The Fire Raisers (reprise)

About 40-odd years ago, when I was little older than Sean is now, I took part in my first school play at Campbell, an English adaptation of Max Frisch's ,Biedermann und die Brandstifter' (The Fire Raisers. I was in the chorus, dressed as a fireman, and the shortest by a long way. My parents only identified me under an oversized helmet about half-way through the play, and then started to worry about my height). By coincidence—or perhaps not, it may be a perennial favourite among school drama teachers—it is the current school production running at Canadian Academy on Rokko Island, where we all go on Sundays for Sean and Julian to play football, and where I puff around a 5km running path with some of the other fathers. I was reminded of this last night, when Sean appeared on local tv and in the evening paper (see below), setting fire to stuff inside a public building.
Happily for us, this incendiary act was completely legal: his appearance was as a member of the winning team in his school Rokko-san Elementary School, the first group to make the fire to light the school's wood-stove. No fire-lighters, no matches, just wooden sticks, friction and tinder. (Somehow I don't think the Health and Safety people would look well on this in the UK.) His school is one of the few left in Japan—probably in the developed world—to depend on a wood-fired stove to heat the building in winter, and being half a mile up the mountain and an average of five degrees colder than anywhere else in Kobe, it is the first to light the fire, signalling the beginning of the season. Thus, all of the local media send cameramen, photographers and junior reporters up the hill for a view of young wannabe arsonists, and what do you know: Sean triumphs again.

Full story (in Japanese) here:

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Reflections on Thought: Work in Progress

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Musical Triumph....

it wasn't, but a family triumph most certainly. After four weeks of occasional rehearsal, Sean, Julian and I appeared on stage in support of Justin's first piano recital. The quality of the performance does nothing to detract from the historic significance of this event: 10 years ago, I could not have imagined that Justin would be able to take piano lessons, nor that Sean and Julian would have rallied round in such a way to support their brother. Justin has brought out the best in all of us.

Starting over

Blogging is no different from any other activity: once the momentum is lost, it's hard to get going again. So pushing, grinding, out these first few lines is even more difficult than I had anticipated. Yet looking back on the posts from last year, I can see some value in the enterprise, as a family document, and from the fact that some readers come back regularly to browse... So let's begin with the headlines, in brief. After months of torpid indecision, Ayumi and I decided not to return to our professional lives in England—though we spent a very pleasant two months there in February and March—but to give Japan a go for a bit longer. In December last year, I was offered a permanent job at Konan University in Okamoto—Kobe's Hampstead, if Kitano is Chelsea), where I have now started teaching English and Linguistics courses to a delightful bunch of students, in the company of friendly and extremely welcoming colleagues. First day at Konan (Okamoto) The professor I'm

Devenish

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