Devenish

Today, I received a book that Ayumi had ordered for me from Amazon—two-day delivery from Seattle, Washington to our door!—on Early Communication Skills for Children with Down Syndrome, by Libby Kumin. It looks to be excellent, and hopefully will give us (and Justin) a head start on the months and years to come, but it's also daunting, and not a little enervating, even to peek into. Meantime, as you can see from these images, Justin continues to thrive. It's just a pity he thinks he's a bat: having slept pretty much continuously from 3-8pm today, he's now awake and set to snuffle through the early night-shift...

After school on Wednesday, Sean, Justin and I went off to post a letter, and have an after school cup of hot chocolate in the café next door. Nothing special in that, except that most people's experience of the local post office is less pleasant than ours—there's even a children's story book based on this post-office on Rokko Mountain—and in both cases, the post office and the café, we may have been their only customers all day...Incidently, the red-roofed house in the sunset in the fourth picture is ours, taken from the post-office window... Rokkosan Post Office - reception area The pancakes aren't bad, either! View across to our house (the rightmost, through the gap in the trees) As in this Francis Cabrel song, but without the melancholy—or the sea-air (!), we are now really out of season up here...

In my class yesterday, I introduced and used a fragment of this video, in which Renee Baillargeon, lecturing at Vanderbilt university, talks about her research on young infants' knowledge of events. If you only watch one youtube video this month, make it this one! <p><br><br>If</p>

When I was a child back in 1967, Frank and Nancy Sinatra had a hit with a song called Something Stupid . It stuck in my mind then, and has remained with me ever since, so that every time I think of the phrase “And then you go and spoil it all…” it primes the completion “by saying something stupid like I Love You.” And then the first verse comes along in its entirety, and there it is again, 43 years on (click to play). It doesn’t matter how incongruous the context; so, even though the intended completion today was “...by sending 200 missiles into South Korea”, I can’t get the wretched tune out of my head. It's all a tad worrisome, this Korea thing: as the delightfully named Happyzebra.com helpfully informs me, it's only 538 nautical miles, or 1 hour and 29 minutes flying time, from Kobe to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital (Is such precision timing really necessary—or plausible, come to that?!).  It does put things in perspective: as I said two posts ago, we should eat o

Today Yumi, one of Ayumi's students, took Sean and Julian downtown to some pre-Christmas festival organised by Familiar, an upmarket children's clothing store. From the first few pictures a good time was had by all. Some of Yumi's other pictures are here. This gave Ayumi, Justin and me a few hours to have lunch, and look into a new café near Rokkomichi station. This is not an exceptional café by Japanese standards, but it was a bit different from Café Nero and its ilk in Sheffield: quiet jazz music played in the background, there was no mess, no dirty tables, no paper cups, or loyalty cards, the coffee didn't scald your mouth; they even brought along a timer on the tray to make sure Ayumi's Earl Grey was not poured too early. Not that Justin cared...

Some days are better than others, I suppose. Yesterday started quite unpromising, with fog nipping at the edge of the balcony, by lunchtime, the sky had turned to this presage of winter, and by evening, it was clear again, the city glistering below us. And so it was with Justin. This picture was taken at bathtime. I suppose it must be a usual stage of coming to terms with his condition, but so often he looks to us like any typical baby; despite the evidence and the meetings with consultants, we rashly hope that there's been some wonderful error. It's not that we wouldn't love him just as much, it would just be that much easier. At the moment, it makes no odds: he's a great wee man, as my sister said. But then I wonder about the future: will he have the same fun in snaffling a doughnut on the cable car, and coveting his friend's... This only reminds me that one shouldn't project too far ahead...about anything: eat your doughnuts while you may!

These autumn days won't last much longer: soon the trees will be bare, and the first snow will fall in the mountain, so we'd better make the best of it while we can. Today, I dropped Sean off down at Julian's nursery, from where our friend Chiemi took him to football: Sean hasn't played for months now, and it was great fun by all accounts. On the way back, I took some more pictures of the autumn leaves, including some shots of the scenery around Kayo and Nathan's house. Later on, we went down to pick Sean up from the Kobe University annual music festival. We've been before (two years ago), and I'm continually impressed by the students' enthusiasm for jazz and other alternative styles of music: beyond the Music department, you never hear this on British campuses. Here is one clip (excuse the shaky camerawork):

Justin had a very good day today: a bath, of which there are unfortunately no pictures, and regular feeding and sleeping. Nothing remarkable, exactly as we could hope. He does seem to be an alert little guy...Here are some evening pictures.

