For Aeravi:

I was once told by my English teacher that she was to go to a funeral for a woman she knew when she was younger, and her family requested that everyone bring a jar, filled with something that they considered important or relevant to their relationship with her. She told us to use this information as inspiration, and show her the results when she came back. True story.

Now whenever i think of empty jars, I can see a huge cottage in the British countryside, its summer, and warm, but the weather isn't terribly good, and its probably closing on 5pm, the house's garden stretches down a mild slope, there are giant pot plants, and tools dangling from vines and wooden structures around the edge, and toy trucks and a rickety metal framed swing and see-saw combo, and wooden bench which probably needs to be bonfire fuel, but seeing as its only the kids who use it, it will be left there until winter rains claim it. At the bottom of the garden is a two barred wooden fence, which frames the lower part of the rolling fields which run down the huge hill side to the surrounding valley. To the left of the fields below the fence are more fields, belonging to the neighbours, and to the right, the forest lives. Huge evergreen trees which deepen into black velvet shadows. The place would be scary for a child, had it not been coupled with the beauty of the surrounding valley, and if you had lived there your whole life, you had nothing to fear of the close relationship you developed with its outer edges, searching for whatever secrets it is that forests keep.

Whenever i see empty jars, I see a small girl in a flower patterned summer dress and a tatty cardigan that she is only allowed to wear when there is no change of the family going out in the day. Its garden clothes. She wears red wellies and had her hair tied back in a knot, but not very successfully. She is coming out of the giant wooden door at the centre of the back of the house, and struggling to shut it because her arms are too short for her body to get out of the way when she pulls on the handle, completely ignores the need to tell people where she is going. She's carrying a large empty glass jar, with the lid in the pocket of her dress, and she is heading straight for the fence at the bottom of the garden. It takes a small amount of concentration for her to hoist herself over the sty, but she's thinking of other things, and absent mindedly jumps down and hops into the forest, going about her daily business, like she is not that interested in it, but knows its got to be done.

Whenever I see empty jars, I see a huge forest and this girl far too small to fit into the picture proportionally strolling along, looking up at the wildlife, touching her favourite trees, lest the gremlins come out of the holes that only a human touch can close (lucky for the forest that she is there then really), picking small flower shrubs that are growing in the sunny patches and dropping them moments later because she forgot what it was she was fiddling with. All the time, keeping pace and knowing exactly where she was going, carrying the large jar all the while. At one point, there is a yellow forest flower, which is probably attached to a giant weed, she scoops up some compost from the ground absent mindedly with the jar without looking at what she is doing, while she concentrates on pulling the flower free without upsetting the rest of the plant. She pots the flower and carries on trotting through. After the picture is clear enough in my head, and i get the feeling she has been walking for long enough to be away from anywhere that would be of interest to any other person, she hops ahead to a ferny area which covers the floor of an arch of two or three trees, like a large doorway, through it she goes and places the jar at her feet.

When I see an empty jar, I see the jar with the yellow flower full of soil at the feet of the girl with the red wellies, and touching the far edge of the jar is another empty jar, and in front of that jar is another, and in front of that jar is a wall of jars, and stretching like a wonky round house outward, either side of the girl, and behind the wall of jars are more jars, and the jars tower above her into the sky, like jacks beanstalk. Less than a third of the jars have plants in them, some ferns, some flowers, growing and spilling out into the jars below them. Some of the jars are green, some are brown, some special ones are blue, and occasionally there is a pink tinted jar. As the tower goes up they begin to glisten in the shards of sunlight that hit them. I imagine if it went as high as the sky, that there would be clouds and birds circulating the top jars. The girl stands for a while marvelling at the height of the structure, smiles to herself, and turns and hops all the way back to the house, through the forest, over the fence, through the trucks and toys and shovels and plants, onto the step of the giant yellow wooden door, and back into the house.

She has such a responsibility, but she never fails to uphold it.

Ah the poetry of the open road...

Yesterday i decided i was going to buy a bicycle, because wherever i walk i notice myself ignoring whats going on arond me to rank all the bikes in coolness, and imagine what my perfect shopper would look like. I enlisted Jon to help me, but instead of going to buy a new one, he convinced me i should buy his off him, except his is over an hour away, and it was broken, apparently, but it did sound more perfect than the cheap one i could get from the supermarket in Numobukuro. So i decided i would do something useful and productive with my holiday, and fix up and collect a bike.

