From its down-to-earth origins in the north of England, your friend and mine, the humble KitKat, has come a long way.

Long gone are the days when a simple red wrapper (when everything else was, after all, black and white) was enough to get it noticed on the shelf in the corner shop by some excitable little boy in need of an urgent sugar rush.

The KitKat has only managed to ensure its survival by evolving. And evolution has seen to it that the 21st century KitKat is quite a different animal…

The end of the rainy season has brought temperatures in the mid 30s and the usual humidity. So we did what any sensible people would do. We ran away.

We ended up in Amakusa, where we strolled along a deserted beach, and rooted around in rock pools. The place was teaming with life - we discovered the usual fish and crabs, but also mudskippers, prawns, and a cluster of sea urchins.

Mrs C was after taking them home and preparing some uni for dinner. I’m not fussed about them myself, tasting as they do of sea water and little else. Fortunately we had no spike-proof receptacle, so the urchins lived to see another tide.

Yesterday was even hotter, and this time we headed in the opposite direction - up towards Aso, and into the Kikuchi gorge with its green forests and mountain streams.

No messing about, we set up our pair of camping chairs in the shallows and watched the crystal clear water flow past while we enjoyed a picnic.

If you remember our chat about the colour of Japanese cars, and which shades of white you are permitted to flaunt, you’ll realise that this, our new car, is riding roughshod over years of inhibition. Or tradition, whatever.

This garish little number has electric-this and automatic-that, and as such, is very much the car of the lazy, hedonistic show-off. Mothers of young children gasp, and shield their children’s eyes as we drive past, lest we pollute the minds of their fragile offspring with our immodesty. Old ladies frown and purse their lips. And if police kouban weren’t air-conditioned, then they’d probably come out and look confused for a while. Because it’s not just blue. It’s metallic blue.

During a press conference announcing Jose Mourinho’s appointment as manager at Inter Milan, our Jose was asked how he’d managed to pick up the Italian language so very quickly, to which he replied

I am very intelligent

Those lucky Italians.

Under the ever watchful eye of our self-appointed Dinner Guardian, we enjoyed a very special dinner last night.

It’s been years since I’ve eaten crab, and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten this much in one sitting.  What’s more, it was a gift (which came with the apology “Sorry it isn’t much”).  This was most certainly a dinner to which I’d like to become accustomed.

It took my wife a year to train me to take a shopping bag with me when I went over to the konbini to buy lunch.  It was all I could do to remember my shoes and what I was supposed to buy when I got there.  And when I got there, I usually realised I’d forgotten the bag.  But eventually, like Pavlov’s dogs - only different - I was conditioned to hear the call for lunch, and automatically pick up a shopping bag.

What has taken slightly longer is training the staff in the konbini to stop trying to give me another bag every day.  Along with chopsticks, spoons, forks, and wipes that I don’t need.

I stood at the cash register, counting out money, the bag tucked under my arm, and keeping my left eye on my money, I’d have to swivel my right eye - chameleon-like - to catch them as they grab a plastic bag.  I’d tell them I didn’t need one.  They’d express surprise, then thank me, then apologise.  I tried variations on this which involved opening the bag obviously while counting out my money, but found that not only did this do nothing to dissuade them from thinking I might like another bag, it also required three hands at the very least.

After two years of standing at the till going through this Groundhog Day routine, I was shaken out of my complacency today.  I chatted with the cashier about the weather - good, safe, conversational ground for the English and Japanese - and then something peculiar happened. We just stood looking at each other waiting for someone to do something.

I realised that the routine had been thrown to the wind - she’d overcome her reflex to reach for a bag.  Unprepared, I stood there, gormless, with my MyBag (yes, ‘my MyBag‘) under my arm (no, not ‘my MyArm’), until my brain creaked back into action.

When I stepped outside, it was no longer raining. The sun was even making an effort to shine.

It’s no secret that despite studying English at school for around 6 years, most Japanese students leave school unable to have a conversation in English.  There are many reasons for this.  One reason is the emphasis on writing (students are, after all, often quite hot on grammar).  This is because students aren’t being taught to use a living language, they’re being trained to pass written tests that have no spoken element.

Another reason is simply the standard of teaching.  I once interviewed a lady who came for English lessons who was unable to understand the question “Where do you live?” but later revealed (mostly in Japanese) that she was a public school English teacher.  I think it fair to say that there are almost no native speaker English teachers in Japan’s public schools.  I couldn’t hazard a guess at how many have English degrees or English-teaching qualifications, except to say I imagine there are few.

So I shouldn’t have been shocked this week.  But I was.  As one of my classes got on with some groupwork, I had a glance at one student’s schoolbook which was on the table.

Here are some examples from written translation exercises that her school teacher had marked correct.

“Hi is Japanese.” Moments later - “Shi is Japanese.” Elsewhere - “He is Japanise”.

