When London meets Japan

The author Douglas Sladen - writer of the May 1895 Windsor Magazine piece "Odd Scenes in Japanese Streets" - rang bells, though I've never written about him on JSBlog. It eventually dawned on me that I'd mentioned him in A Wren-like Note as a neighbour of Maxwell Gray after she moved to Richmond.

The Amè-ya

Further to Blossoms from a Japanese Garden (5 June 2015), I just had to check the context on this one. What exactly was an Amè-ya, the vendor celebrated in the first poem in Mary Fenollosa's 1913 illustrated collection of poems for children, Blossoms from a Japanese garden: A Book of Child-Verses? I'll quote first.

Blossoms from a Japanese Garden

Blossoms from a Japanese Garden by Mary Fenollosa: cover image found during a quick camera purge.

Prickly ash revisited

An elaboration further to my March review of Mitch Cullin's Sherlock Holmes novel A Slight Trick of the Mind: the linguistics weblog Language Log has a very good post and discussion of the "prickly ash" that's central to one of the main threads of the book.

Milne-Shaw

A recent post at the Ptak Science Books weblog - On the Continued Rediscovery of the Horizontal Pendulum - leads into an interesting backstory with roots in Birmingham, Japan, and the Isle of Wight.

Jun Togawa sings Pachelbel

戸川純　"蛹化の女" by GO-GO-STALIN

A year back - see Guernica - Kaigenrei - I mentioned the avant-garde/retro Japanese group Guernica. Good to see there are other fans: MetaFilter just had a post - Say you love me or I’ll kill you! - featuring tracks by Guernica's lead vocalist Jun Togawa.

I especially liked the versions of a song called 蛹化の女 ("Pupa Woman"), which is sung over Pachelbel's Canon. The one above is a pretty straight lyrical version over a standard orchestration (it's also at Grooveshark). Then there's this rather rawer live version played against acoustic guitar ...



... and finally a punk version:



They're all brilliant in different ways.

A look at the Jun Togawa Collective website finds a translation:

In a moonlit white forest
Dig at the foot of the trees
To find many pupas of the cicadas, ah

My overwhelming love for you has changed me
In the woods under frozen moonlight
Sipping sap from the tree, I am an insect

Someday
When you are to notice me
The girl who has changed into an insect
With an amber colored stomach
Shall have a parasitic plant
Growing stems of sorrow on her amber colored back

In a moonlit white forest
Dig at the foot of the trees
To find many pupas of the cicada, ah
My overwhelming love for you has changed me
In the wood under frozen moonlight
Sipping sap from the tree, I am an insect

So it's a song about unrequited love: the narrator has been waiting so long that she feels like a cicada pupa, waiting for years underground for its day of release. Personally I find it a poignant metaphor, but I rather concluded that Clare isn't a romantic soul. When I told her about the song's scenario, she said of the narrator - and I quote this with her permission - "she should get over it". :)

- Ray

Sharland grave, Bonchurch Old Church

We visited Bonchurch Old Church (aka St Boniface) in October 2010 - see Isle of Wight flying visit (3) - but it's such a charming location (and I missed quite a few details the first time round) that we had another look on Friday (May 25th). This rather odd mountain-shaped gravestone near the entrance gate caught my attention, and as far as I know, no-one has offered any analysis of the story behind it. The inscription reads:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

RICHARD SHARLAND

OF BIDEFORD, BANKER,

WHO WENT AWAY TO BE WITH JESUS

JANUARY 20th 1871, AGED 60.

ALSO OF

ELLEN S. SHARLAND HIS WIFE,

WHO ENTERED INTO REST AT CHOFU, JAPAN,

APRIL 19th 1895, AGED 69.

