this is Tenki no ko 「天気の子」, which translates as Weather Child - a perfectly adequate name in my opinion. Whereas, in English the word "weathering" suggests, at best, a stone being worn away over time. It might be appropriate if the film were a tribute to an aged Baucis and Philemon couple who'd gone through thick and thin together, who'd weathered storms and come out of it a bit weathered themselves. But that is not a good description of the film's teen protagonists. The English title is awkward, unnatural and confusing.

In both those cases, you wonder how much trouble it would have been to find an English speaker to run those titles past.

I also have a third grumble, though in this case it's no fault of the Japanese. The letter at the end of Dragonball Z is, naturally enough, pronounced "zee" by Americans, but in Japanese, where they take their hint from British pronunciation, it's "zetto." What is slightly annoying is that even British and Australian fans invariably pronounce it "zee" - even when they are also fluent in Japanese (yes, Joey the Anime Man, I'm looking at you). What gives with that?

Yes, these are trivial matters, but I have a lot of marking to do, so I had to come here and write about all this instead.

It's all change here at Steepholm Towers. Although the UK has been under lockdown for the last several weeks, Haruka has managed to land a job with a Japanese company in London, and moves there today. The interviews, conducted by Zoom, were in Japanese, with a bit of English customer-service role-play. I'm really very impressed - both because she managed to beat some 30 other candidates at her first attempt, and that such an opportunity existed in the first place. Of course, it helps to be Japanese to get it, or even to know about it. It seems there's a whole sub rosa world - a Jafia, if you will - of Japanese job, accommodation and childcare sites, through which expats here support each other. No doubt it's the same for immigrant communities everywhere.

I'm very happy for her, though I'll miss her company. However, I'm not letting my Washlet go to waste! My other young Japanese friend, Ayako, will become my tenant in almost exactly a month. Until then, I have the run of the house.

My last two big projects for the house are a) the garden - currently halved equitably between plain decking and equally plain astroturf - and b) some kind of statement wall in my bedroom. Of the garden, more in a future post, but I'm currently musing about the wall. Because my room is below a sloping roof, one of the walls is very tall (about 3.3 metres): it seems a shame not to do something dramatic with it.

Getting wallpaper from Photowall is one possibility, and I've been having fun browsing their catalogue. At first I thought something natural and foresty would be good. Unfortunately, most woodland scenes are landscape, and my wall is basically portrait; cropping out most of the trees makes such views far less atmospheric. Still, a single Yggdrasil-ish tree could work. Tunnels and paths look good, but tend to lead straight into the room as well as out of it, and I've no wish to create an inadvertent portal for something from the Thither Side. Since it's a bedroom, the moon is also a strong possibility. Then again, I appear to have discovered an unexpected appetite for kitsch.

What do you think? Which of these would you put on a way 2.9x3.3m wall - if any? Feel free to browse the catalogue!

If I were Sei Shonagon
I’d put this in my pillow book -
Three lovely things:
A pickled plum; a paper crane;
A Toto Washlet toilet.

(Click on the videos for the full son et lumiere performance.)

Yes, I know it's an extravagance, but once you've sat on a Japanese toilet, you can't go back. Indeed, you don't even want to get up: Haruka tells me that piles are a problem in Japan because people just bliss out on them all day.

It's also, I tell myself, an investment, although probably not a tax-deductible one. In the medium term I want to let a room to Japanese students, and this will be a draw, I fancy.

Having Haruka to stay makes for some interesting cross-cultural moments. The other day she saw a Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewell for the first time, and cried, "It's the hinomaru!" And it's true, the resemblance, once seen, cannot be erased.

Then, a couple of days ago, we were looking at a field of deer, and we got to talking about the different names in English for the male, female and young of various animals. (This is one of the areas where English is far more complicated than Japanese, which has a standard prefix for each of these things.) I mentioned that a female deer was called a doe - like in the song.

She looked blank. What song? It turned out that, though she was familiar with that song from The Sound of Music, in Japanese the tonic sol-fa system has a very different mnemonic. In particular, the "Doh" line is:　ドはドーナツのド ("Doh" is the "doh" from "doughnut"). This seemed so quintessentially Homeric (in the Simpson sense) that I had to laugh. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting - something more Japanese, I suppose?

In January my friend Haruka won the lottery for a 2-year working/holiday visa to the UK, at maybe the sixth attempt (they hold it every six months). She was delighted, but then of course Coronavirus hit, which made her delay somewhat. The visa clock started ticking in October, and last week she finally came over, in the hope of finding work here. She's staying in my house until she gets herself sorted out.

What a time to come, though! Ports closed, mutant viruses stalking the land, unemployment rocketing, Christmas cancelled, Brexit looming, nothing good on telly, a government whose corruption is rivalled only by its incompetence. Also, it's raining. I hope she has a lovely time, and I'll do what I can to smooth her path, but we may have to rely on the natural optimism of youth a lot.

Meanwhile, she brought - as an omiyage - a packet of official, government-issue masks, as sent to every household in Japan back in the spring.

