Sayonara, Mata Ashita

This morning, from on my raidio, his voice came again. I don’t know how many months have passed since the last time I heard his voice. It was a long absence. Just yesterday I heard that a young guy saddly announced saying “Paul Harvey the rest of the story will not be aired today”. So it makes me think his program was more and more disappearing. But today, I’ve heard. And he told about an earthquake hit eastern part of Japan yesterday. Actually, the quake occurred in the pacific ocean and far from Japan’s main land, Shaking was not do hard. I felt the shaking a little bit in the Kanto Plain. His words about the  latest earthquake made me sure that, that was not re-broadcasting. Okay, He has returned to the program. And his sun was doing “rest of the story”. Does it last? I hope so. Though I don’t know how old Mr. Paul Harvey is.

It’s difficult to upload image files onto wordpress. I don’t know how to do that. Even if I check FAQ, I can’t figure out. So I don’t use storage of wordpress. Everytime I put an image file here, I just use a link from other website (today, too). It bothers me, but it’s the only way. I think that a blog hosting cannot survive if uploading photos is difficult to understand.

Although tomorrow is national holiday “The day of the sea”, I will never have a time to go leisure like the sea. I just draw a scene in my mind. That was some years ago when I saw the sea from that place in a small island.

That was happened just one month before the Japan’s surrender to the Pacific War. In the northern part of Japan, Hokkaido (island) and Honshu (main island of Japan) were connected by some ten and a few of ferry boats for material distribution. The boats with rails could carry freight train carriages on board. They were important life line for wartime Japan.

The day, July 14th in 1945, US bomber planes came to Tsugaru Kaikyo (Tsugaru Straight) between Aomori and Hakodate. Aomori is the northern city on the main island of Japan, and Hakodate is the southern city on the Hokkaido which is the second largest island of Japan. Ferries were air raided by US carrier based bomber; Curtiss SB2C “Helldiver”. The attacking resulted that 9 ferries sank, 2 touched bottom, and 2 heavily damaged. It is safe to say that Seikan Ferry Boats were all demolished by the air raid. Of the 1154 crews and passengers on board of 13 Seikan Renraku Sen (Boats) on the day, 343 people were died.

Today’s post is totally relying on the following site.
Seikan Renrakusen Kuushuu - Air raid on ferry boats between Aomori and Hakodate

It’s a thing that is often said between bloggers. Actually I don’t have enough energy to write a post in English. The link below is the Who’s “Substitute”, which was titled in Japan as “Pinch Hitter of Love (Koi-no-Pinchi-Hittah)”. Probably I was not born yet at the time. I think this is a good song, but for me, it sounds too smart and sophisticated as a Rock ‘n’ Roll song. Although I am not going to be too much bitter for this song, I don’t like the bass using the lowest E, open string of the fourth.


Ah,…tonight again, WordPress deletes an embedding of youtube material automatically. It irritates me a lot. But I can do nothing for it. Okay, I just put a link by using “a href” tag.

The Who - Substitute

Supper of mine

I’m really sleepy. Now it’s 1 a.m. in Japan. It took time for me to find this piano piece on you tube. I like this very much.

Tonight again, I have tried more than 20 times to paste the object of youtube in which Bartók’s and Liszt’s photos appear. Unfortunately they are not movie pictures but if I could display the picture, I think I would get more people go to the movie clips. Nonetheless, wordpress mercilessly　takes html tags away and deleted. Why do they made the system cuts off the youtube?

