http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7354458.stm

Man grows back his own severed finger using magic powder in 4 weeks. Sweet.

No, not this one!

Proof that I will read almost anything in the art of work-dodging  is found in the knowledge that I have spent whole minutes of my employer’s time reading “the dullest blog in the world“. Kindrid spirits will likely do likewise, as it really is quite good.

“My knee had a slight itch. I reached out my hand and scratched the knee in question. The itch was relieved and I was able to continue with my activities.“

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One of the most enduring memories of my childhood is the song Sixteen Tons - made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford, covered by such musical luminaries as Johnny Cash, Eels and, more importantly for the purposes of this post, by my dad. He’d sing the song almost incessantly; as he cooked us up an Ulster fry on a Sunday, as he showered or shaved through the bathroom door, as he drove us in the car to visit our many relations.

Too young at the time to appreciate anything other than the catchy rhythm of the song and the powerful bass of my father’s voice, the bleak message of the song was entirely lost on me. The song details the existence (life would be too generous a description) of a man, who despite back-breaking manual labor, finds himself deeper in debt each day - so much so, that his own soul is owed to the company he works for.

Less than two weeks ago, I became possibly the first in my family (certainly the first in my immediate family) to circumnavigate the globe. What’s more, I did it in a Phileas Fogg-beating 30-odd days. However, there was no £20,000 reward awaiting for doing so.

Having flown home to Japan via Amsterdam and over Russia in early January after spending Christmas in Ireland with my family, I settled back into what had become the daily slog of teaching English to high-school kids in Okayama. This mundane normality prevailed only until Friday two weeks ago, for as I was preparing for work, I received a phone call from a clearly upset brother.

My dad had had an accident.

A freak accident in work had shattered my father’s cheekbone and left him needing emergency 5 hour surgery to remove a fragment of bone from his brain. With help from my brother and cousin, I was booked onto the next flight home, what was to be a seemingly never-ending 33 hour journey via San Fransisco. However, the journey was made immeasurably more bearable as news reached me before I boarded the plane that my father was out of the surgical procedure.

It’s been more than ten days since I received that phone call from my brother. At once, those days seem both an eternity and an instant. Sometime in the midst of last week, my maternal grandmother passed away - delivering yet another blow and also a welcome distraction to my family.

Though still in intensive care and as yet unable to speak or communicate with us, my father seems to, superficially at least, be on the road to recovery. Progress is necessarily but frustratingly slow. The various drips, monitors, ventilators, bandages and tubes are slowly disappearing, and my dad is slowly emerging from the heavily sedated, swollen and bloodied figure I saw before me two Saturdays ago. The extent of his recovery is still unknown, and may not be clear for some time yet.

Needless to say, I hope he makes a good recovery. We all miss him terribly. I want my little brother to look back on a childhood punctuated by our dad’s singing. I want my sister to be walked down the aisle by our dad. I want my dad to warm my mother’s feet in bed, like he used to do, and complain about it, like he used to do. I want to share a pint with my dad and my older brothers.

More than anything, I want my dad to enjoy life - to stop and smell the roses, not end up like the character of a favourite song.

My statistics plug-in tells me that the presumably NSFW http://www.funflip.com/tag/Korean-Anal is a not inconsiderable source of traffic to this blog. A badge of pride, if ever there was one.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written on the Japanese psyche, but I dare say none offer as succinct an insight as a conversation I just had in work today.

I was approached by a Japanese teacher asking for an English proverb that conveyed the opposite meaning of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

I drew a blank, as such sentiment is rarely expressed back home.

If you’ve any suggestions, please post in the comments…

Xboxen weighing as much as they do, I was unable to bring my 360 with me to Japan. Even though a brand spanking new PS3 was one of my first purchases upon landing, the last few months have been tough from a gaming point of view.

While Resistance proved to be rather excellent,  other big name titles like Minna No Golf 5 and Motorstorm left me completely cold. That the 360 was playing host to triple-A titles like Bioshock and, more recently, Halo 3 compounded my woe.

Anyway, last week I attended the Tokyo Game Show - press pass in hand, due to my work with gamestoaster. The event offered a glimpse into the direction the various industry players are heading.

Microsoft are still trying valiantly to win over the Japanese gamer, with big Japanese franchises like Winning Eleven, Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden and Virtua Fighter all appearing on the 360, as well as cult shooters Rez and Ikaruga. That Rez is coming to Xbox Live Arcade in hi-def bells & whistles form makes me all kinds of jealous.

