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contents of this diary - contents special topics written about - topics First entry this page: this page: first entry Hugh Cook - his blog: latest entry |
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and the relevant article is online now at:- www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1016923,00.html The article is worth reading in full, but here is the quick answer to the "rabbit" query:- Yeah, and, now you've got this far, do check out theThe novelist Doris Lessing has accused the prime minister of being a "fantasist" and of "running around like a little rabbit" to please the Americans. Section 66 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 September 02 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Sunday, I went to a Chinese restaurant in Gakugei Daigaku, where I had frog tempura. The frog was rather heavily seasoned, to the point where it was difficult to taste much more than the seasoning. Personally, I like my frog plain. However, if you like plain food, then Japan is really the wrong country, because the cuisine here very definitely tends in the direction of complication. En route to the restaurant, I saw a dog tethered outside a shop, a plastic bag heavy with dog poop on the roadside beside it, and a second plastic bag, similarly heavy, suspended from its collar. Dogs, as you may know, are small degenerate wolves which some Japanese people keep in their homes for obscure cultural reasons which I can't quite figure out. These "dogs" are, in my opinion, totally useless animals. If you could eat them, then there would be some sense in raising them, but apparently that is not the custom. I feel the glimmerings of a story forming ... alien visits planet Earth ... observes dogs ... observes humans diligently collecting the faeces of dogs, sometimes catching the said faeces in a plastic bag as they are in the process of being extruded from the animal itself (this, incidentally, is something that I personally have observed while walking the streets of Japan). Alien reads Freud, acquires weird Freudian notions about the psychological importance of excrement ... alien observes that, in human society, it is generally socially unacceptable to play with, collect and store excrement ... alien realizes the obvious reason why people keep dogs. Once you have a dog, thinks the alien, you have a socially acceptable reason to interact with dog excrement. In fact, interacting with dog excrement becomes your duty. Benevolent alien contemplates the problems humans are having in satisfying their covert desires ... figures out a way to benefit humanity, copiously .... But that's fiction, and I don't really have the time for writing that particular fiction right now. Leaving the world of fiction to return to the world of fact, it has to be said that, in this country, dog owners interact with dog excrement pretty efficiently. In six years in Japan, I think there are only perhaps half a dozen occasions in which I have observed dog excrement lying in the streets, and that's remarkable, because there are dogs all over the place. Scene from a summer a couple of years ago ... tough guy comes out of gateway with dog, dog in this case VERY small, a wolf which has degenerated into a kind of hairy maggot ... dog, which is decorated with pink ribbons, winces and complains when its delicate paws hit the road ... tough guy asks it what's wrong ... puts his hand to the road ... feels how hot the surface is ... picks up dog, carries it. Another scene. Young woman is pulling ineffectually at her dog's leash. Dog (which is about the size of a cat) refuses to budge. Woman does what a Japanese mother will not infrequently do with a child who is similarly misbehaving: walks off and leaves the miscreant. In the child's case, this sometimes results in the child bursting into hysterical tears ... in the dog's case, however, it doesn't work like that ... dog just sits there, perfectly content to be, for the moment, ownerless ... young woman eventually comes back, picks up the leash, tries to figure out what to do next .... Section 66 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 September 07 Sunday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) The pig's face had been cut away from the flesh in one single piece, and let's hope the pig was dead when this was done, because otherwise it would have caused quite a bit of pain. Question: how long does it take to cut off a pig's face? Stuck behind the pig's ear was a fragipani blossom, giving it a suitably festive air. The entire face, cooked, was on sale in the market in Ishigaki City. Ishigaki City is on Ishigaki Island, a tropical island which is part of Okinawa Prefecture. Pretty quiet at this time of year, since September is the low season - workers are at work and kids are back at school. (Later in the year, apparently, large numbers of oldsters arrive on the island, presumably escaping the cold weather elsewhere in Japan.) I just got back from Ishigaki today, having spent a couple of totally uneventful days sitting on the beach, unplugged from reality as we know it. It was a pretty relaxed vacation from start to finish, apart from one tiny little event at Haneda airport on the outbound journey. My carry-on luggage went through the X-ray machine, and the next thing a couple of security people have their heads together, then a security woman asks me, in Japanese, "Do you have PET bottles or anything like that in your bag?" (PET is a kind of recyclable plastic commonly used in Japan for bottles containing softdrinks and so forth.) In my own mind, I was firmly of the belief that there was absolutely nothing in my battered old green rucksack except for a pump for blowing up an inflatable beach toy (the rest of my luggage having been checked through to Ishigaki.) So I said, in Japanese, "No." Then the security woman asked me, again in Japanese, "When is your flight?" In response, I showed her my boarding pass, and then she asked something which I didn't quick catch, but which I think meant "Do you mind if we look inside your bag?" So I said "Dozo" - meaning "Go ahead." Anyway, the bag was opened - at this stage I can't remember whether she opened it or whether I did - and there, to my chagrin, were two PET bottles, both full of water. (These had been purchased less than ten minutes previously, but their existence had already slipped my mind.) The security woman's anxiety disappeared when she saw the bottles of mineral water, plainly marked as such, and still sealed, and she waved me on my way. Obviously I fitted some kind of profile, though I can only speculate what that profile might be - maybe something like "Down-at-heal foreigners with battered been-round-the-world knapsacks containing nothing but bottles of mystery fluid X." Coming back today, I had no trouble at all, though I may have caused some. On the train, I put my big backpack in the overhead rack, and then, a couple of times during the journey, I saw the guy sitting next to me brushing at his suit. And I rather feared that my big pack (which had been to the beach with me) was leaking sand. However, as I didn't look closely, I can still claim to be unaware of this. Section 66 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 September 09 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Ad in the train: a man in a formal suit is sitting cross-legged, as if in meditation, staring into the distance. He is sitting on the sand at a beach. The sand is awash with water - he is sitting in the waters of the sea. A fairly young man, totally bald. He conveys (to me, at least) the impression of being stern, resolute. The ad slogan is "LIFE. FULL ON" - a green cigarette packet marked with the brand name "SALEM" tells us what the product is. (On one side of the poster, text in Japanese warns us, mildly, of the dangers of smoking.) That's one of the good things about life in Japan: this country has such great ads. I saw the ad in the morning and it wasn't until two in the afternoon that I realised the key words - the "life full on" words - were in English. Remember that this is an ad aimed at Japanese people living in Japan, most of whom don't have a strong grip on English. I didn't think about it initially - there is any amount of decorative English in Japan, on everything from T-shirts to advertisements, and after a while you just stop thinking about the fact that half the people who see this stuff probably can't understand most of it. |
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