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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