Hail to the King, baby

(Pictured: No images of the royal child are yet published, so here is one of me instead)
Although it was probably only a minor news story back home, here in Japan the birth of a baby boy to Princess Kiko and Prince Akashino was big news. The young prince, as yet unnamed, is the first heir produced by the Imperial family in 40 years. The birth comes as a great relief for Japanese conservatives, who are now hoping that the debate that has been raging regarding whether or not women should be allowed to succeed to the throne will go away. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who proposed the reform last year was heavily opposed by hardline conservatives who believe that only a male heir should be allowed to succeed, some suggesting solutions as radical as Crown Prince Naruhito taking concubines. Survey suggests public opinion is that there isn't any reason why women shouldn't be given the chance to succeed, but the conservative minority is by far the more vocal of the two camps. Thankfully, the birth of a son gives the Japanese government the chance to objectify the discussion; perhaps a dispute whose consequences lie 70 or 80 years into the future will be a less touchy subject. For now though, the mood is joyous. Japanese people are unequivocally delighted by the news of their future Emperors birth. Both camps are united in celebration. Everybody seems to have accepted the birth with a feeling of relief and pride.

While not a monarchist by anyone's standards, I find this quite touching. Growing up all I can remember about British Royal Family is scandal after scandal, affairs, alchoholism, public racial slurs, the Queen snapping a pheasant's neck, and whole lot of other events I don't care to remember. While the media must take a certain amount of blame for pursuing them endlessly and not giving them any privacy, I've always felt a little embarrassment on account of their antics. It's refreshing to visit a country where they actually respect their monarchy. It's just different. It feels good not to wake up every morning and see Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi on the front of my newspaper and think These are the people who are representing me on the world stage. If you want to look at a country whose people have respect for their monarchy, take a look at Thailand. Everywhere you go in Bangkok the King's face can be seen. They have huge posters, giant billboards, statues, paintings hanging in every household. His bespectacled visage is inescapable. I went to see a movie, and at the beginning of the film the words "All Rise And Pay Your Respects To The King" came up on the screen. Immediately everybody stood up, and the national anthem started to play. Still seated, and knowing if I stood now I would be spotted, all I could do was awkwardly sink lower into my chair as a montage of patriotic images of the King was played - the King riding a horse, the King addressing his people, the King wearing safety goggles and gazing intently at a test tube (he's a chemist? Inspiring.) and finally the King playing golf. While the sheer distilled patriotism of the occasion was enough to make any believer in liberal democracy shiver slightly in trepidation, it was still impressive. Here, like in Japan, is a monarch people actually look up to.Maybe we need a King. Ideally someone like a monster hybrid of Elvis, Jesus and Robert the Bruce, someone with style, daring, intelligence, guts and an agenda. But that's dangerous thinking.

Greeting from the Mountain...

As this is my first post, allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Blackwood. I was born in Kirkcaldy in 1983 and grew up around the town. I studied in Aberdeen and then last year I moved to Japan to teach English. My town is called Ena, in Gifu Prefecture, a beautiful and mountainous area roughly in the centre of Honshu, Japan's largest island. Ena sits in a river valley, surrounded on three sides by mountains. It has roughly 58,000 people, a little less than Kirkcaldy, but spread out over a larger area in smaller villages which have emalgamated with the town over a period of time. In the surrounding forests monkeys are often seen, and very rarely bears are sighted.

Japan, as many will be aware, is an extremely homogenous society. Long periods of isolation, from medieval times up until the end of the last century, and again after the war, have meant that immigration is minimal. The largest groups of immigrants are Chinese, Koreans and South Americans, - the majority are Brazilians - who mostly do low-paid manufacturing work and are kept at arms length by the Japanese community in general. Most of the non-Asian immigrants are centred on the urban areas like Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, so you can imagine the regular Japanese persons confusion at seeing me wandering around in a small city up in the mountains.

