Beach follies

Yesterday was our first officially sanctioned Family Trip to the Beach, which seems worth a post of its own seeing as it’s been such a struggle to get there.

Unfortunately it was low tide so the beach was half empty of water. You can see the waterline on the breakwaters. It was also a bit murky, whereas normally the water is crystal clear and inviting.

Incidentally those breakwaters may seem a bit namby-pamby but the Japanese are not known for their swimming skills (which seems odd for an island nation with the population clinging to the coastline). And we think they’re great, given that the memory of seeing our two kids swept out to sea by a rogue rip just last year is still fresh in the mind.

My favourite bit of the beach is the line of vine-covered shelters up the back. You can see them on the right here:

I’m not very good in the sun so it’s great to have a bit of shade to escape to. Of course, this being Japan, there are vending machines stationed at regular intervals dispensing ice-cold drinks. The only thing missing is an ice-cream vending machine. Yes, they do have them; there’s one at the soccer ground where Felix trains on Saturday mornings with 16 different flavours.

And this being Japan, the beach also has loudspeakers blaring out music all day long. That is, all day long during the official beach opening hours from 8:30 in the morning through to five at night. I know this because I can hear the music starting up from my office window, several hundred metres away up the hill. It’s that loud. I think the authorities, when they designed this man-made beach, decided that it would be not just a nice stretch of coastline for swimming but a proper beach resort with amenities such as showers and vending machines. And piped music. (The other day when Eleni and I went for a swim, guess what was coming out of the speakers? Beach sound effects such as waves crashing and seagulls cawing. To add to the experience, presumably. You gotta laugh.)

This being Japan, the loudspeakers are naturally used to discharge regular announcements at deafening volume welcoming us all to the beach and reminding us of the rules, such as not climbing all over the breakwaters, not lighting barbeques, swimming safely and taking your rubbish home. From four o’clock onwards at ten-minute intervals there are more announcements alerting us to the fact that the beach is about to “close” and encouraging us to start packing up and going home.

To me, the loudspeakers neatly symbolise the Japanese love for information bombardment. Despite what we Westerners might like to believe about rock gardens and Zen minimalism, the Japanese (particularly those in positions of authority with loudspeakers at their disposal) seem to believe that “more is better” rather than “less is more.” A look at any typical Japanese website (like this one) will show you what I mean.

The Japanese are constantly being bombarded with information. Constant announcements on the trains. (In Tokyo, where there’s a station every few minutes, the announcements basically never stop.) Endless tape loops shouting out from the shelves in the department stores. Guys with megaphones at any public event involving more than, say, 20 people. And how about those Big Brother loudspeakers that are stationed in every town and village throughout the nation blaring out announcements, usually early on Sunday mornings, such as the one at 7:30 this morning reminding us all to vote in the election. As a result the locals have acquired an innate ability to just shut it out. I think this is a key requisite for anyone planning to live in Japan for any length of time. Either that or a massive stock of earplugs.

To finish off with: we had Mr. Nishihara and his wife to dinner last night for a barby. The Nishiharas brought these dinky little fold-out tables. It was highly convivial although I still didn’t get the coals going properly and managed to burn the eggplant slices, while the onion was so black that it didn’t even make it to the table. Oh how we all laughed.