I’m in Greece after going to Tim and Xenya’s wedding at the weekend. It was good fun, great to stay for a while with lots of my university friends. The service was at a tiny chapel on the coastline just north-east of Athens. The congregation could never have fitted in the chapel, which was just about big enough to contain the legal paperwork for signing. So the wedding was outdoors, which feels splendid. Bright summer sun, cool blue water, the stark white paint on the chapel building. The ceremony was held in ancient Greek, with chanting and singing. It was restful, both upbeat yet serious at the same time.

Photos courtesy of Ben, who spent the evening taking zillions of snaps. Thank you!

On Saturday I went to a curious and quasi-pagan event at Granchester. Some Trinity puntspeople had the desire to dispose of an old warn out punt. I got there quite early with some friends and spent a while drinking beer, walking up and down the river waiting for the punts to arrive, watching the sunset. There were couples lighting barbecues along the bank, and even someone camping. Eventually a small flotilla turned up, packed with people from the smaller punting companies and syndicates. And petrol.

The Cambridge punt world is a microcosm of global capitalism at work. Or at least this is how it was described to me. The vast corporate conglomerate is the inocuous Scudamores, who much to my surprise turn out to be scourge of the world, partaking in dirty tricks to make BA envious. They have a couple of smaller commercial competitors, and there is even the equivalent of a government run or perhaps newly privatised enterprise, in the form of Trinity punts, connected to the university college. At the smaller end are the “mobilers”, a group of self-employed people who each own their own punt. They formed a syndicate, touting for business on each others behalf, sharing profits, and getting their name from the mobile phones used to organise it all.

I’ll briefly describe two of the tricks that Scudamores have got up to, to preserve their power. The first tale is from the distant past, and no doubt much blurred by the time it reaches this retelling. Scudamores were deceived by an employee into selling some of their old punts to him, and he set up a new punt business to compete against them. In revenge, and in order to stop him working, Scudamores deliberately sank a large number of their own punts all round his, to blockade them in and so prevent him from working. Since they have such a large fleet they could continue to operate, eventually forcing him out of business. Then they recovered their sunken punts, and resumed using them.

More recently, the mobilers were starting to compete too efficiently with Scudarmores. Was their belief in capitalism and the free market so strong that they accepted this new threat with a stern face, and proceeded to make themselves more efficient, offering higher quality tours and more effective punt repair sechedules? Not exactly. They have sufficient capital that they could invest in paying some of their staff to go on “bastard duty”. This splendid job, paid an hourly rate of six pounds, involved following the mobilers all day and harassing them. When they’re talking to a potential customer, the bastard would go up and shout “Nuuuahhh!” very loudly to put them off. Should someone decide to buy a river tour despite this chicanery, the Scudamore’s bastard would immediately offer the same tour at half the price, even if it would make them a loss.

Needless to say the mobilers’ business wasn’t going so well with this new hazard. They complained to Scudamores, who signed a deal with them, agreeing to cancel bastard duty. What did the mobilers have to do in return? Agree never to employ anyone solely to tout for business, and agree never to stack up multiple parties in one punt tour. Both measures mean they can never grow their collective business, so never seriously compete with Scudamores. This outcome is so self-evidently fair that my faith in the beauty and purity of the free market is fully restored.

And the burning? The riverfolk were reassuringly bad at setting fire to their means of production. Clearly drunk, they put the punt, drenched with days of recent rain and sitting in the river, upsidedown and poured petrol on it. When lit it formed a spectucular fan of flames leaping many feet into the air. Alas it simply went out, the wood barely even noticed. We had to have a whip round for another can of petrol.

Hello! It’s time for an update on what I’ve been up to. I’m working on two projects at the moment.

The first one is the Public Whip, a website which analyses the voting record of MPs in the House of Commons. It was Julian’s idea to do it. There’s some nasty backend code which extracts information from the Hansard transcripts online and puts it into a database. We then run various statistical analyses off this, and present the results as a web page.

