Non-Sequitur on Nanikore

Hello 2022!

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 16:05:00 +0000

Well hello, fancy seeing you here, just over from 2021.

Yes, well let’s see how this one goes, and all the best to all those who happen upon this site! For the last couple of years I’ve tried to keep to about to a post a month - mostly I have, sometimes I haven’t. Even with COVID, there have been distractions - new jobs, new things going on in life but I’m planning to put something up each month, but only if I think there’s a bit of value. I’m also think of doing some photo posts from rides, or even…a video. Well let’s not over-blow things, but at the very least, all the best for this year, and I’m looking forward to getting more outdoor things going on, and more riding to be done.

明けましておめでとうございます。（令和４！）

Shingo and the Tomb of Christ

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 08:41:00 +0000

There is a place in northern Japan called Shingo, in Aomori Prefecture, where a local story holds that it has the real Tomb of Christ. No, that’s not clickbait, but I wanted to get that in the first paragraph.

I heard about this place several years ago, and chalked it up to a bit of almost P.T. Barnum level marketing as a bit of a laugh, and it sort of is, but having visited the place, it also sort of isn’t.

The Story

Let me explain. Shingo is a small village in the northern prefecture of Aomori, which is itself very rural and more famous for its apples.

It seems that in the 1930s, some documents were found known as the Takenouchi documents though sadly since lost and only copies of which exist today. These documents are said to be based on ancient texts which amongst other things tell the story of how Jesus came to Japan in his youth. This is why he sort of disappears from the Bible for several years as he was travelling across Asia, finally arriving and settling in Japan. In the following decade or so, he was learning everything he needed from the Japanese for when he would return to the Middle East in his late twenties and become a teacher and healer.

According to these documents, he returned to the Middle East with his brother Isukiri to continue his teachings. It was then his brother was arrested and crucified by the Romans, leaving Jesus to return to Japan, and settle in Shingo for the rest of his life. During this time, he was said to have married and had several children before he died at the age of 106. Locals have claimed a genetic heritage ever since the documents were brought to light, with one local land owner in the 1930s claiming his son’s larger size, strength and more Caucasian features were due to this.

There’s a few places treat these Takenouchi documents akin to other contested religious texts as apocryphal and perhaps hints at other truths. Others dismiss them outright as just flights of fancy.

The Tomb of Christ, Shingo

The place itself is interesting in its own right. It’s signposted from a few kilometers away, and has an official blue sign as well as it’s own signs, and a couple of small carparks for visitors. There also seems to be a small hut near the road, but that wasn’t open the day we visited. The carpark does have a basketball hoop and a sign which advertises the annual festival run most Julys.

From the car park it’s a short walk up a wooded incline to the main entrance of the Tomb area, which itself is at the top of some stairs with a multi-language sign explaining briefly the origins of the claim, as well as a commemorative stone apparently given to the site by the Israeli government. The main area features two mounds with large crosses in each. These are to signify the burial spots of Jesus himself, and one for the ear (a kind of reliquary) of his brother Isukiri, brought home by Jesus following Isukiri’s execution. It’s very nicely done and well kept, in sculptured grounds for sure.

A few hundred metres away is the main museum itself. This is actually split in content into some exhibits about the farming history of the area, complete with old farm implements and a mock up of a house, and the tale about this being the Tomb of Christ.

Various panels explain the link to the Takenouchi documents, as well as a copy of them in a glass case. There’s also a bit more information on how this is all true, much of which dates from around the documents in the 1930s. Again, it’s all multilingual and looks like any other small museum, with everything presented as very factual.

Does it add up?

Obviously I’m no theologian or historical scholar of Japan. I ride motorbikes and snowboard. I’m definitely not getting into a debate on the over the existence of Jesus here. In the context of Shingo though, it has to be noted the Takenouchi documents have no historical support aside from the person who collected them, and no original exists. It’s important to note these all came up in the mid 1930s when Japan was already involved in military campaigns in Asia and was signing up to some of the Nazi doctrines, and so I’d suspect a story where some Japanese could be descended from Jesus would probably get some traction if only locally. It certainly would have fit into the superiority ideas of the time. That some local son of a land owner had traits perceived as Caucasian possibly has other explanations, but who knows - that Jesus was broadly Caucasian is obviously a point of historical conjecture as it is. The other issue is that the modern Japanese had not settled this part of the island of Honshu two thousand years ago - the Yamato-jin as the early Japanese are known, likely arrived much later, so it’s unlikely Jesus and Isukiri had anything to do with the current inhabitants.

