Only a Blockhead

Rain, sunshine, growth

The rain began falling late last Friday. It poured during the night and continued on steadily all day Saturday only letting up after dark. This week we have had blue skies and brilliant sunshine. The floor of the orchard has suddenly burst with weeds, including tall daisies and waist-high thistles. Behind the house, bamboo shoots grow as tall as a person within days.

Forest in Kamikochi (Photo: Joi Ito, Wikimedia Commons)

I've been reading a paper called Japanese Roots by Jared Diamond. It's mostly concerned with the riddle of the origins of the Japanese population, but in building its case, it takes in a host of other fascinating and to me unknown facts. I learned that because Japan's copious rains fall mostly during the warmer growing season, it has the highest plant productivity of any nation in the temperate zone. (To make a comparison, Japan's farmland, acre by acre, supports 8 times as many people as farmland in Britain, a country where the similarly abundant rainfall is mainly in the colder months.)

It was this fecundity that allowed the Japanese hunter-gatherer inhabitants of 12,000 years ago to do an extraordinary thing. Rather than being nomadic, there were enough nuts, plants, fish and animals in the vicinity for them to settle and live in one place. Which led in turn to an unprecedented development.

The Jomon people (as we call them now) of Kyushu developed pottery vessels. They were the first in the world, and they were possible because the Jomons were settled: nomads don't want to be lugging around heavy, fragile earthenware.

Jomon Pottery, 10,000BCE (Wikimedia Commons)

Pots allowed the Jomon people to boil the toxins from nuts and acorns, greatly increasing the edible foods available to them. They were also able to boil and soften, rather than grill, plants, which meant that babies could be weaned earlier, and the old and toothless live longer. The population exploded, and the Jomons continued a basically hunter-gatherer life until less than 2,000 years ago, unmolested by the relatively poor dry-field rice farmers of mainland Korea. (Then Korean farmers began rice-paddy farming, the population exploded, and everything changed....)

Reading all this made the Jomon people--who I'd known only through their ubiquitous pots and pit dwelling sites and shell mounds excavated all over the country--feel much closer. The shells that sit at the bottom of my compost pile 20 years after I put them there will doubtless still remain in 12,000 years time. And the rain falls and the sun shines and the land bursts with growth just as it did for the village-dwelling hunter-gatherers who made their living here before me.

--Julian

Progress or eternity

The idea of progress is detrimental to the life of the spirit, because it encourages us to view our lives, not under the aspect of eternity, but as moments in a universal process of betterment. We do not, therefore, accept our lives for what they are, but instead consider them always for what they might someday become."

John Gray in his latest book Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings, reviewed by John Banville in The Guardian.

--Julian

Early morning ride

The snowy cone of Fuji stands out in the sparkling clear air with every trace of pollution blown away in yesterday's gale. Twigs and leaves litter the ground.

Azaleas are out everywhere.

Yesterday at the Chigasaki museum, we saw a small exhibition of prints and scrolls related to the Tokaido road that runs from Kyoto to Tokyo. Today I realized that the road has been replanted here and there with the pine trees that originally lined its route.

The Tokaido by Hokusai (Wikimedia Commons)

The Tokaido in 1865 (Photo: Felice Beato, Wikimedia Commons)

Back at home, two crows flew high across the blue sky. A pheasant's sudden cry, and the bush warbler's song.

--Julian

(David writes about his windy Sunday here.)

Why I Like Newspapers

coffee and newspaper

In a single day's edition one can find, higgledy-piggledy:

