The Sugar Road II

The other day Mrs Fool glanced up from the book she was reading and asked, "What was the name of that route in Kyushu you mentioned the other day?"
"The Nagasaki Kaido," I replied. "Why?"
"Well, it's mentioned in this book I'm reading."

Ubazakari hana no tabigasa: Oda Ieko no Azumaji nikki by Tanabe Seiko is a historical novel based on the diary of Oda Ieko, the wife of a Kyushu merchant who in 1840 set off with three women friends and several porters and bodyguards on a 3200-kilometre, five-month journey on foot that took them to among other places Miyajima, Osaka, Nara, Ise, Nikko, and Edo. Along the way they composed traditional Japanese poems, or waka, which are also included in the book. Oda was 52 years old at time, making her quite elderly given that the average life expectancy in Japan in the late-Edo period was somewhere in the late thirties. This explains the ubazakari of the title, which means something like "the prime of old-womanhood".

A couple of days after this conversation, Mrs Fool again brought up the subject of the Nagasaki Kaido.
"How long would it take to walk?" she asked.
"About ten days. Why?"
"Why don't we walk it together?"

It turns out she had been discussing the book with some Japanese friends over lunch, and they all agreed it would be a wonderful experience to do something like the walk undertaken by the women in the novel. Then Mrs Fool told them about my walking exploits, and they convinced her she should join me if and when I walk the Nagasaki Kaido.

Mrs Fool and I have done a few short walks together, but I never imagined the two of us would attempt anything on this scale. Things are still very much in the early planning stage. Mrs Fool doesn't want to be in Kyushu in autumn as it gets quite a few typhoons at that time of the year, and summer and winter are out for obvious reasons (too hot and too cold respectively), so the earliest we would consider doing it is the northern hemisphere spring of 2011. That would give me time to walk the Koshu Kaido on my own first, perhaps in October this year.

Obama announces high-speed rail plan

Does the POTUS read Walking Fool? From the Guardian:

Barack Obama today called on Americans to climb aboard with his ambitious vision of building high speed rail corridors along 10 of the country's busiest routes.

In a high-profile announcement before leaving for a trip to Mexico today, Obama said America could not let itself be shunted to the side while other countries invested in modern transportation systems.

Read the rest (including at least one more bad railway pun) here.

The Sugar Road I

When I mentioned a few posts back that I fancied doing a ramble around Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, I had no idea that Kyushu had a number of old walking routes which, like the go-kaido (five routes) on the main island of Honshu, were developed during the Edo period (1603-1868). In fact one of these routes, the Nagasaki Kaido, which links the port cities of Nagasaki and Kokura, is one of the most famous of these waki-kaido, or sub-routes.


Like the go-kaido, the waki-kaido were established by the Tokugawa shogunate to improve communications around the country, and were later used by feudal lords during their regular trips to the capital of Edo (now Tokyo), a requirement under the sankin kotai (alternate attendance) system, which was in force from 1635 to 1862. This system also applied to the Dutch traders based on the tiny artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki, which was one of only a handful of Japanese ports open to the outside world during Japan's two centuries of seclusion in the Edo period. The head of the Dutch East India Company was required to make the journey to Edo yearly between 1660 and 1790 and once every four years after that.

Dejima

For the Japanese, this association with the Dutch traders lent the Nagasaki Kaido an exoticism that set it apart from the other routes. Even today, covers of guidebooks for the Nagasaki Kaido feature exotic animals such as elephants and camels. This exoticism is also reflected in the nickname given to the Nagasaki Kaido: The Sugar Road.


The nickname derives from the fact that imported sugar was an extremely rare and highly prized commodity in the Edo period. It was imported into Japan by the Dutch in Nagasaki, who took it with them when they traveled along the Nagasaki Kaido to present to the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo. The availability of sugar also explains its use in many popular dishes in and around Nagasaki, although the most well-known of these delicacies, Castella, was actually introduced by the Portuguese, who established Nagasaki as a port in the 16th century and occupied Dejima from the time of its construction in 1634 until their expulsion from Japan in 1639 as part of the crackdown on Catholics in the wake of the Shimabara Rebellion. Two years later the Dutch, who were anti-Catholic, were forced to move to Dejima from their base on the island of Hirado about a hundred kilometres to the north.