On July 7th in 1945, 60 (approximately) P-51 Mustang fighters came to Osaka, Japan. They took of Iwo Jima, which may be convoying some B-29 bombers. To intercept them, 17 Ki-61 air fighters scrambled from Itami Airbase. Ki-61’s nicknames were “Hien” in Japanese, “Tony” for the Allies.
Since P-51 is so famous as the best air fighter in WW2, I’d like to skip the explanation for it. On the other, Hien is the only air-fighter having liquid-cooled engine of the World War Two era of Japan. Although Navy’s Suisei had also liquid-cooled engine, it was not air fighter, but carrier based bomber. For Hien, it is said that the nick name “Tony” came from similarities of silhouette with Italian fighter airplane “Macchi MC.202 Folgore”, in additon that name “Tony” was popular for descendants from Italy. If this reason for the nickname Tony is not Politically Correct, I will delete this sentense (tell me). And sometimes Hien is regarded as a copycat product of Messerschmitt Bf 109. It did use the licensed engine of Daimler-Benz DB 600, but most of the parts of Hien were designed by engineers in Japanese heavy industry company, Kawasaki. Besides, its shape looked similar to even P-51 Mustang. It is said that many Japanese fighter planes were shot down by P-51 at the first stage of P-51. Japanese air fighter mistakenly believed that P-51 might be Hien, and then they had gone too much closer to P-51. Even if the two planes looked similar, performances were so different in terms of speed and arming. P-51 was stronger than Hien as fighter air plane. I think it needs not to point out the reason, it was the reality at near the end of the war.


17 Hiens scrambled from Itami Air Base, but three were shot down, two were destroyed on land by P-51. At around noon, one Hien was shot down in dogfight in the air. The pilot was a Japanese Imperial Army’s second lieutenant, Junichi Nakamura (pronunciation should not be Ju-ni-chi, but Jun-Ichi). He got out of the plane by parachute. But what happened next was really tragic. A P-51 cut the parachute by the wing. I think that the P-51 pilot fighting in the battle was also at the border between death and life. Since I have never experienced such situation in my life, so I cannot simply criticize what happened. Perhaps P-51 pilot might have thought that if he didn’t kill, the Hien pilot would land safely, get on another new Hien, then attack him or his friend US fighters again. Considering the situation, I think that what I can say from this incident is that war is always miserable and worst thing ever that human kinds do. Cutting parachute resulted in, needless to say, the death of second lieutenant Nakamura who was just 23 years old at the time. He was raised to first lieutenant after his death.


The body of S.L. Nakamura felt down into rice field at 3978-6chome Hoshidakita in Katano City, Osaka. Because of the place, his body was not so broken. A nurse got rid of mad of rice field and cleaned the body with water of stream in front of the town office. Then the body was placed in Kourinji (Korin Temple) until the Army came to take the body to their base in the next morning. One witness said that the pilot was having a small red doll as mascot with his body. That was happened on July 7th in 1945. Japan surrendered on August 15th. So if he landed alive, taking into account of the lack of operative air fighters, he would neither fight again nor die for the war, I guess. It is often said that saying “if”s are useless about things happened in history, but I wish he could go on living in prosperous Japan after the war.


Today’s post refers to the web site of Katano City. You can look the photo of the S.L. Junichi Nakamura’s face in the site. And it says that there is a memorial stone at the place he died.

If I start with explanation of “Comfort Women”, it would be a long story. So let me skip it. So many Asian women, most of them were Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese, too, had suffered from Japanese Imperial Forces’ sex exploitation system since Sino-Japan War and during World War Two. For this issue, a women activist group “Violence Against Women in War-Network Japan(VAWWNet Japan)” held “The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery” in 2000. They say in their web site

“The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery” (the Women’s Tribunal) was a people’s tribunal organized by Asian women and human rights organizations and supported by international NGOs. It was set up to adjudicate Japan’s military sexual violence, in particular the enslavement of “comfort women,” to bring those responsible for it to justice, and to end the ongoing cycle of impunity for wartime sexual violence against women.

At that time, Japan’s state-run broadcasting cooperation NHK covered the story of the Women’s Tribunal with interviewing VAWWNet Japan and some victims of the sexual slavery. But just right before the on-air, the program “ETV2000; How war should be judged?” which was the coverage of the Women’s Tribunal was changed its contents by pressure of two high rank politicians. It is unforgivable by any means that a public broadcasting accepts politicians’ pressure and bents their reports by that. Isn’t Japan a country that freedom of expression is guaranteed? It is to be shamed but one of the politicians, Shizo Abe, became prime minister of Japan. He threatened guys of NHK and demanded that the program should be changed. And when he was the prime minister, what he did was just escalating conflicts with North Korea and in turn making it difficult to settle the abduction issue. He was so irresponsible that he suddenly threw his job away.

