Science in my time off.

April is one of the prettiest months in Japan. The weather is mild and not too humid. The rain hasn’t quite kicked in yet and the Sakura flowers are in bloom. Naturally I’ve spent almost all of it locked in a temperature controlled, artificially lit environment. Oh the things we give up for work. Still it went well, we took some good data and I learnt a new Japanese word (夜勤).

Still after 10 days of working nights, that expression rolls off the tongue so wonderfully it's a shame that the sentiment behind it is so unpalatable, I had to drag myself down the mountain to do something. Naturally the wonderful weather we’d experienced whilst stuck inside the ring evaporated with the coming weekend.

 

And so did my original plans to play Frisbee. Curse the heavy rain. Thankfully a couple of friends had a back up plan. One of them had taken a passing interest in astronomy and wanted to visit a nearby planetarium. Since I’d been working nights I’d spent a fair bit of time staring into the night sky and I needed a chance to get off the hill.

The planetarium is located in Akashi, home of the famous bridge and interesting octopus based dishes. We stopped for a little Thai food before departing to the hall of space. It’s only about 15 minutes from the station but it is bordered by an interesting little park containing a few shrines and a lot of graveyards.　On the way up I also came across this odd little shop called rosemary. The weird woollen puppets for some reason made me think of the herbs and rosie and Jim. I think the whole day was just one big nostalgia trip from then on.

I do love a good planetarium, it invokes some fond memories of Liverpool when I was 5 or 6 years old. There was a major lack of English on most of the displays however, I’m pretty sure the target audience was children as nearly all the Kanji came with furugana.

I don’t remember too much of the planetarium show sadly. I was so knackered that I fell asleep shortly after the instructions of how to locate 北極星 (the north star), well it was warm and comfy in those reclining chair.

The building itself is a large cylindrical tower, again flashbacks of a childhood spent wandering lighthouses, giving a nice logical flow to all of the displays. My favorite was a temporary exhibit dedicated to solar eclipses. Mainly this is because the kanji for eclipse 日食 literally means “Eating the sun”. I love taking kanji at face value. It’s also interesting going to places like this with natives, the language is so specialised that they couldn’t read some of the words.

The whole complex is on a hill overlooking Akashi and when you climb to the top of the tower, via a spiral staircase with illustrations of all 88 of the constellations, you are rewarded with some epic views out on Akashi. Thankfully by this time the weather had cleared up a bit and we could see all the way out to Shikoku. It was a nice little trip with good company and a good little recharge for the batteries.

Mata ne.

帰る

Aｈ spring. In the UK it brings forth Easter, showers, renewal and of course lots of chocolate. Out here some of these themes are also present. The idea of renewal and life beginning again are centered around the cherry blossoms or “桜”.

The beautiful pink blooms sprout for a mere 3 or for weeks and during this period vast swathes of people venture forth to the famous spots to relax under the flowers and have a good time. These events are known as Hanami 花見 or flower viewing and it is one of the few times in the year that restraint is dropped and Japanese people really let loose with much drinking and eating and revelry.

I’ve written about this before though so I’m going to pick up on another topic. There is another aspect to the Sakura you see. They are seen as metaphors for life. They bloom and die quickly, swept away in the wind in a snowstorm of pale pinks and whites. This brief existence is thought to reflect our own on the planet and is another reason why the events are so focused on enjoying life.

Last year I’d only just arrived so I didn’t get a real sense of this second aspect. This year however things are much different. In Japan spring sees the start of the new financial year and as such it is a time of much turbulence as many people leave their jobs and new employee’s start. As an overseas resident of this country I’m struck by my impermanence.

 

So many of my friends are leaving over the next couple of months. Great guys who I have enjoyed interacting with and hopefully I will try and keep in touch with. Living in a society that really emphasises your differences it is hard for foreigners not to group together, terrible I know but it happens. The trouble is that when we return we are so spread out. It’s a pretty sad time knowing that the likelihood of seeing some of these people again is fairly low.

This got me to thinking of the real resolve it takes as a Japanese person to befriend people like me. Friendships take a lot of time and effort to develop. Is it really worth it for something that may only last 3 years at most and more likely only one? If you enter into this community you’ve got to deal with that heartbreak of goodbye every year. That’s tough and I’ve got a lot of respect for it.

I’ve been feeling pretty rubbish about it all the past couple of days and I know I shouldn’t. This sense of impermanence has made such interactions all the more intense. You really have to wear your heart on your sleeve to get by or you will just go mad through isolation.

Anyway this is a tribute to the great guys who will soon be gone. And the great guys I’ll be leaving behind when I eventually leave in a year’s time. It sucks but it’s incentive to go out and see the world and reunite with all these wonderful people I think.

