An Irishman's Diary

I STOOD on the edge of a live volcano once, on the Japanese island of Kyuhu. The sulphurous smoke caught in my throat and made me cough. But my guide assured me we were safe and pointed to the concrete “bomb shelters” nearby, where we could retreat in the unlikely event that the mountain exploded.

The volcano was (and is) called Naka-Dake, and forms part of the much larger Mount Aso: a huge volcanic “caldera” with five smaller peaks inside a rim up to 15 miles wide. The larger crater was created by a cataclysmic event 100,000 years ago, creating a fertile, green landscape now ringed with placid towns and villages, and grazed by cows.

Meanwhile, to remind us how it happened, there is Naka-Dake. It was September 1989 when I visited, at which time the cable-car to the summit was closed due to recent eruptions. The road was still open, however, so my hosts cheerfully drove me up.

Among the many exciting things I learned at the summit was that the shelters had been built in 1958, after a completely unexpected eruption killed 12 people. And that as recently as 1979, another outburst claimed three more lives, a whole kilometre from the crater. So lovely as it was to visit Mount Aso, it was nice to leave it behind again too.

Japan is a very volatile part of the planet. During the same trip, while visiting the top floor of a Tokyo high-rise, I noticed the chandelier was swaying. That would be an earth tremor, the guide explained, pleased with an opportunity to advertise the earthquake-proofing of local architecture. The usual practice was to count to 10, he added calmly. If nothing more happened, it was definitely only a tremor.

One of the less turbulent environments experienced during that fortnight in Japan, funnily enough, was the Bullet Train. Our tour group took it between Tokyo and Osaka – or was it Kyoto? It’s a bit of a blur now, and it was a blur then too, as we were shot between cities at record speeds but with less vibration than on the Dart.

If you know how expensive Japan was in 1989, vis-a-vis Ireland, you might be wondering at this point how I could afford a fortnight there, especially when – as I may have mentioned here previously – I was a humble civil servant at the time and nobody had thought of bench-marking at that time. Well, as it happened, the trip didn’t cost me a penny.

Like the other 20-odd Europeans participating, I was a guest of Japan’s foreign ministry, through whose annual essay competition we had won an all-expenses-paid odysse, ranging from a dawn tour of the Tokyo Fish Market to a night at the Kabuki, with various shrines, museums, shopping trips, and the odd banquet in between. I spent the first week pinching myself to see if it was really happening.

Our tour coincided with a turbulent event in Japanese life. Shortly beforehand, the 87-year-old Emperor Hirohito was reported to have vomited blood. He was now confined to bed. And although nobody mentioned cancer – his doctors withheld the diagnosis even from him, apparently – the media had now begun a death vigil.

This was extremely respectful and oddly invasive at the same time. Like volcanologists, for example, the emperor’s doctors issued regular updates on the patient’s vital signs – pulse-rate, blood pressure, temperature, etc – which were published in panels on the front of each day’s newspaper.

It was the ending of an era in Japan. Older people remembered the emperor as a god, before, in 1945 (when the general population heard his voice for the first time, on radio), he publicly renounced any claims to divinity. In the event, he was still alive when we flew home, and he lingered until the following January.

Of the many strange experiences that trip offered, none was stranger than an evening in a bar in Kumamoto. I was brought there by a businessman called Mr Murayama, who had been my volcano guide and in whose house I was guest (the schedule included a short home stay, so we could glimpse real Japanese life).

It was, in most respects, an ordinary bar. Except that we were joined at our table and waited upon by several charming hostesses, all from the Philippines, who served drinks, made pleasant conversation, and pretended to find everything we said fascinating. They were modern-day geishas, I suppose. But they also offered a service I had never heard of before.

No, nothing like that, reader – that’s just your dirty mind. What they did was sing for us, periodically. And at a certain point, one of them also insisted that I accompany her in a duet.

"Aargh!" I thought, silently, never having sung in public before (with good reason). But refusing would have been rude. So I joined her on stage, behind a curious juke-box style machine, which provided backing music to a selection of songs while also displaying the lyrics. And audibly squirming, I picked the least challenging song: which, incredibly, was Bridge over Troubled Waters.

The quality of my performance was such that, although the hostess later assured me that it was like singing with Art Garfunkel himself, not even her professional skills could make the claim sound convincing. In any case, I learned then that this weird entertainment concept was called “karaoke”. And embarrassing as the experience had been, I flew back to Ireland safe in the knowledge that, whatever else might happen, we would never see the like of that here.

• fmcnally@irishtimes.com