VAWWnet Japan sued NHK in order to clarify the reason why the program was distorted to underestimate the significance of the tribunal, and to recover the damage. The final decision handed by the Supreme Court recently was quite surprising and terrible, which dismisses the high court decision demanding NHK to pay compensation. It also rejected the appeal that interviewees’ expectation should be kept. The decision by Chief Justice Ms. Kazuko Yoko’o was enough to make me doubt the quality of jurisdiction of Japan. Oops, I think foreword of today’s post has already been long, but what I want to write is starting from here.

VAWWnet Japan got an e-mail on June 13th, it’s around 4p.m.. The e-mail address indicated that it was sent from a news paper company “Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei)”. Although I know that my English is not enough to translate the e-mail especially to express how the words in the mail are rough, but let me try it.

No way for media to yield interviewee’s expectation.
Have a common sense, Stupid. It’s the role of media to report neutrally even what the interviewees don’t like. Why should the public broadcasting release you guys’ extreme ideology? No-brainers. You guys’ lack of common sense is absolutely hopeless.

Nikkei Shimbun made an oral apologize on June 24th, but did neither show the name of the sender nor how retribution was made for him in the company. To me, what this Nikkei guy said is quite amazing. His common sense is non-sense for the people. I mean if you overview this issue between VAWWnet Japan and NHK, which is involved with far right politicians who want distort the reality in history, how mass media should deal with the issue is very simple. Obeying strong power, insulting victims, and cheating ordinary Japanese people? NO. It should be opposite. Mass media should reject suppression from politicians and government and should try to show people what happened especially in the situation that wrongdoing of the government resulted in huge damage on people.

I don’t say that a person should not send an e-mail to tell his/her personal opinion by using company’s e-mail account. And sometimes it should be allowed for an interviewer to use the materials of an interviewee in different ways that do not follow the expectation of interviewees, for example, like the case of the sword craftsman in the movie “Yasukuni”. But as a result, what he did was insulting ex-comfort women and allowing freedom for the power to intervene mass media.


A blogger, Mr. Hiroyuki Ida says “This level of guy works in mass media, who pave the way for war”. I agree with him. I guess that sometimes news coverage on economy says Nikkei Index or Nikkei Average with Topix for stock market in Japan. I think it will soon be taken place by Shanghai Index or some. But anyways, would you please remember today’s post; what a person who works in Nikkei did.


Any mistranslations or misunderstandings, if there were, they should be aiueo5’s responsibilities, not the quoted materials and its authors. And at last, the sender of the message from VAWWnetJapan welcomes forwarding. So I just extract and put the whole of e-mail from a worker in Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The souce is Mr. Hiroyuki Ida’s blog.

——- following a quotation of the e-mail  ——————

『　取材先の「期待」に報道が従うわけないだろ。

常識を持て。ばか者。報道ってのは取材先の嫌なこともちゃんと中立的に
伝えるのが役目なんだよ。なんであなたがたの偏向したイデオロギーを公共の
電波が垂れ流さなきゃいけないんだよ。あほか。

あんたがたの常識のなさにはあきれはてる。　』

——-  the end of quote ———————————

It’s unusual for my blog to get several tens of page views a day. My post “When will Paul Harvey be back?” has got many visitors recent days. I guess that people will never come again, soon my blog return to be unpopular as used to be, if I had wrote replies to all comments on my post (actually not all, sorry). It’s used to be that some minutes later 7 o’clock in the morning, I could listen to Paul Harvey News and Comments on AFN radio being broadcasted from somewhere in Tokyo. Until the day before yesterday, I had just noticed that the person who took the place of Mr. Harvey emphasized so often by saying “Paul Harvey News and Comments CONTINUES”. But yesterday, what I heard after AP radio news on 7 o’clock was just popular songs one after another. This morning, it was the same. Does this mean that the program is gone forever?


To tell the truth, I couldn’t understand what Mr. Harvey was saying because English is foreign language to me. But I felt that his English is very good to learn the language. If AFN radio will continue to air popular songs on 7a.m., it will be useless to brush up my listening skill. Besides, such songs are just noisy to listen during my breakfast. Anyway, it is very difficult for me to figure out what is said in English. For example, AFN radio often announces that “This is the eagle eight ten”. The eagle is symbol of the U.S. and “eight ten” means the frequency of the broadcasting, 810khz. But I always hear that is “This is illegally ten”. It is unlikely that radio says they are something out of law. But it sounds like saying so.


