 Shirakuni Shrine, Himeji. Where can you find a really, really big tree in Himeji city?
You can’t. The City would like you to believe that a standing, living tree does not create jobs. But cutting one down does. And for the past few years I have borne sad witness to an industry that has turned tree doctoring into ‘tree butchering.’ Before the relentless summer heat arrives, small trucks of hard-hatted men with chainsaws disperse throughout our city shaving and snipping, chopping and chipping, wiping out the very shade and oxygen-giving botanicals that we need! Yet in this sprawling western Japanese city, unplanned and mismatched in every sense of the architectural word, small green spaces exist. They are pockets of calm, oases, where a forest giant or two rises, birds congregate, highschool kids smooch and elderly toss coins, clap their hands and bow into the warm, fragrant depths of Shinto shrines. That’s right, I’m talking about the abode of the Gods: Shinto shrines. My local shrine sits on a tiny knoll cut off from the world by a rice paddy sluiceway and a luxuriant wall of foliage. Out of this rise two enormous kusunoki (camphor trees) and at the foot of them stands an old weathered Shinto shrine, pelted by bird poop and succumbing to creeping moss. It is the quietest place in the Good Hood, a traditional neighborhood north of Himeji Castle and my home away from Australia for the past 14 years. So there I sat this morning, on a poop-pelted bench, watching feathers and fruit stones fall from the canopy and shafts of morning sunshine illuminate patches of fiery red spider lilies. Beetles whirred and butterflies flitted through the undergrowth. The reason such life exists is because the grounds of a Shinto shrine are sacred turf--off limits to the little men in hardhats with the biting saws and stinging blades. Trees are the realm of Shinto gods. They are untouchable. My troubles dissolved, I left through the torii (Shinto gateway) refreshed, my mind emptied and at ease, ready for the surge of new knowledge, stimulation and stress that each day brings living in Japan--a country which, despite its traditions, prides itself on living at light-speed. Next week: The Good Hood celebrates Autumn with colour, noise and plenty of hops.
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 A coffee syphon bubbles. Ching! goes a toaster. The doorbell jangles and in walks a man with a limp and sweat on his brow. He shoots a glance at the counter staff and says:
“Iced coffee. Make it cold.” Behind a newspaper a customer sniggers. “Big night, Fujimoto-san?” the staff asks, jiggling cubes into a glass. “Is there any other kind?” He jabs a cigarette between his lips and like a cowboy with a gammy leg hobbles into the cafe’s depths for a quiet smoke ahead of his coffee. The syphons are really bubbling now, like a mad professor’s chemistry set, filling the shop with every aroma from Java to Jamaica. Customers enter in ones and twos and the counter talk is of the nation’s big run on earthquakes, typhoons, tornados and floods in the past week. But I (and these customers) digress. This week’s commentary is on the ups-and-ups of good caffeine hit in the Good Hood, a traditional neighborhood in Himeji city, western Japan, and my home away from Australia for 14 years. While the Way of Tea (cha-no-yu) embodies Japanese sophistication, it is coffee which drives the nation. This is no hat-tip to Starbucks, Seattle’s Best et al. No-no, I’m crediting a far more humble and deserving institution; one that sends the suited battalions off to work each morning with hot coffee and hearty breakfasts in their bellies. I’m talking about the KISSATEN (“keesa” for short): the train station cafe, the sidestreet coffee shop, the neighborhood information hub, morale raiser, instiller of “wa” and neighborly camaraderie, a place where you can be alone but not lonely and have your coffee personally brewed. So it is at Cafe Tiffany which sits beside the slow-moving Ono River on the west side of the Good Hood in Himeji city. It is home to the hobbling cowboy, several chain-smoking housewives, one drunk-by-lunchtime retiree, a lively senior citizens’ croquet team and a swag of other colourful, friendly characters who are so regular they don’t even need to order--a morning greeting suffices. To my knowledge, nowhere in the Good Hood does a cup coffee come at the click of a button, nor in a disposable cup. It comes from a bean that is milled. That is percolated in a glass syphon with hot water that is heated over a white spirit burner. And that is served piping hot in a fine china cup ON A SAUCER. And that’s not all; order before 10:30am and you get a fat wedge of almond-butter toast, a salad with shiso dressing and a hardboiled egg. For it all you pay the yen equivalent of a few bucks. Last week I warned you off a place I call the “Ginz.” But elsewhere in the Good Hood there are no other such landmines. There’s the Laugh Laugh Cafe down the street, a not-for-profit business that gives special needs kids a chance to acquire business and social skills. There is Cafe Parland, run by a friendly young couple who have reversed the demise of my old neighborhood by building a large, airy wooden restaurant-cafe where people come even from outside the neighborhood to eat healthy Japanese fusion cuisine and shoot the breeze over a good brew. I like this place a lot. I like the funky toons, the potted jungle, the natural wood bench seating with wide windows that look out onto olive trees and a herb garden and give you a front seat to the wild Autumn weather everyone’s been talking about. And I LOVE the knockout espressos. Drop by, let’s knock ourselves out together! Next week: I have no idea. But after this next espresso I might.  Photo Jessie Carlson  Let me tell you a tale of two cafes. It begins here in the Good Hood, a traditional Japanese neighborhood in Himeji city, western Japan, and my home away from Australia for 14 years.