A quick sum with the dates shows that Richard Sharland was 25 years older than his wife, and as tends to be predictable with such arrangements, he predeceased her and left her with 24 years of widowhood. That she died in Japan - Chōfu is a centrally-located city on Honshu, now part of Tokyo Metropolis - strongly suggested that she didn't spend those years idly. The short answer is that she became a self-funded missionary. A number of missionary magazines contain obituaries, particularly relating to her time at Chōfu in the last f'ive years of her life.

Our Japan Mission is again bereaved, in the death of Mrs. Ellen Sharland of Shimonoseki, Japan, who passed away on April 19, in the seventieth year of her age. Mrs. Sharland, having some fortune of her own, has for many years devoted herself to labors for the salvation of the destitute in various parts of the world. Dec. 9, 1890, she was appointed a missionary of the Union, in special relation to the Woman's Society of the West, and has since that time labored in connection with the Baptist mission at Chofu, a suburb of Shimonoseki, Japan. She not only supported herself but contributed largely to the missionary work, of her own means. Mrs. Sharland was of a sweet and deeply pious character, greatly beloved by those who were associated with her in missionary work. For some time she has been laid aside from active labors, but has been of continual assistance to the mission school and work by her counsels. Her example is one which ought to be largely followed. There are a multitude of the followers of Christ who have means sufficient for self-support, and who, if they would, might give themselves without expense to missionary societies or to the church at large, to useful labors among the heathen. Having means for self-maintenance their time is a talent which the Lord has committed to them. How shall they account for the use of this talent on the great day if they have spent their time in idleness simply because labor was not necessary for personal support.
- Baptist Missionary Magazine: Volume 75, 1895

Mrs Ellen Sharland came under the auspices of this Society as a self-supporting missionary in 1890, and was assigned to the newly opened station of Shimonoseki as an associate in the work of Miss Browne. Possessed of wide experience gained on missionary fields in India, China and Japan, together with a consecrated and self-denying spirit, she at once won the love and esteem of her co-workers. Her usefulness greatly increased from year to year until Miss Browne wrote of her: "Mrs. Sharland is an indispensable member of the Mission, being helpful to all. She supports one Bible woman, keeps up one of the eleven Sunday-schools, maintains a young man in school who is preparing for the ministry, and shares equally with me the burden of the "Orphanage." "An indispensable member of the Mission!" And yet a few months later, April 19, 1895, the Lord of the harvest called His busy worker out of the field into the rest that remaineth for the people of God. "Auntie" Sharland, as she was called with a tender familiarity of love, will long be remembered as a faithful follower of Him who said "By their works ye shall know them." She had, in an unusual degree, the true missionary instinct, laboring continually for the conversion not of the heathen only, but the Romanist and the Jew. She was faithful in the discharge of her daily duties, even when weakened by pain and disease. Taigo Fuslaida, her son in the Gospel, deeply realized that she had no other purpose in leaving her home and coming to a foreign country except the burning desire to give the knowledge of salvation to sinful man. This, indeed, was the key-note of a life ever loyal to Christ and consecrated to His service.
- Women's Society of the West, 25th Annual Report, 1895

Much else remains unknown, including her pre-1890 missionary work; everything concerning her husband; how a Bideford banker ended up in a grave in an Isle of Wight churchyard; and the reason for the mountain-shaped gravestone.

Addendum: Jane Clark kindly e-mailed me with some further background on the Sharlands.

I was fascinated by your piece on Richard Sharland's grave at Bonchurch Old Church, I.O.W. I believe Richard Sharland to be the son of my 3xgreat Grandfather, also a Richard. Richard married 'Nellie' Bartlett in 1866 at Croydon. Her real name was Ellen S.Bartlett, daughter of a Captain Bartlett of Bideford, there was no issue. Ellen's travel may have been inspired by her father being a mariner. The gravestone was certainly unusual. 

If you know any more pieces that fill in the picture, let me know, and I'll forward it to Jane.

