Story and Photographs by Lehan Ramsay
This is the local Neighbouhood Association. They have a nice hall around the corner. People who around live here pay a few dollars each month. They come and collect the money in April. They do a lot, the Neighbourhood Association. They arrange for people to plant flowers and maintain them. They distribute bags for picking up garbage on the street. They keep a makeshift shed for people to take their recyclables, they make a little money off it. Once I asked for paper for my wood stove, and a few days later was told by my neighbour that I shouldn’t do that.
They have a bazaar once a year, and sell old things for a dollar or less, and they take a trip to a hot spring some time in the autumn. A newsletter goes around once a month, and you stamp the bottom of the front page to show that you’ve read it. Usually it has information about free medical checks, or some information for what to do in a particular situation.
Once I went to the annual meeting and was greeted warmly. I was planning to go to the next one, but my neighbour fell out with them and stopped telling me about things. My neighbour was organizing the bazaar and was quite involved. But the manager of the centre decided that he couldn’t work with her, and after some time she quit. When the next bazaar was coming up I went to volunteer again. Some time after my neighbour came to tell me that I was not required to volunteer, as she was no longer working for it. I came to understand that I had been grouped. It angered me that I wasn’t accepted as a volunteer, and I went there and shouted at them. That was very shocking to them. So now they simply ignore me.
This is an area where the young people have largely moved out, leaving retirees, and I am the youngest retiree. There are schools around; the elementary school is across the road. Why then do I so rarely see children? No children, no young people in the Neighbourhood Association.
The Neighbourhood Association has been a small peripheral part of my life here. I don’t think I’ve done a very good job of fitting in with it. It makes me feel old and a little unnecessary. It’s one part of Japan that has helped things stick together well. But it didn’t keep up with the times. Now more and more people live in apartment blocks and don’t bother to pay their monthly fees, don’t go to the bazaar, don’t help to plant the flowers. All that is left to the old people. The old people a little younger than those old people, in their sixties or early seventies, like to keep to themselves too.
These photos were taken at the annual rice cake (mochi) pounding party a few years ago.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
There was one thing I found interesting at the annual meeting. I’m guessing that the man who runs it is a retired public servant, and this is his “fall from heaven” final job. He’s a little arrogant, and during the meeting he talked for far too long about things that weren’t particularly important. When he continued talking for too long, the women got up and loudly started passing tea around. Women are the tea-makers, the volunteers, the people who do much of the actual work, and the actual work is simple so that it doesn’t require people who will be assertive. That way the management can stay in the hands of the men from the public service who do little themselves but like to get others to do things. But the women also find a way to use their small contributions to affect the action a little. It was a glimpse into office politics. Office politics is very harsh in Japan. Because people stay in the same job their whole lives, they have to submit to being controlled without complaint or face years of hazing. In return they get guaranteed employment.
This is the system that I fell from. Not into heaven, but into estrangement. When my university began, there were 18 women faculty out of 60. When I left after ten years, there were about 3. I have never seen a more classic example of something that began by saying it was new and different, and evolved so quickly into a classic pattern.
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One of the things that I most appreciate about your writing and also your paintings, Lehan, is the clarity that you bring to the illustration. Many thanks.
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And it’s unfortunate when you think about it. In order to maintain the office politics, the work needs to be gutted of any tranformative effect. And so, change doesn’t happen. Like irradiated fruit, the seeds are barren. The same functions are simply repeated year by year, and the organization becomes less relevant to the people around it.
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There seems to be a particular type of person who likes to organise others, but, at the same time find every excuse for inaction. The organisation never gets ahead, it dwindles and spirals down.
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I know that organisation too, Big. In the interests of finding work for a few years, I’ll refrain from naming it 🙂
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And spiritually killing to those who work within it. Cry “Freedom” for all wage slaves.
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Yes Lehan,
That’s how it so often is. Humanity does its best but so does the frailty of it all. We all hang together orphan-like with acceptance and rejection part of a thin thread precariously close to being stretched to breaking at any time. The miracle is that we keep going and find snippets of contentment between all that, even happiness.
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Theo, was a tramp on The Island. He walked mostly, but I encountered him on buses, occasionally.
