TsukuBlog

433 Tsukubans (115 men and 318 women) celebrated their 88th birthday this year. (The 88th birthday is auspicious in Japan.) 13 people celebrated their 100th birthday (2 men and 11 women), and 19 people are over 101 years of age (2 men and 17 women). Tsukuba’s oldest citizen is Ms. Ko Michikawa (路川好さん — did I get the romanization right?) at 105.

Source: Tsukuba City Hall Newsletter, November 1, 2007

In the summer months, you cannot help but notice clusters of tachi-aoi (hollyhock) growing wild on the sides of country roads or beside vegetable patches. You can’t miss them because of their height. As tall as sunflowers but not as heavy looking, they are graceful yet imposing and come in red, white and pink blossoms which bloom up and down their long, lean stems.

It is my interest in these very common and uncelebrated flowers that led me to the discovery of a bizarre state of affairs in the world of Japanese-English translation — especially in regard to the names of certain plants.

Knowing the roadside flowers to be tachi-aoi (立葵) and confirming that the same flowers were called hollyhock in English, I tried to learn more about their history and cultural associations. At first I was surprised that the ancient Aoi Matsuri Festival (葵祭) was often referred to as the Hollyhock Festival in English guidebooks and other texts.

I also discovered that the  J-League 2 soccer club representing the capital of Ibaraki was called The Mito Hollyhock. This name was chosen because the crest of the great Tokugawa Family which ruled the Mito Domain for centuries consisted of  3 futaba-aoi leaves. This crest has been made extremely famous by the classic TV series Mito Komon. The Wikipedia article on hollyhock also said that that flower was the symbol of the Mito Clan.

At first I was excited. These flowers that I alone seemed to be interested in appeared to have highly distinguished historical and cultural associations. I wanted to write about this. Luckily , I started to dig further.

I did this because I still had lingering doubts about the connection between aoi and tachi-aoi. I had been to the Aoi Matsuri and seen that the  Aoi associated with that festival was a leaf. I had even taken one as a souvenir and kept it in my wallet. The seal of the Mito Clan also consisted of  3 leaves (representing the 3 branches of the Tokugawa Family).

The leaves on the Mito Crest and the aoi leaf in my wallet looked NOTHING like the leaves of the hollyhock (tachi-aoi).Photos in field guides also showed me that tachi-aoi was the roadside flower, but I could find no pictures of aoi in any bookstore flower guide.

To make a long story short, I became slightly obsessed with getting to the bottom of this mystery. At the library I was able to confirm that the scientific name of tachi-aoi(hollyhock) was Althaae rosea , and that the symbol of the Mito Tokugawa and of the Aoi Matsuri was a plant with NO COMMON ENGLISH NAME but known as Asarum caulescens among botanists and futaba-aoi among the Japanese (see photo. These two plants have NO CONNECTION other than being PLANTS and having the character aoi (葵)in their names.

Finally, I went to the Tsukuba Botanical Garden to consult with Dr. Tadamu Matsumoto. He was also astonished that the Mito Soccer team had been called Hollyhock, as there was no botanical connection between futaba-aoi (the highly esteemed leaves on Mito Komon’s emblem) and the common roadside tachi-aoi (hollyhock).

There is obviously a big problem with translation when dealing with the names of plants which are not familiar to the translators. These types of errors occur not only in Wikipedia and blogs but also in respected journals, dictionaries and encyclopedias. I fell victim to such a mistaken translation when writing about the Boy’s Day (Tango No Sekku) traditions in Japan (Tango no Sekku over the Ages).

In my article I mistakenly wrote that the Japanese put irises(the Japanese term is shobu 菖蒲） in their baths and on their rooves on that day. I had gotten this translation from very respectable source books. However, I later realized that the shobu used is NOT an iris(hana-shobu) at all but a completely unrelated plant called CALAMUS(related to taro) by botanists and which was believed by the ancient Chinese and Japanese to have the power to expel evil and bad luck.

For me hollyhocks are amazing flowers and are worthy of having a soccer team named after them. But I’m sure that the citizens of Mito will not be pleased to learn that their team is named after the TACHI-AOI and NOT the  revered FUTABA-AOI.

It’s like calling the Seibu Baseball club The Azarashi (sea lions) instead of The Lions. Why not? They are both mammals!

Compared to other places in this mountainous and densely populated archipelago, Tsukuba offers plenty of open space. One surprising feature for me when I first arrived was the abundance of open fields of grass, lawns not fenced off, which tempted me to take off my shoes and run, play fetch with my dog, have a picnic or a nap.