Yes, when I first arrived I felt like a regular rock star. Everybody was curious, and they all invariably asked me the same questions: Do I like Japan, do I like Japanese food and what part of America am I from? Fortunately I had memorized the phrase "Watashi wa Amerika-jin ja nai" (I am not American) in case of this eventuality. The answers to the other two are more complex. Do I like Japan? - Yes, I do but sometimes it drives me up the wall. Do I like Japanese food? - Yes, but if I have to eat another cup of dry white rice I'm going to karate chop someone. Like its food, Japanese culture is often frustrating and confusing, but it's these differences that are teaching me day by day to be a more open and understanding person. I'm no longer scared to try new things - I've knowingly eaten bowel. And like its culinary counterpart you have to react the same way to the cultural opportunities afforded to you in this place - never refuse an invitation, never miss a chance to see something that could change your life. You have to take life by the reins and accept what it throws at you, and enjoy it, even if it did used to be part of an animal's digestive tract.

Fortunately for me, the curiosity has worn off now, and although people recognise me on the street, and I am pretty much an accepted member of the community, people mostly leave me to get on with it. At school I am comfortable teaching and interacting with the students, and my Japanese is good enough to get me out of most scrapes (there's still room for improvement though). I have a number of good Japanese friends, and a number of good foreign friends. I also have an awesome Canadian girlfriend. I know my way around town pretty well and often take long trips in my beautiful but filthy & dangerous car. I am very much in my element. Yes, life is pretty sweet.

With this blog I hope to give you a little insight into what it's like for a Scot living abroad - the various trials & triumphs, some facts, some outlandish anectdotes. Hopefully armed with those ingredients I'll be able to paint an accurate portrait of this unique experience.

Don't be a Fool

Here is my News blog. I have created it in the solemn hope that pieces of it will be reproduced in the Fife Free Press newspaper. It is exactly like this blog except I can't swear.

http://www.blogstoday.co.uk/bloghome.aspx?username=Blackwood

Everytime I write an article in it, I'll reprint it here, partly because having two blogs is too confusing for the four or five people who actually read this, but mainly because I like Blogger better for ease and the ability to add pictures wherever I choose. The Fife Free Press editors are trying to start a sort of online blogging community and they say they want to take the best pieces from the blogs and print them in the paper weekly. It's still very much in the development stages so we'll have to see how things go. In any case, here are the two articles I wrote today, one giving my personal history which you don't need to read if you already know me, although it contains some interesting philosophical information and the topography of my area, and another truly magnificent piece about the monarchies of the world. Shitting it? you should be.

Steve Irwin We Hardly Knew Ye

Devastating news - yet another true life hero has been struck down in his prime, adding his name to the list of such dead luminaries as Bill Hicks, Hunter Thompson, James Belushi and John Candy. Yes, today in the cruelest twist of fate imaginable by a morally decrepit butcher of a God, Steve Irwin, TV's the Crocodile Hunter has been savagely murdered by a Stingray in the a diving accident in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef. The stingray, whose identity cannot be disclosed for legal reasons was arrested by Queensland police and taken into custody.

Several Australian cities now lie in ruin after riots broke out shortly after his death was announced this morning. And who can blame them? We have surely lost a Herculean figure. Irwin was always a larger than life character, and through his TV series and movies brought us closer to many exotic breeds of creature. Dubbed "The man without fear" Steve had no qualms about getting up close and personal with the animals he studied. In fact, it landed him in trouble sometimes - in addition to the myriad bites, stings, gauges and chomps he received, he was also wildly criticised for feeding a rampant croc while holding his strangely sedate baby son and slammed by animal rights groups for getting too close to penguins and rare whales. Nevertheless the main selling point of his show was the way he pushed, prodded & cajoled creatures to lure them into some kind of camera activity. Indeed, the image of Irwin jabbing a venomous snake with a stick and saying "He's REALLY aggravated now" was possibly enough to women sigh and grown men sob piteously for their lack of manhood. But there was a sort of almost lackadaisical innocence about him that really appealed to people - he was almost like the natural progression from a child poking worms with a stick, full of curious delight for the world around him and its treasures.