He wore layers of clothes; a hotchpotch of worn garments, usually topped by a camel coloured duffel coat and a threadbare scarf. His fingers always seemed spare, poking out of his mittens . And he seemed always to have a wry smile: inoffensive, but bemused.
One could spot him anywhere, with his carrier bags and bundled possessions, but I do believe that he had an actual lair somewhere. Rumour had it that it was in some woods near Ryde. I suppose that he liked to be near the sea.
Other rumours were, that he was a failed, or jaded, I can’t quite recall, concert pianist. I know that his piano talents were verified by numerous locals. I think that he played in pubs. Perhaps for a few quid. I don’t know. Although other rumours had him as a wealthy recluse, so I’m really not sure.
He had a ruddy complexion, as becoming a gentlemen of the road, walking in rain and shine. He was a character! I wish that I had got him into conversation now.
I saw him when I was a child , visiting The Island after living in Java–and then later when I returned to live there bringing my young family. And in all that time I never heard a bad word about him. I think that he died, just before I came to live in Australia.
He always wore wellington boots, even in Summer. They were probably donated. He was a frugal man.
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I think that I meant to post this on getrad’s blog, but I just read them both-and as usual wrote quickly and didn’t pay attention.
On reflection it doesn’t much matter, as long as it’s nestled in somewhere. It’s quit cosy here. In your cosy story.
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Jayell,
Nice story, nicely told, a tale that fits in well with Gerard’s parsimonious-ness(?), or is frugality a better word…
But then again, Jules, it feels quite at home here among Lehan’s old men and women….
Well done both of you, and you too Gez.
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That’s very nicely put. Rather poetic. What’s The Island?
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The Island is The Isle of Wight, where I was born. Hence ‘Vectis Lad’. Vectis being The Roman name for The Island.
I visited in 2009, the year that I met Mike in Paris-and I’ll visit this year, when I have 3 weeks in The UK; primarily to visit my grandson and eldest son. All three of us Js.
All new and original inhabitants refer to The IOW, as The Island.
Tennyson lived there, and if you recall, I visited his old house, now a hotel. It retains the name of his old home Farringford House, or manor.
I took a photo of a Pig’s Tee, draped by the sign outside. (And a photo of The Tee tucked into the Jimi Hendrix statue at nearby Dimbola house.
Tennyson was an English Poet Laureate, whose long poem, Morte d’Arthur’, I learnt and recited, to show off, when I was thirteen. It was based on Thomas Mallory’s stories of King Arthur. I referred to Lyoness, when I was effusing about Malcolm Turnbull–but I’m guessing that only I knew what I was babbling about 😉
He wrote of Farringford:
“Where, far from noise and smoke of town
I watch the twilight falling brown,
All round a careless-ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, also wrote a poem sitting underneath a tree at my junior boarding school house (Preparatory school): Swainston House: also on The Island.
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Jules, I love your comments. They are where you hide your stories 🙂
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You are right Emmjay about Jules hiding his stories; don’t be shy VL put them out, they are big enough to stand on their own feet 🙂
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I worked closely for a while with a bloke from the Isle of Wight. Funny how all paths sometimes lead to the same place. I was thinking the same when I read about the Neighbourhood Association.
How characteristic the NA is of organisations or the absence of them I have experienced; they spring up to meet a perceived need and take their course to become an organism that somehow or other gets captured or its plankton get captured on the way to that forum. I began an informal community art group and the few people (women as it happened) who attended a few times came up with some fabulous ideas and designed a brochure, I set about raising grant funding for materials and one, who yes, true I had resisted in an attempt she made to make me her ‘mother ‘, telephoned me out of a clear blue and announced she was their spokesperson. I was amazed at that alone as originally I had to encourage her confidence to attend to meet them… and thank you, she said crisply, none of them would attend anymore. They were not having anything to do with “that”… to this day I do not know what “that” was, but all disappeared.
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What’s a Pig’s Tee? Is this a really naive question? For a piglet?
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You have one, don’t you ‘Shoe ? It’s white with the Pig’s Arms on the front.
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A tee-shirt.
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