Julian’s idea is that this sort of information can be used by the public to better keep tabs on what MPs are up to. The equivalent of all the league tables and targets, but turned back on them. The interesting thing is the number of directions it can go in; there are many possible users, and many other things that could be done in a similar vein.

Possibly interested groups include newspaper parliamentary monitoring services, charity campaigners lobbying for social change, the public affairs departments of large corporations, and eccentric conspiracy theorists. Not to mention the MPs and political parties themselves. How much is the information worth? Who decides who gets power over it?

The second project is a game called FleaFall which I’m not going to say much more about just now.

( I’ve changed the software that I use to post this blog from Blogger to some open source software called b2. Amongst other things this means that the archive page now has a search, and I’m not tied into paying Blogger every year. If anything has broken, let me know. )

In Tokyo in May, I went to visit people from two different development charities. They were both Christian charities because the contact that I found them through was Christian. However there isn’t a strong secular philanthropic tradition in Japan, as people are more inclined to let the government do everything.

Keep in mind that although these notes have come from Japanese people, they are quite Christian and American points of view. They may be unbalanced.

Religion and Communism

In communist Vietnam and Laos, I was told that the government is scared of religion. The staff of one of the Japanese Christian charities were followed and monitored closely, and they had great difficult renewing their visas every year. Eventually they had to close their local offices. Secular charities were left alone.

From the Christian point of view, this communist fear is because religious people “obey no earthly authority”. This is certainly true at the cutting edge of missionaries working in Asia (although in my experience believers are just as likely to obey authority when in the West). On the other hand, as someone who supports secular charities, I can imagine why a government might get frustrated by a ham-fisted linking of development aid with religious instruction. People should be free to explore whatever religion they like to try and understand what we are in this astonishing world, so it is a shame when the politicisation of religion from either direction causes such conflict.

It’s interesting that in Asia organisations like the Wycliffe bible translators, and Christian development missions seem to have far more difficulties than in Africa. I wonder whether this is because of the presence of an existing similarly structured religion (Buddhism) to compete with, because the African’s monotheistic animism is better tuned to Christianity, or some other historical reason?

Reliance on Government

I was told that Japanese people are very submissive these days. The older generation from just after the war were much more creative and active, but now people are more likely to just slot into their cog’s position in society. For example, there were demonstrations against the renewal of the Japan/US Security Treaty in the 1960s, but there are never large protests now.

This conformity is worrying from an economic point of view – that Japanese inventiveness may now decline – and also from the point of view of a charity looking for donations.

Once a charity takes too much government money, it can do less advocacy. One of the charities I visited refused any government money, to force themselves to try and make the rest of society care directly about poverty throughout the world. After WWII the Japanese had little and were helped. Some of the old people alive now remember this, and so in turn help those who are suffering in today’s world.

The government does do what would otherwise be charitable work. Often a welfare service started by Christians will be taken over and run by the government. On development, it is believed that although the Japanese government give aid, it does not really get to help the poorest of the people. NGO spending tends to be longer term than the short 1 or 3 year government projects.

Other Issues

Another problem that Japanese charities have is racism. There’s no feeling that you need to help people from another race. Black people are for some reason considered more alien than white. I didn’t manage to get a full understanding of how racist people in Japan are, but unlike the submissiveness problem, this one is on the decline. Japanese culture is becoming less racist.

I’m back in Cambridge now, and I’m likely to post less frequently here for a while.

For the first couple of days after I got back, I inevitably examined my country with a tourist’s eye. The diversity of people on the London underground was really striking and astonishing. In Japan nearly everyone is ethnically Japanese. In London you’ll see tall African men in fun hats, small Chinese ladies quietly reading. Even the white people are incredibly diverse, short and fat, tall and thin, faces of all different shapes and sizes.

In Asia each country seems less diverse. This is partly that my eye is more used to distinguishing occidentals from each other, but also I think because the populations haven’t mixed up as much. There was a distinct look to the facial shape of ethnic Khmer (in Cambodia) and to the Vietnamese, in a way that I have never spotted in say Scottish or French people.