Steve was a truly decent man, and his loss is a grave one. This is a sad case of the heaven's injustice. Why God, why? Why take Steve of all people? What did he ever do? Why take an entertainer like Steve when Jim Davidson is still alive? One day perhaps I will understand why. It is better for us to never forget him, remember him as he was, a hi-octane blend of Indiana Jones and Rolf Harris that couldn't but hold mass appeal. A thatch-haired, iron-nutted, khaki-wearing legend wrestling rolling crocs with a cheeky grin on his face and poking hairy tarantulas with sticks for the power of education and, of course, our entertainment. May flights of angels wing thee to thy rest! He is survived by his wife Terri and two children.

Monkeys don't give a fuck

(Pictured: A monkey consumes a used condom somewhere in Asia...)
On a recent daytime trip upriver in mountain-town (Neo) I was thrilled and delighted to witness a family of monkeys going up their business. A nuisance in town, the furious Japanese threw rocks to try to scare the monkeys off but they just howled, ballooed and cursed in their own monkey tongue. The monkeys of ruratopia Neomura have a reputation as gifted helions - they steal, screech and throw poo at passersby and I even hear they disrupted a child's birthday party by eating the whole cake and then biting the host's head and neck while he pissed and wept. They are vicious, savage little bastards to be sure. I remember when I came face to face with one in 'Nam - the screaming shitsack got down on all fours and opened its mouth wide and howled at me. I did the same and succeeded in confusing it. Then I caught it in my hand, gave it a quick rabbit-punch to stun it then drowned it in the ocean. Then one of its companions bit Jeremy. What can we learn from this? Only that monkeys hate tall people.

Well met, monkeys, well met.