Incidentally, the port city of Kokura, which is now part of Kitakyushu city, was the primary target for the second atom bomb which was dropped on Japan on 9 August 1945. Bad weather over Kokura forced the pilot to head to the secondary target, Nagasaki.

Reading this could shorten your life

Under the headline WATCHING TV FOR HOURS COULD SHORTEN YOUR LIFE, this recent article in The Press warned of the dangers of sitting in front of the TV for too long each day. It quoted a study carried out in Australia which found that people "who watched more than four hours a day had a 46 percent higher risk of death from all causes and an 80 percent increased risk for CVD-related death".

Someone wrote a letter to the editor a day or two later rightly pointing out that a) the risk of death from all causes is the same for everyone (i.e. 100%), and b) it's the lack of exercise rather than the TV watching which is the problem, and it would be just as accurate to say that reading books for hours could shorten your life.

I get a bit annoyed with people who regard television per se as some kind of evil. Yes, most of the stuff on TV is crap, but the problem lies in the way the technology is used rather than the technology itself. In other words, it's the commercial, ratings-driven model that's the problem.

Take The Wire, for example, which many people (myself included) regard as one of the best TV shows ever produced. As the show's creator, David Simon, has stated, the chances of it surviving on ratings-driven free-to-air TV were slim, so it was made for HBO, a pay-TV service. Sure enough, when the show eventually screened here in New Zealand, it was at a ridiculously late hour because Television New Zealand, despite being a state-owned broadcaster, is run according to a commercial, ratings-driven model.

I should also point out that, as I mentioned in my very first post, if it weren't for television I wouldn't have got into walking and this blog wouldn't exist, since it was after watching a documentary called The Naked Rambler on TV that the idea of walking the Nakasendo came to me.

By the way, if you're wondering what the subject of that doco is up to, well, according to this opinion piece in The Guardian (hat tip: my brother in Bhutan), he's still roaming around the UK naked and still getting arrested.

Chess update

Black resigns! White (Walking Fool) wins!

The Pandolfini Effect

I'm not a very voracious reader (except when I'm traveling, I normally only read for an hour or so each day before I go to sleep), so on Wednesday when I finished reading two books on the same day I was left feeling particularly satisfied. It helped that one of these books, American Rust, which right up until the day before had seemed destined for a truly unhappy ending, actually ended on a quite optimistic note.

There's hope for my chess game, too. The other book I finished was Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess. Although as I mentioned the other day this book is easy to follow, I probably only took in something like half of what was written. Still, this was enough to help me beat the chess game on my iMac for the first time ever (although admittedly I had the difficulty level set lower than normal), and so when my brother challenged me to a game I accepted, thinking it would be a good opportunity to see how much progress I had really made.

Black to move...

Two days later this game is still in progress. I think we're either at the end of the middlegame or the beginning of the endgame. Despite my brother's rather flattering comments and the surprising result of the poll on his blog, I think the longer the game goes on the more of an advantage he, as the vastly more experienced player, has. There should be a result later today.

Also on Wednesday I received the copy of The Imperial Cruise which I'd ordered from The Book Depository. Not only did I get free shipping by getting it from The Book Depository instead of Amazon, but I also got the paperback version, which isn't officially out yet and didn't even appear on Amazon until very recently.

The most challenging and entertaining game ever invented

One of the tasks I've assigned myself this year (I hesitate to use the word "resolution", since according to this article in the The Guardian, New Year's resolutions are almost doomed to failure) is to improve my chess game.

I learned to play chess (or should I say, I learned the rules of chess) as a teenager, and have played casually on and off ever since, mostly against my brother Mark and more recently against my walking buddy Erik. But I never really thought much about things like tactics or strategy, and have never read a book about chess. So the other day on my way back from the doctor's I popped into my local library and picked more or less at random from the half a dozen or so chess books on the shelf a paperback called Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess.

It turns out to have been a pretty good choice. Although it starts with the fundamentals by explaining how each piece (sorry, "unit") moves, this book is really aimed at people like me who are familiar with the basics and have played a bit of chess but are ready to turn it up a notch. It's written in a casual style and is very easy to follow.

