“JAPANESE STYLE”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26198, 8 July 1946, Page 6

“JAPANESE STYLE”

MEMOS AND MEMORIES SHEEP, BEETLES, AND FLAX SEED This will probably be the last article prior to his return home in the series we have received from Captain J. I. Spedding, of the Daily Times staff. He has been serving for the past six months as public relations officer, 2 N.Z.E.F., Japan.

For the Daily Times by John Spedding. TOKIO, June 30. There comes a time in the life of every wandering scribe when he finds that his pockets will contain no more scraps of paper and he is forced to turn the accumulation of scribbled notes out for a census and inspection. After six months’ of pounding a typewriter between Sasebo and Tokio, I have unburdened myself of my stock of rumpled personal memoranda and those which are still legible have brdught back a mass of fleeting ideas which I have noted down from time to time for further reflection or investigation.

These modest trivia of the daily round make a weird collection, ranging as they do from accents (Oxford) to flax at Yamaguchi, and from boogiewoogie to beetles. Why, I have evidently queried myself, should a hotel be called the “ Kogushia ” —which, an interpreter had informed me, was “ a little stick which is stuck through a rice dumpling ”? In its way, it is reminiscent of the Gat Rimmon Hotel, in Tel-Aviv. As memory serves, Gat Rimmon is the Yidish for “ ripe persimmon.”

Elusive Sheep

“ Sheep on Kyushu,” says a note from my pocket, bringing to mind a deal of traipsing around in Fukuoka and Sasebo on the trail of a phantom flock of New Zealand sheep which was reported to be roaming the mountains of Kyushu. The rumour as it reached me held that the sheep had been brought to Japan from New Zealand many years ago and had gone wild into the mountains. Now the Japanese wanted to get stud sheep into the country to improve the flock. No Japanese whom I have encountered has asked me if I could get any stud sheep for him, and the only indisputable New Zealand sheep I have sighted have*been in the Kyoto Zoo.

From the number of scribbled notations which I have disinterred. I would appear to have been absorbed by the local fauna on other occasions. A small black beetle with the apparent technique of a Mexican jumping bean had me intrigued for a whole evening. Tip the insect on its back and it would perform—a click, a somersault seven inches in the air, and he would land right side up. Then there was the troublesome case of the silkworm farmer down south. The Americans decided to attempt to rid a section of countryside of certain insect pests, so they started to spray the district from aircraf with D.D.T. Unfortunately, the first land they hit contained a silkworm farm and the mortality rate was high—a lucky break for nylon manufacturers, but distressing for the farmer.

“ Stag at Bay ”

Why, I should very much like to know, does a piano solo (genus boogiewoogie) named “ Mr Freddie Blues,” as played by a Negro ex-dishwasher in a Chicago restaurant, send a maid servant in the Japanese hotel where I normally live into something -closely approximating to a ' Sinatra-style trance? For the benefit of addicts of “le jazz hot” who want to compare reactions, it is the recording played by Meade Lux Lewis. Also in that hotel—which is a typical product of Japanese restraint and taste in its interior decoration—is a lone jarring note in the form of a badly-framed copy of “The Stag at Bay,” that delight of boarding-house owners throughout the English-speaking world. Admittedly, the Japanese have hung it in the least conspicuous room in the hotel, but even so it comes as a prise. Somewhere in Yamaguchi prefecture is one of the sites chosen for the planting of phormium tenax, the seeds for which flax were. I understand, procured from New Zealand. But nobody appears to know where the flax is, and there is a fair chance that the area was resown :n more edible plants in recent years. That has been the fate of almost all golf courses in Japan, we have discovered. * The Oxford Manner

I find a whole host of fleeting impressions included on these crumpled scraps of paper—the three girls in brilliant blue kimonos and carrying samisens, sighted in the foyer of Radio Tokio and presumably the Japanese equivalent of the Andrews sisters; the snobbish Oxford accent which the children use in their limited stock of English greetings; the railway freight trucks with six wheels instead of the customary four; the way the locals fish above the rapids instead of in the pools which lie below; and the quartet of citizens in shabby frock-coats scraping out strangely incongruous and semi-classical music during dinner at an American officers’ hotel in Osaka. There is a tumbled mass of these fragments and faded themes in front of me now, giving an uneasy impressions that I have left undone a lot of things which I should have done. The virtue of ideas lies in their transience —they should never be noted down to come back and haunt one. With this theory in mind, and an empty waste-papeV basket at my side, I shall proceed to dispose of this driftwood from the daily round —leaving my pockets ready and receptive for the next batch of scrap paper.