Mata kondo minna.

Eye, eye, eye. Oi oi oi

Once again crazy week of experimenting. I had 6 hours sleep last night for the first time in about a month and suddenly the world seems a much better place. Amongst the wonders I discovered during the recent beamtime the most prevalent in my mind are:

1. 1.   4am is definitely the worst time during a long stint awake.
2. 2   Failing that the 21^st hour sucks hard, though you get your second wind after that.
3. 3.     Checking out the cheekbones of people of Asian descent is a good way to work out their nationality.

So now onto more important matters, a quick eye update. My lens are finally ready woo, I just need to pick them up tomorrow. The fitting went pretty well last weekend except for leaving with a bit of a black eye. Not being Japanese the morphology of my eye is somewhat different. The main difference, apparently, is that my eyelids are stretchier.

This led to a ridiculous scenario. The ophthalmologist spent a good hour jabbing my eyes trying to get the contacts out muttering something about being “柔らかい”（loose) and how different my eyes were to a Japanese persons. So one black eye later he figured it’d be best to try something different, which worked straight away.

 

Complaining aside the difference in my sight is unbelievable. It was like switching from normal TV to HD. In fact it was a big shock when I looked at my face with the lens in. I could see all the stress and malnutrition based blemishes induced by beamtime. It wasn’t pleasant, if I didn’t want to read without squinting so bad I think I’d just opt to have crap vision and not see my face again. Naaaaaah.

At any　rate the main event of the weekend occurred on Sunday. Kobe was hosting this years Punkspring, an annual punk rock festival with one day in Tokyo and the other somewhere else in Japan. With the Offspring as the headline and SUM41 as one of the supports I couldn’t not go and relive my teenage years. I’ve been craving live music for a while now also so it was an awesome opportunity.

The gig brought me back to Port Island, it still awes me to think the whole thing is man-made. The gig was to be at the international conference centre. It’s a huge hall and serves to have many uses. As well as hosting gigs it hosts sporting events, a giant pool in the summer and an ice rink in the winter.

Well I could bore you with details of the bands but I won’t. Some of them were decent, total fat a Japanese punk band were a pleasant surprise. Others were a bit rubbish. The headline acts of course were great though they are looking a bit old.

What felt a bit awkward though was the American bands interaction with the crowd. Given that a lot of the audience can’t speak English I can imagine it’s tough but the approach of the bands was very different. One opted to, pretty immaturely, just take the mick and say stupid offensive stuff that most people wouldn’t catch. I’ll admit I’ve done this in the past at international Frisbee tournaments but I don’t condone it.

One band made a real concerted effort to interact and I think it came across a bit. The other method taken was just to ignore the crown and get on with the music. For me that’s just a bit lame. It got me thinking. With all the pressure of being in a band and having to learn songs and whatever, should you learn a bit of the local language before an international gig?

Personally I think yes. Even just a couple of basis (thank-you, lets go, how’s it going) is going to go down well. It almost feels a bit dismissive to me but then I’m not a big-shot punk star.

Enough musing and on to some surprises. The crowd was mental. I mean absolutely heaving, pogoing like crazy, crowd-surfing and massive circle pits. I’d been growing some expectations about Japanese society in general and was happy to have them smashed by the youth. It was like any punk gig I’ve been to and it’s good to see a flame of rebellion still burning in some, crowd surfing was strictly against the venues rules but it stopped no one. Interestingly People were told at the door not to take pics, and almost no one did, something I doubt would happen back home.

There was one point that sticks in my mind and that was SUM41 playing fat lip. The song has the lyrics: 

I don't want to waste my time

become another casualty of society.

I'll never fall in line

Become another victim of your conformity.

I couldn’t help but be struck by a ten-ton brick of irony. It was odd to be in a crowd of hundreds singing lyrics that possibly 3% actually got. I’d love to think that they’d carry that forward but sadly Japanese society is one built on conformity. You enter high school and your life ends as you study to get into a good university. You work your balls off through Uni to enter into a Job that sees you working 60+ hours a week and no one complains. Why? Cos it’s normal. I’m glad I’ve met some wonderful people in this country who feel different I just wish they weren’t such an exception to the rule. The thing that scares me most is I’ve seen it happening in the UK before I left.

All in all it was a great gig. Best bit? Not getting caked in beer due to the fact no one brought drinks into the standing area. That or the announcer speaking （ 敬語）totally felt out of context. Anyway I leave you with this vid I found which I hope inspires some change in the worlds education system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6UP65M8pYY

Mata neeee