Pansy violetsPansies have served as an integral part to the landscape of Japan in winter and spring. I started growing pansies last November. After their full blossom in a comparatively warm autumn last year, their rigor has amazed me since then. As the natural world is gradually waking up from dormancy and responding slowly to the call of spring, these tiny monkey-faced flowers are already, again, in full bloom.

The impression that the name of viola, a species that pansy derived from, gives to me is romantic and therefore connotes fragility. However, they are very winter-hardy.

A couple of days ago, I came across the following sentence in Katherine Mansfield's shorty story, 'An Indiscreet Journey': '[p]olicemen are as thick as violets everywhere'.

I would not have paid serious attention to this descriptive detail if I hadn't had pansies in the garden. It is perhaps too cruel to associate these herbal flowers with policemen and the masculinity that their profession represents, but the density of the blossoms and the watchful faces of the flowers were made surprisingly sensible.

Reading

In order to reread The Canterbury Tales, I started to use Kindle, one of the electronic readers available in the market. It has been a very pleasant reading experience especially when I was traveling between places. For people like me who had considered herself as a devoted follower of the cult of real books, it was certainly a surprise. Reading on iPad, iPhone, or mobile phones has been a trend around me for some time, and my first attempt was a recommendable one. For a moment, I wondered if my faith in real books had fallen apart.

Yet, there are still places where electronic devices are banned, for instance, foreign embassies. (Well, I have to admit that it is not the kind of place where one would frequent.) For security reasons, the embassy that I visited last month disallowed any electronic gadgets; therefore, my paperback Chaucer regained its presence. When the book was opened, immediately I felt nostalgic for the smell and the texture of real papers and the crispy sound when pages were turned. This book that I carried was a fourth of a fat volume of Chaucer's works dismembered for the convenience of reading. Lacking a proper back cover, it felt rather soft and fragile between my palms when the sweat and grease of my fingers damped the pages.

It needed a cover, I decided.

Then, as a amateurish tailor, I spent 3 days cutting and sewing a cover for my Chaucer. The tailoring process also involved necessary mending work when my ill-trained hands misguided the scissors to a wrong direction. This manual labor had resulted in stiff shoulders, sore eyes, and some delays in other work. The task was overall enjoyable, albeit I also felt sorry for the time that might have been more effectively used (who knows?!). The threads that are snaking all around the end product are embarrassing. The embarrassment, however, does not prevent me from adoring the floral pattern of berries(?) or flowers (?) in the frame of cold and conservative black color. It would be a romanticized metaphor for reading itself, I think: inside the dull, conventional, squarish format of a book there are many exciting ideas and amazing stories blooming as the reader goes along.

Despite the cold weather these days and the saddening emotional climate in Japan at the moment, spring has stolen in in the air. I have been waiting for spring since August when we moved. As I have written on the new year's postcards to friends in the freezing December of 2010, spring has been very much anticipated because there are so many to look forward to in the garden. It is unfortunate that right before spring will start, the nation is faced with multiple unprecedented natural and artificial disasters. Yet nothing will linger forever and there is always a tomorrow to live for.

Gardening is a philosophy that attends to the arts of anticipation. A seed planted is carefully nurtured to grow into, to enrich, and to flesh out, its gardener's imagination. Before budding, before stemming, beofore flowering, there are many to worry about, many uncertainties, but much more to hope for.

The seeds that I sprinkled in the soil last autumn have projected for me an exciting image of the garden in the spring.

Today, I planted the first tubers for this year, dahlia, and will look forward to their blossom in between early summer and autumn this year, a time when, I hope, the people and the country that are suffering from the current catastrophe will recover and move forward again. It would take some time, and a gardener's patience and vision will be helpeful when one cultivates the land, cares for the wounds, and looks forward to the future.

The tulip bulbs, which were planted last winter, have pierced through the ground and are vigorously extending their leafy arms to the sun. It was not until the fourth month after the seeding that I was assured of their vitality when buds were felt at the fingertips beneath the surface of the soil. Last winter was fiercely relentless, very cold and dry, but they have made it through.