- Ray

Above are some of my October 2010 photos of Bonchurch Old Church. Its churchyard is widely documented for the handful of historically interesting people buried there, including ones with literary connections. One, as I mentioned, is Charles Hassard Wilcox, cousin and godson of Lewis Carroll, who died of tuberculosis after a stay in Ventnor - then a health resort for chest diseases - failed to cure him. Others include the authors John Sterling and William Adams (I mentioned this author of Christian allegories recently - see William Adams: The Old Man's Home). These two also died of TB; perhaps this explains the presence of Richard Sharland too? More about the hospital in the next post.

Addendum 2: I just ran into Philip Bourke Marston's The Old Churchyard of Bonchurch, a rather depressing poem which refers both to the chruchyard and the instability of the landscape here.

The churchyard leans to the sea with its dead,—
It leans to the sea with its dead so long.
Do they hear, I wonder, the first bird’s song,
When the winter’s anger is all but fled;
The high, sweet voice of the west wind,
The fall of the warm, soft rain,
When the second month of the year
Puts heart in the earth again?

Do they hear, through the glad April weather,
The green grasses waving above them?
Do they think there are none left to love them,
They have lain for so long there together?
Do they hear the note of the cuckoo,
The cry of gulls on the wing,
The laughter of winds and waters,
The feet of the dancing Spring?

Do they feel the old land slipping seaward,—
The old land, with its hills and its graves,—
As they gradually slide to the waves,
With the wind blowing on them from leaward?
Do they know of the change that awaits them,—
The sepulchre vast and strange?
Do they long for the days to go over,
And bring that miraculous change?

Or love they their night with no moonlight,
With no starlight, no dawn to its gloom?
Do they sigh: “’Neath the snow, or the bloom
Of the wild things that wave from our night,
We are warm, through winter and summer;
We hear the winds rave, and we say:
‘The storm-wind blows over our heads,
But we here are out of its way’”?

Do they mumble low, one to another,
With a sense that the waters that thunder
Shall ingather them all, draw them under:
“Ah, how long to our moving, my brother?
How long shall we quietly rest here,
In graves of darkness and ease?
The waves, even now, may be on us,
To draw us down under the seas!”

Do they think ’t will be cold when the waters
That they love not, that neither can love them,
Shall eternally thunder above them?
Have they dread of the sea’s shining daughters,
That people the bright sea-regions
And play with the young sea-kings?
Have they dread of their cold embraces,
And dread of all strange sea-things?

But their dread or their joy,—it is bootless:
They shall pass from the breast of their mother;
They shall lie low, dead brother by brother,
In a place that is radiant and fruitless;
And the folk that sail over their heads
In violent weather
Shall come down to them, haply, and all
They shall lie there together.

- Ray

Multiplying devices

click to enlarge

Some mathematics-related oddments. I was pleased to find the above nice curio - a pair of circular slide rules, complete with manual and wallet - very affordably in the local Estuary League of Friends. Charity shops are getting increasingly savvy and commercialised these days, to the point where you rarely see anything as obscure and interesting as this.

Both slide rules are made by the Concise Corporation, Japan, and the instruction leaflet says the agent is Takeda Drawing Instrument Mfg. Co. Ltd. The little one, a bit over 8cm in diameter, is a Concise No. 28N, a basic model with D, C, CI, A, K scales on the front and a metric-imperial conversion table on the back. The larger 11cm one, the Concise No. 300, is a full-featured log-log slide rule:

• K, A, D, C, CI, B, L on the front / LL3, LL2, D, C, S, T1, T2, ST on the back.
• Especially designed for professionals, this circular slide rule enables you to make various calculations ranging from general multiplication and division to the square root, cube root, trigonometric function and even logarithm and descending series.

I know all this because, surprisingly, they're still manufactured - here's the Concise No. 28N and Concise No. 300 - and available by mail order from the Concise website. The No. 28N costs ¥1,000 (a bit under £8) and the No. 300 costs ¥2,600 (around £20). Concise have diversified, and companion products include various drawing and measuring tools, stationery, and personal kit for the traveller.