I don't intend to use them. Rather, they're going into my Corona museum, which is right next to my Reiwa museum from last year - my favourite item from which features a capsule toy with Suga, the current Prime Minister, announcing the name of the brand new era:

A Japanese friend recently recomended Kimetsu no Yaiba『鬼滅の刃』(aka Demon Slayer), so I've been watching it as best I can on YouTube. It's been insanely popular in Japan recently, so I was curious to see what the fuss was about.

I'm not sure I entirely understand, even now. It's a solid monster-of-the-week shounen series. Just as Full Metal Alchemist's Edward Elric has the long-term goal of restoring his younger brother Alphonse to full humanity (after their experiments in magic in Episode one made him manifest as a suit of armour), so Tanjiro in this series has the long-term goal of restoring his little sister Nezuko to full humanity after she is bitten by a demon, also in Episode 1. In order to do that, he needs to train as a demon slayer, then take on increasing powerful demons (which he luckily encounters in the right order) on his way to Boss Level. The fights are well done, and some of the demons have an affecting back story about their lives as humans, which is a nice touch, although these are often fairly perfunctory.

However, it does bothers me that demon-Nezuko, when she's not sleeping for months on end, has to be carried around in a ~~portable refrigerator~~ box the whole time and (being muzzled with a length of bamboo) never speaks. This seems a pretty male-centric vision of the perfect imouto.

Actually, the most interesting thing to me is the series' setting in the Taisho era (i.e. the early twentieth century). Normally, sword-fight dramas are going to be set in the Edo period or earlier - indeed, carrying a sword was made illegal after the Meiji restoration - so why was this set so very late? So far no obvious answer has presented itself, but perhaps it will.

On the other hand, I have no reservations in recommending The Promised Neverland, now on a streaming service near you. If you like tense, claustrophobic thrillers, interesting moral dilemmas and smart people twistily outthinking each other in ingenious ways, then this story set in an orphanage with a secret could be for you. I literally had a nightmare based on it, which is a kind of compliment.

God bless the gods of internet serendipity (and if God and the gods of internet serendipity turn out to be one and the same, so much the better), for bringing to my attention the Nintendo DS game, Pokémon + Nobunaga's Ambition (known in the West as Pokémon Conquest). I'm sure that Pokémon fans are already aware of it, as it's been around since 2012, but I only just discovered its existence. Not that I actually want to play it, but the Wiki page alone has given me great pleasure.

It's a Pokémon game centred in Japan's Warring States period, in which the player (accompanied by an Evee) travels through sixteenth-century Japan, taking on ever more powerful warlords before a final showdown with Oda Nobunaga himself.

How do you capture Pokémon in this world of bushido? Rather than chuck a Pokéball, "a Warrior attempts to form a link with a wild Pokémon by coordinating button presses with a display, reminiscent of Dance Dance Revolution."

No true samurai would settle for less.

The other day I received a very nice present from my friend Chiho: a set of karuta cards based on famous lines from「千と千尋の神隠し」, i.e. Spirited Away

I'm a late developer, and Spirited Away was the first Ghibli film I ever saw - or, at least, saw properly. (In retrospect believe I may have come in halfway through a showing of Laputa on television at an earlier date: I remember thinking that, if this cartoon was an adaptation of the third voyage of Gulliver, it was certainly a loose one...)

Anyway, I loved Spirited Away, and it raised many questions in my mind, among them being:

a) Why do they drive on the left in Japan, when usually only countries that were in the British Empire do so?

b) If "Chihiro" is written "千尋", how come "千" on its own is pronounced "Sen"?

I wondered these things fleetingly during the film, but they evidently didn't weigh heavily enough for me to find out the answers immediately on leaving the cinema. It was only years later, when I started learning Japanese, that I discovered the history of British involvement in the development of Japanese railways, and (more importantly for me) the on-yomi/kun-yomi distinction in the pronunciation of kanji. When I did learn these things, though, I remembered my former puzzlement with all the urgency of a crumb of stale madeleine finally being dislodged from my teeth.

In Japanese, 朝飯前 literally means "before breakfast," or (even more literally) "before the morning meal" - but is used to refer to something that's really easy, a bit like "a piece of cake." The idea is that something so easy that it can be accomplished without the sustenance provided by a full Japanese (rice, miso soup, natto, grilled mackerel, etc., with a health-giving pickled plum on the side) must be child's play indeed.

I suppose it must be a coincidence that the same expression exists in English - although I think it's a little old fashioned now. Think of the Red Queen's "six impossible things before breakfast." Or did Carroll coin it, in fact? It's easy to hear the Red Queen echoed in later usages, such as the "six VCs before breakfast" won on the first day of Gallipoli.