Past the Funabiki Barber Shop, the Narusei tea seller, the bicycle mechanic, the yakitori grill, a little further on from the liquor store and the rice miller, there stands a small building with smoke-stained windows and a faded sign that reads “Ginza Tearooms.” An ode to this place might go something like this: “You’re better off in a tea room in Ginza than in the Ginza Tearooms….” It is hands down the filthiest cafe this side of Tokyo Tower--a place where brewed means stewed and dust rises in dunes under the tables. The air hasn’t been changed since the Showa Period. Now I’ve had coffee in some pretty stuffy joints, but this place, the ‘Ginz’ I’ll call it, is more pinched than a Bangkok bus driver’s underpants. And I wondered, I wondered why, after 14 years, had I not noticed this tiny, forgettable place in the shadows at the end of our traditional shopping street. Curiosity almost killed me. I took a seat by the window last Tuesday, ordered, and opened my book of Roald Dahl short stories and started a tale about a sinister hotel madam who lures a young man to a gruesome end. Behind me dice rolled over a greasy tabletop, a man chuckled; ahead of me, a local ancient tapped a hard-boiled egg. Endlessly. My Japanese Java arrived. The matron slid a plate of toast in beside it and backed off slowly. I looked at my book, I looked back at her. Was it me or the toast? Moldy toast! The egg that came with it had been boiled when the last samurai walked these streets. The coffee was bitumen black….one sip, two sips. My tonsils were tarnished. My bowels clanging. I quickstepped across the linoleum to the small room, pressed the grimy light switch and assumed the position that a traditional Japanese toilet demands. With no lock on the door I risked being the main act for the breakfast crowd. Not that they would have known: all heads were lost to a cigarette haze. After washing my hands, I washed them again. I found an unused corner of a grubby towel, wiped my hands, paid my bill and fled. My time at the Ginz was served. I was free to breath the late summer air and marvel at the beautiful blue sky once again. And that is the story of a cafe I know. (Yeah, yeah, I know I said a tale of TWO cafes but I’m over the word limit for this week.) Next week: The Good Hood’s Caffeine High.  Hang 'em high in the Good Hood  Festival fever beats cabin fever Beebedy-beep-beep. Tonight’s air traffic over Japan will be heavier than usual. Across the archipelago, over city, town and paddy, spirits of all ancestors will return en masse to the spirit world.
