Nezu Museum

Normality is still trying to return. I mean sure, everyone is worried about the radiation - I probably glow in the dark now during my self-imposed nightly blackouts. But the city is going about it's business, just at a less hectic pace. So while there is stuff going on, the streets are way emptier than they would usually be.

It's not all bad having fewer people out and about. For one thing, it's easier to get a table at restaurants, especially the really popular ones that would usually have queues out the door. In light of this, I started my weekend with breakfast at a nice French brasserie. You can say a lot about the French, both good and bad, but they sure know their baked goods. If you're in Tokyo and you're looking for an authentic Gallic experience (minus the odorous waiters) Aux Bacchanales in Ginza comes recommended by me... Best pain au chocolat to be had over here.

The rest of my Saturday was given over to Nezu Bijutsukan in Aoyama. This is a small private museum in the heart of city that was refurbished a couple of years ago. It was rebuilt in a kind of zen modernist style. Here is the subdued but chic entrance.


The museum is most well known for its Chinese bronzes. I really liked this one. It would be have used to hold wine offerings to the sheep god.


The latest special exhibition was one of bronze mirrors. The poster had a tag-line along the lines of "come see the reflection of 1,500 years ago". I liked that, that somehow the images of the faces that used these bronze plates all those hundreds of years ago were somehow left on the surface. Of course, I felt it was a bit of a cheek when 79 of the 80 mirrors were laid face down - it's the decorative engravings in the backs of the mirrors that collectors really prize. Only one piece was set up face out and burnished to it's original glory. It was impressive what a good reflection you could get out of a piece of bronze; kind too, as it nicely softened out the wrinkles and gray hairs.

The other thing that caught my eye was a display of 買い合わせ (kaiawase). This is a game dating back more than 1,000 years to the Japanese Heian period where you lay out decorated clam shells face down and make matching pairs, kind of like memory.


This was such a popular game with young girls of the period that a set was often gifted to them upon marriage. According to the exhibitors, this led to a woman's 'kaiawase' becoming synonymous with her virtue - the Heian Period was a time of courtly refinement with a lascivious underbelly of noble men and women sneaking out in the dead night to meet their lovers. The bit of history gave a new depth of meaning to the 'clam shucking' euphemism so popular with my friends in Luxembourg.

But the best part about the Nezu museum is its gardens. You could almost forget that you are in the city. Stone pathways lined with moss-covered statues and lanterns twist between ponds and pagodas and small tea rooms.



It is very peaceful.




I felt this little Buddha. Happy to be alive, yet wary of becoming too attached. Alive in the moment and trying not to count on more.


The magnolias and even some early cherry tress were in bloom. Life goes on.

Abnormally normal

People appear to be going about their business as normal today in the city. Admittedly, the streets are a lot quieter than they would usually be on the sunny Sunday of a three-day weekend. But folks are working and shopping and chatting and walking.

There is a certain raw energy about the place, though. It's like Tokyo is pulsating to the elevated heartbeats of 20 million inhabitants. We are all on edge: the rumbling of a heavy sliding door or a ring tone that sounds too like an early-warning siren bring on nervous glances in all directions.

And you wouldn't have to scratch too far under the average Tokyoite's controlled surface to find some anxiety about the nuclear reactor. It's like one step forward and two steps back with that situation. All I really know is that the greatest danger at present is irrational panic and that we owe a great, great debt to the brave workers who are struggling to get the thing cool.

I'm trying to be philosophical in the midst of all that is going on around me. Because of events in my life this year and last, I had been reading a lot about death and the human condition before the earthquake struck. I'm now glad of this because some of it has been really helpful. We are all going to die - it is an unavoidable certainty. It seems the point is to fill our hours with as much compassion, generosity and wisdom as we can while we are here. I fail at this most of the time. But a disaster like the one that has befallen Japan is a reminder to at least keep trying before our time is up.

An eerie day

The past 24 hours have passed by so oddly. The quake lasted about two minutes, but it felt much, much longer. And since then time has somehow sped up: a whole day in Tokyo has passed in an eerie blink of an eye.

I feel powerless and at a loss. We are told that if we are somewhere safe, we should just stay there. We should avoid unnecessary travel because it blocks up the routes for emergency relief and for people who really need to get home. And above all we are told to save electricity: with the nuclear plants in trouble and all the devastation from the tsunami, the people in the north need every kilowatt we can send them. So I have just sat around all day with everything off except my computer so I can watch the streamed news.

It's really been like watching a bad movie with all this talk of natural disaster and nuclear meltdown, and at times it has felt like it is happening somewhere else. But then you get another aftershock (we've been getting about 4 or 5 serious shakes per hour - some serious) or hear a familiar place name on TV and it brings you right back to reality.

I want to assure you all, though, that I am fine: I'm unharmed and I have shelter, food, running water and power. The worst I've suffered is that I didn't sleep much last night. Please send out your thoughts and prayers to the people in the north.

Focusing on good things.

I'm in the glums (work-related bizarreness and general middle-aged angst) so let me focus on the good and tell you about the nice weekend I had there two weeks ago. I walked a very roundabout way (read miles out of my way) to go see the King's Speech. On the way, I came across a bamboo forest.


It was a little bit magical and reminded me of where I used to live in Kanagawa a couple of years ago. P.S. I really enjoyed the movie, too, and think Colin Firth deserves all his accolades.

The next day, I finally visited the Edo Tokyo Open-Air Architecture Museum. I have an unlucky history with this place, having made several aborted attempts over the years to go and see it. Most heartrendingly, I dragged my visiting Irish friend two hours by train to go visit it only to arrive and remember museums close on Mondays in Japan. (H., would you believe the same guy is still playing his saxophone out in the middle of the field beside the museum, entertaining the crows???)