There was a kind of synchronicity to this, because I'd just run into a couple of other mathematics-related topics, one of them being the interesting link at Ptak Science Books, Alan Turing--Report Card Teachers' Comments, 1926-1931 (which references Turing’s school reports at the website of the author Alex Bellos). Alex comments that "It’s interesting to see how he changes from an untidy and careless mathematician to a distinguished scholar", and John notes the snarkiness of some of the comments that describe Turing in such terms as "absent-minded":

It may be easy to judge some of the remarks as intemperate, the teachers unable to clearly see the genius-in-the-making who (70 years later) we can so clearly see today. I think the remarks need more careful consideration than that, and that is where they become interesting.

True. There is a standard "teachers are unable to recognise genius" meme, and people who remember their schooldays with hostility latch readily on to this (especially given the regular data points from celebrities who went on to great careers after being written off as the "class clown"). It is, however, a lot more complex than that. I'm not remotely in the intellectual league of Turing, but I can recognise from my own experience the syndrome of erratic achievement in academically good and mathematically-inclined pupils in traditional British education.

In part, the syndrome lies in the system. Good teachers recognise bright students and give them appropriate work to keep them interested; poor ones don't. And I must have run into the latter. I also had a number of reports, at junior school, saying I was "absent-minded", and the description is completely unrecognisable. What I do remember is being intensely bored; in mathematics, I remember with especial loathing what were called "Problems", page after page of identically structured sums that read like primers in capitalism (and sexism):

1. A man buys 10 oranges for 2s/6d, and sells them at 4d each. What profit does he make?
2. A man buys 11 apples for 1s/7d, and sells them at 1½d each. What loss does he make?
...
39. A man buys 19 pears for 2s/9d, and sells them at 2d each. What profit does he make?
40. A man buys 13 carrots for 2s/0d, and sells them at 2½d each. What profit does he make?

I remember similar sets of what seemed interminable repetitions - continuing the exercise long after (at least for me) the point had been driven home - for long multiplication, and I recall not finishing the sets because I'd start playing with other ways of doing them (I knew from books at home about Russian Peasant Multiplication and what's now called Lattice Multiplication).

That said, there are equally faults of working that bright students can get into spontaneously, and a major one stems from over-confidence: a tendency to "wing it". That is, letting trust in one's being good enough to improvise solutions over-ride the need to consolidate basic knowledge. For example, I don't think I ever properly learned many of the useful trigonometric identities such as sin(2x) and cos(2x) because I trusted in being able to derive them as needed from De Moivre's Theorem cos(x) + i*sin(x) = e^(ix) - despite the extra time needed to do that.

With other faults - "untidiness" - it's really hard to tell where the fault lies. Traditional schooling placed what I think was an unnecessary emphasis on format over content - and it goes against the reality of mathematics to expect a perfectly laid-out solution first time. Again, good systems existed, that allowed sufficient space for rough work that didn't count against the final "fair copy". Handwriting has been always been an issue: for some, poor handwriting is involuntary (a symptom of, for instance, dyspraxia); for others, it's a repairable result of poor initial instruction. Personally, I've always found it very difficult, for no reason I can fathom. That may even have helped steer me away from English and History, both of which subjects I enjoyed and still do, because physics and mathematics required much less writing.

And just as I was thinking about that, along came, via Yahoo! Answers, a relevant online paper: Mathematical justification of some non-traditional methods of multiplication (Y. D. Deshpande, Bulletin of the Marathwada Mathematical Society, Vol. 10, No. 2, December 2009, Pages 8–15). This is an interesting paper on on three unorthodox multiplication methods, explaining why they work: the Urdhva Tiryakbhyam method, the Ganesh method and the Russian peasant multiplication method.