Driven to Distraction: A Motorist's Lament

As a Scot resident in Japan, you prepare yourself mentally to be shocked and awed by a variety of cultural differences on an almost daily basis. After a while of being continually being served squid-eyes and raw eggs you gain a learned indifference to those sorts of daily culinary atrocities, and after about the 100th crotch-grab you are even able to take that with desensitized ease. However, sometimes - just sometimes - a cultural difference will pop up unannounced with such alien vigour as to completely boggle the mind.
Of course, as we all know, the place where we are most susceptible to fall prey to the ugly vulture of bad temper is at the wheel of a motor vehicle. It seems that in a car, even the tightest wound coils of human virtue unravel and start damning and cursing other motorists. One need only think back to family holidays, with their excesses of ring-road traffic jams, to imagine the familial good humour disintegrating in a haze of hissed insults and pointed criticism of Dad’s route-planning.
This perhaps explains my chagrin to be driving on a narrow, unlit, mountain road, turning a blind bend and encountering a parked vehicle in the middle of the road with its hazard lights blinking, while the driver stood by the side of the road catching frogs with a net. One emergency stop later, I was driving away fuming in an impotent rage. This sort of thing actually happens a lot in Japan. In Britain, hazard lights are only deployed in an emergency, if at all, whereas in Japan the hazards are chucked on if the driver needs to nip into the shop for a tin of juice. The Japanese as a people are unusually apologetic, in Japanese one has often apologized three or four times before a conversation has even begun – criminals are even often released if they say they are sorry. The hazard light is a way of saying “sorry!” for bad driving practices even as they are being committed. While this will drive a foreigner up the wall this is perfectly reasonable for the Japanese.
My brush with death of course got me thinking about this. Worldwide there are many different conventions for driving. In Cambodia for instance there are no lanes and right of way is determined more or less by a game of chicken, in which two vehicles will go for it at once and the first driver to slam on the anchors in naked terror is forced to give way. Luckily since Cambodia has more or less a lack of cars this does not happen very often.
On a recent trip to Hanoi I got to know another inventive, if flawed traffic system. Hanoi is a city of roughly 5 million, and has about 3 million scooters and motorcycles. There are no lanes here either, and the traffic flows in one direction like a river. Rarely does traffic ever flow two ways at once. In addition to this, the horn is used here rather than as a tool to register one’s dissatisfaction with another driver as some bizarre form of orientational equipment. While honking the horn constantly to inform other drivers of their whereabouts, the Vietnamese driver uses the other driver’s honks to disseminate their locations from the cacophony. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Vietnamese drivers could drive with their eyes closed, so much they rely on the horn to orientate themselves. It’s almost like a bat’s sonar. The honking usually starts with the morning traffic around 4:30 am and continues long into the night. How anybody gets any sleep at all is a mystery to this confounded westerner. The Japanese by contrast use the horn primarily as an expression of thanks to other motorists – like the British they would rather suck in any anger relating to other drivers and rage about it later in private.
If driving conventions differ from country to country, surely must attitudes to driving. A recent EU-wide survey by the RAC has revealed various different attitudes displayed by residents of the EU. Unsurprisingly, the Brits take the crown for the most uptight drivers, with a whopping 87% revealing that they sometimes became “very annoyed” with drivers. Quite what very annoyed encompasses is indistinct but I took to mean shouting, huffing or flicking the V’s. I understand this a great deal. I don’t know how many times I have howled and raved in the driver’s seat of my car while doddering behind some poor old grandmother who can barely see over the wheel driving 20 miles an hour on the motorway and dragging a length of fence and a dead sheep behind her. But as we are British of course we would rather stew in private than actually confront the other road user about their conduct. The French on the other hand, showed a different tack with 60% of drivers admitting they had acted aggressively to other road users. The reasonable Belgians were revealed to be the most laid-back of drivers in the EU, with only a 55% annoyance ratio.
Of course all this really means is that if you intend to go abroad this summer exercise the proper care and discretion when dealing with traffic, and always expect the unexpected. Foreign drivers will be prepared for some little Italian taxi drivers making an emergency stop and reversing down the left hand lane while looking over his hairy shoulders and swearing, but perhaps you will not. Statistics indicate that UK drivers are three times as likely to be involved in a fatal accident in Spain or Portugal than at home. UK drivers are to be advised to pay attention, drive carefully and bottle up their rage for release at a later date, probably in the form of a nervous breakdown or a massive coronary. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

You'd better start running, fucko.

The news this week has provided me with many talking points. The Delhi city authorities are dealing with their monkey infestation by introducing larger, more blood-thirsty simians in the hope that they will wipe out the shit-hurling menaces without proving a bigger problem themselves. Gordon Brown has been voted “Britain’s most influential disabled man” much to his confusion and the amusement of many observers, some of whom have joked that if being born without a personality is a disability then Mr Brown would be receiving a rather large government subsidy. Israel is bombing everyone – Lebanon, Gaza, the UN – safe in the knowledge that until American jews cease to be wealthy they will never be brought to book. But one story, for me at least, has proved the ultimate zeitgeist and really hit home what it means to be alive in this accursed Year of Our Lord two-thousand-and-six.

On the tiny Davaar Island, on Campbeltown Loch in Argyll (West Scotland for those of you not lucky enough to be born in God’s Kingdom) you can see a wonderful example of some late 19th Century religious artwork, a picture of Jesus Christ painstaking daubed onto the wall of a cave in 1887 by local schoolteacher and apparent religious fruitcake Archibald MacKinnon. While not the most famous piece of its ilk, it is certainly a local treasure and attracts a great deal of visitors to the area, many of whom believe the painting to be sacred.

