js50 thoughts at closing

I started this series, the Japan series, about three years ago, not long after we returned from living and working in Japan. It was a kind of a therapy for me - missing the place as much as I was and not having much chance of returning - I felt a need to express, something. Meaning, if you like, that I wanted to establish a sense of place while matters were still fresh in my mind and work through some of the ending issues that were as yet, as it seemed to me, unresolved. It's hard to say whether I achieved any of this, but I have enjoyed dipping into the recent past.

I think that #50 is as good a place to finish as anywhere. And it's fitting that I end with a tribute to the one person who made the whole Japan project possible. My wife, Nadia. If not for Nadia, I don't think that I would have gone to Japan beyond that first Crowd Around venture in 1998. It certainly would have been more difficult. She pushed me into securing long service leave back in 2001, against my expectations, so we could go for that first year. From that decision all else flowed, including the subsequent trips that finally ended in 2007. She was my constant companion, workmate, confidant, advisor and great love during that time. It was in Japan that she proposed to me.

So here are a few photos of my lovely wife, mostly taken in the first few months of 2007(the last one dates from 2001, at Tenjin Park). They document a few occasions, such as a birthday, trips out to Sasayama and Kyoto and walks in the snow near our home in Mukogaoka.

js49 in our neighbourhood.

I did a fairly regular, almost daily, walk to the river which took me past the hospital at the end of our street. One day I was walking by one of the buildings when two batteries came flying from a high window, clattering and bouncing just in front of me. It was a special kind of hospital that our Japanese acquaintances talked about rarely and only then, obliquely.

Past the hospital were the apartment blocks of Nishiyama and then a meandering descent past vegetable gardens and a wood-working shop with a slow-burning brazier. I loved that turn in the road, the shrine on one side and the cute American-style church next door. The smell of fresh-planed wood.

I could walk in pretty much endless loops, choosing different lanes and paths to return by. These ways also formed the daytime walk that I would often do with Tom. He could stay awake for about half the distance, then his eyes would close for the afternoon nap. It must have been an odd sight - a foreign man wheeling a little baby around!

Somewhere between our first and second stays, someone decided to paint a large, lop-sided letter D on a garden shed. I never sought an explanation for this odd and out-of-place curiosity, but occasionally I let on that I wasn't beyond a bit of graffitying myself. Of course, I didn't do it. I'm way too law-abiding. It just remained a little neighbourhood mystery.