Thats what i did today, with the help of Verena, we went to Asaka, found the bike, got the tire pumped up (so much for being broken Jon) and i cycled it all the way back to Kotake-cho. It only took me an hour and a half, in the rain, and the dark, but i feel really good about myself, and i cant actually wait until the bad weather goes away so i can go and explore Tokyo by bike. Im going to start planning now. The cranes are going to have to step aside.

In talk of cranes, i have made 90 cranes. The are strung up in rainbow strings of 18, and they look awesome. I cant wait for Charlie to come back and wow her with my hyper-developed prowess in folding.

Tomorrow hopefully we shall finalise the plans for going to Korea, I actually cannot wait to go there. I received permission from a man we met out there approving us of having a drink with him and his friends, so it should be rukkus. Maybe i should begin the process of reminding him that he said we could stay with him soon, lest he be surprised. OR i could just leave it to the friendly charms of Charlie when we get there. ..

Right now, i have embarked on a new project which will again conveniently take me away from the studies which are really important. I am delving into the money laundering world of the superficial backwards movie industry and watching all the movies the poo-sniffers involved think are worth their weight in blood money and have nominated for best film. If im still not satisfied that i chose to get out of media when i did, i shall move onto the other films in other categories. Finishing with a delightfuly refreshing and reassuring Best Foreign Language film. Im still not sure why those films are never allowed to access the category of Best Film, but then im not George Clooney. I think im trying to rant, i better stop before no one understands the complex links i make in my head and forget to say out loud.

Nothing more, get on with your life, and get off the internet, the mice on bicycle generators are growing weary.

Bit by bit, the dreams are all coming to fruition.

Folding paper cranes makes me feel a way I've never known before i went to Hiroshima. The Story of Sadako comes into my head every time i fold paper, and this feeling which gets my heart racing takes up my thoughts until i finish. And the more i fold the more i think about it, and the more i think about it, the more i want to make a thousand cranes. It feels a little like defiance, and a little like regret. So i have made the obvious choice, and decided to make a thousand cranes before i leave Japan. I'm expecting a revelation to come at the end or something. Maybe a wish. Here's the beginning, ill keep you updated.

Its taken me so long to write anything down because I've been spending far too much time indulging myself with things that i love: reading; eating; learning guitar; learning Japanese; watching ghost in the shell; sleeping; origami etc. For three whole days i don't think i said a word to anyone, and it was fucking fantastic. Then it started dragging a bit, and i was getting more and more pissed of with Bella Swan's constant self obsessed whining, so i have been mixing up my time with the company of others. I found that Jon and Eugene's new part of town is actually a pretty cool part of town, and i may very well buy myself a new bike soon to go to see them easier. I found that Hoppi is a drink i need to fear rather than love. I hung out with Lucas and helped him make glass balls into earing's, and i went to his wife Aeravi's black light exhibition, where i met a Scottish dude, and a brilliant man called Kenji. I bought paints for my Gundam model, and i started building it. I learnt how to make flowers and frogs and people and boxes out of paper. I mentally prepared myself for my holiday plans over the next six months, including planning the flights, and i learnt how to play Ziggy Stardust on the Guitar. I have enjoyed the last two weeks immensely.

Now however, I'm getting that itching to go back to school, lest i completely forget what I'm doing with my life. I went to the university library today after finding out my scholarship was late, thinking i might as well abuse the facilities I'm being paid to use, and got out some Japanese fiction by Abe and Tanizaki. I thought if they were shit, at least i had tried, and i wouldn't feel guilty only reading Murakami. That's next anyway. Japanese isn't doing to badly either, i've been listening into conversations as much as i can, and ive realised my vocab isn't too bad, i just have a terrible time working out the context of the topic. Also, i've been committing a lot of time to Kanji, which turns out when you make it a challenge, is really fun to learn. I happily decided i had reached the 100 Kanji mark yesterday, and rewarded myself with chocolate from the vat that mum sent me. Sadly the vat is only a handful of Easter eggs now. That's nothing to be proud of.