In closing

I treated the whole thing as a bit of a curiosity, an interesting local tale which seems to have taken on a life of its own. Some people think it borders on offensive, but the place itself is quite respectful of the Christian faiths, and sticks to the story they’ve put together. There isn’t any large Christian population nearby, and it seems most Christians in Japan distance themselves from the whole idea. I find it more likely some people got swept up in an odd legend then people just kept it going, never expecting anyone outside the area to care too much about it.

In closing, is it worth visiting? Yes, it is if you’re in the vicinity since there’s some beautiful scenery, good biking roads, and some other places to see in the area. Just prepare that pinch of salt to add to the Takenouchi stories.

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Quotes: Boundaries

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 12:23:16 +0000

This quote is from the amazing Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series by the late, great Douglas Adams. It’s a timeless series of books and radio shows, and if you haven’t listened to them, it’s worth the effort even if they started over 40 years ago now.

“Do you have any advice for a traveller?”

“Yes, get a beach house. It gives you somewhere to go … a beach house doesn’t even have to be on the beach, though the best ones are. We all like to congregate at boundary conditions … where land meets water, where Earth meets air, where body meets mind, where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.”

Old Man Up The Pole, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Quintessential Phase, Douglas Adams.

These quotes are just bits I’ve seen around the place which I thought were interesting or potentially witty. I like this one as it’s likely true; I think we do like boundary conditions and contradictions. I myself have been happiest on these boundaries either on the beach, watching the waves, or snowboarding feeling like you’re going to fall into the sky.

Modern Hoaxes & Frauds from Japan

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 21:30:36 +0000

One thing that seems to happen all over the world, are hoaxes and frauds, like Piltdown Man, crop circles and Justin Bieber being a lizard, to name but three. Some have been subtle, and yet others were put on display almost as challenge hoaxes, such as those by entrepreneur P.T. Barnum. Many fall somewhere in the middle. Is there a difference between a hoax and a fraud? I’m going to say a fraud is pretty much a hoax in these situations, but where someone has intentionally benefited either financially or through reputation. Let’s say that shall we? Here then, are four hoaxes/frauds from Japan over the last couple of decades.

When is a stem cell not a stem cell?

Early 2014 was an interesting time in Japan with the rollercoaster scientific ride which was RIKEN and Obokata-san’s announcement they could re-program adult cells to become stem cells in a process called STAP (Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency). This was an exciting announcement, given with great fanfare in January 2014, making Obokata a celebrity in Japan, right down the apron she claimed to get from her grandmother which she wore during the experiments (and later proved to be largely untrue).

This news of a simple way to create stem cells was published in Nature magazine in fact - not a lightweight outfit in itself. The Japanese media lapped it up.

Quickly though, many peers became unimpressed, initially citing doctored images, and by April 2014, these doubts had made Obokata quite irritated, and so the press rallied to support her, given the pressure being put on their allegedly photogenic star scientist.

However, it was all for naught. In July, Nature retracted the paper as Obokata could not recreate the results she claimed to have been able to do 200 times, neither could any other lab; her mentor - Yoshiki Sasai - tragically committed suicide just a few months later, in August. It all came to a close in December when Obokata resigned, after six months working with an independent team and still not managing to recreate her results.

Like most hoaxes/frauds, this one took a lot of time in the checking and unraveling which could have been better spent researching in what is a very worthy field, so I label this one a fraud, and given allegations Obokata hadn’t been entirely honest on her doctorate submission either, we await if she can make a comeback in the field.

Not The New Beethoven-san

It seemed that for years a man called Mamoru Samuragochi had been earning a fairly tidy living being known as a deaf composer, indeed a modern day Beethoven - except that he wasn’t actually writing the music. Also, he might not even be deaf.

The music was actually being written by another composer, a music teacher named Takashi Niigaki, who effectively was ghostwriting for the rather more flamboyant and charismatic Samuragochi.

