Roma

Roma at Lac Castor near Hunterstown, Quebec, August 25, 2001

Roma Flag, colours from Roma nationalist movement in 1930s, wheel added later to remember origins of Roma in India

Diary 2001

Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Diary 2001

2001 - Meditations on mortality, An old old man came to the office..... he wanted to show us some medals he'd got in the mail recently - they were only the two service medals that everyone got for joining and serving in the war... he would be just twice my age... he also told me a weird story about having to go to the Elgin Hotel during the war because an airman and a army girl had become stuck together and they had to take them down the freight elevator with a cover over them... he said the airman had died somehow during the process to separate them..... Murder, lots of shouting in the court room...." I want your blood"....
May 20, 2001 - Crabapple blossoms falling.... last week I saw a woman at the Chinese pavillion in the Botanical gardens in Montreal play the Erhu.... a two stringed violin - it is amazing the expression of sadness that she made with only a small and simple instrument.
May 25 - found the holy well........
July 27 - Pictures from the bot garden and a rainbow ..... there is a little grey white smudge in the sky that's a comet - I found my camera battery was dead when I got up early in the morning to take its picture and I have not gotten up early enough to get it again..... the HMS Hood has been found in the Denmark Strait and they showed the last sailor left alive from it dropping a wreath over it. My mother's neighbour died on it......
July 28 - Fireworks, where are the fireworks of yesteryear.... specifically those of 1984?

I saw the Erhu woman again in Montreal. This time bought a CD.
Shen Qi
August - "Shorts Deli, on the Main".......never expect someone on Morphine to pronounce "Schwartz". Saw where the fireworks of 84 were..... same kids playing in the park, yet they can't be the same............Birthday..... camped with Romany folk......... hosted by hippies blonde dreadlocks.....worship Kali Hindu Goddess of Death, their flag has Chakra of Change, wheel of mobility and to remind them of their homeland a thousand years ago in India.... Yul Bryner half Rom... sang songs love death Auschwitz, told story about Merlin turning himself into a good witch and turning her into himself to keep a promise and to marry her....... Red squirrel runs out from stage, looks at audience, jumps on Rom's thigh, he smiles, doesn't move, squirrel jumps off.....it was a squirrel and not a chipmunk a long time ago.......Flamenco dancing, the turning gestures of the hands symbolize birth life death, the death card in Tarot, not a thing to be feared but a symbol of change and rebirth, big bonfire unearthly yellow flames, sparks shoot skywards, fall to the ground.. fireworks are only pretty because you let go of them................ a woman shakes a plastic bag at her little white dog on the neighbours' lawn...

Click on door to enter world of Roma.. Door of abandoned house between Louiseville and St. Paulin, Quebec Sept 11, 2001!! A day that will live in Infamy! Remind me to get a souvenir copy of the times................ I got a big cheque from my late Aunt..........................everything silent, first time ever, no planes in the sky, no boats on the river, police and Air cadets watching the water.. 
As the late great Ramones said:
You watch the world complain, but you do it anyway
Who am I, am I to say
Bonzo goes to bitburg then goes out for a cup of tea
As I watched it on TV somehow it really bothered me
Drank in all the bars in town for an extended foreign policy
If there's one thing that makes me sick It's when someone tries to hide behind politics
October 7, 2001 - Question for Today: Why does Bush only read the letter from the little girl who thinks it's OK for her dad to be sent to war?
Neighbour dies, I was looking at him the day before - all grey....
December 25 - 87 years ago today my grandfather was sitting in a trench in France when the Germans came over for Christmas.... he said they heard them singing the same songs in English and German and then the Germans came into no-man's-land and they had snowball fights and played soccer.....

David Tsubouchi's secret SCTV stint

Tsubouchi's secret SCTV stint










copyright 2001 Mark Bellis


Stills from SCTV broadcast:

