mattersofthemoment

“Japan is becoming a society where harmony comes less from tradition now and more from shared intention.” Will it be fast enough to heal some serious social problems?

For us, visiting Japan was like the icing on the cake of life long travel. Having visited 60 countries including every province in Canada and state in the U.S., we found Japan to be downright amazing. Never colonized, it exhibits a harmonious culture that honours its roots and practices historical rituals. Japan has a lot to teach us about cherishing our collective past instead of making “we vs. them” judgments.

和 (wa). Pronounced wah, refers to harmony, peace, balance, and also the traditional Japanese spirit of social unity. 調和 (chōwa). Pronounced choh-wah means “harmonization” or “being in balance,” often used for things like colours, elements, societies, or ideas being in harmony. This is Japan’s social philosophy.

However, Japan is not without its unique social problems. Hikikomori is extreme social withdrawl of a person caused by pressure, shame, fear of failure and lack of an escape route. Expectations of social harmony can cause a Japanese (or any) person to feel totally out of place. Consequently a million or more Japanese have retreated to their bedroom to avoid all social interaction other than with family.

Japanese cultural values mean that these families do not confront or force a withdrawn family member to change. Instead, parents will continue to provide meals and accommodation for years hoping that the person will eventually change. Many of the so called hikikomori are now in their 40s or 50s! It’s known as Japan’s “8050” problem: parents in their 80s caring for children in their 50s who never reintegrated.

In chatting with some Tokyo residents, we were also told that many workers in Tokyo are extremely stressed out and not happy. They are constantly being asked for more and more by their employers. Work life balance ironically enough seems non-existent there. On the other hand, suicide deaths (mostly among middle-aged and older adults but also some youth) are trending downward due to strong prevention efforts. However, the numbers remain higher than in many other high-income nations. 

So will Japanese society be able to change fast enough to contain and resolve such social ills? Not likely according to some. Japan has a history of changing its culture incrementally. Rather than solve any deeply rooted social problem, it is likely to build support systems to help alleviate the pain.

What we noticed that was different in the Palm Sunday Mass we attended at Yukinoshita Catholic Church in Kamakura Japan was:

• parishioners did not say the Lords Prayer together
• their was no kneeling
• the priest handed out the Eucharist alone with no (lay) assistance
• there was not a lot of the sign if the cross until the final blessing
• Instead people bow towards each other
• people took the Eucharist in their hand and none did on the tongue
• the singing was particularly good
• the wafer was double the size of what we are used to
• the priest did not say goodbye to folks at the door as we exited

What we did not realize at the time is how rare Roman Catholicism is in Japan: 0.5%, one of the smallest Catholic communities in the world. It was thus a privilege for us to attend.

What the swamp of Japan means is that when Japan absorbs western ideas, it twists and transforms them into something more Japanese in nature, culturally or theologically. In this case theologically: shades of Buddhist and Shinto rituals are evident in the Japanese Mass.

Japanese culture traditionally emphasizes:

• shame over guilt
• harmony over individual conscience
• community before self

This changes how Catholic teaching is understood here. Confession tends to be less psychological, more formal. The emphasis is often on not disturbing social harmony rather than internal moral crisis.

Very interesting. This is something Shusako Endō explores in his 1966 book Silence which Martin Scorsese made into a 2016 motion picture film.

The metaphor of Japan as swamp means it’s easy to get sucked in and hard to get out. People use “沼” (numa) to describe any hobby that becomes an obsession (anime, J-pop, idols, games, manga, figure collecting, etc.). Japan, with its huge pop-culture ecosystem, is jokingly called a “swamp” that traps you.”

So watch one anime → you get hooked. Buy one figure → suddenly you collect ten. Visit Japan once → you keep going back

This is playful internet slang, not an insult. And it’s very true.

We are just returning from a 19 day trip to Japan mostly by cruise ship where we visited the following places: Tokyo, Yokohama, Kamakura, Osaka, Kyoto, Shimizu, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Kochi and Enoshima. Yes it was quite a trip!