After we brought Justin home, I walked down to the cable car to pick up Julian from the nursery. It has been another gorgeous autumn day, as you can see. (The pictures are in reverse order from around 4:35pm to 4:15pm, which is why it gets gradually lighter: I've got to learn to work around this Blogger bug!) Meantime, at school in Seán's English class, they learned about American Thanksgiving: everyone had to draw a Turkey/Hand picture, naming four things to give thanks for (one per finger): Seán chose football, fish (his new pets), friends, and baby brother...

In searching for Justin's kanji, I found this page on the Uniqlo site: the Uniqlock . Perfect.

This morning, we drove through heavy traffic to the Children's hospital to hear the news of Justin's tests and to bring him home. When we saw the doctor, he gave us a long list of impenetrable kanji, starting with his heart 心 臓, and ending with various considerations about metabolic tests, and a printout of his blood work. I didn't understand everything that was said, but all that really matters is that he's very well: aside from his genetic condition, he's medically healthy and without complication. This is the very best news we could have hoped for today. A propos kanji, Justin's characters are based not on the sound of the Western name (as Seán's is), but on associative meaning : his Japanese name is the kanji for 'justice' kanji 正義 (pronounced seigi). It's a beautiful name, and a good start to life.

Our new Prius The title is misleading, as Julian's nursery is not on Rokko Mountain, but down the hill, and—more to the point, these pictures aren't of the nursery, but of the shrine beside the nursery where I park the car to drop him off in the morning. If I had any preconceived notions of what parking was like in Japan, this wasn't it... (though it should be said that it is not always so pleasant!)

One of the best things about living in Japan is an almost unbelievable honesty and responsibility for other people's property. Last Saturday, the day before we were due to bring Justin home from the hospital, I put my wallet on the roof of the car for reasons best known to someone else (plain stupidity, most likely), and drove off from the car park of a large electronics store, on the 25km journey home. Later that day, when I couldn't find the wallet, Sean worked out what I had done. We called the shop and the local police station, but no-one had found it. "Don't worry,' Ayumi said, this is Japan: it will turn up." Comforted, but unconvinced, I called Visa, Amex and my bank to cancel the cards, said goodbye to the £150 in cash, and prepared to make a new application for my residence card, health insurance, Cable rail pass (see below), and all the other bureaucratic nonsense I carry around. O ye of little faith! This morning, the Nagata police station called:

To follow up on the last post, and also to catch up on other things, here are some more pictures of our situation on the mountain. First, the Cable car. We live about 1.2 km straight up Rokko-san (Rokko Mountain), to the North East of Central Kobe. There are two ways to get to our house from the city: a 20-minute drive around hairpin turns, or a sedate straight ascent on the Rokko Cable Railway: the latter is much more beautiful, and less stressful. Sean took these pictures a little while ago of the trip down. Not many people can be so lucky as to use this as their means of commuting to work (I am one of the few foreigners to have a "teki" (monthly pass) for this particular train). On sunny weekends, it's packed with day-hikers and other tourists come to admire the view, but during the week, and especially in the evenings, we often have the whole train to ourselves). Julian and I especially like the cable, not least because we're both prone to car-sickness and the ro

It's now six days since we heard the news that has changed so much in our lives: perhaps for the good, perhaps not, but at any rate things will never be the same again. Last Wednesday night, the doctor came in to tell Ayumi that Justin has/is a Down's syndrome child. Yesterday, we took Justin to the Kobe Children's hospital, where he'll stay for tests until tomorrow morning. The initial signs are positive, though: his heart seems to be normal and other internal organs look to be ok; as long as the blood tests show no signs of leukemia, we can go all go home and start to live our lives together. Both Sean and Julian love him already, and can't wait to have him home again. I cannot describe the intensity and range of the emotions we have felt these past few days. One thing I do realize is just how selfish we are: we cried for two days in grief and despair, but really, this is not for him — he's well, and seems content, and alert — but for our idea of that perfec

It's been too long since the last post on this site (June 2010), and so many things have happened in the meantime, the worst of which was the death of my father. I wish so much that he could have seen the pictures and video on this post, which show one of the very best things to have occurred in the last months: the birth at on Monday 1st November 10:35am (Japan Time) of Justin Duffield/Matsuo. Here are some pictures from the first minutes of his life, plus some taken later that day, also a video taken yesterday (Tuesday) in the neonatal room. Ayumi will be in hospital until Sunday: we'll go over to Asagiri on Saturday and bring them home the next morning.