Obon has been a blast (for them). Three days of lurking and lingering in incense-filled rooms, with the pinging and bonging of altar chimes and the hum and drone of the visiting Buddhist priest’s sutras to venerate their retired souls. In addition, the living must leave their cool, dark homes and venture out under a blistering August sun to pay further homage. This means, for my old friend Ono-san and my old kitchen gardener mate Smokin’ Joe Matsumoto, a trip to the cemetery. City of the Dead, Spirit Suburbia, Hallowed Heights--call it what you will, but here in Himeji city, Ono-san, Matsumoto-san and half a million more, know it as Nagoyama: an entire hillside combed by long, neat rows of gravestones which rise to a Buddhist stupa at the summit. From here I would like to say that ‘on a clear day you can see forever’ but the mills of Nippon Steel on coast cause me to swallow my words. Small paper lanterns are lit and placed at the graves on the first day of Obon to ‘guide’ the spirits in--much like the runway lights of Kansai International Airport. Gravestones are then wetted and cooled with ladles of water and rubbed off, their chrysanthemums changed, offerings made, candles lighted, incense burned and prayers murmured. Occasionally a hard-up drifter might take liberties with the offerings of fruit, snacks and cans of beer and sake, there’s no law against it, but you won’t catch me peeling hot oranges and drinking boiling beer. Obon is a strangely eerie time. Cicadas fall out of the sky dead, crisp as beer snacks, the streets and alleys of the Good Hood, my home for 14 years, are suddenly lifeless, dreary even. Thankfully, Obon is sandwiched by vibrant summer festivals--in the weeks before and after, fireworks turn the nights into day and Himeji’s neighborhood streets fill with stalls and parades of dancing women in yukatas. And the Good Hood, despite its slow decline, partakes. Woo-hooo! Lanterns are hoisted high on the shopping street, yakitori and cotton candy stalls materialise and the courtyard of Keiunji Buddhist temple glows with candles and the cheeks of old shakuhachi flute players who have drunken too much beer. Children appear in yukata, followed by parents and hobbling parents’ parents, all eager to sample the night’s delights; for the kids, that’s mountains of coloured ice and for parents, an icy beer will do nicely. Obon also means the return to hometowns of old school friends, which in turn means you will be hard-pressed to get a table at any of the city’s rooftop beer gardens around this time because of all the sodden reunioning. Seaside Japan empties too after Obon; kids suddenly remember the mountains of summer holiday homework they haven’t touched, while company workers trudge drearily off to catch a bus to somewhere they’d rather forget, dreaming instead of the past week’s seafood feasts, bikini girls and white caps of the Japan Sea or Pacific Ocean. And just like that, summer is gone, slipped through our fingers. Melted away like a wily spirit. Next week: Where can you get a good cup of coffee in a land famous for tea? Why, the Good Hood of course!  Photo: National Geographic  Photo: tokyojournal.org “Can you ride a bicycle?” must be the dumbest question anyone could ask a citizen of Himeji city, western Japan. “You ridin?” Warmer. “Did you grease today?” Now you’re learning. See, in my city, two wheels are king. Citizen Rider rules. In fact, you could say the place runs on rice, takuan and two wheels. The lay of the land encourages it. Save for a few small mounds (which people call mountains), Himeji is as flat as a teppanyaki grill, with narrow streets cut with alleyways and a vast underground parking lot manned by cheery old men in powder blue vests. True, the family car is an extension of the family home in Japan. Yet no citizen will deny that cycling is cleaner, cheaper and faster in rush hour AND, when the sun goes down, can be used under the influence of alcohol (but don’t quote me on that). Citizen Rider is vaguely aware of the road rules, like some nagging little detail they once learned but can’t quite remember. So to all of YOU reading this and contemplating a visit to this great city, I say “When in Rome...” forget the helmet, ride on the sidewalk, the wrong side of the road even, do it while smoking, talking on a cell phone, holding an umbrella, with a case of beer in your front basket and your date on the back. Seriously though, what makes the bicycle the proletariat’s choice is its versatility. It is packhorse, child carrier, people mover and treadmill to the half million of Himeji city.  In the Good Hood, north of Himeji Castle and my home for the past 14 years, people are not so much upwardly mobile as they are simply ‘mobile.’ Outside my door runs a street that should be called the Hood Chi Minh Trail for the amount of two-wheeled traffic it serves. Along this narrow stretch of blacktop comes and goes a host of familiar faces: the orange-haired kid with the pop singer’s voice, the dawn-riding opera singer (an elderly Puccini fan), the three complaining housewives (always three abreast), the chuckling kitchen gardeners who waft onions, the Funabiki Barber boys with their coconut haircuts, and the list rolls on.