Now, who was that man in the shades with a beard, here shown with Robin Williams in an SCTV episode from 1982...... could it be a certain David Tsubouchi (Shown in insert), now Ontario's Solicitor-General in the Progressive Conservative government? (Rather scarily in charge of the police.... prone to do crossword puzzles during those boring meetings with the public he has to take part in....and who reminded all those people on welfare how much better the weather was in Vancouver when he cut back payments... Tsubo portrayed a Japanese porn dealer in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, something he was understandably modest about when someone noticed it after he'd been named minister) ....in this spoof of the Deerhunter, he plays a Chinese gangster who gets clocked by Williams.........one of my big pet peeves is North American film makers think that everyone from East Asia looks alike, and they often put people who REALLY don't look Chinese in with regular Cantonese - and that's what got my attention on Tsubo. If you watch Hong Kong movies, you'll notice that they get Japanese actors to play Japanese roles.
Tsubo did this stilted Fu Manchu Chinese accent as he extorted money from Williams......."Ah the American, yes he's here but it's going to cost you... thirty-four thousand dollars ... American!"
Ah well, I'm sure it improved the public image of Asian-Canadians no end......

Diary 2000

Sept 18 - Murder! Worked for the Star again. Didn't get published. New court room. Nice looking Mohawk youth up for variance of bail - he had a job working high steel in NYC and couldn't stay on the rez at Akwesasne.

Sept 24 - Found a little dog someone had abandoned by the roadside - I called him Lucky - I cried like a baby for hours when I had to give him away. Montreal, the synagogue near where I lived had been turned into a community centre and was now up for sale. 

Lucky

Oct. 4 - Hmm, listened to someone in the next room at Chris' place in Stratford making the oddest noises, loud sucking and rustling of papers - I thought they were having some strange form of sex.... in the morining I found a pile of scribbled papers - they had done e and since one was deaf they had to write...... total gibberish....later I stepped on a box of nails rickett had thoughtfully left out......Trudeau's funeral - I remember going up to Trudeau at a Cite Libre dinner because Sibylle wanted to get him to autograph the back of her son's birth certificate... he turned it over and did a wonderful double take and signed it anyway.
Police shooting in Stittsville - man had tried to stabbed his wife.

December 29 - Went with Kurdish demonstrators to the Turkish embassy - someone had tossed a Molotov cocktail at a Kurdish demo there last year - lots of cops with some Mounties in riot gear forming a barrier in front of the embassy - there was one shaven headed plain clothesman (standing out in freezing weather) pointing out two young men in the crowd he wanted detained........ so the Kurds pretty much knew what was going to happen and wouldn't walk to the tour bus they'd hired that the cops had had brought round to a back street nearby, despite the urgings of the community relations officer - "You'll be much warmer!". They finally made the arrest on a main street with lots of scuffling and screaming from the crowd and that weird keening cry that middle eastern women make.... and then released the guys a few hours later....

Japan weird stuff

Students on the trains, one scowling little girl kicks another, boys picking their nose, reading comics and eating, passing a school one boy does up his fly at the open window of a washroom and smirks back at us....

The weirdest thing was sex... the cable in the hotel had videos of schoolgirls being raped, office women being raped, girls being molested in public toilets......

Girl in Pikachu drag handing out Kleenexs with Phone Club numbers

The girl in a dirty Pikachu costume with a jacket over it is handing out these kleenexs in Kyoto that have numbers for 'telephone clubs' where guys sit at tables with phones and wait for girls, often school or college students, to call and arrange dates - these can be for money or for things like high-priced handbags.......

This is what you get ... the cutesy cartoons are really creepy when you know what it's for......

There was a Hotel Crevette (Hotel Shrimp) by Itami Airport in Osaka. 

In 2001 a twelve year old Osaka schoolgirl was abducted by an older man, a 34 year old junior high school teacher, on a date she had made over her cell phone. She had been dating on the phone club since Grade 5.  She died after being hit by a truck after escaping from his van. The kidnapper was only given six years.  The story is hard to read -  Wikipedia article  in Japanese on her death

Next weirdest were the things about your backside.... toilet seats often have a built in water spray and dryer.... one commercial on TV that had this giant peach being attacked by a starship toilet seat spraying a buttock-like fold in the fruit... another with three women simultaneously kissing three babies' butts (Diapers) and another with a girl sitting on a giant toilet seat floating in a lagoon (Wet toilet tissue).........

Japan 2000

Me as seen by Japanese 6 year old - note big eyes!

