I first heard of Misuzu Kaneko during the tsunami that devastated the north-east coast of Japan in 2011. One of her poems, written 90 years earlier, was being broadcast on TV in place of commercials. That poem was called "Are You An Echo?" and apparently inspired a call-to-action for nearly one million volunteers. 

Kaneko's life was brief and ended by her own hand in her mid-twenties. She was locked in an unhappy marriage with a pretty awful man. Before her death she was able to write hundreds of short poems, all for children, though as for that, they resonate with adults too. Her themes echo classic Japanese ones such as the impermanence of things, the beauty of that which must fade. She also took on the part of animals and plants, imagining their thoughts and inner life. There is a gentleness about her writing, a knack for observation and a capacity to put into words what most can only feel, but rarely articulate. Here is one of them.

Big Catch

At sunrise, glorious sunrise,

it's a big catch!

A big catch of sardines!

On the beach, it's like a festival

but in the sea, they will hold

funerals

for the tens of thousands dead.

I was reading The New Statesman in the train the other day, in which could be found some fabulous opinion pieces by people whom I would probably classify as British intellectuals. One piece was by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as thoughtful a man as you might ever meet. He was opining on the necessary uses of education for a modern society in which critical thinking skills and the capacity for deeper reflection might be held in a higher regard.

He wrote,

..we need to ask what our education system should do to nurture intelligence about citizenship, which is ultimately intelligence about human behaviour and language; human collaboration about making a shared world. A system that is obsessed with skills and their marketability, that is interested mostly in problem solving, educates, at best, half the brain. The sense of shared human project needs a lot more resource from the worlds of imagination, sympathy, faith in all its forms, conventional and unconventional."

I have lamented at this blog before, though with far less erudition than Dr Williams, the current obsession with skill-driven outcomes as the only meaningful measure of educational progress. Skills are important and yes, they do need to be measured somehow, but they are only a part of the story. I would like to see philosophy and comparative religion jostling with science and maths for the attention of young people, amongst many other disciplines. Of course, the syllabus is already crowded out with a lot of subjects, but why should school be 9 to 3 five days a week? 

There are new ways of engaging that make more choice possible. Let's throw out the one shoe fits all outlook. After all, for every ten bankers, there should be at least one paid philosopher.

winter gazing-
through the beech tree
the boat of the moon

The summer Grand Sumo Tournament has finally started after an hiatus of four months. But like the last meet, it is not business as usual. For a start, the venue has moved from its traditional summer spot in Nagoya to Tokyo's Kokugikan. Also, due to the potential spread of Covid, only 25% of seating is being allocated. Individuals are spaced one to every masuseki (boxed enclosure), places that would normally hold four people. But at least there is some atmosphere this time round. In Osaka in the spring, the stadium was empty, save for the officials and the wrestlers.

As for the rikishi, they are masked up until they exit the tunnels and set well apart from their retinue. Of course, once the bout is underway, all bets are off. I am guessing that most of them were happy with the extra time to recuperate from injuries. Tochinoshin, for example, looked far more comfortable on his feet yesterday.

As always, the basho is Hakuho's to lose. The magnificent Mongolian still dominates the dohyo, even at 35 years of age. There are up-and-comers but no-one yet has the consistency to claim a string of victories in the same manner as he does.

Below, the new ozeki, Asanoyama (right) and Takanosho, on Day 1.

Since changing to the NBN, I have a few new channels on TV, all through a different set-top box. One of them is based in Singapore(CNA) and offers a range of Asian profile programs, including one called Japan Hour. Naturally this attracted my attention and luckily so, because one recent episode was about the Kobe Dentetsu line, specifically, the line between Sannomiya and Sanda.

Readers of this blog (surely none! - ed.) will know that I have a mild yet incurable obsession with Japan, having lived there in the first decade of this century. It is rare for any program to feature the town that I lived and worked in (Sanda), so watching the train and its presenters wind their way through familiar terrain from Kobe to Sanda was really special. Seeing landmarks, shops, stations and places that were my habitue was just plain exciting. Ann remarked later that it was like sitting next to a little boy waiting to open his birthday presents.

Oh, I must get a life!

Just finished yet another excellent podcast from the Slate Political stable, one of my go-to weekly programs. Sure, it is American content but there is enough meat to chew on, especially given the quality of the presenters. If I had to characterise its politics, I would say sensibly centre-left, a position I tend to occupy too.

One of the topics this week was cancel culture, something I have written about before. We are not talking about folks who espouse openly racist views or incitements to violence or murder. They are not people who hate minorities or necessarily wish to turn back social reforms. By and large, they are writers, thinkers and academics who cite contrarian views or hold contrarian views themselves.

The right position, it seems to be, the honest position, is for those who are offended to challenge those views in turn. A dialogue ensues. That does not appear to be what is going on, and mores the pity. The moral strengths of an individual can be lost in tumult of the crowd, the latter relying on pure emotion. It is a hunt that is not worth going on.

