Heathrow, 15.06.2012: Grey, dull, delayed.
Haneda Airport Tokyo, 16.06.2012: Man employed to buff up shine
on highly polished clean floor keeps at it regardless.
Well, it is Monday morning, just turned 7am, and I am sitting at my desk with the window wide open. Outside the crows are scratching at the Tokyo soundscape with the rasping call of an un-oiled hinge. All around the local community awakes and the sounds of bathrooms and the smells of breakfast percolate through my window. After a weekend of adjustment to temperatures above 30 degrees centigrade and enough humidity to choke the enthusiasm from life, I am beginning to find my feet. Obviously such an art of balance is imperative here and the two earthquakes in the last 24 hours help to reinforce the need to be able to stand on firm foundations.
A picture from my "office" window taken last January.
These were not major events just the usual rumblings and shudderings that accompany life in Japan. The cupboards rattle, the building judders, the walls creak and beneath it all comes the gruff voice of mother nature telling you in a very deep tone that she is most certainly the boss.
As you all know, I love being in Japan and this trip has special importance. Leaving Tufnell Park in November 2010, after Akane having been in that flat for 25 years, we took up a position in a rented flat in Cheshunt. From here we carried on our work, maintained our business and began the search for the home that would see us through for the foreseeable future. All the time living with 90% of our personal lives tucked safely away in boxes and crates.
Our lives in boxes.
The move out of North London had occurred in lightning speed. On returning from our summer 2010 trip to Tokyo we found we had an offer that would be stupid to ignore. The condition of this offer was to be able to move out within six weeks. Trying to find accommodation can be difficult at most times but to do so when you are packing up 25 years of living and almost literally peeling it from the walls and fabric of what had been home, then such a move is challenging with a capital "c".
Add to this challenge the emotional trials and tribulations endured by Purple High Mountain as she left the solidity, certainty and convenience of London and you would be right in speculating that emotional lava was spewing forth at every opportunity. Japanese people do not exactly thrive in an environment of uncertainty. Japanese women prefer a certain home, a safe bank balance and a husband who will bring home the bacon every week. My wife had to put up with my exhortation to "Enjoy the adventure and forget any worry about an uncertain future: Everything will be alright!".
This personal optimism and naive self belief held very little currency and proved an inadequate balm against lava burns.
In comes the digger.
After one year we found our new home and moved in on November 1st 2011. But we could not move out of boxes as we had to build our home to our own design. Planning permission, building quotes, council officials, architects, a complete army of voices telling us what we could and could not do whilst sucking the very financial marrow from the bones of our bank account. The emotional geomorphology of Japanese wives always begins to bubble fervently with the sight of savings draining away. Wearing my best asbestos underpants I kept up the mantra: "Don't worry, it will all be ok."
Foundations down, let carnage commence.
Yet even for a worldly adventurer of my own calibre and history the strain of almost two years of living from boxes whilst builders rip apart the fabric of a house you have just poured all your financial savings into does provide an emotional challenge of its own. Within the tight confines of rooms sectioned off with plastic sheeting, to try and mitigate against the dust, we have been living our lives trying to keep our business and life activities going.
Buy a house and then trash it, proper job.
When you are living in rubble, breathing in brick dust and living out of boxes, well, boy do you look forward to arriving in Tokyo and having some peace and quiet.
Here I find some sense of civilisation I can respect. I also find real quaint expressions of social humanity which make you smile. Yesterday we were standing at some traffic lights in a side street. Waiting at the roadside edge for the green man to start flashing, we stood patiently, Japanese style, even though there was not a car in sight. I feel it is a zen discipline, a discipline which promotes patience and inner calm.
Unexpectedly a man stepped forward and crossed against the warning of the red flashing man. For a moment there was the possibility of the herd breaking and all assembled following the heretic. But a solitary voice spoke out firmly and clearly in the night air.
"That's not very good Daddy, you shouldn't do that!"
The man's young daughter, possibly about 8 years old, remonstrated with her rebellious parent (she had refused to move with him) and shamed him in front of the assembled, patient, aspiring road crossers. Across the other side, standing in a solitary moral detention, the man could not do or say anything. The young child's voice had invested all who had stood obeying the red flashing man with a fresh belief in the correct way to behave. In the complete absence of traffic the view of the transgressor was clear and constant and for the guilty man the heavy seconds until the little green man appeared to invoke correct social behaviour, were clearly painful to endure.
I love Japan.
Freshly laid tatami mat. The new is the paler, still green, reed mat.
At home last night we settled down to our futons on the freshly laid, new, tatami mat floor. There is nothing quite like the smell of freshly laid tatami mat and sleeping on its firm support with a thin futon and a rice pillow is one of the great joys of my life. As I settled into the security and comfort of being back in Meguro, HMiL poked her head around the corner of the paper screen:
"Get to sleep quickly, the builders will be here at 8 tomorrow. I am having a new bathroom put in."
Patience, inner calm and a sense of social order, that is what you need at moments like these.
Enjoy the calm brother Jack.
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