Oh yeah, and then there’s me, the token foreigner on a peach-coloured ladies’ bicycle named “Sweet Libs”. This classic beauty is on extended loan from a friend of mine. So each time the cops pull me over for a random check of the serial number, I have to unwind a story so long their eyes glaze over like mackerel in a fish market. They quietly slip away, nodding politely. Can’t blame them. For pulling me over, that is. You see, years ago, the city was besieged by a gang of bicycle thieves. That was the summer of ‘99 and I lost three bicycles--and one the following year--to sticky fingers. Word on the street was that the hot bikes were being shipped to hot countries in the southeast and even North Korea. A police crackdown choked their operation, but to this day I still wonder if some radish farmer north of the DMZ isn’t whistling happily home on a set of wheels that once turned to my rhythm. There are half a million people in Himeji city. Almost everyone has a bicycle. Unfortunately not everyone loves their bicycle, and here and there you find them, abandoned, saddleless, half-submerged in the silt of Semba River or the Himeji Castle moat, or stripped to their frame in some vacant lot. How could you not love a bicycle that goes by the name “Fat Cat”, or “Ferrari”, or “Fromage”, or “Vincent”, or “Mimolett,” and my personal favourite, “Eleanor.” Next week: The Good Hood erupts with summer festival fever. Stay tooned.  Himeji Shimin Pool As Himeji simmers into August there is only one expression you need to know:
“Atsui-naaaa!” No other country to my knowledge substitutes “Good morning” with “Geez it’s hot!” But as temperatures soar and humidity threatens to collapse the atmosphere, these two hyphenated words are all you need to carry a conversation in the Good Hood, my home for the past 14 years. It might go something like this: Atsui-naaa! = Hotter than hell isn’t it! Atsui-na? = Me? Oh I’m surviving. Atsui-na... = Only just... Atsui-na? = Matsui-san’s dog died, didn’t you hear? Atsui-na. = Heatstroke. Atsui-na... = Cremation’s tomorrow... Atsui-na? = Going? Naaa = Nah. Atsui! atsui! = Hear it’ll be hotter than hell. But to the meat of the matter: Summer is for swimming. And just where does one go to cool off in the Good Hood? Well, there’s the Semba River; its waters run swift, cool and teem with life, though not the human kind, for the reason that dozens of neighborhoods lie between its source in the mountains and my house, and the ‘northerners’ tend to muddy the waters for us ‘downstreamers.’ I try to visualise my neighborhood as it stood 50 years ago. My old friend, Ono-san, helps me: she says it was “a lush blanket of rice fields with a river running through it” and shaded by camphor trees where she could swim after school. Nice. But last year a government-funded construction scheme erected a wall along the river’s banks, all but snuffing out that memory. “The neighborhood’s steaming,” howls Ono-san. So these days hot heads and hot bodies are cooled in inflatable pools; huge pink and lavender-coloured things into which pile the kids, and the kids from next door and the friends and cousins of these kids, until Archimedes water displacement theory is enacted and all water flows out and down the street. Returning to the sea from whence it came. So with the river sealed off, the pink inflatables stretched to their limits and the Seto Inland Sea only a vague whiff of salt on the humid air, what to do? What to do? The Shimin Pool, of course! “Shimin” (“Citizens” in Japanese) and “swimmin” are interchangeable words. Coupled with “pool” they both stand for the same thing. Like the watering holes of the Serengeti, the Shimin Pool is where the herds of Himeji city migrate on hot afternoons. By 2pm every patch of wet concrete has been paved over with picnic sheets or shade tents and the pools--a wave pool, current pool, water slide and super warm toddlers’ pool--have become large pots of bobbing, sunburned citizens. By day’s end, when the human tides have receded and the distant thunderheads loom high, dragonflies come down from the nearby mountain to drink at the pools’ edge. This is the best time of day. I don’t see too many of my elderly neighbors at the Shimin Pool. “Too noisy, too crowded!” says Smokin’ Joe Matsumoto, the old kitchener gardener who lives up my street. Privately though, I think he still feels some nostalgia for the public pools; it’s where many of the city’s old timers came of age during their summer holidays, so long ago. Next week: The Good Hood by bicycle! 
From late June to mid-September, we of the Good Hood drink the air not breathe it. The humidity is crushing and life becomes strangely aquatic as we wallow in a bath of our own making and watch our skin take on a shiny, glistening sheen.