On the train back to Cambridge the ticket inspector came down the carriage, and I couldn’t find my ticket. Frustrated, I searched for a minute or two, and in the end got my wallet out and asked him how much it was. Just over 15 pounds. He said he’d go off for twenty minutes so I could search for it some more, and then come back again. When he returned, I still couldn’t find the ticket, so I got my money out to pay him. He asked me again where I bought the ticket, and I explained how I had got it at a station the other side of London, and used it in the underground, but then lost it somewhere in King’s Cross before getting on the train. To my astonishment, he then said that he believed me, that he couldn’t charge me twice, and walked off.

Did my honesty persuaded him, because I kept forcefully trying to pay, and never begged him to let me off for free as perhaps most fair dodgers would? Or perhaps he was a ticket inspector with an unsuitable character flaw, unable to extract money from people against their will, roaming the system performing angelic deeds until a statistic at central office spots him and relieves him of his job.

The countryside out the train window was beautiful. Rich and green, only slightly rolling, but verdant and it made me happy.

Last week I flew right across the largest landmass in the world, taking what those of us who spend too much time with maps and too little with globes would consider to be a surprising shortcut across Siberia. I’ve always had an affection for the next country that I’m visiting, although I admit to being somewhat confused by its name. Can’t they make up their mind whether it is called Britain, or the United Kingdom, or Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or England, or what? In most countries people refer to it with a local pronunciation of the word “England”, but I think in Ghana this confused people and it was called UK. Quite what the Welsh think about this, I don’t know.

Of more immediate concern to me, what do I need to type into Google news searches to get my fix of local information? Luckily the brilliant boys at Google have thought of this, launching a special service just in time for my arrival. Ironically, it doesn’t in the least bit display news about the UK, but instead mainly international news for people who are living in the UK. Quite why international news should be tailored to fit a particular audience country I’m not sure; perhaps the people here can only handle “truth” specially wrapped up to suit them. It certainly isn’t what I’m after.

The situation with the name of this un-nation is even worse than the Myanmar and Burma confusion. I’m half expecting that I’ll have to take an internal flight across the Scottish border to avoid the warlord armies that hide in the hills. They would be in some delicate pact with the national government and the drugs traffickers, who trade a new designer pill to the otherwise good people of Norway. In turn, the Norwegian government would have recently cracked down on the drugs trade, ex-judicially slaughtering hundreds of its own citizens.

I would then visit a protestant convent on a remote Scottish island where I’ll talk to a nun, whom it will soon becomes clear deliberately refers to “England” as the “United Kingdom”, as a political point. Doing so undermines the UK project, and aids the cause of indepdence for the ethnic Scots. (If you know of a Scottish nationalist party which already does this, please let me know).

I landed at London’s Heathrow airport, and soon decided that this is a fantastic country.

Living in Japan isn’t quite as futuristic as you might have hoped, perhaps Europe has been catching up the last few years as the Asian tiger economies have crumbled. However there are lots of interesting innovations to spot.

