We're easing ourselves into Japan...

Well, let me rephrase, because my hard labour with my conference presentation feels like anything other than ease.

We are orienting ourselves towards Japan.

Lunch on Sunday was Hokkaido ramen at Quill. Apparently, real Japanese food will spoil us for anything to be found overseas, so it's good to enjoy these tasty offerings while we can...

Our concert that afternoon was conducted by Kazuyoshi Akiyama, who conducts the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra. First on the programme was Hiroshi Oguri's Fantasy on Osaka Folk Tunes, which I loved. So distinctive and atmospheric.

There were two other pieces on the programme. One was Mozart's delightful Sinfonia Concertante, which had absolutely nothing to do with Japan apart from the conductor. The other was Elgar's grand, end-of-empire-portending First Symphony, which premiered in Manchester in 1908, just three years after the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and the Treaty of Portsmouth, which consolidated Japan's presence in southern Manchuria and Korea.

On Monday we went to see Late Spring, a 1949 Japanese movie by Yasujiro Ozu. Very beautiful; full of horizontal and vertical lines; very much centred on homes and other small spaces; replete with classic Japanese cultural elements such as noh theatre, tea ceremonies, and austere gardens.

The heroine, Noriko, is being pushed to marry, despite the fact that she is quite happy not marrying, and staying at home to look after her father. He feels this would be a bad and selfish thing on his part, and pretends he is remarrying, in order to open the way for her to agree to a likely party that her aunt has introduced her to. She doesn't seem that ecstatic about the whole thing. And Dad ends up home alone. Was this all a good idea, we wonder?

Interestingly, the film would have been subject to American censorship. See here for some further context.

Not Japanese, but nevertheless very enjoyable was our pre-movie Thai dinner at Samira. Beef salad, som tam, and crab-and-prawn cakes, with a glass of wine apiece.

Similarly, there was nothing Japanese in our Tuesday Titian Budaya concert by the "Singapore Chinese Orchestra and Friends". This was a quite delightful melding of cultural influences. The orchestra features a phalanx of gaohu, erhu, and zhonghu, plus Chinese dulcimers, lutes, mandolins, and various wind instruments. In the various sections, it teamed beautifully with a tabla player, a Kelantanese wayang kulit siam outfit, a jazz pianist, and a vocalist doing P. Ramlee numbers. I LOVE fusion...

I am, however, noticing lots of Japanese references in my second Inspector Chen novel, A Loyal Character Dancer. His journalist girlfriend has fled to Japan. There's a go tournament happening, between Japan and China. One of the characters went to Japan on a language programme, worked over there instead, and came back to open a karaoke bar (and karaoke itself came from Japan, of course) ...