Though the paper calls them "non-traditional", they're perfectly traditional, just methods that pre-date the dominance of the standard long multiplication algorithm. The Ganesh method is a slight variant on the lattice multiplication known across a number of cultures, the Russian Peasant Multiplication goes back to Ancient Egypt, and the Urdhva Tiryakbhyam method - a method from Vedic mathematics - is in the same territory as the merchants' multiplication systems I mentioned in November in the post Tagliente's multiplication by columns.

Although ancient India produced some serious innovation in mathematics, Vedic mathematics is something different: a system presented by the Indian author and scholar Bharati Krishna Tirthaji in the early 20th century. I say "presented" because it seems extremely doubtful that it comes from ancient Hindu sources as the author claimed. It comprises a set of algorithms, presented as fundamental "sutras", for performing rapid calculations on, usually, a one-line basis. I can't really disagree with one main criticism: that it was more relevant to pre-calculator days; and furthermore, the algorithms have the fault of it not being 'transparent' as to how they work. That said, I find Vedic mathematics interesting for that very reason; as with the previously-mentioned Tagliente method and similar, untangling the algorithm can make a diverting puzzle.

There are a number of websites and books about the topic. They vary between the adulatory (see Vedic Mathematics Academy) - via enthusiastic but straight expositions (see the Google Books preview of Vedic Mathematics, 1992) to the distinctly hostile. For example, Vedic Mathematics - 'Vedic' or 'Mathematics': a fuzzy & neutrosophic analysis (WB Vasantha Kandasamy, Florentin Smarandache, 2006) frames a technically accurate description of the system with the assertion that its popularity in India reflects its appeal to those with a right-wing caste-driven fundamentalist Hindu agenda. It reports an impressive body of signatories to a statement to the effect that "it is largely made up of tricks to do some elementary arithmetic computations. Its value is at best recreational and its pedagogical use limited". On the other hand, "the fuzzy and neutrosophic" method the book uses to analyse opinions on Vedic mathematics looks a majorly unproven dialectical method (and from the description here - Neutrosophy - my immediate feeling is that it could even be pseudomathematics).

- Ray

Fitting designs (continued)

Further to Fitting designs - which looked at the history of the classic puzzle of making an object that will fit three holes of different shapes: square, circular, and triangular - Emily from the largely mathematics/nature blog Ephemeral Curios commented:

These might also be the inspiration for Douglas Hofstadter's "trip-lets"-- the blocks on the cover of Godel, Escher, Bach that cast three different letter shadows.

Thanks! Yes, the GEB "trip-let" (left) is identical in concept to the object with three orthogonal letter shapes objects spelling "PSM" in Popular Science Monthly for July 1927 (see Arthur L Smith's A Square Peg in a Round Hole).

But I'm not clear if (as is quite possible) it was independently conceived; Hofstadter wrote in the intro to GEB:

The trip-let idea came to me in a flash one evening as I was trying to think how best to symbolize the unity of Gödel, Escher, and Bach by somehow fusing their names in a striking design. The two trip-lets shown on the cover were designed and made by me, using mainly a band saw, with an end mill for the holes; they are redwood, and are just under 4 inches on a side.

Does "idea came to me" mean the whole trip-let concept, or just the idea of using it for the cover?

There are plenty of interesting spin-offs. Googling found a nice page by Humberto José Bortolossi of the Mathematics Department, Universidade Federal Fluminense - Triplets - which has rotatable models, along with an intriguing reference to the generalisation of the idea. Objects can exist with an arbitrary number of specified shadows when illuminated from different directions. This is not merely theoretical, but has actually been applied to the creation of the "digital sundial" designed by Scharstein, Scharstein and Krotz-Vogel: see U.S. patent 5,590,093 and Digital Sundials International.