The elderly tend their gardens at sunrise to beat the heat, eat watermelon, then burrow away in their dark, ancient houses until it subsides. Then, around sunset when the lights come on, windows open to reveal elderly men stripped to the waist with cold bottles of beer and televised baseball games turned to full volume in front of them. These--and eating more watermelon--are the rituals of summer in the Good Hood. Another is bathing regularly. “A shower twice a day keeps evil spirits away,” says my old friend Ono-san. By “spirits” I think she means the odorous kind. Whatever. It doesn’t stop a crust of salt forming on my hard-working collar. If you’ve been following this blog, you will note that kids don’t feature much in the Good Hood commentary. This is because, like water sprites, they seem only to appear on weekends along my neighborhood river, the Semba, where the medaka fishing is good. That is until summer holidays begin. Then hell breaks loose, an amiable hell, punctuated by the whump! of a soccer ball against the neighbor’s wall or the pop-pop of a distance skyrocket. And suddenly sprites are everywhere. But what really signals the start of summer is the 6:30am reveille, the call to arms (and legs and stiff torsos) by NHK national radio and neighborhood associations across Japan. This is “rajio taiso” (radio exercises), a tradition designed to raise the nation’s youth at ‘school hours’ throughout their summer holidays. In my neighborhood, where many residents have been up since 4am, the crackle of the NHK broadcast from a portable radio is matched by the crackling of knee and hip joints as the elderly lead the sleepy-eyed youth in a gymnastic routine in our local park each morning. So where to cool off as day wears on and humidity climbs? The Funabiki Mens’ Barber Shop is a good start; it’s air-conditioned for your comfort, with Tahitian Lime hair tonic to cool your scalp, piped Okinawan music your temper and the rhythmic snip-snip of scissors to lull you into a perfumed doze--until the perfumed bill arrives. For the kids and the elderly life is just one big sweet watermelon. But what about the poor parents of the Good Hood? How do they keep their cool during the long hot summer? I know the answer because I have served on the neighborhood rubbish collection supervisory team (NRCST) and twice a month, at our designated collection point, have watched the middens of empty beer cans rise to rival the Pyramids of Giza (well almost). Speaking of liquid refreshments, next week’s blog squeezes into swimwear and goes to the City Swimming Pool. Stay tuned. 
Image thanks to koshersamurai.wordpress.com
When the residents of the Good Hood roll out their futons and fluff their chaff pillows at the end of another long, sultry day, most are too tired to hear the orchestra warming up outside their window: the clicks and whirrs, hisses and purrs, croaks and growls of the neighborhood’s other denizens.
The ‘others’ are the insects, reptiles, stray cats, pets-on-the-run, drunk English teachers and other nocturnal animalia exotica that take care of their primal needs after the meek, the sane and the sensible have hit the tatami mats. Like other towns and cities across Japan, Himeji’s skies, streets and waterways crawl with creatures of the scaly, slimy, boggled-eyed or beaked kind. Look into the sky on sunset and you’ll see hundreds of black crows cruising north after scavenging the city streets and parks. Where are they headed? “Where do you think,” says Smokin’ Joe Masumoto, the old kitchen gardener who lives up my street. “The Crow Bar. Ha-ha!” (Is the quality of one’s jokes relative to one’s age? Chew on that one and get back to me.) But back to the animals - ah yes, the bats that skirt and dive for insects over the Semba River on dusk, the white egrets that trawl the shallows for medaka fish, the swallows that roost under the eves of people’s houses and bother no-one. Unlike those damn paddy frogs. How would you like a million amphibians on your doorstep, generating a sonic ripple that comes in nauseous waves from across the rice paddies? If you live close enough, your money is on the paddy snakes. As this traditional neighbourhood declines as a result of an aging population and a preference for modern building materials over traditional ones, an irony emerges. Nature is making a comeback. Yesterday I passed by a clump of ivy in the shape of a house. A few doors down stood a residence taken prisoner by bamboo gone mad. Roots have penetrated its entire block, pushing spears through the roof and encaging the house in a green grill. Nothing has come or gone from that place, to my knowledge, for ten years. The gardens of these abandoned homes run wild; they become a fruit free-for-all, a biwa (loquat) bonanza, a persimmon party, kinkan (kumquat) and kiwi klatsch for the local birdlife. For months I could not locate the source of a mysterious pinging sound outside my toilet window. Then one day I looked up and there, balanced on a telephone wire, sat a fat crow firing persimmon seeds out its butt at the drain pipe. Dink, dink! ping-padink! Now late July and the incessant drone of cicadas heralds the end of the rainy season and onslaught of summer. Can you imagine the sound of a food processor filled will one yen coins, turned on ‘high’. Multiply that din by ten and you’ll appreciate what I’ll be waking to over the next six weeks. Ah summer. Now there’s a season to test the best of the Good Hood. But more on keeping one’s cool next week.   Last week I told YOU about the smells of the Good Hood, the crazy potpourri of soy sauce, Tahitian Lime hair tonic, rice paddy water, dog piss and yakitori smoke that defines the traditional neighborhood where I live.