• Rotating seats on trains. At the terminal station the train pulls in, the doors on the other side open and everyone piles out. Just as you’re wondering if you’re on the wrong platform, the doors close, all the seats magically rotate to face the other way, and the doors on your side open to let you in. I was gobsmacked. OK, I’ve only seen this level of efficiency once – Japanese trains do vary in quality a fair bit. But a manual seat rotating lever is standard fair, so everyone can always sit facing forwards.
• Electric map on underground trains. A light shows where you are, which direction you’re going in, and which station is next. When you are about to pull into a station, a light flashes on the side of the carriage that will open up. I’ve also seen a more sophisticated system on an overground train – it had a full computer screen, with not only a map of the line, and text in English, Japanese (both Kanji and Hiragana), but also at each station a map of the platform telling you exactly where the escalators are relative to your carriage.
• Automatic taxi doors. Unfortunately not high tech ones that lift up Back to the Future style, but a cunning little metal arm that can open or close the rear, pavement-side door. It’s ferocious, and you always worry that you’ll get your foot caught in it.
• Infra-red soap dispensors. Even in England we’ve started to get used to automatic taps, those hygenic and water saving things that turn on when you put your hands under them. In Japan this is occasionally taken one step further, with a second infrared device that dispenses liquid soap when you put your hands under it. If only they could figure out a decent hand dryer, they all suck.
• Electric toilets. You’ve no doubt seen these on TV programmes about Japan. We may have invented the western style toilet, but only the Japanese decided that it has to have a heated seat in winter, and that the lack of a built in bidet would be atrociously unhygenic… When the bidet spray doesn’t miss these are simply the best toilets in the world, but I still think the Burmese/Thai nozzle hoses are a better compromise of complexity, cost and utility.
• Cameras in your phone. If it hasn’t caught on already, prepare yourself for this in Britain over the next year. Sometimes I felt almost embarrassed to have a merely ordinary digital camera, which couldn’t instantaneously beam pictures of tourist sites to my friends across the world. A school girl on a train admired my blue eyes (really they’re off-grey, but in a society where all eyes are brown and all hair is black, caucasian variety is loved), took a photo of me with her phone, and then I daren’t think who it was sent to…

This morning on my way out of the hotel I noticed it was raining. The Japanese love umbrellas, and wouldn’t be seen dead in a waterproof coat except when hiking in the mountains. For a 500 yen coin (between two and three quid) I bought an umbrella from the, yes!, umbrella dispensor in the lobby.

Earlier in the week I was outside an electronics store and spotted an amazing machine for creating digital photos. For 50 yen a piece, you could pop in any sort of digital media card, select the photos you want from the screen, and print them out within a minute.

It’s possible to spend an entire day in Japan subsisting entirely by putting coins and notes into machines without having too miserable a time. Dinner is the hard one, until you find the fast food chains where you pay at a machine and hand a ticket over the counter to get your meal. This system is excellent – more hygenic as staff don’t handle food and money, safer as there are no tills for robbers to raid, and reduces both queues and misunderstood orders. Local fast food is very varied and very high quality in Japan, with real tasty meals in actual dishes that somebody washes up after you; I can’t quite understand how McDonalds manages to compete at all.

They’re rare but you can also track down fully automatic meal machines. Some of them contain frozen food, and I can only assume microwave it for you after you put the money in, delivering fresh hot fried chicken and chips. Others are vacuum packed with a cord that you pull to heat it up by dissolving lime.

There are drinks machines literally everywhere. On every floor of every hotel, at the remotest local train station, on a boring suburban street corner, and even on board trains. They sell canned and bottled stuff, mainly iced coffee and tea, but also an isotonic sports drink called Pocari Sweat, and lemon pop. Coca Cola the drink isn’t very popular at all, but Coca Cola the company competes quite well selling drinks unavailable in the west. At first I kept accidentally buying cans of hot instead of chilled tea, which might be nice in the winter. Unfortunately it doesn’t work too well as the metal can almost burns you, while the drink inside remains unpleasantly tepid.

These machines are truly amazing works of engineering. They accept notes or coins, never break down and always have enough change. Nobody really trusts machines in Britain, in Japan everyone trusts them implicitly. When you press the button for your drink there is a satisfying instantaneous thunk! as the can falls down for you to collect. You sometimes see people filling up the machines, and I wonder how the business model works that has caused such proliferation of them. Does the owner of the land rent or buy the machine from the drinks company, or does the company pay rent for the land?

The best thing about the drinks machines is that they always have can and bottle recycling points next to them. These have round shaped holes to indicate what rubbish you are meant to put in them. The Japanese are enthusiastic recyclers, including bins with long flat thin holes on train platforms for you to dispose of your newspaper after the daily commute.

My favourite automated food machine is the ice cream vendor. These are delicious. For a small fee at any time of day or night, without a queue, they deliver you a choice of 17 sorts of ice cream. One day when I’m very rich I’ll import one and put it in the front lobby of my mansion.

