C.W. Nicol - The Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Apr 2, 2008

John Oxley (c. 1785-1828) was among the first Europeans to ever explore this flat, brown and red land, after he was appointed surveyor-general of the British colony of New South Wales in 1817.

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Mar 5, 2008

In praise of the 'mountain whale'

Not long after I arrived in Tokyo for the first time in October 1962, Klaus Naumann — a childhood friend from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in the rural southwest of England, who had come to Japan ahead of me (and is still here) — took me on a magical trip to the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture....

JAPAN

Feb 9, 2008

Killing calves makes Japan's whaling indefensible

KUROHIME, Nagano Pref. — When I turned on my TV to both BBC World and CNN this morning, I was shocked and saddened by the sight of a minke whale and calf being winched up the ramp of a Japanese factory ship in the Antarctic Ocean.

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Feb 6, 2008

Talking sense about deer

We were filming a television documentary in the mountains of Hokkaido. It was winter, and bitterly cold. Through the trees, bare of leaves, we could see floe ice, dotted with eagles, gulls, crows and a few ravens. Then a raucous gathering of crows ahead drew our attention and we trudged through the crisp...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Dec 5, 2007

Wintertime and the livin' ain't easy

I came to live in Kurohime in Nagano Prefecture in the autumn of 1980. An old friend lived here, the poet and critic Gan Tanigawa, and he found a house for me. It was a big old country house, a couple of hundred years old, at least, with massive wooden pillars and beams and a thatched roof. The house...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Nov 7, 2007

Pride towers amid ongoing woes

In 1669, the Ainu leader Shakushain, who rose up and united the Ainu in rebellion against Japanese invaders, was called on to observe a truce, and invited to a banquet in his honor. The Matsumae clan, who had established a foothold on the island then called Ezo, now Hokkaido, by building a castle in...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Oct 3, 2007

'Stoopid ninja' keeps on learning

T he first time I ever heard cicadas was in 1963, during my very first summer in Japan. I was wandering through a small mixed woodland where some small boys were flitting from tree to tree, playing ninja. I, as a strange young foreigner passing through, became their target for assassination. Being just...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Sep 5, 2007

High times away from summer's heat

Early in August, when Japan's big cities were really beginning to cook and parasols were in full bloom in the sultry streets, we again invited a group of children to escape the stifling lowland heat and come up to our woods for a few days.

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Aug 1, 2007

A tale of morels

I have a Canadian friend, Nedd Kenney, a brilliant scholar, musician and fieldworker who now lives on Baffin Island off the northeast coast of Canada. It was Nedd who got me my first bhodran (Irish drum), and came to my house in Kurohime, in the Nagano Prefecture hills, to give me some tips on playing...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Jul 4, 2007

A very special friend

Last year, on June 10, my dear friend Eiji Nakahara died. He was 65.

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Jun 6, 2007

Reflecting on life's amazing twists and turns

I came to Japan in October 1962 to learn martial arts.

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

May 2, 2007

Life can be sweet down in the forest

Mr. Matsuki, our forester, is six years older than me, so he was born in 1934. When World War II ended, life in the countryside of Japan was tough, so sugary sweets, chocolates and suchlike were scarce. He recalls that, as a boy, he learned that the twigs or branches of a certain native Japanese tree,...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Apr 4, 2007

Breakfast with rodents

Iwas home alone the other evening when I heard a scuttling sound coming from the kitchen. Two mice had climbed up a strut in the woodwork of the sink counter and jumped down into the compost bucket below, which just had a few centimeters of food scraps and vegetable peelings in the bottom. It's a red...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Mar 7, 2007

Coo-ee! Or how to snipe posh pigeons

Iwas just turned 20, and earlier in the year I had quit teachers' training college in the genteel Cotswolds town of Cheltenham in rural western England. I was earning money by working part-time at a slaughterhouse as a skinner, helping out as a bouncer at a jazz club and fighting in two or three professional...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Feb 7, 2007

A short essay on seeming rugged

My eldest daughter Miwako visited me from Canada recently, bringing with her a large cardboard box full of old letters, field notebooks and field logs that had been stored away somewhere. The oldest of the notes was the log of my first expedition into the High North of Canada in 1958. I was 17 when I...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Jan 3, 2007

Pied piping for the parsnip

Thanks to the great Roman naturalist and writer Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), we know that parsnips were brought to Rome each year from imperial provinces across the Rhine, and that they were destined for the Emperor's table.

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Dec 6, 2006

Guns, geese and bears by the pair

We leaned back in our seats and gazed at the ruins of the goose. Our hut on Devon Island was festooned with decorations we'd made from toilet paper, and the five of us -- the Arctic Institute of North America's wintering party in Canada's far north, straddling the Arctic Circle above Baffin Island --...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Nov 1, 2006

Bear-faced cheek and jumbo bugs

One of the best perks I get from the wild woods is honey. Mr. Matsuki, our forester up here at the Afan Woodland Trust in Nagano Prefecture, is a beekeeper who prefers to encourage wild Japanese bees -- whose honey has a very delicate taste -- rather than raise foreign varieties better-known for their...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Oct 4, 2006

Tackling the cedar-pollen blight

According to figures given to me by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, about 16 percent of people living in Japan suffer an allergic reaction to pollen from Japanese cedars (Cryptomeria japonica). In the Greater Tokyo area this increases from one-in-six to an astonishing one-in-four people. The very...

ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Sep 6, 2006

Tree of the Baskervilles

I was in Britain from July 6 to July 13 this summer, and on the Saturday of July 8, my companions and I stayed at Baskerville Hall just outside Hay-on-Wye, a beautiful and very historic little town in the Welsh county of Powys on the border with England.

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