This all came out in February 2014 (a good time for these things in Japan it seems), when the composition “Hiroshima Symphony #1” was about to be used by one of Japan’s Olympic skaters at the Sochi Olympics. In fact the truth was outed by none other than Niigaki himself. I expect since this was on an international stage, Niigaki decided it was time to get some personal credit for his work.

Incidentally, the New York Times called Samuragochi ‘beloved’, and referred to the incident as a hoax, but I’m going to have to call fraud on this one. The two were in cahoots for 18 years, and whilst I don’t doubt either of them had talent, they needed each other - would Niigaki’s work have received the same attention it had done if it was he doing the PR for it, or does it get more attention to have a hippy looking, deaf ‘composer’ fronting the works?

Sadly I can’t find any details of how it works under copyright, but Niigaki claims he’s received 70,000USD for his work with Samuragochi, and with his tune soon to be getting massive exposure in Japan with the popular skater Daisuke Takahashi, I have to assume the timing was related financially.

That Samuragochi may not be totally deaf is just another twist on this, as claimed by Niigaki and others, and even the man himself admitted, “The truth is that recently I have begun to hear a little again.”

The proof in this one is the calibre of future works by either of them.

I’m Your Biggest Fan!

It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that may not be the case when the other person doesn’t know you’re doing it, you’re claiming it as your own, and accepting awards and money for it.

In 2006, Yoshihiko Wada received a fairly prestigious award in Japan - the “Education, Science and Technology Minister’s Art Encouragement Prize”, except that, following an anonymous tip, it was alleged that Wada had in fact copied some of ‘his’ works from an Italian artist, Alberto Sughi.

If you look at two of the items side by side, they do look a little more than similar - that’s assuming you can find images as they seem a little scarce nowadays.

It’s not as if Wada had just randomly found the images either - he’d met Sughi whilst in Italy, studying, and claims to have worked with him, which might be stretching it a little, since that’s not how Sughi remembers it - he thought Wada was a fan and remembers he took a lot of photos of his work.

“I never knew he was producing works like this. They’re stolen” - Sughi

This then, has the added wrinkle of plagiarism to it, making this the only one here most definitely not a hoax. Wada also lost the award - and the tidy sum of money associated with it, and given his defence argument, it’s not difficult to see how:

“I borrow others’ compositions and add my own ideas,” he insisted. “Only artists who’ve studied abroad can understand the subtle differences in nuance.” - Wada via BBC

I’m not sure where he’s going with that, and neither it seemed, did his peers. It seems like he thinks it’s OK because it was outside Japan, so no one inside Japan would notice? Perhaps he underestimated the global nature of modern art.

The sad thing here, like most artistic frauds, is that Wada seems to be a fair painter in his own right, a body of work which is now likely to be discredited or even ignored after this.

Making up History

I’ve saved one of the older hoaxes till last, because for some reason, I find this one the most annoying.

Shunichi Fujimura was an amateur archaeologist who participated in over 180 digs around Japan, and was responsible for making incredible finds which raised huge questions about when humans had first arrived in the archipelago, and thus how and from where they had come. At each dig it seemed he’d find stone objects in ground strata which suggested they were much older than expected.

In late 2000, he and a team had been working at a site near Tsukidate in Miyagi Prefecture, and after a few decent finds, Fujimura announced they’d found proof of human dwellings almost 600,000 years old. That’s a significant difference to what was then believed - most estimates put it at around 40,000 years ago that people had arrived in modern day Japan, via land bridges from mainland Asia.

It seemed almost unbelievable - and indeed, it was. The man had his doubters, and it seems they were correct when Mainichi Shimbun released photos of him actually burying the finds before they were excavated. They then did an interview with him, and he tearfully confessed that pretty much all of his most impressive finds were fraudulent, some going back to the 1970s.

That someone would do this to aggrandize their standing in a community may be understandable, for it did gain Fujimura a great deal of respect and drew admiration from peers, with the Japan Archaeological Association [JAA] and even local and national governments, some of which themed tourism campaigns around the finds.

It’s not clear though as an ‘amateur’ archaeologist, how much this financially benefited Fujimura, or whether it was just the adulation he craved. The man himself, by way of explanation said something along the lines of ‘being tempted by the devil’. This perhaps parallels that he was sometimes referred to as having ‘divine hands’ when it came to finding exciting artifacts.

