How to Grow Chrysanthemums

This morning saw me on a bus heading out from Nagoya to look at agricultural practices in nearby parts of the east coast of Japan close to the city's port district, the place from which a lot of Japanese cars, and especially Toyotas, are sent to the rest of the world. The city of Toyota was en route to our destination. Much of the afternoon revolved around the growing and marketing of chrysanthemums, a favourite flower of the Japanese since the emperor sits on the Chrysanthemum throne.

The following images are just a fraction of what we saw, taking into account growing them and also sorting and packaging the blooms. A local farmer, who spoke no English explained how the blooms were grown in hundreds of local glass-houses each owned by individual small-scale farmers, but processed by the local cooperative they owned.

The first picture shows a crop ready to be harvested 100 days after initial planting out of the seedlings. This schedule means that farmers can generate three crops a year. Today, the temperature inside this glass-house was > 40 C!  The stems, with training via a network of strings shown in the third picture, grow tall and straight and their height can be gauged by the height of the people in the second picture. The blooms are picked when the flowers begin to emerge but are not fully out. The uniformity of height of the plants is helped by excellent soil and the feeding of nutrients to the roots via a network of watering pipes not shown here.

The farmer, who owns the facility we saw, is on the left of this picture. He's helped by family members and four employees, one Japanese and three 'apprentices' from China.

The next picture shows the blooms arriving from the greenhouse in large bundles wrapped in paper.

The blooms are then placed one by one on a conveyor belt by hand as shown here - and we were told that the labourers were Brazilian-Japanese (at least 1/16th Japanese). I seem to recall that the mostly women's husbands worked in the car industry in the district. There were quite a few of these conveyor belts in operation and I'd guess that the cooperative was processing 100,000+ flowers a day. The conveyor belt automatically sorted the blooms according to length, size of flower and other characteristics to form homogeneous bunches.

The bunches were stored upright, as shown in this picture, but after the lower stems were wrapped tightly in plastic. All the flowers shown here had been processed today by the time we arrived.

Alternatively, the bunches were stored in boxes like those below and ready to go to customers.

The vertical bunches shown two above were later on placed in large boxes ready for despatch to customers.

 So there you have it - much of the necessary information to set yourselves up in business.

By the way, the return trip to Nagoya was glacially slow as we were caught in heavy rush-hour traffic. Still, the meal 8 of us had tonight in a local Sushi bar was very good. Back to the normal conference activities of delivering papers and chairing sessions tomorrow. And I may be posting to this BLOG this time next year from Bucharest!!

AS

Another Japanese Castle - exterior

The summer monsoon was in full force today in Nagoya, Japan's third largest city with a population of about 2.3 million in the incorporated area. The rain simply teemed down out of the sky without a break. And so a small group of us including a couple of Australians and three Israelis decided to head for Nagoya castle, which at least would put us inside away from the rain. Well, that was the theory, but in practice it took us ages and after many wrong turns trudging the streets of Nagoya looking for the castle, we eventually found the quite impressive structure. Here are several shots of the outside of the building and models of the castle and surrounding palaces we found inside the edifice.

I should warn you that what you see dates from quite recently rather than the 1600s when a lot of the original construction work was done during the shogunate. That is because US bombing raids over Nagoya during the second world war destroyed much of the original compound and reconstruction is still under way in some parts. Here are some external shots of the buildings as one sees them today:

And here's a photo of much of the site ablaze in 1945.

The view from the viewing platform on the top floor of the castle is impressive, even on a day with pouring rain. Our hotel is adjacent to the tall structures on the sky-line, which gives you some impression of the distance we walked looking for the castle.

Here's a model of the castle compound showing how extensive it was. You can see the tall castle structure in a good defensive position in the foreground.

 

And here is the compound shown on an ancient presumably silk screen: 

This drawing inside the castle shows the main tower and a second, satellite tower called the main donjon and the minor donjon. This sparked some lively debate among us on whether the Japanese had imported the term donjon meaning 'dungeon'. However, the diagrams show a stately fortress, not a basement for banging up prisoners, so perhaps the two terms arose independently with different meaning.

Another screen inside shows the castle in the top left hand corner attached to the Hommaru Palace whose date and use is captured in the next picture.

And finally, we have a reconstruction of what some of the surrounding palace buildings might have looked like:

AS

A Hard Day's Travel

Greetings from Nagoya, home of Toyota.

I had a hassle free trip in getting here from Sydney. Everything went to schedule and, after leaving my Sydney hotel (Formule 1) at 5.45 am I arrived in Nagoya at 9.18 pm the same day after two flights and two high speed train journeys. And I also saw Port Moresby (PNG) and Guam on the way. Most of the rest was ocean.

Every flight was early arriving at its destination, and the last one docked at Kansai (Osaka's airport) at 6.10 pm Japan time (7.10 pm in Armidale). I was almost the first non-Japanese (most of the passengers were!) through customs. Having collected my case, I went to the Japan National Railways (JNR) Office and booked all the way through Nagoya without any trouble - the booking clerk spoke good English. After waiting 25 minutes for the Haruka (airport express), I did the 70 km or so to Shin-Osaka in the gathering dusk in about 45 minutes, waited another 15-20 minutes for the Nozomi Super-Express to Tokyo and 'flew' the distance to Nagoya via Kyoto in about another 50 minutes - but the train, by estimate, was doing something like 280km (c. 175mph) per hour (which equals doing Sydney in 2 hours from Armidale!).