Rather than the buildings themselves - which were great -


I was more taken with the attention to detail and craftsmanship. The weaving and carving and knotting and pinning really spoke to me.








I did a project on thatch many moons ago as part of my masters and admired the finish on these Japanese roofs. It makes the Irish ones that I studied look a bit like they were thrown together by the above-mentioned crows.



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Japanese do detail really (obsessively) well: a virtue their in roofing, not so much when you're trying to get a key HR policy document approved in a hurry.

I know I also vowed no blossom watch this year, but I just couldn't resist. It's still very early in the season, so these are plum not cherry blossoms. Nonetheless, I clocked up my first ohanami, sitting under a tree with a bunch of other city folk...





...enjoying traditional food on a stick - a glutinous rice dumpling, grilled, dipped in soy sauce and covered in a sheet of dried seaweed - sounds revolting but is yummy!

Photo dump

I know that the following type of post is the blog equivalent of Patty and Selma inflicting a holiday slide show on the family Simpson, but I like taking snaps. These pictures must be worth at least a couple of hundred words.

So yesterday, I got my culture on and attended an exhibition of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. In contrast to the western aesthetic, Japanese arrangements rarely feature flowers in full bloom: Ikebana is not about explosions of colourful flowers. In fact, the stems and leaves are equally - if not more - important than the actual flowers because so much of the beauty is supposed to come from the overall form, how the arrangement occupies space and where the eye is led.






There are lots of styles and schools and rules governing the practice, about which I know nothing. I just love how some of the arrangements feel like miniature gardens.



Technically, this is my first cherry blossom of the year, but I have decided not to do any more blossom watch - it's making me feel the passing of time too harshly.


A view of Buddha from the temple in Sugamo, and a serenity in which I am severely lacking these days. Whatever happened to Zen Patrick and all the 'think positive' carry on?



A bit of an only-in-Japan scene. Can you see what's going on here? The person living in this oldish house on a narrow street in downtown Tokyo doesn't have the room or drainage to have a washing machine indoors. So they just leave it fully plumbed on the doorstep! I'm telling you, space is a luxury in this city. I don't think this machine would last five minutes in Dublin. I mean some nasty, nasty Dubliners stole the freakin' sandbags put out by the local government to protect the city from a hurricane there a few months ago.





A view of Fuji from an early-morning train to Kyoto.


Here you can see where the name of the company comes from. (Mount Xerox is just to the South of Fuji in Yamanashi Prefecture.)



I come from docker stock, so I have a genetic affinity for quays and loading bays. The cranes lined up on the horizon here put Dublin to shame. Even though the Japanese economy has slipped to number 3 in the world rankings, this caravan of proud metallic beasts is a reminder of how much stuff still gets traded through this port.







Last photo. I love the light quality in this snap. Can you guess whether it's dawn or dusk? Only for the fact that I took the picture, I'd get the answer wrong.

Bowing runs deep in this culture.

I'm on my first business trip in ages and of course it falls on the first day of snow this winter in Tokyo. To quote Gob Bluth, "Come on!"

(Quick aside - I read that Mitch Hurwitz hopes to have the Arrested Development movie in theatres by the end of this year. Woohoo!)

Anyway, heading out on the train today I saw something you'd probably only see in Japan.

So a station guard was leading a blind passenger by the arm to his seat on the train. He sets him down and then goes to the door and as he's about to leave the carriage he turns back and bows deeply. He then waits on the platform until the train pulls out of the station and bows again, long and deep.

I guess I'm not yet all that one with the Borg because I just kept thinking, "Dude, he's blind."

It reminded me of all the people you see over here talking on the phone and bowing away merrily. To be honest, I might occasionally be guilty of the odd nod during a phone call myself.

iPhoneから送信

The glorious mysteries of the Japanese language.

This is a post to encourage all those struggling to read and write the Japanese language. Fear not! The Japanese themselves can't seem to agree on how to read and write their own bloomin' words.

Background Information The First:
I've been learning Japanese for about 8 years. I work in a Japanese office, with Japanese people, through Japanese. So I'm pretty comfortable with the language, including reading and writing it.

Background Information The Second:
I work for a fairly traditional Japanese company. In such a company every document needs to be stamped by about 49 different people. I am not kidding - you need to get a special form stamped three times just to get the official stamp of a director put on your report. It's madness, but it's how 'we' roll and I ain't gonna hate.

So the other day a Japanese co-worker was swamped. They had written a report and it needed to be circulated. This is usually done through internal mail and can take ages. I knew we needed to get this document out asap, so I offered to walk around the various departments and get it stamped.

At my first stop, I show the report to the director and he gives it the once over. He stamps it reluctantly and says, 'I'll approve this but I want to show you some mistakes in your Japanese.' Bear in mind that a native speaker wrote this and I had nothing to do with it. But being a good little Japanese, I didn't want anyone to lose face so I just smiled and said thank you. The positive-thinking part of me felt that at least he thought I could plausibly write like someone born to it. Then the next director says almost the same thing, only this time he changes about half the previous guy's corrections back and then adds a few new ones. When the third and final stamper had more input about how to make 'my' Japanese more 'adequate for a business environment' my icy smile was starting to wear a little thin.

Moral of the story. I believe there is no such thing as a perfectly correct Japanese sentence. The language is so complex and full of nuance that there's room for everyone to give their two cents and still have the sentence be right but just different. This is frustrating as hell, but the other way to look at it is that you shouldn't waste your time aiming for accuracy. Just keep plugging away using Japanese as a communication tool and once the idea is getting across, job done!