Unfortunately, yesterday the painting was discovered with a huge image of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara spraypainted over it in what has been described as an “apparent political attack”. This saddens and shocks me, firstly because of the destruction of such a beautiful piece of artwork, and secondly because of the way it was destroyed. Certainly this was not an act of political vandalism. Guevara’s image is one of the most instantly recognizable in the world, and although people rarely know anything about the history involved, Che’s handsome and defiant visage represents to us a righteous and indignant rebellion against tyranny of all kinds. Forget communism, what this represents to people is sticking it to the man. While a potent image, let us not forget is also a generic image, a prepackaged imaged, cruelly hijacked by capitalists and “alternative” clothing companies to give middle-class privileged kids that anti-establishment edge they will need to give them credibility while they study to be economists of some kind. What has happened, very probably is that some kid, who thinks he’s smart, and he knows about politiks has spraypainted – nay, stencil spraypainted – a picture of a long-dead commie from a different hemisphere, who means nothing to him politically or culturally over a beautifully painted, loving created piece which represents the more sublime aspects of a religion, which while has been damaging for Scotland as a whole, has been responsible for some of our greatest moments, and is a vital part of our history and heritage. It is a case of something beautiful being destroyed to make way for something that is frankly a bit rubbish. No doubt this child thinks himself the graffiti king – well if you’re so good why do you need a stencil? Why not draw it yourself? Are you a communist? Doubt it – if you were you wouldn’t use a symbol that had been so obviously co-opted by capitalist institutions, you’d draw - oh I don’t know – Frederick Engels or even fucking Leonid Brezhnev. Then I’d believe you had even a minute amount of knowledge regarding communism. Have you no imagination? Why shout so loud when you have nothing to say? Ah, what’s the world coming to? I am a great believer in the power of social revolution, and completely irreligious, so as you can see politics and religion don’t come into it for me. All I see is art that means something being replaced with art that means nothing. If I catch the kid I’m going to strike him mute and fuck him lame. Bastard.

Dontcha just hate ...

... when feminists say phallocentric.

Germany - 1, Bear - 0

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great sadness I relate to you the news of the terrible tragedy that struck one innocent bear in the Bavarian Alps yesterday. Bruno, the sprightly - if murderous - brown bear on the run in Germany's picturesque south has finally been executed by a pack of German hunters. This is obviously an atrocity of mammoth proportions - devastating news. From my home on the mountain, in between rooting for countries I don't come from against England and the USA in the world cup, and treating my students with brutal disdain & callousness, I confess that I've felt my heart warm to the tale of a plucky bear evading the authorities like some kind of filthy, hairy Dr Richard Kimball. An epic underdog tale; Bruno was released into the wild as part of an Italian program to reintroduce extinct species back into the Alps, and making his way through the mountains eventually arrived in Bavaria. The German Environment Minister, Werner Schnappauf initially welcomed the bear, saying it had nothing to fear, but quickly changed his tac when they realised the beast was savage & uncontrollable. Over coming weeks the bear would run a murderous campaign of butchery & pillage on the area, slaying numerous sheep, goats, birds, a kid's pet rabbit and rooting through piles of garbage like it was going out of fashion. The people of Bavaria, clearly not used to this kind of behaviour, were outraged. The final nail in the coffin was when after a night of chasing residents around the streets of an alpine village, Bruno sat down in front of the local constabulary, gurgled blood and howled in open challenge. This was the last straw, and the powers that be pushed the button on Bruno. The call was out: Bruno had to be destroyed.

From all around the assassins came to try and take him down. Germans, Dutch, Finns. Until eventually he could run no more and he was capped like a bitch by Teutonic huntsmen outside the town of Spitzingsee.

But why? Sure, he was a killer. Sure, he knew no law but his own. And sure, he ate garbage and left giant, glossy shits on the bonnets of police cars, but HE WAS A FUCKING BEAR. That's what bears do. Whose bright idea was it to rerelease one of natures most batshit insane, blood-drinking, death-craving monstrosities into the wild anyway? A bear's place is in a zoo or a laboratory.

