Don’t open the box!

An acquaintance of mine recently wrote a short story based upon the Japanese folk-tale, Urashima Taro, which got me thinking about the story. 

I am sure that every Japanese person will be familiar with the story.  There are a number of different versions, but the most common is as follows:

Urashima Taro is a young man who sees a small sea-turtle being tortured by some children on the beach.  He rescues the turtle, and it turns out to be a princess, the daughter of the God of the Sea.

So to thank Urashima Taro, the turtle takes him to a caslte under the sea, where he enjoys feasting and dancing for three days.  However, he gets lonely to see his village again and so asks to go home.  The princess takes him home but first gives him a magic box, saying that it will protect him and that he should on no account open it.

When Urashima Taro gets home, 300 years have passed and he doesn’t recognise anyone.  In a daze, he opens the box and a white smoke emerges, covering him.  He then turns into an old man.

And that’s the end of the story.  It seems a little bit harsh on Urashima Taro, doesn’t it?  Even though he helped the turtle, in the end he loses his family and friends, and his youth, and he only enjoyed three days in the underwater castle.

But is there a moral?  Perhaps it could mean that the God of the Sea cannot be understood by humans, and seems cruel.  In an island nation like Japan, with many disasters at sea, typhoons, tsunamis and so on, then people would have felt like this.

Or perhaps Urashima Taro lost his sense of time in the underwater castle because he was having too much fun.  While he was enjoying the feasting and dancing and talking with the princess, his family and friends were hard at work.  Maybe the moral is about hard work, about not avoiding your responsibilities.

If you have a blog to write, don’t start by checking your emails and the Scottish football gossip.  If you do, then you might forget the time and your life will pass you by!  In that case, perhaps the magic box that you should never open is your email inbox.

Thank you, Urashima Taro.  You have taught me a valuable lesson.  What’s this?  A new email!  Sorry, I’ve got to go.

 

Vocabulary:

an acquaintance – Someone you know.

a folk-tale – A traditional story, passed from person to person.

to torture someone or something – To deliberately cause extreme pain to someone or something.

“You should on no account open the box” – Whatever you do, don’t open the box./ You must not open the box, no matter what.

to be in a daze – To be confused, when your brain is not functioning properly.

to emerge – To come out.

to be harsh – To be hard or unfair.

 

 

Black dealings in Blackpool

I found an interesting story this week about a hotel in Blackpool, England.

Blackpool is a slightly odd tourist town.  There are seven miles of sandy beach, but remember that this is the north-west of England.  The temperature is rarely high.  In the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, it became popular for Britons to head to the beach to swim in summer.  Blackpool grew up as a town designed entirely to cater for these tourists.  By the 1950s, there were 17 million visitors coming every year, enjoying donkey rides on the beach, riding the trams, watching the illuminations and so on.  Of course, after the 1950s, cheap air travel became available and people found they could go to beaches in places with hot weather, like Spain.  So visitor numbers to Blackpool declined, while the city tried to create more modern attractions like amusement parks with roller-coasters.  Blackpool today is an odd mix of the quaint and modern.

 So if tourism has faced challenging conditions for many years in Blackpool, I can understand that hotels might have to work harder than ever to attract customers.  Might that partly explain the following story?

A couple stopped in Blackpool for one night recently.  Their one night stay cost 36 pounds.  They paid by credit card and then went on their way.

Then, as many people do these days, they wrote a review of the hotel on a web-site.  They weren’t happy with the hotel and wrote a very negative review.

When their credit card bill arrived, they found that 136 pounds had been deducted by the hotel.  The hotel management had “fined” them 100 pounds for writing a bad review.  Actually, the guests had signed an agreement allowing the hotel to do this, although they didn’t notice it when they signed.  It had been written in the small print of the booking agreement.  It is the hotel’s policy to avoid getting bad reviews.

This has provoked a debate.  Is the hotel stifling free speech?  Is the agreement unfair on customers?  Or perhaps are some customers not careful enough to be fair to hotels or businesses when writing their reviews?  The hotel management said that many customers have started threatening to write bad reviews on the internet just to try to get a discount.

I feel a little sorry for the hotel.  After a public outcry, they had to refund the 100 pounds to the guests.  Who knows if their complaints were really fair?  The internet has given more power to people to complain.  I like using the internet to complain too, but let’s try to be fair to those we are complaining about.

Vocabulary:

to head somewhere – To go somewhere

to cater for – To serve.

to be quaint – To be old-fashioned, but in a pleasant way; to be charming.

to be deducted – To be removed, or taken off.             

to fine somebody – To charge money to somebody as a penalty.

the small print – The details in an agreement which is written in very small letters.

to provoke something – To cause something.

to stifle something – To restrict something’s freedom, or ability to move or grow.

an outcry – When many people complain loudly.