It was Sony, though, that really impressed me. As well as having the undoubted game of the show on their console in Metal Gear Solid 4, they had such an array of titles on display that crossed every genre and demograph. Whereas currently their line-up consists of banal RPGs and racing games, over the next year that line-up will expand to include  big budget titles like Singstar, The Eye of Judgement, Killzone, Metal Gear Online, Time Crisis 4, beautiful indie titles like Echochrome and fl0wer, as well as some visually arresting, if not truly innovative, RPGs and racers like Valkyrie of the Battlefield and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, respectively. Playstation Home was kept under wraps, while the mysterious Afrika remains little more than a title and beautiful screenshots at the moment.

Add multi-platform titles like Assassin’s Creed, Guitar Hero III, Resident Evil 5 and Devil May Cry 4 to the list, and the next 12 month is looking good.

Until these games start to hit store shelves (Christmas is mercifully fast approaching, so the yearly deluge of games is about to begin), I’ll have to entertain myself with the Japanese-only 20th Anniversary box set of the Metal Gear games.

I’m into my third week of teaching English classes at my Japanese high-school, and so first impressions are beginning to solidify into actual opinions. Here are a few:

Japanese students are painfully shy. This has its advantages, as they don’t need to be ruled with an iron fist, as many of my secondary school classes were, but it also has its disadvantages. Getting students to contribute to a class is like pulling teeth. From a stone.

Japanese high-school girls are not the playful sex kittens that they are so often portrayed as. Nor, as it turns out, are they proficient in medieval weaponry (a la Kill Bill), hand to hand combat (a la Battle Royale), and nor do they sell their used undies from vending machines (a la every article you’ve read about Japanese school girls/vending machines/Japan). However, they do, on occasion, like to play table tennis and softball.

Japanese high-school boys are like girls. They congregate in groups, giggle and blush. They boast ridiculously styled hair, designer belts and man-bags, and wouldn’t say boo to a ghost.

On a final, non-school related note:

Japanese banks are like Irish banks. OK, their ATMs close (yes, they close) at 6pm, and they seem to have ten staff milling about their branches for every customer, but in many ways, they’re the same.

I’m currently waiting for AIB to sort out my loan restructuring, which was applied for, signed for and approved by everybody a good 2 months ago. I’m also waiting, and have been for the last week, for my Japanese bank to send me out a new ATM card because they spelt my name wrong. If I’m lucky, I may receive it by next Monday. Which would be nice, because they’ve frozen my account until I do receive it, and with Pay Day being last Friday, I am none too happy. I don’t mind being ‘Breidan’ if they’ll let me use my own fucking bank account.

Today I had to transcribe a portion of BILLY BLANKS’ BOOT CAMP WORKOUT so it could be used to teach high school kids English. Quite why you’d want to teach anybody how to talk like Billy Blanks is beyond me.

My favourite phrase?

YOU GOTTA WRAP THE SPECIAL-OPS BAND AROUND YOUR WAIST.

It`s the height of summer in Japan, with the mercury consistantly scoring in the mid 30s - even after the sun has set. As such, you`d expect the nation`s children to be out kicking football, breaking windows and capturing butterflies, or at the very least, sitting at home in front of their Playstations.

Not so, however. Instead, though term time has ended, the schools are full of teachers and students. The students are there for their club activities, and are insessantly drilled for hours and hours every day. The Japanese approach to sports offers an interesting insight into their psyche - prior to the introduction of Baseball with the opening up of the country, sport simply did not exist in Japanese society. The closest they had were martial arts, and in many ways they based their approach to sport around their approach to martial arts.

 As such, kids stand out in the hot sun all day repeating the same activity again and again and again until they improve. It`s an approach that is completely at odds to the Irish mentality, and seems to value achievement and self-betterment over enjoyment and the social aspect.

 While the students are outside fainting in the heat (and sadly, even dying - as happened to one local Junior High School student recently), the teachers are inside working. Except that, with no classes on, there`s no work to be done. And so, they just pretend that the`re working - putting on a magnificent, if not thoroughly convincing, spectable as they rush around the office (but not too quickly!) , photocopying documents, filling in various unimportant forms and writing feverishly on their word processors.

 The mask does occasionally fall, however. Notably, if two teachers share a quick joke, everyone in the office makes a bee-line for the offending couple and try to join in the merriment. More notably, a look around the office will typically reveal at least one teacher sleeping with their forehead pressed against their laptop keyboard.

 And yet, nobody will admit that they`re not working. It`s a big charade that everybody is in on but that nobody will acknowledge. And so I must play along…

Here are some shoddy videos taken by Liz over the course our the last week or so in Japan:

• Discovering the Odori Festival
• Tail end of my on-the-spot speech
• In the crowd at a Purple Sanga game