It was sometimes difficult to savour Japanese cultural differences because of the background noise on the ship, eg. ra-ra spirit, loud western music, trivia contests, people talking loudly etc.), we did enjoy observing the following:

• streets are clean beyond belief (if you ate a candy bar you had to bring the wrapper back to the ship as no public garbages pails anywhere)
• there were no visible homeless people on the streets
• the JR train and connected subway system is amazing, tap on tap off, go anywhere, no reservation needed
• one eat’s out of a bowl here eg, noodles, rice etc., there were few large plates and no knives in our rented apartment
• toilet seats are heated!
• prices seem less than in Canada eg. Bordeaux wine for $8 a bottle
• everyone waits for the green pedestrian signal, no one jaywalks here!
• fish is so plentiful, so fresh and so delicious!
• everyone is calm, no visible conflict or trouble
• we never saw any smoking or vaping anywhere
• low obesity rate, people are generally small and skinny
• Japanese dress well (blue jeans, sneakers and shorts were not really in)
• streets and parks very crowded during Sakura (cherry blossom time)
• fantastic infrastructure, motorways, sidewalks, pedestrian streets, public washrooms, parks and gardens

We saw hundreds of young people in beautiful school uniforms. Dozens of young couples happy and laughing. Purple, blue, green, blond hair, short skirts, faces whitened, white socks and black shoes. Beautiful young women being photographed by their family in lovely dresses in the cherry blossoms at Shinto shrines. Well dressed workers. Really cute kids with pageboy haircuts.

We loved it particularly when we got ashore and spent a few days in Kamakura where they have a huge Buddha and a lovely bamboo forest where they serve traditional matcha tea. Very peaceful.

I picked this book up at the condo as we were leaving Mexico heading for Japan. I thought oh well, I might as well read it now while on our cruise ship trip as opposed to sometime in the future. Glad I did.

Pierre Bertons’s 1971 book about building the Canadian Pacific Railway between 1881 and 1885 is a true masterpiece of Canadian history. Who said Canadian history is boring? Read this book and then see what you think.

Difficult to read at times because it is so jam packed with detailed stories, in the end, the story of the last spike being driven in Craigellachie, BC, occupies only a page or 2 out of the 420 pages. Indeed the book should be called “the 10 million spikes” lol.

In reality, this is a book about leadership and Cornelius Van Horne, General Manager of the project and George Stephen, its President and financier, stand out. Both had an unrelenting drive, the skills and the energy to see the vision of a railway from Ontario to the Pacific through to completion despite countless roadblocks: finance, geography, politics, resources and competition. They literally built the west, Winnipeg, Brandon, Regina, Calgary, Vancouver and countless other communities around the railway. The irascible Major A. B. Rogers who discovered the Roger’s Pass is unforgettable.

The American born Van Horne and the Scottish born Stephen created perhaps the greatest business partnership in Canadian history, were fiercely Canadian in their core although Stephen moved to England afterwards due to his dislike of politicians.

Along the way we are treated to many interactions and anecdotes involving Sir John A. MacDonald, Sir Charles Tupper, Donald A. Smith, Sir Sanford Fleming, Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont, Crowfoot, Fr. Albert Lacombe, OMI, flamboyant engineers, contractors and countless others.

The challenges in particular that had to be overcome:

• the geography of the prairies, northern Ontario, the Selkirk mountains and the Fraser Valley in BC
• constant financial pressure as costs continued to exceed resources requiring increasingly creative financial solutions and government bailouts
• interactions with the Cree, Blackfoot and other indigenous that threatened to block the line
• manpower, thousands and thousands of workers needed to survey the route, grade it, install the rails and stay sober
• the politics and competition were brutal, unrelenting and threatened to derail the project on numerous occasions

In the end, the project came within 1 hour of total collapse as the CPR needed one more loan from the government to make a debt repayment to avoid receivership. Van Horne, Stephen et al. would have been ruined men. Instead they danced on tables and smashed a few things when the loan came through. Who says Ottawa is sedate? The rest is history, a nation building project that we take for granted today that was anything but a sure thing at the time. A smashing read!

