The cherry blossom is very beautiful now - pink fluffy confetti snowflakes falling from candyfloss trees..
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We went up Koboyama the other day for a bit of a hike, and among other things admired the ashi-onsen - portable foot baths, lined with hinoki (Japanese cypress wood), and heated using homemade charcoal.
Was out on the water a couple of days ago in H's speedboat - shooting along at 21 knots - and came across a three-masted steel-hulled schooner, apparently used for management bonding sessions. She was doing 8 knots.
In the evening 1,000 or so of us attended a meeting in the local town hall to protest against the proposed changes to the Constitution which would enable Japan to officially have a military (at present it's known euphemistically as the 'Self Defence Forces'), and to enable Japan to attack another country if that seems like a good idea, and to attack a third country if that country attacks the USA. The meeting kicked off with a luvvy-duvvy Carpenteresque couple singing Hawaiian based music on ukeleles, which I'm afraid to say rapidly lulled me off to the land of nod. This was followed by a lengthy, impassioned and clearly humorous speech by the writer 井上 ひさし Hisashi Inoue- regrettably the only bits I could catch were the six countries that 'remained neutral' during WWII - Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Afghanistan (?), and the cities destroyed by atom bombs (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) which were visited recently by a traditional Hawaiian peace boat that apparently had crossed the Pacific using only stars for navigation.
While in Britain I watched a TV programme on earthquakes - a thought never so very far from the mind of anyone living in the most earthquake-prone country in the world. It seems that moonquakes are considerably larger than earthquakes - while an earthquake is unlikely to last much more than a few seconds, perhaps up to a minute, those on the Moon frequently last for up to an hour. This is despite the fact that the Moon is mostly solid rock with very little molten magma at its core.
It seems that the effect of the Earth's gravity on the Moon is so immense that it pulls great swathes of solid rock around. Made me think about seeing things from the other's point of view - we are used to the idea that the Moon has a great effect on the Earth, particularly its various liquids - the tides, the plants, our natural cycles - but I at least had never thought of the huge effect of the Earth on the Moon. Likewise, we might be very aware of the effects of others on ourselves, but we have to learn to see things from their point of view, through their eyes, our effect on them - not so easy, perhaps.