Writing in the beginning:
Dear friends and family, thank you for heart-warming messages and kind offers. I have talked to my parents and have had them understand the situation here. We will take good care of ourselves and will move when it is necessary. Thank you all for kind supports.

As the name of this blog, Sorry-ology, denotes, the blog owner is expected to be quite pessimistic and melancholic in her writing as she is trained to be sensitive exclusively to the bitterness of life. (So dull! I know!) So be warned of any negative thoughts and feelings that this blog might provoke.


In one of the previous entries, I mentioned using flashlight when there is blackout and managing household work with dimmed indoor lighting.

Soon after last weekend's quake, the supply of batteries and all sorts of illuminating equipments in town all went out. Instead of going for batteries and flashlights (the truth was that none could be found) we acquired some solar light. These solar lighting rods are originally designed for gardens and have been one of my most-wanted items on my wish list for gardening.

On the top of each lamp is a solar panel that transforms sunlight to electricity and recharges a battery inside it. When the small sensor next to the panel can no longer sense sunlight, the lamp would be turned on by the recharged battery. The light that each lamp can offer is only minimal, but it is enough to help us get around in the house in the dark. I have been very fond of this idea of clean energy that this small gadget has embodied. It does not seem to involve very complicated mechanics and appears neat and affordable. What a legacy of the sun that is channeled by modern technology!

Next week, we will have solar panels implemented on the roof following the plan that was scheduled before the quake. I am very excited about the idea of having the house powered up mostly by solar energy in the daytime! I have to admit that there was a point at which my moral courage and commitment to the environment were daunted by the high cost that this change will cause (even after the subsidies from the government and the city council). I am very ashamed of that moment of weakness. Fortunately, K has been there supporting the plan and made it work. With the solar panels, in the future we will be able to recreate power, use it, and sell it to the electricity company to reuse in other needed areas. It is probably unlikely that we will be able to make any monetary gains out of it, but there is nothing to lose. At least, we are making efforts to make it a better environment.

The daily presence of the sun is assuring and comforting. It is probably how the arrangement of the universe has meant to be: always there is the sun to rely on, to be used and reused without many consequential damages to the earth. And perhaps it is only now that the technology has brought us to the realisation of such a grand design.

I prepared two emergency backpacks today.

The idea had been hatched in my mind for some time, but this quake and a flyer about preparation for emergent occasions yesterday finally made me carry out the plan.

There were probably more than 30 items on the list , but I only packed those that seem to be most needed and those that were available to me in the house. My bags contain the following items: canned food and nutrition tablets for energy, raincoats for bad weathers, plastic sheet to sleep and sit on, lighter to make fire, gloves and ropes for rough environment, medical kit for cases of injury and illness, towels, tissue paper and alcohol handwash for hygiene, and flash light for nights. Bottled water and clothing were also packed in.

The flyer advises that a bag of 15 kg is ideal for a male adult to carry, and 10 kg for a female.

I have tried my backpacks, and they are not light. A rearrangement is inevitable.

Packing is never an easy task for me, I have to admit, either for moving or short trip. I am too attached to the things that I own. My dependence on my belongings has made me their possession instead.

I have always been anxious before check-in counters in airports every time when I travel. It has been a question for a long time: how weighty is a life? or, how light should it be? We might only need 10 to 15 kg to live on, but how much is required to have a life?

It was probably the first time for me to be honest about my anxiety after the quake. At the moment of panic attacks, I fired complaints at K accusing him of all the preparations that I myself should have done but didn't.

K took me to an emergency shopping to acquire the things that I thought we should have had in preparation for the ever-unfolding disaster. There were empty shelves in supermarkets, but most of the food supply seemed to be running smooth. After I stuffed my shopping bags, sanity returned.

After the quake last week, the planned power-cut in Tokyo has divided my daytime into preparing food and eating meals. It is probably a desirable means to distract myself from the negative thoughts that are triggered by repetitive news updates. To avoid cooking in dark and to make food preservable, I would be cooking and pickling between meals in the afternoon. Usually soon after all preparations, dinner has to be served and finished before electricity is cut off.