We just might take a trip on the CPR soon to find that last spike.

Pierre Berton in his 1971 book The Last Spike has this to say about Fr. Lacombe:

“The CPR Directors invited Father Lacombe who had saved them so much grief, to be their guest at a luncheon. On a motion by Angus, Lacombe was made president of the CPR for one hour. Taking the chair, the priest immediately voted himself two passes on the railroad for life and, in addition, free transportation of all freight and baggage necessary to the Oblate missions together with free use for life of the CPR’s telegraph system.

The directors were only too happy to grant Lacombe what he asked. He was the man who had the full confidence of the Indians. All the promises that day were honoured by the railway. Moreover, Lacombe’s rather cavalier use of the passes, which he lent out indiscriminately (as he did most of his belongings), was regularly tolerated.”

To have garnered this, Fr. Lacombe was a great friend of Blackfoot Chief Crowfoot. Through his influence he had convinced them and the Cree to allow passage of the CPR line through their territories. Crowfoot trusted Fr. Lacombe and decided there was more to be gained by cooperating with the Government than opposing it.

A strikingly good looking man, he was particularly adept at raising funds and political support for the Oblate missions in western Canada. His superiors often had him come to Ottawa and Montreal where he was very well connected to assist them in fundraising and political activities.

Nevertheless, towards later, he did take responsibility for a parish and started up an industrial school to teach indigenous employable skills.

Pure speculation on my part but his skill in “secular” activities had too often resulted in him to being pulled away by his superiors from his holy activities and in the balance, may have outweighed them. Apparently, no miracles were ever documented and no major push for canonization was ever launched by the Oblates. Furthermore, his legacy is tied to colonization and in particular, residential schools. Consequently I surmise, he was never proposed for sainthood. A true Canadian hero to be very proud of nevertheless.

We recently visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City commonly called Saigon.

We toured the War Crimes Floor. We saw gruesome photo after photo of Vietnamese people being shot, tortured, burned and mutilated with agent orange, phosphorous and napalm by American forces during the Vietnam War 1965-75. We were appalled by what we saw.

Many of the victims were women and children, hardly a threat to the United States. I guess they could not distinguish who was VietCong and who wasn’t. It reminded me of the the famous quote by Arnold Amharic the Catholic Abbot responsible for ending the Albigensian Heresy in 1209. When asked by his Crusaders how they could distinguish between loyal Catholics and Cathar heretics, he ordered them to “Kill them all, God will know his own.”

Now we see today Venezuela being attacked, Cuba being starved out and in Iran a girls school bombed out and an unarmed Iranian ship being blown to pieces with no attempt to save the survivors. The United States is a killing nation.

Later we visited the former CIA building where the last Americans and allies were rescued by helicopter. Our tour guide encouraged us to take this picture at the exact site.

No more wars!

“Louis Napoleon is not to be blamed, he is to be pitied.”

The quote from J. M. Thompson’s book about Louis has stuck with me. You will recall Louis Napoleon, Napoleon I’s nephew came to power in France in mid-nineteenth century and was declared Emperor in 1852.

From an early age he was driven to recreate the greatness of France’s Napoleonic era that his uncle had established so successfully from 1799 to 1815. He was determined to make France great again through modernizing the economy, social reforms and having a strong and visible foreign policy.

He starts off very well. He joined with Britain and Turkey to defeat Russia in the Crimean War 1853-56. (This was also a victory for modern nursing, think Florence Nightingale.) France gained increased authority and prestige in Europe. France and Britain were reconciled and Russia under Tsar Alexander II became a French ally.

However, Louis was a prisoner of his own intellect. Apparently he would listen politely to advice and then make his own decision based on intuition. Unfortunately this caused him sometimes to turn left when he should have turned right and right when he should have turned left. Sound familiar?