Eventually, when he was outed by the Mainichi, he seemed to come clean as to the scale and duration of the lies, meaning much of his work could be quickly debunked, and updates were made in many textbooks to reflect that various sections they contained were now known to simply not be true.

So why does this one annoy me? Mainly because some scholars based years - decades - of research on his findings, trying to figure out and piece together the history Fujimura’s finds suggested, and the generation of archaeologists who would have to unlearn his findings from their textbooks. That’s a lot of other people’s time wasted for an ego boost. Some suggested he did it for vague nationalistic reasons, but I think was just an average man who got swept up by fame and forced himself to make the next ‘find’ even more incredible than the last, perhaps not appreciating the knock-on effects these finds had internationally. A review by peers found that the JAA was also somewhat at fault, in not checking for tell-tale staining and other environmental effects on the finds, which should’ve raised questions earlier.

So there are four hoaxes from the Japanese archipelago over the last few years, which join the thousands of others from around the world. Some hoaxes are sometimes started as a bit of fun, such as the crop circles, but as with many things, many seem to have more serious intent, either for fame or simply money. Having looked at these four, I came away at least thinking they should have taken a leaf out of P.T. Barnum’s book and managed to put on a bit of a show with some of these!

Kiva Update - Two Loans!

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 02:17:46 +0000

Kiva is an organisation which works with micro-finance organisations all over the world to provide loans to help people move forwards with their ideas and businesses. Essentially, several people, sometimes many, pool their money to extend a loan to a person or group they select from the Kiva website.

I made my first Kiva loan in 2011 of 25 USD to a group in Viet Nam, the second was to a sewing services, the third was to a man in Kenya, looking to build his motorbike transportation business. I won’t deny my love of motorbiking played a part in that last one. However, this has been that same 25 USD going around, so I’ve added another 25 USD (as well as a small donation to Kiva itself) and made two more small loans this time around.

The first new loan is to another Kenyan motorbike transportation chap, and the second is to a Balinese crafts family. This latter one is the first time then that I’ve lent money into a country I’ve actually been to.

This brings my money-lent level in total to 125 USD, well below the Kiva average of 333USD. One must try harder. Kiva knows this and provides plenty of statistics and badges on your portfolio in the hope it might make you want to cover that last country you haven’t lent into yet.

It’s worth remembering that this is a loan, not a donation, and many recipients are looking to build businesses, or better themselves for their communities, and unlike a donation, you stand a very good chance (98%+) of getting your money back to loan it out again, or even take it out of Kiva.

Give it a try then. I have to say it’s quite inspirational reading about some of the ideas people have for businesses and how to better their lives in other ways, such as via trying to fund further education.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Paul Brown — 2014-08-28

Do you have a Kiva team that you donate on behalf of? Not that I have an ulterior motive and want you to join my team (http://www.kiva.org/team/smrt) or anything…

Tax, Alcohol and Radiation?

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 14:13:10 +0000

It’s a new year, so in a fit of preparation, I decided to go and make sure my tax links were all correct before next month when I sit down, watch Black Books Series 1, Episode 1, then figure out how much money I owe the Japanese government.

My first stop for this is always The National Tax Agency website. The English page may look a little 1998-esque, but importantly:

There is an English page;
It provides a link to the English language summary guide for filling in your tax forms ( 2013 .pdf here, if you’re interested).

I might write this up next month when I do the taxes, but I have to say that doing your own taxes isn’t so bad. It’s easier than some other things here for sure, and the people involved are actually usually very helpful.

Back to my original point. I was looking around the page and much of it is quite dry, with very dull sounding links like, " Commissioner’s Directive on the Mutual Agreement Procedures (Administrative Guidelines)", and " Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States issue internal guidance to improve the Mutual Agreement Procedure and Bilateral Advance Pricing Arrangement processes". Thrilling stuff.

Then, you find links like, “The results of Sake Awards”. I have no idea where that fits on any governments tax pages, but there is a very decent page outlining the winners out of various sake (rice wine) breweries in their pursuit of excellence.

However, the winner of the “Links I Don’t Expect to Find on a Government Tax Page” award goes to:

The results of radiation examination of alcoholic beverages (Last updated on January. 9)

For the purpose of providing consumers with safe and good quality alcoholic beverages, the NTA conducts radioactive examination for alcoholic beverages including those for exports.