Another good page is The magic of trip-lets at mariano tomatis blog, which shows the design (not trivial to achieve) of an "EMC" triplet for the Eseential Magic Conference. It also raises the possibility of trip-let type objects in the past - that is, objects designed to look different from different directions - via the example of a 17th century carved crucifix by the Franciscan monk Fra Innocenzo da Petralia, deemed miraculous for its ability to show different expressions on the face of Christ (suffering, dying and dead) according to viewing angle. This looks to me an equivalent of the "Noh Mask Effect": the ability of masked actors to convey expression change in Noh drama by tilting the head to give different viewpoints of their rigid masks. See Michael J Lyons, Noh Masks & Facial Expression Perception, which has several research papers. The concept seems to be pretty widespread: see, for example, Perceiving faces of Buddha statues, Same miraculous statue; different expressions, and How Moving Light Changes Expression on Face of Small Statue.

- Ray

Guernica - Kaigenrei

While finishing my tax, I've been listening to the 80's Japanese band Guernica. They did strange but often compelling stuff: avant-garde and often atonal cabaret/electronica with Jun Togawa as vocalist, all with retro 1920s-1930s styling reflecting the Westernised element of the pre-WW2 Japanese imperial era.

At the moment my favourite piece is the one embedded above and below in two versions: 戒厳令 (Kaigenrei in Romaji), whose title appears on the web variously as Martial Law in English or Belagerungszustand in German. The chorus section from 0:55 to 1:38 recalls early 20th century totalitarian or patriotic anthems - I think it's a brilliant tune. But although it seems very familiar, I can't find it on Musipedia. The version below is a powerful slower-tempo arrangement for conventional orchestra, sung in German with a lot of Sturm and Drang.



This seemed a strange conceit until I realised that Guernica's lyricist Keiichi Ohta wrote the lyrics in German originally. The song is about the repression and fear of living under totalitarian rule, with strong allusions to Nazism, judging by these lyrics I found (the German is a little fractured in places):

Die Autobahn in der Nacht
Durchfaehrt im heftigen Regen
Der Asphalt wird das schwarze Plastik
Den Tropfen der Frontscheibe
Warnt das Autoradio vor Kreis
Die Belagerungszustand reisst die Nacht.
Ach, Ach, Belagerungszustand
Ploezlich erscheint das schwarze Beiwagenmaschine.
Der schwere Ton des Offizerscheibes
Hilfeschrei eines reinen Maedchens
hoert man hinter "Gesperrt" hevor.
Die Belagerungszustand reisst die Nacht,
Ach, Ach, Belagerungszustand

Die Sirene heult jetzt in der ganzen Stadt.
Wie Mantel Totenengels
Der Regen Faelt auf den roten Backstein,
Wie die traurige Traene deren,
die nach Hoelle gewhen. Wie traurige Traene.
Die Voegel singen die Fried und die Freiheit, aber
klingt es leider hoffnunglos.
Das Gebeht der Frauen zum heiligen Kreuze
weckselt ja mit dem Fluch ueber schwarze den Teufel.

- lyrics from this Guernica fan page

There's another video here - Martial law - Belagerungszustand / Guernica - which brings out a powerful irony to the song by juxtaposing the pageantry of Nazism to these downbeat lyrics that portray its dark side. I don't know if the anthem section is a genuine Nazi tune - if not, it's a superb pastiche of one. But if it is, its upbeat and disturbingly inspirational flavour is completely subverted by Belagerungszustand's lyrics. Loose partial translation:

The siren now wails over the whole city
Like the mantle of the Angel of Death
...
The birds sing of peace and freedom, but
the sound is sadly hopeless.
The homage of women to the holy cross
becomes the curse of the black devil.

If you read Japanese, the official Guernica site is here. If you do, I'd be delighted if you could feed back any information on the background to Kaigenrei if you see any. What was its inspiration? Why did a Japanese songwriter choose to write a song in German? Is that compelling catchy anthem a real Nazi tune or a pastiche?

Addendum I like this one too: Denrisou karano Manazashi (which means something like "Gaze from the Ionosphere") I haven't the least idea what the lyrics are about, but it has a Weill-like urgency and atonality to it.



- Ray