Kana, my girlfriend. Kodak put this sticker on - I think the technician was looking at the highlight in her hair rather than making a racist comment! The highlights in her hair were dyed brown, so they probably thought it was yellow from a incandescent light bulb. Her grandfather was the head priest at a famous Zen temple (Japanese Buddhist priests can marry) and her grandmother performed the tea ceremony and had a license to prepare fugu fish, which can be deadly if it isn't prepared right.  Kana's favorite things were kakigouri (flavoured shaved ice), chocolate, Hello Kitty and Disneyland. Her favorite place was a toy store in Hirakata City. She made her own teddy bear, which she named Jason after the Friday the 13th monster because it was kind of lopsided. She used to like repeating English phrases, like "Skosh of Scotch", I'd taught her. She looked like a cat enjoying the taste of a fish.

I remember she and her mother lying on the floor with their legs under the kotatsu, a heat table with a cover that goes down to the floor. Their were closed into little half-moons and they were smiling. The room was also heated with a kerosene stove that didn't have a chimney that worried me because of carbon monoxide but they are supposed to be safe. I still checked my nails for the tell tale cherry red discolouration.  

Jason. She had lived in Africa for a while too.

foot remedy - she had broken her foot earlier and this was a therapy... it was a high voltage current and the wand her mother is holding would light up. She also took these blueberry pills that Japanese believe give better eyesight.

This is at the famous Kinkakuji or Golden Temple, also called the Golden Pavillon, in Kyoto. You can see it on live cam here:

Kinkakuji live web cam - the trees haven't grown at all - I guess the gardeners keep them trimmed like giant bonsais!

Kana was a Zen Buddhist, like this temple, but of the Soto sect rather than than the Rinzai. She taught me the meaning of the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?". It's just a metaphor meaning you need more than one person to do some things, like the saying "It takes two to tango". Soto doesn't use Koans for meditation, as Rinzai does, just as aphorisms, so Koans have meaning in this tradition.

Hardworking lads. Note the artificial tans, very popular with Japanese youth in 2000.

On a lighter note...... this is Osaka Castle....

'Spider' rocks - several metres wide but only about 10 cm thick. The builders used very large saws to cut them - there was a Ukiyo-e print that showed them using something like a Swedish saw.

Me in front of Gate in Kyoto - Nijō Castle (二条城, Nijō-jō) 

This was the official residence of the Tokugawa Shogun in Kyoto. This is where the famous nightingale floor that would squeak loudly when walked on to deter intruders was built. There are bits of iron set so they would rub together under the floor to make the noise. A friend worked there on restoration and saw them but they wouldn't let him take photos - photos weren't allowed inside when I was their either, but there are photos of the irons I've seen online. After the Meiji Restoration the Tokugawa Shogunate was deposed and the Castle became an Imperial Palace so this might be why there's no photography allowed. The Imperial family donated the castle in 1939 to the city of Kyoto.

Itty Bitty Dolls.... popular in Japan really.. there is even a Doll Day.....

Sushi a gogo - you pick what you want off the conveyor belt that goes round and you pay for the number of plates you have left on the table.....

Celine Dion hawking a course for English, something she'd never do here....also saw Meg Ryan on a TV commercial.....

Yes, I love Japlish... get a nice claup??? They also like using other languages - I saw a whole sign in German -- even cafes in small towns have 'Good Morning' written in hand on the sidewalk menu.. also there's this TV commercial for a cell phone that has a camera inside that lets you send pics to another phone..... guy's trying to pick up a girl in a bar.... she gives him the cold shoulder and he sends her his pic with 'Sorry' written on it....

Temple or Shrine in Kyoto with elephant head on pillar - only time I saw an elephant in sacred art in Japan, which surprised me as they are common in Buddhist and Hindu art elsewhere . The complicated wood structure at the top of the pillar is supposed to act as a shock absorber during earthquakes. Update: It's Kangiten, the Japanese Buddhist equivalent to Ganesh. 

With Kana's sister in law and father

Golden Temple

Katano's love hotel! The local kids try to get in since they think it's an amusement park. 

There is one near the Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts (同志社女子大学) in Kyoto (it has a much more modest exterior, as it's close to the Imperial Palace). My friend gave me the impression that that one was used for 'compensated dates', a form of prostitution, by students.

More at the Golden Pavillon. Kana had broken her foot. I carried her around some places - she barely weighed anything.

Kana's niece.

I liked the green tea ice cream. Gave you a green tongue.

Little boat by the Golden Pavilion

Pikachu Jet

Mt. Fuji as seen from the plane back to Tokyo. Passenger nice enough to point it out. Only time I've ever seen it in person.