Today in the dark we watched a film on laptop together. With a small torch in hand, I looked through the window into the moon-lit darkness. Perhaps it will be full of radioactive substances out there at some point, a thought into which my wild and pessimistic imagination dragged me. But on this side of the window, every moment is peaceful and beautiful together with K no matter what might become out there.

Thank you, K.

50 percent of luminance

Everyday life has become stressful since the moment when everything was shaken and displaced 5 days ago on the 11th of March.

The pace of the cosmopolitan life was hampered but is trying to resume slowly, but the busy landscape of Tokyo has been inevitably silenced since then. On the morning of the 12th, after a night's horror, I woke up to a bright but quiet Saturday. The day was seemingly as peaceful as any other Saturday, but the soundlessness was unusually uneasy and agitating. The rhythm of routine in the house was greatly altered and interrupted by the 24-hour update of TV news about the devastating earthquake and its aftermath disasters. The flow of life was halted and stopped in front of an unending stream of news updates and a string of more and more heart-breaking images.

Due to the crisis in the nuclear plants in Fukushima and the shortage of electricity supply in the eastern part of Japan, Tokyo metropolitan has started a planned power-cut since yesterday. To be of any help, we have been trying to economize every degree of power. Therefore, whenever lighting is needed in the house, we would tune the light down to a degree that is supposed to be more environmentally friendly. 50 percent of luminance.

Thus in such partial brightness we watch news, cook, eat and feel an ever-aggravating sense of worry about the disasters.

Over these days, I have been thinking how we have persuaded ourselves in the first place to create such a gigantic bomb, nuclear plant, to worry ourselves at this point. Many questions have been asked whether such a monstrous electricity-generating machine is really necessary to keep the body of economy working. And it seems that most of the time, the answer is negative. Is it merely a cheaper and therefore convenient option into which short-sighted politicians and business vultures ensnare the public?

If 50 percent of luminance is manageable to live a life, if 50 percent of energy can be saved when more attention is paid to details, if 50 percent of efforts can be made to develop a cleaner and safer energy, we would probably be better free from this current state of great anxiety about the threat that the power plants have posed to lives.

curve of sunlight

A patch of growing alfalfa sprouts bent towards the sun.
It is quite amazing to see how plants manage to survive wherever they are, indoors or outdoors, in harsh winter or steaming summer. Every fine stem practices well this ritual of solar worshipping in spite of how I have moved it around in different directions.

Plants are unbelievable tough and resilient. In a conversation with some ecologists a couple of months ago, they informed me of some amazing findings about the ecological cycle. At some point, we touched upon a question about what might be the strongest life on the planet. Plants, or trees in particular, apparently. If a city is abandoned, trees will take over everything very soon. They break cement, uproot skyscrapers, hold on to the earth and live on while all man-made structures gradually disappear with time. Nature is extremely fragile but irresistibly powerful at the same time.

I recall an undelivered speech by John, Annie's husband, in the movie, Calendar Girls (2003).
Before passing away from leukaemia, John wrote a speech for the Women's Institute (where Annie and her fellow ladies in Yorkshire are involved) comparing women to sunflowers. Sunflowers never fail to follow and trace the sun, the source of life and energy, and so are women who always remain hopeful and strives to live on.

Last year, an acquaintance asked how everything had settled down for me as a new immigrant in Japan. He commented that '女性は強ういです': women are tough. I do not know if this is a shared opinion among men, but it seems to explain a lot about the lives of many women around me: my grandmother, my mother, and female friends, who have taken care of their families and built up their life all over the world. Some are happily triumphant; some take on whatever comes to them.

I am rather happy to hear that comment honestly. However, I have also heard of some women's stories that are too sad to bear, and that has made me doubt if women are really that 'strong' or 'tough'. Or, my question is rather why women have to be strong. Is that an end result of a society with a structural flaw?