Yonezawa's annual Snow Lantern Festival took place this past weekend. Unlike the previous year where snow had to be hauled to the main site of the festival by dump trucks, this year there was plenty of snow available. Similar to last year, it snowed during the first evening of the festival. Once more, like last year, I trudged down to the site that first evening to pay my respects at the memorial which sat at the top of the small hill on the grounds of the former Yonezawa castle. The memorial is a column of snow whose design changes from year to year. I don't know exactly in whose memory it is raised but I have a vague idea it has a connection to the stone one nearby. That one, if I recall correctly, is dedicated to those who sacrificed their lives in military service. I'll have to check that site sometime after the snow melts.
I spent the next evening at home having decided not to visit the main festival site two evenings in a row. I ended up whittling my time away in front of my computer whilst listening to music played through iTunes. I have a sizable collection of music so I challenge myself each year to listen to each track at least once. To make things a touch more manageable, those tracks which have lost favour with me over several iterations of this challenge get moved to an archive library. I've tried different strategies to work my way through the remainder such as listening to tracks organized by the albums their on where the albums are listed in alphabetical order. Another was to listen to tracks according to the alphabetical order of their recording artists. This year I'm going through albums listed by the first letter in their titles. The letters are chosen at whim. So when I was listening to albums starting with "I" on Sunday night I hadn't worked my way through the alphabet from A to H.
One album I was listening to on Sunday evening was "Inflammable Material" recorded by the Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers back in 1978. But I didn't hear a track from that album until 2008 when the song "Alternative Ulster" was included in the soundtrack of the film "Fifty Dead Men Walking".
"Inflammable Material" is in my mind a product of its time and place. That time and place being Northern Ireland in the late 1970's. The fact that thirty years later a track from it would ignite my interest in it attests to the energy and power it encapsulated.
While listening to the album I cast my mind back to the film which had lead me to it. It was a reasonably good flick that was quite tense for its first half or so before wrapping up in a flurry of action. The following night after that listening session I went back and read a bit about the film it had been featured in. In particular I checked up on the points where the film differs from its source material which is the book written by Martin McGartland. Those differences were so great the author disowned the film and is quoted on a Wiki page as having said "The film is as near to the truth as Earth is to Pluto".
Now reminiscing and reading about a record album and a movie it's connected to, while sitting at my kotatsu in my apartment in Japan, didn't give me any new more insight into The Troubles. But it did bring back a memory. Not a vivid one since it came from an evening of drinks at the Rose and Thorn pub in Vancouver back in the early 1980s. I'm not sure when. Perhaps the summer of 1982. I surmise the occasion was someone's birthday. Or perhaps not. But the gist of the memory is the face and words of a fellow from Northern Ireland who joined our table at some point in the evening. I don't know who he was but I can remember vaguely his expression and gestures as he spoke about an incident from his past. He had had the experience of being interrogated while he was living in Northern Ireland. It's been a long time and the details of the story are murky. I believe he stated his interrogators were British. While he related the story he acted it out a bit. He told how his head was locked into an upward direction. He was facing a bright light and he was unclothed. I don't remember how long he said he was forced to endure that situation. But needless to say it wasn't a happy memory for him.
That happened a lifetime ago. I wonder now if that fellow is leading a happy and prosperous life in Canada. Perhaps he connected with other Irish immigrants such as a former co-worker's husband who made it a point to grab a group of buddies and to go drinking after a game of hurling (or was it Gaelic football?) at the British Ex-Servicemen's Club on Kingsway. If I recall correctly, my co-worker said they did that in jest...and to be annoying. Or perhaps it was done just to be annoying. Who knows, eh?
Postscript: As I walked out of the local Mister Donut shop earlier this evening I glanced at something that was a hideously bright green. It was a sample of a set of six different coloured handbags which the company is offering to patrons as part of a promotion for a line of pastries they're currently selling. The bag was hanging on a sign with the words "Caribou Green" above it. I said to myself "Caribous aren't green". I have no idea how anyone connected caribou with the colour green....