And so, that's why this whole story left me feeling a bit down. I can't help feeling sorry for the old bugger. It strikes me that essentially he was killed simply for being a bear. He was only doing what nature intended him to do, and if man can't cope with nature, he shouldn't mess with it in the first place. Species on this planet come and go. Survival of the fittest. Our forefathers and foremothers hunted bears to extinction in Europe precisely because they were a threat to our way of life. And now that we've got sloppy and complacent, and we couldn't fight our way out of an Nsync concert, this is not the time to start reintroducing carnivorous beasts to mainland Europe. And these environmentalist assholes want to reintroduce wolves to Scotland. Sweet Jesus! What next?

Bruno's official website:

http://www.brunoderbaer.de/

And the BBC news coverage of his martyrdom:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5116316.stm

On Education

Job moans. If you have a job you undoubtedly have some. I have a few but not as many as I would have if I worked in the office of Babylon & Sons mired by bureacracy and trapped in meaningless and trivial relationships with mediocre middle-managers and grey, ill coworkers. I live in Japan for sweet Christ's sake! I am two hours away from Tokyo! If I wanted to I could be in one of the most electric hives of pure human energy in the world in under two hours, and drink, fornicate and cuss as much as I like. In the other direction, if I drove two hours in my beautiful car I would be at the tallest peak of the Japan Alps, soaring amongst the eagles and romping with bears. That's why whenever I have a moan I usually just count my blessings and set about amending whatever the situation may be with cruel & brutal efficiency - because I am a positive aggressive, and not a wimp.

Having said that, I am in the Business of Education and I find it pertinent to share with you some observations I have made since I have arrived here. Firstly the standard of English in Japan is wholly inferior to other countries I have visited. Although this can partly be chalked up to geography and the great difference between asian and romance languages, this hypothesis truly does not cut it. When one considers the Vietnamese and Cambodians whose standard of English is staggeringly high, even mostly without any formal English education, the example of Japan proves a paradox on a planet otherwise eager suckle at the teat of linguistic globalization. So why can't they speak English? English education in Japan traditionally begins at around elementary school level, sometimes even before. The answer partly lies in Japan's resistance to change and also the students reluctance to make mistakes. Japanese society, as is well known is based around the concept of "face" and keeping it. Because making a mistake would cause a student to lose face, most times a student would rather ignore the teacher asking them a question (ie me) than give a possibly wrong answer. This can be seen even in adult Japanese society, when frequently people will just pretend they haven't heard a question when they don't know the answer to it. Japanese students are also conditioned to think as part of a pack rather than an individual, and so when questioned will typically seek to confer with their confederates.

It seems that the Japanese Education Ministry has their work cut out for them. However individual schools, also obsessed with saving face schools buy textbooks so easy that they do not challenge the students at all and actually compound the problem by setting a consistent low standard for the students, all of whom of course pass with flying colours, but choke on their tongues the moment a foreigner speaks to them. The emphasis on rote learning and grammar translation methodology reduces something dynamic to something static. Language is like an equation, and Japanese schools teach you the algebra of it, but not how to add your own variables. Grammar is taught by endless repetition of esoteric expressions, which are unusable in the real world. The structures taught are not flexible enough to be used - what exists is essentially teaching by archetypes.

Of course, students can't learn natural conversational English from a textbook, which is where ALTs like me come in. Or so we are told. In reality, we're here because about twenty years ago some Japanese guy at the BOE caved to American pressure to internationalize their society, eager for a slice of the Japanese bubble economy. I think overall Japanese teachers would be glad if we weren't here, partly because they worry about losing face due to their English abilities, but mostly because the inadequacies of Japan's education system are painfully obvious from the outside, and although for the most part ALTs let them get on with it, sometimes a naive and pesky gaijin will try and shake up the bottle (I'm of course speaking in broadly general terms here, I'm very happy with my English department - they speak better English than me).