But was "before breakfast" used earlier than the Red Queen? Google Ngram is, as so often, our friend in these situations. In the decades prior to Through the Looking Glass people doing things before breakfast are generally doing them for the sake of their health:

These facts show the importance of breakfasting soon after rising and dressing, at least in many cases. I am fully aware that there are numerous exceptions to this. Some persons not only suffer no injury from but actually appear to be benefited by active exercise taken before breakfast, its effect being with them to create or augment the appetite. But in others the effects are those which I have already stated. I am satisfied from repeated observation that in children disposed to spasmodic and other brain diseases the practice of making them attend school for two hours before breakfast is injurious, and I fully agree therefore with Dr Combe that in boarding schools for the young and growing, who require plenty of sustenance, and are often obliged to rise early, an early breakfast is almost an indispensible condition of health. Epileptics, especially those disposed to morning attacks, should invariably breakfast soon after rising. (Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, Vol. 6, 1842)

A walk to Priessnitz Quelle by the Silver and Fichten Quelles, and back the same way, is more than three miles, and this is the regular walk before breakfast in winter. In summer the guests usually extend their excursions much farther. As they return many stop to drink again and some return by the douches having become sufficiently warm to take that bath before breakfast. ... In his Graefenberg dishabille the patient, whether he be count, baron, captain, general or priest, forgets all his dignity in the feeling of irrepressible joy and energy produced by the plunge bath and the bracing morning air. A few stalk along the path in stiff and formal dignity as if offended at the liberties taken by the careering sporting winds and the merrily waltzing snow that surround them. It is deeply interesting watch this infinite variety in the guests they ascend the mountain on a cold morning before breakfast stopping now and then to pant and breathe, and look back upon the glorious amphitheatre around them. (Water Cure Journal, 1849)

I think the Red Queen probably did kickstart the meme, at least in the English language. The only person doing an impossible thing before breakfast turns out to be Mozart, who uses that opportunity to write the overture to Don Giovanni:

Showers of crotchets and quavers now gushed from the rapid pen. At times, however, and in the midst of writing, nature would assert her sway and cause the composer to relapse into a nod or two. To these, it is generally pretended, the leading passage in the overture turned, repeated, and modulated into a hundred varied shapes, owed its origin. The somnolent fits, however, soon gave way to the cheerful converse of CONSTANTIA and the excellent punch which formed its accompaniment. The overture was completed before breakfast and the copyists scarcely had time to write out the score. (Proceedings against William Hone before his Trials, 1817)

As for me, all I did was write this rambling Livejournal post.

It's really strange how researching my Japan book (at least the nineteenth-century part of it) keeps me bumping into my relatives. First it turned out that Isabella Bird, author of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (and more recently, protagonist of the manga Bird in Wonderland) collaborated with my great-great aunt Fanny to build a hospital in Srinigar. Then I discovered that Fanny's sister Annie wrote a children's book about Japan.

Just recently I've been reading Recollections of a Happy Life by the botanist Marianne North, who travelled to Japan in 1875. And who should pop up in the early pages but dear old Uncle George Butler, initially in his capacity as a headmaster and latterly as a family friend?

[My father] was born in 1800, and when a mere child of eight years old was sent to Harrow to fight his way among his elders, and endure many a hard hour of bullying and fagging. But he always spoke with pleasure of those days at school, and his sorrows came more in the holidays at home. Years afterwards, when opposing the election of Mr. Brisco,* he used to say, it "vexed him to have to do so, as he could not help remembering how he (a big boy at Harrow) had interceded with the others to put little North on the top of the victims who were to be folded up in a press bed, he was so very small" (a mode of torture very fashionable amongst school bullies then).

My father stayed at Harrow till he was Captain of the school in Dr. Butler's house, and the old Dean** used to say jokingly in his latter years that he would never have been able to get married, if my father had not kept such good order in the school and given him time to go a-courting. His daughter was one of my first friends, and is my best friend still. (3-4)

* Musgrave Brisco, along with his brother Wastel Brisco, was a name to conjure with in nineteenth-century St Leonards.
** George became Dean of Peterborough.

I'm pleased to see Louisa, George's daughter, get a mention, because she's always been a cipher to me. It was she who went on to marry Francis Galton, which I think must have been a hard row to hoe, for various reasons, although the impression I get from this book is that they were a happy couple. They pop up here and there throughout, in kindly guise: Galton also helped regularise North's spellings on Indian and Javanese place names. I suppose none of them knew what would become of eugenics the following century, and I doubt they would have approved, but still... Knowing that connection makes me revisit North's assessment of the Japanese:

The Japanese are like little children, so merry and full of pretty ways, and very quick at taking in fresh ideas; but they don't think or reason much, and have scarcely any natural affection towards one another. Everybody who has lived long among them seems to get disgusted with their falseness and superficiality.

I mean, even under the kindest reading this hasn't aged well, but in the shadow cast by eugenics it looks quite a lot worse.

A Very Ishii Christmas

Two Happenstances

Octopus and Garden

Through a Glass Marnie-ly

Not Tokyo Bound but Earthbound

Remembered Hills

An Expotition

From the Hayashi of Kobanashi.

The Fruits of Misunderstanding

Surprise Hiccoughs!

Annoying Anime Titles

Doors and Walls

The Golden Bowl

Deer and Doughnuts

Things Can Only Get Bitter

Two Recent Anime

Pokémon Gone

The Remembrance of Puzzles Past

Before Breakfast

North in the East

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