Rewriting history

Japanese school textbooks do not mention any massacre at Nanjing. Even though hundreds of soldiers have gone on record admitting that Chinese citizens were burnt alive, babies were used for bayonet practice and women were routinely raped and killed during the Japanese occupation, textbooks talk of isolated “incidents”. On a similar note, the current Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has claimed that there is “no evidence” of women Chinese and Korean women being forced to work as sex slaves to satisfy Japanese soldiers. This sexual slavery is so widely documented outside Japan as to be considered common knowledge. This week, the Japanese government ordered seven different high school textbooks to be altered to omit all mention of the fact that the Japanese army forced the quiet people of Okinawa to commit mass suicide in 1945 rather than surrender to the Americans. The government, rather than researchers, teachers or history professors, knows best what to teach about history you see. And in more news today, a further 30 Tokyo school teachers have been threatened with the sack for refusing to stand to attention and sing along when the militaristic Japanese national anthem was played at school.

The amazing Mr Vongole

The boy who had been assigned to wash my hair introduced himself.
“I am Asahi”
“Like the beer?” There is a famous brand of beer in Japan called Asahi.
“Uh?”
“You are Mr Beer? Like Asahi beer?”
“Ahh, no, no” He crept close to me, cupped his hands together, one on top of the other and opened them as though presenting a precious jewel, “Asari. Vongole. I am Mr Vongole”.

Jaws

To calm down after my anti-smoking rant, I went with a colleague to an onsen resort in Hakone for the day. While onsen are traditionally rather sombre ritualistic affairs, where one must follow a raft of unwritten rules about how to bathe, this was a more of a theme park, complete with waterslides, hot-dog machines and giant teapots. There was nothing for it but to bathe in the following substances:

• Wine (suspiciously pink and not as yeasty as I’d feared)
• Green tea (pleasantly mild)
• Charcoal (black and boiling demonically)
• Sake (I didn’t believe it – didn’t smell of sake at all)
• Coffee (one side was espresso, the other cappuccino)
• Hot red pepper (bright orange and very hot)
• Salt (we floated)
  

The strawberries and cream bath was full of small, giggling children and no amount of scary, hairy foreigner behaviour could get rid of them, so we had to give that one a miss.

The highlight of all this novelty bathing was definitely the feet-eating fish. You sit round the edge of a warm shallow pool and, upon putting your feet in the water, are munched by a million minnows. And let me tell you, being eaten alive by fish is a tickly experience. These little fish called Garru-rufa apparently like nothing better than to eat the dead skin from anyone game enough to dip their horny appendages below the surface. No one did it that day, but I’d pay good money to see a man put his willy in there.

Fucking smokers

Whenever I go to a bar, café or restaurant, someone next to me invariably lights up a fag and blows their smoke over me and my food. Everything I am wearing has to be washed when I get home, I need to shower to get rid of the stink and my eyes are pink and itchy for hours. Call me demanding, but I don't think I should have to put up with that crap. Everyone knows that fags give off toxic fumes and everyone knows that breathing toxic fumes is harmful, so why does anyone think it's OK to smoke in enclosed public spaces? Is there such a thing as a "right" to poison other people? Would smokers be happy to work in offices lined with asbestos? Would they like to have sarin gas piped into the pub's air conditioning system? No they fucking wouldn't, so they should leave their fucking fags at home and stop being so fucking selfish. Fuckers.

Barney's new pal

Timorous Beast’s sister lives on a farm. Thus, at least one horse, three guinea pigs and two dogs are obligatory. The two elderly Jack Russells kicked the bucket last year, so a new pooch, Barney, was rescued from a local dog home. Having been kept chained up by a previous owner, he was a bit bonkers – chasing his tail and biting himself on the arse whenever there was a loud noise and so forth. He has calmed down a bit now, and proved himself deserving of a friend, so Beastly sis is acquiring just that – in the form of the fat little cutie at the front, with her pink paddle for a paw. Definitely worth clicking on to see all the cuteness up close.

Prukopnici

I wouldn't normally be the first to congratulate people on getting married, what with my cynical views about marriage being an outdated, sexist and ultimately desperate act rooted in religious and moral delusion. Buuuuut.....I have to make an exception where the couple are raving lesbians and er....my mates. Congratulations to J and K in Prague for paving the way for a more tolerant future.

