mayoral election

Breakfast

Today is the day of the Mayoral Election. It's a tight-run thing. There is only one candidate, but a rival could appear at any moment. A rival candidate has until 5pm to declare her or himself - so naturally we are all nervously watching the clock at home. Meanwhile my homestay father, his friends from the neighbourhood and the current mayor, cruise around Niseko in landrovers wearing orange anoraks and caps which read 'WE LOVE NISEKO.'

I am now a proud owner of this jacket.

In the afternoon, I visited the 有島 武郎 memorial site. Arishima Takeo is (was?) a famous Japanese novelist from the Meiji period who moved to Hokkaido to 'get away from Tokyo's petit bourgeoisie'. I was told that no one read him anymore, because his Japanese is old-fashioned and barely comprehensible.

The man himself, giving us his blessing

The memorial park is, like the rest of Niseko, quiet and unpeopled. It is rather confusingly laid out - but maybe that is a just a feature of 'memorial parks' generally. There is a crazy pink-handed clock, a spiked tower, and stripes of lavender planted here and there. Once you get through to the other side of the brick paving, the little paths that lead nowhere, and the swinging-benches, the memorial park seeps into Niseko countryside. A stream trickles around the tower and down past cornfields and flowering ditches. For a moment I think I hear hundreds of dogs panting simultaneously, before realising it's frogs croaking, hidden in the water. I don't meet another soul.

Writer's Retreat... or a Witch's Hat?

On doing more research (Wikipedia) it turns out that Arishima in fact ended his life by committing double suicide with his lover in 1922. His body was not discovered for weeks 'due to the isolated location'...

I see

To end on a more cheering note, here is a photograph of my homestay father's Japanese Sake collection:

There's more, but I couldn't fit it all in.