Time, Winter, Tom.

Since Christmas, time seems to having been racing by. In a week it will be February (stop stating the bleedin' obvious -ed.) and we will be starting to wind things up here. Presently we don't know just how the story will end. Will the school sell to a happy buyer and go on for another twenty years, or will we close it down? I sincerely hope for the former. We won't see a brass razoo, but both of us hope that something we believe in can continue and that our relationship with Japan can remain strong. After all, its been our second home for a long time now.

Tom is moving through the hai hai phase and is walking with the support of whatever object his hands can grasp. Sometimes these objects lack purchase or grounding and so he discovers, to his discomforture, that gravity is a central force in his life. I can't count the number of times his head has impacted the floor. But he always bounces back.

He has also taken a liking to the keyboard as the picture above attests.

Worst pop music ever

Sometimes I tune into my local community radio Honey FM for the short duration of its tiny footprint, though I am never sure why. Morning programming is particularly anodyne, either, a selection of American Country from the 1970's, or, pop hits of the same era. Thinking about the latter ( a mismash of bubblegum tosh that I really had forgotten existed) set me to wondering about a SMH blog I read the other day,,,,,,,the worst ever pop songs.

I had meant to respond to the blog but found myself wondering whether the songs listed could ever represent anything other than a personal viewpoint. Surely there must be a list of the top 20 worst songs we could all agree on? Doesn't everyone groan at the mention of....(Insert your most hated song in this space)? But here is where memory plays a trick. Even while I agreed, for the most part, with the bloggers opinion, listening to Honey FM's ghastly selection demonstrated that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of forgotten pop tragedies. Most of them are of equal awfulness. Any ranking would be purely subjective.

Was it Elton John who said that pop music is really a disposable commodity, like so much else? We can love songs for a little while and then forget them , like spring flowers. Perhaps all that matters is how we felt at the time we liked them, in that short space between familiarity and contempt.

Moider most foul.

On the whole, I feel very safe in Japan. It's an orderly place and people exert a high level of self-control, certainly more than in Australia. I haven't checked the crime figures, but I would guess that the murder rate per head of population is higher in Oz too.

But when it come to brutal or bizarre murders, often amongst family members, Japan takes the cake. Rarely a day passes when another out of the ordinary killing is reported. Most recently, a young man murdered and chopped into pieces his sister, allegedly because she told him that he wouldn't amount to anything. It's now pretty routine for news items about fathers killing sons or daughters, sons killing their fathers, mothers dropping infants from high rise apartments and so on.

I've asked Japanese friends and students just what is going on. Is there something the matter in modern Japanese society? I have a few pet theories that I wont discuss here. Suffice it it say that many people seem to think that something is rotten at a fundamental level. Too much pressure...few mental health services.

I do feel safe here but I wonder, for example, about the man next door, who dislikes foreigners and who one evening banged angrily on his bedroom window when our baby was crying. Yes really, a potential lunatic, in my opinion.

Happy New Year!

The world is a sorry place. Bomb blasts, wars, cruelty and ignorance abound. Things appear to be getting worse in absolute denial of any notion of progress. There is surely, no perfection for the human species. Who would place odds on another 500 years of earthly domination?

Still, there is a light, small, distant and hard to distinguish through the noise of infamy and folly, which is compelling and necessary.

So Happy New Year from this tired family. And a moment of levity.....