Although there are lots of diagrams in the book illustrating the various moves, I'm finding it helpful to have a chess set beside me as I read. One problem I was faced with was how to prevent our two cats jumping up and knocking the units over. I've gotten around this so far simply by keeping the cats out of the room while I'm reading, although one possible solution (a suggestion from my brother) would be to get one of these fancy vertical chess sets.

But is all this effort really worthwhile? Isn't chess just a waste of time, like watching TV (not The Wire, of course)? Shouldn't I be spending that time doing more important things? What will I gain from improving my chess game? Perhaps Pandolfini is right, and chess is "the most challenging and entertaining game ever invented", but it's still only a game, right?

(American Rust update: Things have gone from bad to worse for our two young protagonists. One is in prison, and the other is on the road somewhere between Pennsylvania and California, practically penniless after having been robbed by a fellow freight hopper.)

EMPTY

My brother in Bhutan has launched himself into the blogosphere. You can see the results here.

A mystery solved

American Rust is one dark, depressing novel. All of the main characters seem doomed, and I'm not holding out much hope for a happy ending. It's also extremely evocative and very difficult to put down.

In other news, in light of a couple of medical mishaps in recent years which could have turned into medical disasters, I decided to start the New Year by getting a new GP. His first task was to solve a problem which has been dogging me for the last couple of weeks in the form of dizzy spells which hit me first thing in the morning and last for an hour or two. On Tuesday things were so bad I felt quite nauseous.

I had a feeling these had something to do with a drug I'd been taking since I was diagnosed with a kidney stone last October, one of whose effects is to reduce the blood pressure. But what I couldn't understand was that I'd been taking this drug for over two months before the dizzy spells started. The other strange thing was that they appeared to get worse after I stopped taking the drug.

Anyway, I had my first appointment with my new GP yesterday morning, and after quickly checking to make sure my brain and other bits and pieces were working properly, he agreed that the drug was probably to blame. However, he also thought I might have been a bit dehydrated (dehydration being one of the common causes of dizziness). His advice to me was to go home and drink lots of water. So I guzzled down several glasses of water over the course of the afternoon and a couple more in the evening, and lo and behold I woke up this morning feeling almost completely normal. Not drinking enough water is also one of the major cause of kidney stones, so I'll definitely be making a point of keeping up my liquid intake in the future.

'I've learned a bit about Japan and a lot about myself'

One of my first achievements of the New Year has been to finish reading Alan Booth's The Roads to Sata. While I enjoyed it immensely, I think Looking for the Lost is a better book. The historic episodes that inspired the three walks recounted in the latter (in the first Booth follows the route around the northern tip of Honshu described by novelist Dazai Osamu in his book Tsugaru, in the second he heads to Kyushu to trace the path of the retreat of Saigo Takamori at the end of the Satsuma Rebellion, and in the third he follows the Nagara River inland to one of the supposed hiding places of the remnants of the Heike clan following their defeat at the Battle of Dannoura in 1185) gave Looking for the Lost another dimension. Still, reading The Roads to Sata has made me think about my walking plans for the future. I still think I will tackle the Koshu Kaido next, but after that I fancy a less structured ramble, maybe around northern Kyushu, taking in the historic ceramic-producing areas in Saga prefecture, the city of Nagasaki, and the Shimabara peninsula.

Last night I started reading American Rust, a novel by Philipp Meyer which my sister gave me for Christmas. I only managed to read a chapter-and-a-half, but the book has already had quite an effect on me in the form of a disturbing dream in which I was confronted on a long-distance bus by an African-American who felt that I was invading his space. (There are no African-American characters in the first chapter-and-a-half of American Rust, but if you've read the book you'll be familiar with the events and tone that inspired this dream.) I woke suddenly just as this encounter was about to escalate into physical violence, and was unable to get back to sleep. The fact that there was an incredible, gusting Nor'wester blowing outside that sounded like it was going to lift the roof off didn't help. I got up and went through to the lounge, where I sat in semi-darkness on the sofa next to the youngest of our two cats, Gollum, until the wind died down.

I intend to follow-up American Rust with The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, which looks at the relationship between the United States and Japan in the early years of the 20th century against the background of the ongoing westward expansion of the U.S. into the Pacific and Asia, an expansion that started with the events described in Manituana.