France’s Mexican adventure (1861-67) was one of his biggest failures. The pretext was money owed by Mexico to France and others that was not being repaid due to financial insolvency of Mexico’s government. He decided to attack Mexico and install Austrian Habsburg dynasty member Maximilian I as Emperor to reestablish French colonial power in the Americas. It ended in total failure costing the lives of 6500 French soldiers and 750M+ francs.

His progressive social reforms were very well received at home. He legalized trade unions, invested in public health, made massive infrastructure investments in parks and water treatment, supported rural farms and improved education for girls.

He came to the aid of the Italians who were seeking to unify their country, by establishing a French force in Rome to guard the Pope from Austrian intrigues and assisting Sardinia. He kept Europe peaceful for 17 years as he was a master of diplomacy. However in playing Austria off against Prussia, he lost and was captured in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 which led to the unification of Germany.

He spent his last years exiled in Britain and watched from afar as the Third Republic was established in France. Note that his wife Empress Eugenie who was very forceful, proud and headstrong was not the reason for his downfall. Declining health, French military unpreparedness and the dramatic military rise of Prussia under Otto von Bismarck, were. An intriguing figure perhaps ahead of his time and well worth reading about. I rate this book 9.5 out of 10 (could have been a few more maps included.)

This book is a great romp through middle 19th century Europe! Written by a stellar historian, it was a real page burner for well over a month.

In great and candid detail, often quoting from the personal correspondence of Louis, his wife Eugenie, Queen Victoria, the King of Prussia, other royal dignitaries and a host of European leaders, J. M.‘s research and writing skills are evident on every page.

Why was I interested in Louis Napoleon in the first place? Because I did a presentation on his failed Mexican empire adventure under Maximillian 1 (1861-66) and wondered who would have risked such an audacious scheme.

So who is Louis Napoleon, what is bonapartism and why was he driven to reinstate it in mid-nineteenth century France?

Louis (1808-73) was the nephew of the great Napoleon (1769-1821). He was the son of Napoleon’s younger brother Louis (1778-1846). Napoleons wife Josephine was his grandmother since his mother Hortense, was Napoleon’s step daughter. He was the only one of a number of cousins capable and driven enough to do try regaining power.

What is Bonapartism? A strong executive leader claims to stand above all social classes and political factions, ruling through plebiscites, bureaucracy, the military, and populist legitimacy rather than through constitutional checks.

By contrast, a monarchy is where sovereignty is vested in a hereditary ruler (king/queen), often justified by tradition, religion, or dynastic right. Republicanism is where political authority is not hereditary; sovereignty comes from the people, exercised through elected institutions. Finally, parliamentary government is where the executive (prime minister + cabinet) are accountable to an elected parliament, not directly to the people or a monarch.

Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III) firmly believed Bonapartism was superior to both republicanism and monarchy because he saw it as the only system that could (1) restore order, (2) unify France, and (3) legitimize strong executive power through popular approval. He thought parliamentary government too chaotic, factional and ineffective. His strong views were shaped by his ideology, his personal ambitions, and the political crisis of France in the late 1840s and early 1850s.

Here is a link to his background and how he came to power here. And yes if you are wondering, President Trump does have bonapartist tendencies but American institutions – Congress, the Judiciary and Constitution are much stronger than French institutions were in 1848.

Back in the day, I worked there for 8 months. My first job was as sample boy. I went out and drew product samples from various tanks like fuel oil, gasoline, propane and butane spheres. It was winter and I would drive the lab truck out to a tank, climb the stairs to the top, open the sample hatch and drop a weighted bottle on a cord with a cork top. Once immersed in the liquid, a quick flick of the wrist upward would dislodge the cork and the bottle would fill with liquid. On pressurized propane or butane tanks I would use a metal cylinder called a bomb with valves on each end. You connect one end to the tank/sphere, open the valves, flush it out on the ground to get rid of any water and then close the valves. I would then take these sample back to the lab for quality control testing.