Exiting the Shinkansen, the walk to the hotel Meitetsu New Grand was less than 5 minutes in light rain. However, this morning it's pouring! I must have a look at the forecast and hope it clears up because Roy Jones from Curtin University in Western Australia and I want to 'do' the town. I last saw Roy just over 2 weeks ago in Perth.

The view from my hotel window is not exactly beautiful. I attach a couple of picture taken through the grey monsoon.

AS

Global Warming?

Mid-winter on the Northern Tablelands is beginning to look an average British summer. I cycled to my office today in shorts and T-shirt with an expected top temperature of 18C. This is in mid-July, equivalent to mid January in Britain.

It's brilliantly sunny and spring is in the air. Some of the local birds, and especially what we call magpies (Strepera graculina or Pied Currawong), seem to be going through mating rituals. Mind you, wattle day isn't far off on the 1st August and that almost marks the passage into spring. It's a time when the wattle trees and bushes traditionally burst forth into yellow flower, but Dot and I have been discussing how many wattles we have already seen in flower, some even in late June, which is equivalent to December in the northern hemisphere! Can my northern readers imagine trees in flower in January atop Ben Nevis?

AS

Ancient Standing Stones

Britain is awash with ancient relics like Stonehenge, Avebury Circle, and the Callinish Standing Stones on the Island of Lewis. Australia has only one such ancient monument and that is at Glen Innes, 100 km north of Armidale. And to get there we had to drive past Stonehenge, which is 15km south of Glen Innes on the New England Highway! However, the structures at this Stonehenge, like the Balancing Rock shown here, are entirely natural:

Amazingly, the Glen Innes Standing Stones date from as back as 1992, which makes them all of 20 years old! And their history is reported at: http://www.gleninnestourism.com/pages/australian-standing-stones/ . Like some of their predecessors, these stones can be used as points of the compass, a clock, and a means of  telling the two solstices and and the two equinoxes. The stones are made of granite blocks standing upright in an elevated field overlooking the town of Glen Innes whose population is about 6000. The pictures show the stones from various angles, the township below, and the sword of Excalibur. Max and I tried to pull the sword out of its concrete base and thereby gain great wisdom, but it was stuck fast.

AS

Fossicking at Glencoe

Max is visiting us from Canberra for the first week of his school holidays and we decided yesterday to head  to Glen Innes to do a spot of fossicking. For the uninitiated, this involves combing creek beds and mullock heaps for gem stones - for example, sapphires. It was a lovely day, with brilliant sunshine, unpolluted air, little humidity and temperatures hovering around 13C. In short, a typical mid-winter day. Our particular destination was a field near Glencoe. Needless to say, this spot was named after its more famous namesake in the Scottish Highlands, but is much higher than the original at an altitude of 1100m. Only 200 people live in the district and the village, if one can call it that, is famous for its pub, the Red Lion.

The fossicking site was at a bend in the local stream, Marowan Creek which is a tributary of Beardy Waters. For those with Google Earth, its geographical coordinates are: 29 55' 59.87" South and 151 43' 28.05" East. We spent quite a while digging up gravel from the stream banks and the flood plain, placing it in sieves, and washing the mud away:

Alas, we found very little - just a few small slivers of what looked like sapphires. Perhaps we were not too skilled. More interestingly we attracted quite a crowd of onlookers. For example, two horses, a mare in foal and a youngster, made their appearance, examined our car, quite tamely came right up to us and looked over our shoulders at what we were doing. We patted their noses. And, on the other side of the creek, a herd of cattle was  fence intently observing our actions. It looks as if we made their day!

AS

Freo 3

One of the best ways to see the port of Freemantle is on the train going to or from Perth. The port is on the Swan River, which has its famous cluster of black swans. The port is not a large one by world standards, but then Perth is one of the most isolated cities in the world and has a population of less than 2 million. It's actually closer to Jakarta and to Antarctica than to eastern Australia!

While there I saw the arrival of a specialised car transporter from presumably Japan or Korea and, as you can see from the dockside covered in new vehicles, this must be a sizeable part of Freemantle's trade. The final picture show the line of vessels awaiting on the horizon to enter port.

AS

Freo 2

The second stage of my walk around Freo took in some of the historic residential and commercial areas. It's a really pleasant townscape mixing new and old structures, and the commercial heart has a large number of up-market boutiques interspersed with cafes, pubs and restaurants. After my exertions I sat down next to the open window of a cafe serving things like pancakes with Belgian chocolate topping, which is what I had along with a lovely Chai Latte. I'll just let the pictures do the talking.

Perhaps you can better understand Freo's attractions and why it is the destination of choice for visitors and residents alike. And, of course, there are always nearby beaches.

Alas after lunch I had to take the return stopping train to central Perth in order to catch my flight back to Canberra. At least the fare was cheap - just $1.70 for a Senior Citizen like me.

AS