Cheers

I made one of the best decisions in my life when I decided to order a set of six bottles of red wine, delivered to our door, complete with tasting notes. Beast and I are quaffing our way through them like nobody's business. So far, we've shared a syrah from Oregon and a fucking merlot from Washington (merlot is always called fucking merlot round these parts, in honour of Paul Giamatti). Both were gorgeous. The syrah tasted of cherries and licorice, and the merlot, although the tasting notes told us to expect cloves, tasted of woody, plummy deliciousness.

Bitter old hag

After spending the morning wrestling with the Word “insert page numbers” function (suggested slogan: Nervous breakdown guaranteed - within 1 hour or your money back!), I was not in the greatest of tempers. So, I was delighted to read the brilliant journalism in the Observer’s monthly “Women” section, which really cheered me up. There were numerous articles about make up, shoes, and relationships, because these things are prominent in women’s minds most of the time. But even better than that, the lead article was an in-depth, stimulating investigation into the state of The UK’s twenty-something generation of women, with the focus on how lucky they are to be “educated, ambitious, successful”. For the purposes of illustrating just how lucky, it included the following passage:

By your mid-twenties, you're on a six-figure salary forging a path in a previously male-dominated world. You own your own flat, a Mulberry handbag and a Marc Jacobs frock.

Ah, a Mulberry handbag! Well now, that really is on a par with owning your own flat and earning a hundred grand. Us women must truly have achieved all we could desire in life if we have such a bag. And a Marc Jacobs frock? The pinnacle of a woman’s ambitions! I didn’t realize we had come so far! Thank you, Observer, for showing me how fulfilled women are today.

Super furry animals

Q. How do you tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat?

A. A weasel is weasily wecognised, while a stoat is stotally different.

Mountain montage

Red faced and happy

Skiing is not my cup of tea. I like the idea of swishing down a pristine mountainside in puffy yellow clothing well enough. I’m just not so keen on having my feet strapped to a couple of planks of wood via those concrete bollards they call ski boots. So whilst Timorous Beast did the swishing, I did the fun stuff. First, I roasted my face in the sun. So unused to natural daylight am I that it only takes a walk to the end of the village to paint a scarlet stripe down the middle of my nose. Then I spent a distracting stint in the local tourist shop purchasing essential items like a fluffy weasel, a box of blueberry flavoured daifuku and three bottles of sake. And finally, I repaired to the hotel, where I had the onsen entirely to myself for an extended session of scrubbing, rubbing and body boiling.

Mountain repast

Beast and I are in the mountains! And our hotel looks like the one in The Shining. Upon our arrival at 8pm on Friday evening, the receptionist said, “You can check in later. Now I want you to go to the restaurant.” And so we did. Most of the lights were off and middle-aged women in pink pinafores were hoovering the chairs. We sat at a table in the corner, hoping it was sufficiently out of the way, and were immediately shooed away to another, where two trays laden with three and a half meals each sat waiting. Not given to looking a gift horse in the mouth, we troughed our way through shabu shabu, deep fried prawns, baked chicken and mushroom pasta, a massive pot of rice, miso soup, yakitori, and kiwi fruit. How the Japanese put it away and remain skinny little bits of string I don’t know.

The great pretender

At some point in my past, I became known as cold or unemotional, and, to be honest, there’s a Calvinist streak in me that likes this. I’m a macho Scot, so I nurture the image of being detached, self-possessed and un-needy. This horrible trait pervades every aspect of my life.

People are shocked by my lack of affection for children and my lack of desire for my own, so I play to the crowd, snarling at toddlers and rolling my eyes at crying babies. I spent four years in love with my best friend, but always denied having any such feelings, both to him and everyone else that asked (which they didn’t generally, so good was I at pretending). I feign confidence in my work even though I wonder when someone will realize that I am making it up as I go along and reveal me as the fraud I am. Even my dreadful impatience with computers, printers and other machines stems from my desire to be above human frailty. Because I cannot possibly be weak or wrong or in need of training, I blame any failure on their part to do whatever I demand on incompetence by their designers. The whole persona I have constructed for myself makes me angry instead of sad, indignant instead of sorry, and self-righteous instead of forgiving.

When and why did I become like this? And more importantly, how can I change it? Answers on a postcard please…