Lefties, sheep and Janglish

Saturday morning and we are off to meet Ogawa Sensei, a fellow Miura Baien scholar (at least for Rosemary). Baien is a Japanese philosopher and polymath. Bus and train took us to Ikebukuro were we were going to meet him by the 'Seibu platform wicket'. We deliberately arrived early so we could get some breakfast and found a little coffee shop. We headed back to the station 15 minutes early and Ogawa was waiting. He had flowers in hand as we were headed to his wife's tomb. This was a train ride, then a walk, then a bus and then another walk away. It was a new Buddhist cemetery and there was a priest conducting a rite with a group of black suited people when we arrived. I noticed that Ogawa had a black tie on which he exchanged for a more colourful one later after we had left the cemetery. We went to his wife's 'tomb' (a large headstone) inscribed with her name in Japanese and with 'Live(s) in Smile' in English. That is exactly how it was spelt. It derived from a Blake poem that Rosemary had quoted to Ogawa when writing to him after his wife's death. It was clearly straight out of the dictionary, thus the brackets. This is Janglish at its most profound.

We then hiked back to the bus, then to the train and to Ogawa's office in central Tokyo. He bought it with his retirement bonus, some $250,000 as far as I could make out, and it was about 1.5 times as wide as out hall at home, but not as long. It was jammed with books, tables, chairs and a desk and is the HQ for the Baien scholars. It is painted the delightful dull beigey grey that is ubiquitous. Makes everywhere look like a military locker room. I didn't notice at the time but there were actually windows in the room but they were entirely obscured with books and other things.

So we then spent a longish afternoon during which there were the usual broken English and broken Japanese exchanges which, inevitably involved a discussion of the person:sheep ratio in New Zealand and the miracle that is Autumn in May and Spring in September. There were deeper moments in between, it was a study group after all. Then we all headed off to dinner at a hotel. On the way we visited a shrine that was surrounded by office buildings but was beautiful and tranquil nevertheless. Religion is everywhere here, woven, like this small shrine amongst the tower blocks, into the fabric of who the Jpanese are.

I am obliged to record that the shrine included a statue of a very rotund laughing budhhaish fella who is apparently a God of prosperity. Ogawa thought it highly amusing to point at the statue, specifically its belly, and then at me and note the similarity. I don't think I ought to feel insulted but I'll have to give Jenny Craig a call when I get home.

For dinner we were joined by another Baien enthusiast who was a plastic surgeon. This fortunately gave us the chance to once again explore the delicate ovine/human balance in New Zealand and other standard conversational fare. The serious discussion was around their dislike of the nationalism in Japan and the oppressive nature of the requirement for all teachers to have their students sing the national anthem. I was sitting with a bunch of lefties and I wondered what they made of our plans to visit Ise Shrine, the heart of Japanese imperial nationalism. These were children of the war, one of whose father suffered from the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima.

We were accompanied back to our bus in Shinjuku and then a short ride later were very ready to climb into,our bunks.