I remember many a cold day that winter out in the tank farm. I could see the Toronto skyscrapers shimmering in the distance. I had trouble getting to work. I boarded at a friend’s house in Burlington and would catch a bus to the edge of Oakville. I would than have to walk 2 or 3 km or hitch hike from there! Often a colleague at work would see me and give me a lift. One day the lab manager asked me to drive the lab truck to Maple Leaf Gardens in downtown Toronto to pick up his hockey tickets for the weekend. Pretty cool I thought!

My second term that Fall was as shift tester in the lab. Various samples of products would be provided from the units or tank farm. I conducted freezing point, distillation, flash point and viscosity quality control tests on a rotating shift. At least I was inside then but I remember the constant smell of solvents like acetone and maybe even benzene which we used to clean the equipment – as well as our hands! I enjoyed joshing with the guys in the lab at coffee break and lunch when I worked the day shift. I remember the gas chromatograph guy who was very nice, the older engineer who picked me up as well as the good natured lab manager. Also one of the guys in the union who loved working stat holidays for the double time and a half pay lol.

That term I lived in Mississauga near Oakville boarding at another friend’s house. I had a car this time, a brand new VW Beetle that my mom had purchased for me. I remember listening to Green Eyed Lady on the radio and Led Zeppelin III on the tape deck. Cool!

As there were no oil refineries anywhere near my home in Ottawa, I really enjoyed these unique university coop work term experiences! Here are a few pics and the ChatGpt history of this refinery for which I have fond memories of.

Short version up front: the “Trafalgar” or Oakville refinery was built in the late 1950s, operated by Cities Service, bought by BP in the 1960s, later sold to Petro-Canada, and was decommissioned and closed in 2004–2005 (the site now functions as a storage/terminal). 

Key dates & facts

Commissioned 1958 — the refinery was built and began operations in 1958 (original owner: Cities Service Company).  Acquired by BP (early 1960s) — BP bought the Oakville/Trafalgar facility in the mid-1960s as it expanded its Canadian operations. The site was known locally as the BP Trafalgar Refinery.  Growth & capacity — over time the plant was expanded (1970s plans to add capacity are documented); historical BP material shows the Trafalgar refinery processed tens of thousands of barrels per day (period figures in reports show ~31,000 bpd in 1969 and later references list up to roughly 90,000 bpd as a peak/combined figure in later summaries).  Sale to Petro-Canada (1982) — BP’s Canadian refining/marketing assets (including the Oakville/Trafalgar site) were sold to Petro-Canada in the early 1980s. The refinery then operated under Petro-Canada.  Closure & decommissioning (2004–2005) — Petro-Canada permanently shut and decommissioned the Oakville refinery around 2004–2005. The company cited the cost of meeting new, stricter low-sulphur gasoline rules and the small/less-efficient scale of the plant as reasons for closure. Decommissioning took place in late 2004 into 2005.  Aftermath / equipment sale — parts of the refinery equipment were shipped (or planned to be shipped) overseas — there was a plan to re-erect equipment in Pakistan (Indus Refinery Project), though some components were not ultimately reassembled there; the Oakville site was retained in part for storage/terminal operations (Suncor/Petro-Canada legacy). 

Local details / name

The facility is commonly called the Trafalgar Refinery or Oakville Refinery in local archives; examples and photos appear in the Oakville museum / town collections (site address listed historically as 1225 Trafalgar Road). 

…is somewhere I could live. Sunny everyday, occasional sprinkle, 5 beaches within walking distance, a laid back vibe, friendly courteous people, wild chickens.

So we have been everywhere and this is one place I would choose to live. Just had the best of family vacations there in a 4 bedroom house. Six plus days to get into the local vibe: grocery store, shrimp trucks, Catholic Church, ocean sunsets every night, all within walking distance.

The Shaka is the Hawaiian sign used in the surf culture to mean great, compassion, friendship and understanding. Read all about it here. That sums up everything here. Just sayin’

If you ever get a chance….