So basically, the tax men and women of Japan have managed to get a gig where they have to spend lots of time with alcohol in order to … er … test for radiation safety. And to ensure good quality! The health and foods ministries must be upset they missed out on that job, especially since they seem to have issued the testing guidelines.

Yes, this post is very tongue in cheek.

Boundary Conditions

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 12:51:41 +0000

I mentioned in the last post about ‘boundary conditions’ and a quote from the ’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. Here it is. It’s in the fifth instalment, where Arthur Dent is looking for information from an old man who lives up poles (and can seemingly teleport between them). He points out he only lives up poles in Spring, Summer and Autumn, as he goes south in the winter, to his beach house. He then explains why he bought the beach house:

A beach house doesn’t even have to be on the beach, though the best ones are. We all like to congregate at boundary conditions … where land meets water, where earth meets air, where body meets mind, where space meets time, we like to be on one side and look at the other.

Man up a pole

The boundary condition part just stuck in my mind as another truism from THHGTTG - I think people are attracted to them, myself included. Most of the best places I’ve lived have been near such boundaries, and I only have to go to the beach and see how many people congregate there year round to see that maybe, just maybe, Adams - or rather the man up the pole - was on to something.

If you haven’t listened to Hitchikers’ you really need to do so - it’s a masterpiece of wit and observation.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Complete Radio Series

Movember 2013

Sun, 03 Nov 2013 05:31:52 +0000

It’s November again, which means it’s Movember, raise money for men’s health organizations. Simple enough?

I did this last year and found it surprisingly more involving than I expected. That furry top lip becomes a talking point, and people - men and women - are genuinely interested if they haven’t heard it before. Take a look, and maybe make a donation here.

(I know this is my first post in a while. I’ve just been busy. It’s nothing personal!)

Invasion of the Mushrooms

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:38:47 +0000

I must admit to not usually feeling that a vegetable (or fungi) is worth a comment on, but I was fairly impressed, bordering of blown away, when I saw that in the two flower pots near the front door had over ten huge mushrooms in them yesterday night, where only three days earlier there had been none. It is the Great Invasion of the Mushrooms!

I’ve removed them for fear they may be undesirable, and assume they got in there via spores from somewhere, perhaps in the soil. I have weighed LH’s opinion that they may have grown from the marrow of some massive insect which has been buried in the bowl, but the whole concept frightens me too much. I must have cut an odd figure, stood outside my house doing some gardening, in the dark, with a headlamp on, and effectively harvesting mushrooms.

Anyway, there we have it, I’ve managed to achieve a blog post about mushrooms, and not a single hallucinogen oriented comment.

Aptitude Tests

Mon, 08 May 2006 14:01:40 +0000

Right now, I’m doing lessons towards my 400cc motorbike license test, currently booked for the end of May. One part of the procedure is to do an ’ aptitude test’, which is a combination of several test sections. The first few are based on spotting patterns and odd ones out, with each section only taking a couple of minutes, and speed/number of responses also being a factor.

For example, in a left side column there may be the numbers 25367, on the right 25637, and you quickly see they’re different, so you put an ‘X’ between them; the next question may be two strings of kanji which are the same, so you put a circle next to them to say they’re ‘correct’.

This fits a test of speed of recognition and decision making. Most of the sections are based on this concept, such as one which tests mental arithmetic, and one which (odd as it may seem) measures how quickly and repeatably you can draw triangles within a square.

The last section is a personality profile section, with just over 50 questions you can answer true, not true, or ’ ?’.

Fortunately for me, for this last section, I was given English translations of the questions, as I’d still be sat there looking up kanji in my WordTank an hour later otherwise. Some of these questions were easy enough to see where the test was going: Have you ever fainted? Do you have problems sleeping away from home? Do you suffer from anxiety easily?

However, some of the questions had me a bit bemused:

Do you often hate the world and want to die?

Do you hear voices?

Even stranger (in some ways), the next question was:

Do you like children?

I have to say, if I was going to kill myself, would I a) write it down, and b) take the trouble to do my 400cc motorbike license first? I wonder what responses they get to this quiz, and what kind of students are in some of these classes.