The heart of things

This week I finished reading “Kokoro” by Soseki Natsume.  I have heard that most Japanese students study this book in high school.  So I suspect that many people will be intimately familiar with the story.

But it is not so well known in Britain.  So let me first summarise the story.  The title means “heart” but also suggests other meanings such as inner feelings or the true nature of things.

The book was written in 1914 and is set in that period, the end of the Meiji Era.  That was the era which saw the modernisation of Japan.  The book follows the relationship between the narrator, a young university student, and an older man, who lives virtually as a recluse in Tokyo with his wife.

The older man, whom the student respectfully calls “Sensei”, over the course of the book reveals the reason for his withdrawal from human society, including feelings of guilt over an incident in a complicated love-triangle and his inability to come to terms with the new modern Japan.

As a psychological study of human nature and isolation it was very interesting.  The characters are constantly misunderstanding one another and even themselves.  They are contradictory and often show completely conflicting desires.  As a small example, the narrators’ parents are desperate to see their son and urge him to come back from university.  After the first few days, they get annoyed with having him there and wish he would leave.  When he decides to go back to Tokyo, however, they ask him to stay longer.  The complexity of the human mind, which pushes and pulls in different directions at the same time, and can never be fully understood by others is brilliantly explored.

I must admit that I did also get a bit annoyed by the character of Sensei, however.  He had grown up influenced not just by the modern Japan, but the older values as well.  Every relationship he had was strictly governed by rules, ritual and obligation.  He gave advice to his friend K, and felt completely bound by an obligation to help him at great cost to himself because the advice brought some difficulties.  He delays declaring his love for someone for a number of reasons, including fears that it might cause him embarrassment or was not correct according to custom.

As a modern, selfish man brought up in an individualistic culture, I kept thinking, “Just do it!  Stop worrying so much about what other people think!” or similar thoughts.  If old Japan was really as strict as Sensei shows it to be, then it must have been a hard place to live.

Actually, it’s not always that easy even now...
 

Vocabulary:

to be intimately familiar with something – To know something extremely well.
virtually – Almost entirely.

a recluse – Someone who lives completely apart from other people.

a love-triangle – When two people love the same person, it is a love-triangle.

to come to terms with something – To accept something; to be able to deal with something.

psychological – To do with the way people think.

isolation – Being alone.

to be contradictory – To contain two opposites.  For example, “I like cats but I don’t like cats”, is a contradictory statement.

conflicting – Opposite or not in agreement.

to urge someone to do something – To strongly encourage someone to do something.

complexity – Being complex; the opposite of simplicity.

ritual – A ceremony, or a traditional, formal action.

obligation – A responsibility to do something.  For example, “He helped me, so I have an obligation to help him in return.”

to be bound – To be unable to move; to be tied up.
 

 

 

Bear Mountain picnic

Over the long weekend, I went on a short hike with my wife and her sister and two young nieces.  One of the girls is a first grade elementary school student and the other is a sixth grade student.  So, as you can imagine, we chose a hike that was not too long or difficult. 

We climbed to the top of Mount Tenran (Tenran-zan), in Hanno.  We climbed a steep slope with wooden steps to get to the top.  For most people it probably wasn’t a difficult climb, but for a blind guy and a first grader it was pretty taxing.

One of the first things we noticed was a sign that warned that bears had been spotted in the area.  My wife’s younger niece asked if I was swinging my stick in front of me to keep the bears away.  I rather like the idea.

We were all tired when we reached the top and so took a break to have a picnic.  We had onigiri and mikan.  Actually, we had onigiri, mikan and fried chicken which my sister-in-law had brought.  She obviously hasn’t been reading my blog.  I decided not to tell her that I had become a semi-vegetarian and just ate it.  I must admit that it tasted nice.

The real difficulties began on the way down.  We took a different route down the mountain.  Instead of wooden steps, there were boulders, mud and a more gradual slope to the bottom.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t checked my shoes very carefully before I came out.  They were an old pair of shoes and the soles had worn completely smooth.  The day we went hiking, Sunday, was dry.  But the previous day it had rained heavily and the boulders and mud were still wet.

So I was slipping and sliding the whole way down, holding on to my wife’s arm and using my bear-stick to test the ground in front of me and to help support my weight.  I nearly fell over a number of times and other hikers were shouting out encouragement or warnings.

We made it to the ground in the end.  My trousers and shoes were covered in mud and everybody’s legs were sore.  But we weren’t eaten by bears and we got home safely.

I think the bears must have been frightened off by my bear-stick.
 

Vocabulary:

a long weekend – If Monday is a public holiday, we call this a long weekend.

to be taxing – To be tiring; to cost a lot of energy.

to spot something – To see or notice something.

a boulder – A big rock.

gradual - Happening slowly.

a number of – Several.