• Paul Krugman, on whether American torturers should be held accountable, getting it right as usual.
• Robert H. Frank, pointing out the obvious, that: "People born with good genes and raised in nurturing families can claim little moral credit for their talent and industriousness.  They were just lucky.  And they are vastly more likely to succeed than people born without talent and raised in unsupportive environments," and later, "Financially successful tax protesters seem blissfully unaware of how incredibly fortunate they are.  To borrow from the late Ann Richards and her baseball description of President Bush, they were born on third base and thought they hit a triple." (As I write this, the article, "Hard Work and Talent Go Only So Far," appears not to be on-line, but I imagine a link will pop up eventually.)
• A nice piece about Jim Jarmusch and his new film: "The other day his friend the actress Ingrid Craven told him she had assumed the little pieces of paper that Mr. DeBankolé's character swallows are tabs of blotter acid.  'She said each time he eats one of those, he gets perky,' Mr. Jarmusch said.  'I hadn't thought of that, but I'll take it.'"  (This article, too, appears not to be on-line yet.  In the meantime, watch this.)
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  Pankaj Mishra reviewing Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History: " . . . the first British scholars of India went so far as to invent what we now call 'Hinduism,' complete with a mainstream classical tradition consisting entirely of Sanskrit philosophical texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads. In fact, most Indians in the 18th century knew no Sanskrit, the language exclusive to Brahmins. For centuries, they remained unaware of the hymns of the four Vedas or the idealist monism of the Upanishads that the German Romantics, American Transcendentalists and other early Indophiles solemnly supposed to be the very essence of Indian civilization. (Smoking chillums and chanting “Om,” the Beats were closer to the mark.)"
• Roger Cohen reviewing Godfrey Hodgson's The Myth of American Exceptionalism: "The high number of its prison inmates is exceptional.  The quality of its health care is exceptionally bad.  The degree of social inequality is exeptionally acute.  Public education has gone into exceptional decline.  The Americanization of the Holocaust and uncritical support for Israel have demonstrated an exceptional ability to gloss over uncomfortable truths, including broad American indifference to Hitler's genocide as it happened."

I'll sure miss newspapers when they're gone.

—David

Koi nobori

On fine days from around April 5 to Children's Day on May 5, carp streamers swim the skies for the enjoyment of the neighborhood.

(Carp streamers above Tsutsumi, Chigasaki: Photo by M)

They represent the men of the family: below the crowning multicolored abstract sock, the biggest black carp is for the father, followed by a red carp for the eldest son, with a blue carp for the second son, and further colors for other sons, or I suspect just for show.

(Photo by M)

They aren't put up if rain is forecast. On fine days they hang limp until the wind picks them up, and they are a splendid spectacle on a blustery day. A Chinese legend says that a carp that swims upstream becomes a dragon, and these "koi nobori" streamers are raised in hope that the sons of the family will grow up healthy and strong. The girls of the family are celebrated on March 3.

--Julian

Yesterday

Today began clear and sunny. But yesterday...

(Photo: Axel Rouvin, Wikimedia Commons)

The pleasure of
this spring morning is
the gentle sound of falling rain

--Julian

(For David's take on yesterday's weather, see here)

What a Friend We Have in Jesus

What a Friend

--David

Work

If you went by most novels written today, the only things humans do is fall in love and, occasionally, murder one another - whereas, of course, what they really do is go to the office and sleep. The office lends us an identity: we only need to look at our business cards to confirm that we are (let's say) a marketing unit senior manager rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe....

Office work distracts us, it focuses our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it gives us a sense of mastery, it makes us respectably tired, it puts food on the table. It keeps us out of greater trouble."

                                    Alain de Botton in The Guardian (The whole short, wry, wonderful observation is here)

--Julian (who, having recently retired, is enjoying the fleeting insight into being a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. And who will endeavor to keep out of trouble.)

J.G. Ballard, RIP

I wrote about his autobiography here.� In that book he revealed that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and now the cancer has claimed him.

We'll not see another like him.

Future Now Interview

--David

The scent of fuji

We are well into April's floral assault. On Friday, on the way to buy tickets for Slumdog Millionaire, I stopped at the rice cracker store in Kagawa hamlet and saw the potted fuji (wisteria)  outside was in bloom. Fuji shares a name with, and is the designated flower of, Fujisawa, the next town. It grows domestically and also wild, climbing high over bushes and trees and bringing splashes of purple to the countryside. If I have to choose--well, then, I'll say it's my favorite flower.

Cycling to see Slumdog yesterday, we passed a large potted fuji in a backstreet gateway. Its owner happened to be in the front yard and graciously allowed us to take photographs. The vine is very old, she said: It once dripped blossom but produces far less now. And she showed us how one of the branches had grown through the wall of its own accord to spread and bloom in the garden behind.

(Photo by M)

 
She also told us it had a scent, and sure enough it did--slightly sweet, not unpleasant. I never knew fuji had a scent before. I just got to know my favorite flower better.

(Photo by M)

--Julian

(For a report on Slumdog, see the Films Julian Watched in 2009 folder; click on the small icon to get to a larger one with a review below)