In short, Japan is in many ways an extremely atavistic nation struggling to hold on to its individuality and resisting the pressures of cultural imperialism and globalisation, but is also hampered in it's progression into the global world of the 21st Century by it's use of outdated teaching methods and it's unwillingness to treat students as individuals rather as a collective to be molded and sent out into a bog, unforgiving and scarier than expected world with a slap on the back and a hearty "ganbatte kudasai". So the self-defeating attitude of English being "too hard" prevails, while the Japanese economy declines and the Chinese one rises. All I have to say is muri ja nai - it's not unreasonable. If the Chinese and Vietnamese and Cambodians can do it then the Japanese can. However a word of warning - in the English world we have the same attitude to learning languages like French, however we speak English already right? So we don't need to. Well, we'll see. You have no spine, Great Britain.

So I do my part in my own small way, breaking down the barriers as best I can. In recent months I have received a new crop of minds to mold - in my trademark style of course. My opening address to my new first graders ran a little like this: "Ok, maggots listen up. I'm not your grandmother and I won't mollycoddle you like the others. This is going to be difficult but you'll be better off for it in the end. Step out of line and I'll fuck you up like an accident, fool. I know you are allowed to sleep in other classes but anyone is caught doing so in mine I will kick them in the throat and put them in the Boston Crab, just like any mobile phones will be confiscated, just as will any mirrors will be too, partly to help you pay attention, partly out of my own innate cruelty, but mostly because there's nothing less attractive than a girl who wears too much makeup. If you have any questions please address them to the ceiling while you're lying awake in bed tonight wondering what the fuck happened to your life." I am after all in the business of Education.

Ruminations At Twenty-three

I'm awesome! Balls to you and yours!

Sexualise My Beach

Avast! I have returned from Okinawa mostly unscathed. Though my travels were fraught with danger, the most notable threats being my undersea battles with seasnakes and box jellyfish and my life-and-death struggle with the fearsome Man-pig, I prevailed and discovered many new and exciting things about my surrounding, and - since everything is a metaphor and all outward journeys are also inward ones - about myself. For a start the islands of Okinawa may well be the most hospitable parts of Japan, if it weren't for the searing heat. The beaches are long and sandy, and the waters are clear blue and filled with an abundance of sealife (which no doubt pleases the sakana-crazy Japanese). You can really see why the Americans wanted to keep a hold of it for so long, but not why they've put in such a concentrated effort to turn it into Hawaii. The Okinawans are the most laid-back of Japan's people, and have the same lacadaisical attitude to subjugation by a foreign power as the French. The Kingdom of Ryuuku was
originally a fiefdom of China but was nabbed by the Japanese without much effort in the 18th century. The Okinawans didn't really care, until in 1945 a large quantity of them died when the Americans landed, and liked it so much they stayed. The most confusing thing about the relationship between Okinawa and Japan is the traditional foodstuffs used - even though Okinawa is an island they eat pork the whole time, rather than fish, the staple of mainland Japan. Why even 500 miles inland is there still fish? I get fish for every meal. Where does this fish come from? The Okinawans have it all figured out.

Another pleasant revelation stems from having spent almost four days in the company of my good lady wife and not tried to kill her. I can't remember the last time I spent that amount of time with any woman - family and close friends included - and not had a femicidal urge. It must be love.

EDIT: In response to comments and criticisms from some of the most important women in my life in regards to the above statement, let me express my apologies for any misunderstanding - I was joking! I don't really want to kill you. I love my pod-sisters!

The Man You Call "Boss"

Friends, Romans, countrymen. On this most auspicious of Wednesdays I make the leap from child-blog to adult-blog and dispense with myspace once and for all. I am fed up of emo kids with bad hair and greasy skins asking me to be their friend, computer-meddling popups telling me computer is at risk and the conspicuous Tom. Who is Tom? No friend of mine.

Anyway, my previous misadventures are all still available at:

http://www.myspace.com/adventures_of_blackwood

All future mild bigotry, tall tales and sick jokes shall be found here.

"The Boss"