My house does not contribute to this because noise generation is our speciality: kids screaming, meal pots clanging, bath toys ricocheting, shouts, screams, whistles, mixed with the sounds of Marvin Gaye and my six-year-old singing Jingle Bells. Just what goes on inside The Foreigner’s house? My elderly neighbors can hardly imagine. But let me talk about the building itself which contains this madness. It’s a traditional Japanese town house made of wood, bamboo, mud and heavy kiln-fired roof tiles, built in the year of Meiji Emperor’s death, 101 years ago, and my home for the past 14 years. It rises two stories, with tatami rooms on each floor and paper doors dividing them. There are also tokonoma alcoves for hanging scrolls and psychedelic crayoned Father’s Day portraits. Few buildings of its likeness still stand in the Good Hood. Many have fallen to the wrecking ball, only to have risen again as high-tech ‘earthquake-proof’ homes with all-weather exteriors and fake wooden floors which hum with robot vacuum cleaners and plasma screen walls. Such homes you must grow into. Traditional Japanese houses, on the other hand, grow on you; and I’m not talking mold either. It’s not the creaking stairway or the earthen walls which shudder in typhoons, or the paper sliding doors which rattle like old bones in earthquakes, or the hidden gaps in the tatami mats which offer a revolving door service for insects great and small. No, it’s more simple than that; it’s the natural materials and the atmosphere they create. The smell of tatami, the smoothness of the tokonoma wood, the diffusion of light through paper doors and the shifting breeze about the engawa (veranda) that Japanese like my old friend Ono-san appreciate. She says traditional mud walls breathe better than plasterboard and to never underestimate the strength of natural wood beams in an earthquake. With each year passing year, however, each typhoon and long hot summer, a little more of this house returns to the earth and the air and a little more energy and ingenuity must be expended to keep it inhabitable; I corked the walls with my socks during the last typhoon and re-papered the sliding doors with ‘plastic paper’ to stop my son from punching them out. But there are some tides that can’t be turned, like the ping-pong ball which rolls smoothly from east to west without any coaxing, indicating the house has a serious lean. Unlike me, it’s on the move. A final word on the non-human inhabitants. A gecko stands guard over the front door at nights, goes by the handle, Ralphie. Mosquitoes that give him the slip are dealt a heavy hand by us humans. The white ants have been driven off, the slugs banished and the insect world now favours the arachnids--enormous yoru-gumo spiders which roam the tatami on hot summer nights. We call them the Roach Rangers. Before I forget, some years ago two English teachers who lived in this very house discovered a snake in their squat toilet. At first they were suspicious and looked at eachother accusingly, but realising it was alive, quickly photographed it for the record and dispatched it with jerk of a flush chain. Like many newcomers to the Good Hood, it’s easy to take a wrong turn and get yourself lost. Let’s keep with the animalia topic. Next week: The Good Hood Runs Wild.  photo courtesy Hellenismo. A few years back, an elderly woman passed away in my neighborhood. I didn’t know her name but I used to see her in calligraphy class each week at the community centre where I taught English. The ambulance staff wheeled her away on a gurney and left her house to stand empty for two years. Then two weeks ago the Machines moved in. Where she once cooked, ate, slept and tended her chrysanthemums, the smell of a freshly-poured carpark now lingers. When a house made of mud and bamboo walls, tiled roof and tatami floors falls to the Machines, it leaves an olfactoric imprint, a strange mix of ancient carpentry, clay, straw and horse hair, that is hard to forget. “Nothing lasts forever,” says my old friend, Ono-san. “Not even a rock.” Not even the 100-year-old townhouse in which I’ve lived for the past 14 years. A few more years please! But life in a declining traditional Japanese neighborhood rolls on, yes it does. Crowding the air with its odors, scents, aromas and fragrances--a whiff here, a waft there--smells that define the weather and seasons, daily rituals, festivals, people’s homes and businesses. Can YOU define your neighborhood in smells? In 500 words I’m gonna try... ...or at least you are. Go ahead, see if you can match the smells to their sources opposite:
And there are many others. When a southerly blows up my street, there’s a hint of Tahitian Lime hair tonic from the Funabiki Men’s Barber Shop in the air; a northerly brings the smell of camellia oil and the promise of a big hair day at the Wella Ladies Hair Salon a few doors down.
Smell the seasons, too: the heavy pungence of rainy season (now), the tang of altar incense in Obon (Aug), the sweet scent of kinmokusei flowers (early Oct) and the bitter smell of burning chaff after the rice harvest (late Oct). Can’t wind this post up without mentioning the curious cocktail of smells which resides in my own house. Something like this: add one room of damp paperbacks to three rooms of tatami mats, soak in sweat for one long hot summer, drizzle with soy sauce and garnish with empty beer cans. But more about the grand old Japanese house I live in next week. Answers: 1i. 2g. 3h. 4e. 5j. 6.f 7.c 8b. 9a. 10d. |
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