When I was a child there was only one thing considered more dangerous than taking sweets off strangers. It’s so ingrained in me by the ambient protection of society not to hitch hike that I have never even considered doing it. All sorts of unclarified bad things might happen. For example, people might have conversations with other people that they didn’t know already, or (gasp!) who belong to a different social class. Perhaps, like in China, people might learn to start paying each other for lifts, thus creating a more efficient and more capitalist transport economy, with the added side effect of being better for the environment. The consequences both for society, and in increasing everyones standard of living, could have no end of positive implications.

To make the inconvenient pilgrimage to Christ’s Grave at Shingo from Lake Towada you cannot use public transport. There isn’t any. Taking a taxi is plausible, but we suspect only very rich Americans would be willing to fork out the necessary hundred quid. So we decided to hitchhike. My mother would be shocked, except it was her idea and she was with me…

We took the bus round the lake to the road junction for Shingo and waited a couple of minutes for the first car to make the turn off. Rosemary held up a sign saying Shingo in Romaji – we didn’t know how to write it in Japanese characters, and figured we wanted someone happy enough with English to at least be able to read the alphabet. Amazingly the first car contained the sweetest of young couples on their honeymoon; she was four months pregnant. They took us not only all the way to Shingo, but on to our exact destination Christ’s Grave which is just outside the town (not that we ever found the town, it must have about one house in it, and only be ambiently different from the houses which are scattered anyway along the main road).

The grave area is very well maintained, with a surprising reverence. There were freshly cut flowers, a donation box, and a small museum which you could pay to visit. The explanatory sign reads thus:

When Jesus Christ was 21 years old, he came to Japan and pursued knowledge of divinity for 12 years. He went back to Judea at age 33, and engaged in his mission. However, at that time, people in Judea would not accept Christ’s preaching. Instead, they arrested him and tried to crucity him on a cross. His younger brother, Isukiri casually took Christ’s place and ended his life on the cross.

Christ, who escaped the crucifixion, went through the ups and downs of travel, and again came to Japan. He settled right here in what is now called Herai Village, and died at the age of 106.

On this holy ground, there is dedicated a burial mound on the right to deify Christ, and a grave on the left to deify Isukiri.

The above description was given in a testament by Jesus Christ.

This is a sweet story, and I’ll leave it to the curious to research the truth of the matter. Make sure you check up on any other alleged Christ’s graves in the world, and that when you are done you properly undermine any other beliefs which you have that are held on just as flimsy yet plausible evidence, but you didn’t notice this before. Our journey back was somewhat more arduous, but after about an hour of waiting two holidaying women took us all the way back to lake Towada.

(The picture is actually of Kamikochi in the Japanese Alps further south, but it is a much prettier photo than any I took of Towada, and you would never have rumbled me if I hadn’t said anything.)

Now I can finally reveal the goal of all my travelling, the destination which I’ve been striving for all these long, last five months. In Hakodate at the end of last week Rosemary and I finally made it to this technological mecca. For you to fully understand I will first explain some background.

Many people don’t appreciate the ugly aspects of the industrial infrastucture which enmeshes us, providing all the comforts which those able to read this have. It’s easy to stand on a once beautiful coastline and bemoan the oppressive lines of the new nuclear power station, or to look out from our efficiently built low price flat and complain about the aesthetics of the identical apartment building across the road. If you use electricity, what right do you have to complain about how it is generated? If you wear clothes mass produced by light factories, then what right do you have to lament their grim facia?

So it was with some excitement that I discovered Japan commemorates and celebrates the less-than-gorgeous, yet highly utilitarian. This by preserving her First Concrete Electricity Pole (see photo). There’s even a plaque next to it. The pole was built to replace previous wooden poles in order to reduce the damage to the city in the frequent fires of the time. Naturally a wooden pole is much nicer to look at, and I’ll remind you of that next time it burns down in an earthquake and you are left with no lights.