The sentence “犬が好きですか?” (Do you like dogs?) came out as “Do you liek a bog?” but was marked correct, all mistakes unnoticed or ignored. (The transposition of b and d seems quite common among Japanese children. Later, also unnoticed, was “I stuby English”.)

Later on, “docter”. 3 times in 3 lines.

The teacher in me is just dying to put the mistakes right.  But I can’t.  It risks creating an awkward situation if my student goes back to school and calls out her teacher in front of everyone.  But at the same time, saying nothing makes me feel terrible.  Some of the ‘bad practices’ are so ingrained (use of katakana for pronunciation being the worst of them) I sometimes wonder if it’s worth undertaking the Sisyphean task of trying to put them right.

If not your watch, then you could at least set your calendar by them. The swallow’s nest outside the front door of our shop has been the noisy centre of attention again for the last fortnight.

And not only for the occupants, but also for most passers-by. As soon as people walking by hear the squeaking youngsters, or equally likely, have an adult fly centimetres past their head as they swoop nest-ward, they look up, and smile. Everyone smiles.

If you were reading this time last year, you might remember the spring clutch in this nest was a threesome, to be followed later in the summer by five more.

This year though, the swallows have excelled themselves.

There’s not much room in there, and it was rare that no one was being sat on. As the clutch grew, they eventually burst the nest quite literally. There was drama one evening last week when our neighbour found two of the youngsters on the path under the nest, not quite sure what to do with themselves, and as I found out later on, quite unable to take off because of being on the ground (tail’s too long, stops them being able to take off, hence they choose their landing spots carefully). Fortunately they were only a day away from fledging anyway, so once they’d been helped back into the nest, all was well.

Last year marked the 400th anniversary of the completion of Kumamoto castle, and 2008 sees the opening of the ‘Lord’s Inner Palace’ (本丸御殿 - Hon Maru Goten), a “new face of the castle”.  It’s unfortunate then that this new face is so sour.

Billions of yen have been spent on the restoration of this new ‘wing’ of Kumamoto castle, and it was opened amid much fanfare at the beginning of Golden Week when the crowds were queuing for up to two hours to get in and have a peek.

A fair proportion of that money appears to have been spent on signs prohibiting visitors from doing much else other than looking and leaving.

Everywhere you turn there is a sign saying “DON’T…”  Perhaps one of the most interesting parts is the enormous kitchen with its high ceiling.  But visitors are permitted only a glimpse from one corner of the room, where there is a wooden fence preventing access, and if you didn’t get the point, red signs declaring “NO ADMITTANCE”.

When you can approach something, for instance where there are a few (very few, in honesty) informative displays detailing building methods or materials, across the front of all but one of the displays in large lettering is “DON’T TOUCH”.  To back up the signs, there is a team of men in blue commissionaire suits dotted around the place, ready to pounce on people, like me, who look like they might be about to touch something, and bark in not terribly polite terms, “Don’t touch that!”

Last is the nonsensical ban on photography.  And we’re not talking about flash photography, we’re talking any photographs whatsoever.  Throughout the building, and in every room, there are signs displaying a camera in the prohibitive red circle with a thick red line through it.  If you don’t get it, there’s text in Japanese, Korean and English making it clear “DON’T TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS”.  Some of the interior restoration is grand indeed.  To ban people from taking pictures of it is astonishing, unless the goal is to prevent people from sharing photos with their friends, who should instead visit (and more importantly, pay) themselves to see it, in which case it’s no longer astonishing, but extremely cynical.

(There are some ‘official’ photos available on the ‘Kumamoto Castle Official Site’.)

Aside from anything else, the photography ban is inconsistent with the rest of the Kumamoto castle site, where you have always been free to take photographs both outside and inside the other buildings.  Ask for an explanation of the ban, and unsurprisingly what you’ll get is not a clarification, just a repetition.  The Rules, as you should already know, are to be obeyed, not questioned.

The net effect of all this stern authority is to put a barrier between the visitor and the exhibit.  You are at once invited to interact with it, and at the same time prevented from doing so.  To underline this fact, just inside the entrance (before a succession of rooms that you’re prohibited from entering) is a room with a bank of computer screens where you can experience the Lord’s Inner Palace in - wait for it - virtual reality!  Yes, you’ve got off the sofa, made the journey to the castle, and then the closest you can get to see most of it is on a computer screen.

After the years of build-up, and the billions of yen spent on the new building, the experience of seeing it for the first time was a huge disappointment.  Aside from constantly being told what NOT to do, the visitor sees very little of what is an enormous building.  There appears to have been a confused vision as to what part this new face in the city should play.  The restoration team went to extraordinary lengths to recreate it as authentically as possible.  And while it’s open to the public, it appears to be begrudgingly so, lest the public sully the fine restoration work.  Whilst it’s beautiful, it’s worth remembering that it isn’t 400 years old, it’s less than a year old.  Nothing original or irreplaceable would be lost if people were allowed to fully appreciate it.