Today is Anzac Day and I will shortly take Tom to a memorial service in Springwood. While I have the highest regard for sacrifice, especially where it touches the lives of family, friends and country, I also have some misgivings. With each passing year, the sense of sentimentality grows and a media-driven storm of commentary, frequently platitudinous, whips up something approaching a mild hysteria.

It is well documented that returning soldiers of all stripes and nations wanted to forget the war they had just fought. They did not want to talk about it. They had lost comrades and seen first hand the abysmal logic of trench warfare. My Uncle Tony was so disgusted that he threw away his medals.

So that is my one note of caution. Below are two picture of crowds gathering in Memory Park Hazelbrook to welcome home soldiers, sometime during the latter part of WW1 or just after.

On another sad note, my Uncle Ralph passed away this week. I met and stayed with Ralph on visits to the UK in 1980 and in 1990 and also when he came to Australia for a holiday. He was 90 years of age and served with the RAF in WW2. I know that my mum is very sad, as is her remaining sibling, Sam. I will look for some photos to post here as a tribute.

My elderly Samsung mobile has been retired. I took a gamble on a refurbished iPhone4s, essentially the same age as the Samsung, but vastly more capable. So far it works just a like a new phone and even looks rather like one.

I am particularly taken by Siri, the electronic personal assistant who replies to my many inane questions. Last night I asked her for the age of the universe (which she got right) and was pleasantly surprised by her adding a salient quotation by Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

I promise not to talk about tech again.

Whilst on the subject of recollections and the power of music to revive them, I found this photo of a JR 112 series train at rest at Fukuchiyama Station. As alluded to in the last post, this was the train that took me through to my teaching job in Kaibara. They were phased out in 2012, a few years after our departure. A second photo shows the superficially remodelled 113 which plied the same route.

The final photo is as perfect a comparison as I can make. At Sasayama-guchi, the train from Sanda on the left sits as the one on the right prepares for the change of passengers for Fukuchiyama. I did this little two-step on many occasions.

Most days I go walking I take an ipod and listen to podcasts. Today I took my old G2 ipod, one of the larger white monsters with a directional wheel on the front. I bought it over 10 years ago at Yodobashi Camera in Umeda, Osaka, when owning such a device was still quite an exotic thing. It has over 700 songs on it, a small proportion of what the hard drive can hold, and all of them date from that period or earlier.

So it is kind of like time-travelling for me. If I play my older device these days I get that strange moment of recognition, a shiver of recollection, for a time when that song denoted a very particular moment and place for me. It might be a pathway through a housing estate, a wide expanse of park, a shopping centre, even a stairwell. The melody plays, a fleeting image from Japan intrudes, with all its associations and memories. I will never be able to listen to Alanis Morissette's Doth I Protest Too Much again, for example, without being transported to the interior of a JR train pulling out from Sanda station as I headed up-country for work in Kaibara.

Yodobashi Camera (pictured below) is an experience in itself. Next to a Pachinko Parlour, it is one of the noisiest environments I have encountered, with media of all sorts spruiking for your attention.