If you have or have given into the same urges you might want to think twice before indulging or re-indulging. This is because these enticing plots of green (or gold in winter) are not meant for your recreation. They are actually agricultural fields belonging to local farmers and the grass is an important cash crop (Tsukuba City is the number 1 grass producer in the country). Thus, by walking or running on the turf you might be damaging the goods and subsequently cutting into the farmers earnings (unlike the US, however, nobody will threaten you with a shotgun).

Even if you don’t give a hoot about the farmers, you might want to know that these fields are chock-full of powerful chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Many Japanese families with such fields around their houses don’t drink water from their wells and I’ve also heard it said that dogs have been sickened by daily walks on these lawns.

Turf lawn growing has a long history in Tsukuba. Before and during the war, farmers grew the grass which was used for airstrips and runways. After the war, turf has been used for river embankments, parks, and sport fields. The business really took off with the boom in golf-course construction in the 1980s. The golden days of the golf clubs has long passed, but there is still a demand (though quite reduced) for lawn put into private homes, sport facilities and parks. Tsukuba City still produces 50 percent of the crop and remains the number one producer.

The Union of Turf Grass Growers in Tsukuba has announced that it has developed 3 new varieties of turf-grass: Tsukuba-Hime, Tsukuba-Kagayaki and Tsukuba-Taro, all which have been designed for resistance to disease and hardiness to cold and other climatic problems which have made life for other species difficult.

You can see farmers seeding grass fields in March and April, and maintenance being carried out throughout the year. Harvesting happens whenever grass is needed somewhere.

So, next time you pass by an enticing open field, even if there is no sign posted, you might want to KEEP OFF THE GRASS!

Tsukuba City Hall has published a 144-page document with various statistics related to the city. The document is only available in Japanese, but it is a treasure trove of information about the city.

For example, there is a diagram on page 15 (of the pdf file, page 5 of the paper document) that outlines the history of merges that created the city. I knew that Tsukuba was created out of Toyosato Town, Oho Town, Sakura Village, Yatabe Town, Tsukuba Town, and Kukizaki Town, but I did not know that Toyosato was originally Kamigo Town, which itself was originally Kamigo Village.

Page 25 (page 15 of the paper document) lists statistics on the weather from 1998 to 2007, including annual average temperatures, annual high and low temperatures, annual average humidity, annual average wind speed, annual precipitation, and hours of sunlight. It also lists the monthly amounts of the above variables for 2007.

Page 26 (16), says that the area of Tsukuba is 284 km2 with a population of 206,661 (as of October 1, 2007). The population density is 727.5 people per square kilometer. The average household had 2.5 people. There were 5.7 births per day and 3.5 deaths per day. 37.2 people moved into the city per day, and 30.3 people moved out of the city per day. 3.6 couples got married per day and 1.0 couples got divorced per day. As of October 1, 2007, there were 7154 foreigners living in the city, representing 127 countries.

Page 27 (17):
4388 books borrowed from the library per day
1452 people used community centers per day
1.5 cars per household
19 ambulances sent out per day
0.3 fires per day
4.1 traffic accidents per day
207.5 tonnes of garbage produced per day
177,910 yen of municipal tax paid per person
108.3 city hall staff members per person in Tsukuba (1878 staff members in total)

Page 28 (18) has a chart that puts Tsukuba in perspective in Ibaraki.
4th in Ibaraki for size, but 1st for residential land
2nd in Ibaraki for population
14th for population density
7th for youth population
2nd for working-age population
43rd for senior age population
6th for births
51st for deaths
4th for incomes (3.7 million per person)
21st for number of hospitals per person
3rd for number of medical clinics per person
1st for number of doctors per person
10th for number of nurses per person
4th for number of traffic accidents per person
4th for number of traffic fatalities per person

Page 31 (19): Population
More men than women
Drop in population every March, influx every April
More people in the city in the daytime than the night
Page 48 (36) has a breakdown of the foreign population

Page 51 (38): Industry

Page 72 (57): Land

Page 79 (60): Residential

Page 85 (63): Parks

Page 89 (65): Water and Sewage

Page 93 (67): Security
1489 traffic accidents in 2007, 15 fatalities, 1955 injuries, 6505 instances of damage to property

Page 99 (71): Environment and Sanitation

Page 105 (74): Consumption

Page 108 (76): Welfare and Social Services

Page 116 (81): Education

Page 122 (85): Elections

Page 126 (86): Finance

Page 134 (91): City Hall Employees