Mr. Richie Boy wrote on my post that “he’s almost 90″. If a radio anchor could do his job in his nineties…can we listen to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion several tens of years from now?

My post about Mr.Paul Harvey gets relatively many traffic (still small number, though), Anyway it too late to write somtihng in English which is a foreign language to me. So I just put a photo which I took about ten years ago. Nowadays, skyscrapers in Shinjuku should have increased more than when I took it.

It’s quite interesting. My unpopular blog gets so many visitors to a particular post. That is “When will Paul Harvey be back?”. It is indicated that twenty people came to this abandoned blog, though it is not sure how much of twenty were human beings, not search engine crawl machines. Anyway, at the end of that post, I put a video clip of You Tube in which Mr. AgariyaHonpo plays Alexander Scriabin’s “Deux Poems Op.32-1″. Since many people came to that post, I expect that dome of them have clicked the video and listened to his beautiful and emotional performance. But on the You Tube site, Mr. MoonSideMKDS left a comment two weeks ago. I totally disagree with what Mr. MoonSideMKDS. He wrote;


quotation from what Mr. MoonSideMKDS wrote

I listened to the recording of this piece before I saw the sheet music, I completely disagree with the timing and the rhythm.

Of course me, or anyone shouldn’t “over due it”.

I think you should listen to the piece, and let the meaning come to you, try to block out your music theory deciphering units and play the piece the way you think it’s going to be.

(It’s still going on, but aiueo5 omitted)

If he completely disagree with Mr. AgariyaHonpo’s timing and rhythm, so what? It’s just a personal impression of Mr. MoonSideMKDS’s mind. It’s okay to think whatever he wants, and He has right to do so. But if he writes it on a public space on the web, it would not always be okay. Such comment seems to have some kind of intention. Although I don’t know how many times and how much Mr.MoonSideMKDS has listened so far to this Scriabin’s creation or any other music, it seems that he does not have enough abilities to listen to music and to make an opinion to someone’s performances. At least, he should not leave comment that makes others uncomfortable. It is totally opposite action what Mr. AgariyaHonpo did.

I expect that many people have tried listening to AgariyaHonpo-san’s Scriabin. If people enjoyed his play, I would be happy. If Mr. MoonSideMKDS got to there through my post and left that comment, then I am really sorry for Mr. AgariyaHonpo.

When I was a child, I had lived in a rural town in Japan. At that time I hardly ate beef. Maybe it’s because beef was too expensive to buy for ordinary people in such a country town. Another reason might be that my mom didn’t like to eat beef more than chicken and pork. Off course like other Japanese families, we ate so much fishes in dinner although fishes on our dinner table were always low price kind. Let me add one thing, we had never eaten dog, See?. Anyway, there was little chance for me to eat beef in my younger days. The only exception was just once in a year, in my grandmother’s house. My grandma served “Sukiyaki” for her sons, daughters, their spouses, and grandchildren on January 2nd when all the relatives gathered in her house. I felt at that time, beef was quite delicious. I had got to known that beef was highest of meat in price, I thought I’d like to eat beef much more until my stomach would be filled with beef in the future when I became an adult.


Now it’s about time to eat beef as much as I’d like to. But you know, I should pay attentions to keep me healthy, so I cannot eat beef everyday. When I came to this town, I found a supermarket was selling slices of half raw beef with tasty sauce. Now I eat it like every week end. The beef is so-called Aussie Beef. I’m not sure but media says that importing beef from US is a social problem in South Korea these days. I remember that Japan had also banned from importing US beef while ago, but I think the ban was lifted with some restrictions for the exporting side. So there should be US beef on the shelves of supermarket in Japan, but I don’t see them at all. Unfortunately, it seems like Japanese consumers think it likely that US beef contains dangerous part of the meat. So I guess managers of supermarkets decided it’s too early to treat US beef in their market. So I always buy Aussie Beef. When US beef was banned completely in the past, it was said that someone running chain restaurants serving Beef Fast Food(Gyu-Don) said that only US beef could make their Gyu-don taste perfect, other countries beef could not be the same quality as US beef. But for me, Aussie beef is quite good. I don’t think there are any differences between US or Australia in taste.