Ann and I don't get many chances to eat out together these days. Cafes and restaurants were closed to diners for a few months, so some of our regular spots were no-go zones. Even now things are tentative, a second wave being in the offing here in NSW. But anyway, yesterday I took her up to Katoomba to a relatively new pho shop, Pho Moi, to sample their wares.

Ann gives the establishment 10 stars (out of 5!) and I agree. The food was fresh, delicious and moderately priced. Obviously others think so too, as all available seating, including outside in the cold, was taken. Social distancing and responsible cafe ownership were much in evidence too.

My wife looked lovely, as always.

One of the seminal events in my life was the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975, a notorious episode that caused more than a decade of uproar. I was a senior high school student at the time. This is an event that still reverberates to the present day. To briefly recap, the Australian Federal Opposition, lead by one, M. Fraser, blocked the Government's money supply bills in the Senate (the Australian upper house). The money to govern began to run out and neither party would budge. The Government refused to call an election (why should it?) the the Opposition LCP continued to refuse the passage of the bills. Enter the Governor-General, John Kerr.

Kerr sacked the Government and appointed the Opposition leader as caretaker Prime Minister. This act in itself demonstrated Kerr's inflated view of himself and his overstepping of his role. He could have instructed the Opposition to pass Supply, or at least leaned on it to do so. He must have been aware of the upheaval that his unwise decision would have generated. But Kerr was a pompous, vain fool. It is clear from correspondence released yesterday that the Queen had no forewarning of the dismissal, which is just as well. Kerr must wear the opprobrium for eternity.

The Great Man on the hustings.

We do live in interesting times. Apart from the lethal virus stalking the planet, the recession that has thrown many people out of work, and the peculiarity of necessarily changed lifestyles, we have an ongoing culture war. The latter is a fierce debate about which symbols and images from the past do not measure up to a particular level of cultural purity.

I've spoken about this in the past, ergo, the folly of viewing old texts, paintings, cultural artifacts etc through the squeaky-clean lens of the present. Firstly, it just plain unfair to judge the past by present standards. Secondly, who are the people who have developed the criteria for these standards? Thirdly, of course, who says that they are right? Finally, why should artifacts that were once deemed worthy not be allowed to remain in a dialogue with the present?

In a recent open letter to Harper's Magazine, 150 high profile authors, commentators and scholars signed a letter which bemoaned a growing "intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty."

I couldn't have put it better myself. The morally perfect should beware lest the same fate awaits them in the future.

bleak sunshine-
invisible claws of wind
scratch at the door

We are now in the middle of winter, the days being quite pleasant and sunny, the nights chilly. I have been re-engaging with my woodsman's skills, using my trusty splitter to get logs into the smaller size required to fit in the combustion heater. Not being the Temple of Adonis that it once was, my body creaks under the strain of thwacking wood into shape. I like doing it, its just that things are wearing out after much use.

As for the pandemic that dare not speak its name, the second wave is upon us, having an epicentre in the southern state of Victoria. Generally speaking, the authorities have handled the whole outbreak fairly well, the population has taken its lumps with reasonably good humour and it seems we are well situated to deal with whatever is next. Those could, of course be famous last words.

How different is the view across the Pacific, where the world's preeminent democracy is in what can only be described as a shambles. The daily footage is most disheartening, for while most people are likely doing the right thing, a critical mass is not. America's second wave looks horrific. There is an election in November and I pray that at least one of the causes of this shambles is gone and quit the scene. If ever the US needed an unhurried, decent and stable pair of hands at the helm it is now.

I have been reading a lot of the writing of Roger Scruton recently, the conservative British philosopher who passed away earlier this year. A brilliant and erudite man, it is impossible not to be impressed by the breadth and quality of his thinking, even if one does not always agree with all his analysis or subsequent conclusions.

Scruton would probably have been mildly aghast at my previous post, showcasing as it does an entirely popular taste in music. He is of the opinion that much has gone wrong with popular culture (readers of this blog will know that I can only agree) but in my defence I would argue that this list represents only a slice of my life. And anyway, this is before things went really wrong.

So, I was gratefully reminded of just how much wider was my musical taste after speaking with my mother the other day. She pointed out the diversity of music that was often played on the ONE stereo player that we had. There was the multiple-LP Readers Digest Classical set, diverse albums by Vaughn Williams, John Ireland, Debussy, Mozart, Verdi and others, Dixieland Jazz, Cole Porter, The Andrews Sisters, Swing Bands, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, then, lots of Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Perry Como. This was ably abetted by a large gobs of Latin jazz, spear-headed by Antonio Carlos Jobin.

When I consider also that I had some very obscure albums in my collection at that time (eg: Musicke of Sundry Times, Anthony Rooley's Consort of Musicke, Madrigals by John Dowland), then I feel that I have at least made some effort to approach a higher plain.

In the end it doesn't matter because the line between high and low culture is often blurred. Popular culture can be genuinely good when it wants to be, when it has authentic roots in a community or shared experience.