So what happened over the last two months that has made me too busy to write about i hear you ask? I cant remember, although i took enough pictures that they pretty much tell the story without me having to divulge how i felt about the whole thing. Going on Holiday was going on holiday: great fun, lots of travelling and a lot of uphill cycling. I filled a little book with flyers and tickets and memories that i didn't really need to keep hold of and will never find a right place to store, lets see...

I began the holiday with a god awful cold, but Alex brought a long a small chemist, so i managed to dry up like a prune in no time, which helped me over come my cold with good old fashioned healthy eating and wrapping up warm, i am getting very good at looking after my health... (that bit was for nan, hi nan, miss you, xx) ...and so we took some bikes that our hippie layabout hostel owners allowed tenant's to use for free, and searched around the city for a couple of days, castles, aquariums etc, it was all lovely, but clearly the kind of place you need to visit when the sun is at its best and you have time to island hop. Anyway, i was happy to get back to the mainland.

Nagasaki is a brilliant part of Japan, its a valley covered in hills which are covered in tombs and graveyards, and winding in between the old and new buildings which fill up the bottom is a brilliant and well kept old fashioned tram line. The place is so small that you could walk most of it in a day, but the trams are an important part of the history, and its an experience to see the stops named after the memorial sights all around. The speciality food is Champon, which is like vegetable ramen, with tonnes and tonnes of vegetables, and it is of course, delicious. Aside from temples galore, there's a park with a huge statue of the first samurai to wear boots overlooking the bay, the city and the hills. We found this place by walking vertically for a ridiculous amount of time through a graveyard to what we thought would be a beautiful temple, turns out the temple was the construction site we passed near the bottom. We weren't disappointed, the view was pretty spectacular.

Anyway, this man defied the terms of the samurai, put on some boots and went into merchant business, establishing a new generation of elites wot like to trade. He was a very clever man apparently, and if his statue was anything to go by, a pretty attractive man as well. The war memorials, of which there were many, were also on a hill, along the other side of the city. There was a park, with many statues and a giant fountain. Water is an important part of the atomic bomb memorial process, as water was the only thing thousands of people thought about as they died, and you're not expected to forget that around here. The museum focused on education of atomic warfare, and how ghastly its existence is. The testimonials of survivors were in their hundreds on the walls, and on the TV screens. I try to find words that explain how effective they are, but it makes you quiet with incomprehension, all i can think of is a humiliated "I'm so very sorry".

We met some Americans who were living in Korea at our very lovely dorm, and then got the night bus to Hiroshima. Similar to Nagasaki in an bizarre way, it too is laced with tram tracks, but has a more city feel to it, spread over a larger, flatter area, the tram actually serves as an important mode of transportation. We arrived 3 hours before life began in the morning, so we found the living space, and i began learning how to make cranes. This was more appropriate than i could have wanted it to be, as Hiroshima is where Sadako's story took place, and where hundreds of thousand of paper cranes find themselves sent every year. When you get to the memorial park here, its more apparent that Hiroshima has dedicated itself to the campaign for peace through example. I cant explain in enough words, but everyone HAS to see this place once in their life. It a legend of history, and i don't worry that were never going to forget it. The park is lager than that of Nagasaki, and is crossed by many paths, in the centre of the city, you can see the tall buildings all around. The are is filled with trees, which i could grasp, because the said nothing would be able to grow in Hiroshima for 75 years after the destruction. It only took 6, which they also said was a miracle. In the park is the Sadako statue, and the eternal flame, which they wont put out until nuclear war is no longer a threat. At this point, when i saw huge buildings towering around, trees that aren't supposed to be alive, people cycling to work through what was a nuclear wreckage 60 years ago, and the giant symmetrical memorial river with the museum at the end, i felt like i had swallowed a wrench and it was causing an implosion of sadness. I don't think I'm going to forget that place as long as i live. What i imagined a town dedicated to the memorial of an atomic attack to feel like was nothing in comparison to reality, i understand the phrase "you really have to see it" perfectly.

Anyway, there was lots to do, and so we did it and then went home. Okanomuyaki is the speciality here, and we ate it until we felt sick, its possibly one of the most awesome meals in the world. I had a day of relaxation which i wasted getting absolutely blind drunk on red wine before mum turned up. That's another story anyway, so, with the great sentiment of southern Japan, Peace.