Anyway it’s my only pleasure in week, I mean, drinking cans of beer and eating medium raw Aussie beef at weekend night. When I eat and drink, I usually do net-surfing. But recently I try to watch TV drama by DVD which I bought several years ago in order to brush up my English listening skill. The drama is ER(emergency room). Now I’m reaching the end of the fourth season. But sometimes I feel funny or uncomfortable when I am eating the meat during the scene in which Dr. Benton and Dr. Greene are fighting with splashes of blood.

So a photo only

Every AM radio stations in Japan had stoped their programs at very late midnight on Sunday or maybe I should say it very early morning on Monday. I don’t know whether it’s still being done or not, because I just sleep at the time of week. Even if all the radio stations stop, it would not be a problem for most of the people, now I’m included, because ordinary people sleep at the time. But if you are waking, for some reasons, it does make you so sad and even scary. Your radio turns to be silent in very late night right after announcement of name of the station and its call-sign. It makes you recognize that you’re alone under the darkness of the night. If you turn the dial of your radio, you might catch weak signals from South Korea or China, but for most of you cannot understand what they are talking. You just cannot listen to someone talking in Japanese.

Since I have been living alone for almost twenty years in cities far from my home town, it’s kind like my sony radio is the only friend of mine in the night. It might be more than ten years ago, I’m not sure, that I had heard the ends of broadcastings several times. That was the AM radio station ABC in Osaka (Asahi-Housou) around 2 or 3 a.m. of Monday. At the very ending of their program, they aired a music piece “Malinconia” composed by Sibelius. It was rare and still so even now that Japan’s commercial radio stations play classical music pieces. And It is also very rare that whole of the piece is played until the end. Anyway, listening to it at the end of the broadcasting is quite frightening for me. Sounds of cello and piano of “Malinconia” really made me melancholic.

I have been looking for a video clip from you tube, in which “Malinconia” is played by cello and piano. Not to say hours, but it took some minutes to find out. Now I put links to them below. Of all music in this world, I think this Sibelius’s great creation is one of the most well composed one for music instruments in the human history. So I think “Malinconia” should be more popular and played more frequently. I remember that Japanese pianist Mr.Kazune Shimizu praised this piece very much on NHK FM radio program about twenty years ago.

Dúo Calderon & Ordoñez Plays Sibelius “Malinconia” (Part I)

Dúo Calderon & Ordoñez Plays Sibelius “Malinconia” (Part II)

Tonight’s post had already been posted like one or two months ago. But unfortunately, I have known that no one had read this. So I am just going to upload this post about “CUP YAKISOBA” again. Not only for the post, but also for other my english writings here, I have got some little number of page views. So I can’t say there is no visitor here. But the problem is that it seems like what comes to my blog is not a human being but some search engines in most of the time. Quite less numbers of clicks done on my space indicate that what (not who) got here does not understand what was written in my blog because visitors do not behave as I expected. For example, suppose I had put a interesting video clip on my post. If visitors understood English, I think it’s likely that they would have click the video. But it does not happen so far. It makes me wonder and gave me an conclusion, just internet search engines come to my blog….. By the way, followings are how to make “CUP YAKISOBA”, which I think “a must” if you come to Japan. It’s a kind of noodle, but with not so much soup like Rahmen. You can easily distinguish “Cup-Rahmen” or “Cup-Yakisoba”. Height of Cup-Yakisoba’s container is shorter than Cup-Rahmen. And please know that how to make it is different from Cup-Rahmen. Most of the people make a mistake for the first time they make Cup-Yakisoba.

You can easily distinguish “Cup-Rahmen” or “Cup-Yakisoba”. Height of Cup-Yakisoba’s container is shorter than Cup-Rahmen. And please know that how to make it is different from Cup-Rahmen. Most of the people make a mistake for the first time they make Cup-Yakisoba.

Please Do NOT PUT Sauce on the Noodle at this time!!!, It should be taken out and put aside.

And pour well-boiled water into the container, put the lid, and wait for a while.

Several minutes after, get rid of hot water from holes at the corner of container.

Okay, then you can put sauce onto the noodle. And stir up.

My dinner is ready.