Damba di Dada

This song reminds me of Dungeon, the coastal town of  the state of Terengganu. A town with no shopping mall.

But with a beautiful beach. Perhaps the most beautiful beach in Malaysia.

I had been working for sometime by then, but may be only a year in Terengganu, when I decided to move from Kerteh. I had to commute daily as it was 30 km from office, but luckily I have friends to pool car with.

She was a not the most glamorest of singers in the late 80s. May be because she was not a looker, but I was caught by her voice and the Malay melodies of most of her songs. Her album has no killer song, but I must say most of her songs are candies to my ears.

A time when when rock music was the music of the time, so her keroncong and Malay melody laden songs were a breath of fresh air to me.

Then I was living in a kampung house - on stilt. 

Simple music for simple time.

Enka - the beautiful Japanese folk/traditional music

Enka music/songs can be emotional - they are raw, they are honest and they are full of sorrow (at times much like our Asli). You would feel them even if you do not understand a single word. One need not to, to be drowned in typically melancholic songs. Having spent months on end in remote parts of Japan in the late 80s/early 90s, listening to these traditional Japanese folk-influenced songs on the telly on cold wintry night (with nothing else to do, to be honest), one could not help but feel the pain of these songs.

And one can easily be captivated by them.

I remember a couple of such songs that I was taken by by then that I had to hum them to the instructors so as to identify them and, with their help, brought back a couple of cassettes for me to enjoy back in KL.

Beyond the Amagi Gap (Amagi-Goe) is one such powerful song. Aah, and now it is fully translated into English, never mind that the translation leaves much to be desired.

Love Sayuri Ishikawa's engaging performance and the setting is so beautiful.

But the lyrics?

"Stains from mating?", "I would rather kill you than see you love somebody else?" Hahaha, fortunately our writers are not that adventurous!  ;)

Aah, just read the lyric while listening to the wonderful voice of Sayuri Ishikawa and of course her engaging performance.

For the translated version, please go here. They would not allow me to embed it here. I love it when she sings "Darling, over your shoulder, the mountain is burning" while the background is a simulated mountain burning.

Magnificent!

Teluk Lipat dalam kenangan?

I certainly hope that it is not the end of Teluk Lipat.

I saw in the news last night on the severity of the erosion at Teluk Lipat caused by the relentless monsoon winds and waves. It didn't surprise me at all. I have seen it all before - the winds and the waves, that is; but to be honest, I have not seen such erosion when I made Dungun my town.

In hindsight, I must say I have seen it coming over the years when I was there, but surprisingly no one had done anything to mitigate it. Obviously as an armchair critic, it is easy for me to say, but for a state flushed with wang ihsan, I am sure they can find the money to mitigate the erosion.

Teluk Lipat holds many memories for me. It is the place I normally went for my jogging in Dungun. It is my favourite place, despite the fact that it is tough to sweat while jogging at Teluk Lipat due to its windy condition. But then again, it is to be expected since road is just next to the South China Sea, so you tend to get constant breeze from the sea cooling you down.

I had never complained about it. It would not make sense anyway. After jogging for a couple of kilometres, I would only need to sit inside the car, wound up the windows and definitely you would be sweating inside the car. It didn't bother me then that it would probably leave the car smelling with my own sweat. It is a 13 year old dad's car anyway. I am sure by then it would have more than the family's share of sweat!

Sorry I digress.

Actually, then I thought the benefits of jogging would be in the sweat. I love the feel of it when I get the whole shirt wet in my own sweat. It is a great feeling; so when I didn't get while jogging at Teluk Lipat, I thought something was missing.

But I found a way to get me sweating and hence continue to make Teluk Lipat my jogging track.

Until much later I was told that the benefit of jogging (or exercise) is to raise your heart beat, rather than the sweating. Aaah, well. I was bad in biology I guess.

Sorry I digress again.

After many minutes inside the car, catching my breath and sweating, I would then walk to the stalls nearby at Teluk Lipat and enjoy my share of that Terengganuan delicacy. With the wind caressing your face and hair - piping hot keropok leko in your (right) hand, and a glass of teh tarik in your left hand, fronting the sea and occasionally the Ganu meks or ITM gals passing by as sweet candies for the eyes, what else could you ask for?

At times I do wonder what I was doing in the land of keropok leko, away from my favourite hometown of Taiping, but surely that descriptions in the previous paragraphs would alleviate any home sickness that I may have felt during those years.

No, I was not jogging when I took the pic. I must have just returned from work - I was
still in my office attire, and wifey and I must have decided to enjoy the breeze at Teluk Lipat.
When you were in such a small town like Dungun, and living just next door to the
beautiful beaches of Terengganu, would you be visiting the malls or the beaches.
 Ooops, sorry. there were no malls then in Dungun!

Then I had lived only 2-3 minutes by car from Teluk Lipat, though our kampung house did not face the relentless monsoon winds - not directly anyway, but another good friend of mine Zai aka Zainuddin Rahim (a former school classmates and house mate in Perth) had a nice (wooden) government bungalow in the vicinity of Teluk Lipat. I had always been envious of him to get that privilege. 

I wish it was mine.

I love slow driving at Teluk Lipat from one end to another. It is at least 5 km in length; even then it was a tad too far for me to jog. Just wind down the windows - forget about air-conditioning. And don't worry about driving below speed limit. You can just act local; everybody does that there in Dungun. They will not honk at you for driving at jogger's pace. 

Life is like that; when you live near the sea.

Teluk Lipat dalam kenangan. It started at POint A and ended up at the ITM campus.
The road is called Jalan Pantai Sura. I am not sure how they got to name it Teluk Lipat.
Lipat, Lepat, I dont know; the road is a straight road anyway. On the other hand, if you were to cross
Sg Dungun, soon you will arrive at the most beautiful beach in Malaysia - Pantai Teluk Bidara,
immortalized by Kopratasa in their classic Keronchong song.

Ohh..those fragile Japanese women

Of all the countries in the world, I would not have expected them to do it. In fact, I thought they would be the last country in the world to be able to do it.

With due respect to them.

I am of course referring to Japan winning the Women's World Cup.

One of the commentators mentioned after game that Japan had the smallest team in the WC. I am not sure what he mean by that. I did not follow this world cup other than what were shown on the news daily and if there was none (on telly), than I would not know about it.

He could have meant that Japan has the smallest contingent in term of numbers, or he could have meant that Japan's team members, on average, have the smallest physical attributes in term of height and weight.

And I would not be surprised by such statistic.

I believe - and I am not backed by any statistic - that Japanese players would be the smallest physically and I don't know what possessed them to play like they did, and in the process won themselves, and their nation, the World Cup.

I have spent many months staying there - for a total of over a year, cumulatively, in their early 90s, and I must say that Japanese women, to my eyes, are the most fragile women I have seeen or met. 

Much more fragile than Malay women for sure.

They are very soft-spoken and the most well mannered persons in the whole world. I have read somewhere  - I think in the aftermath of the tsunami recently, that if you wish to see the Moslems at the height of the Islamic civilization, they should see just to see the Japanese. They are a first class society, and I would say that there is no equivalent society in the rest of the world.

Ours included.

Or should I say, ours especially!

I think we all remember how people would queue for their food rations in the aftermath of the tsunami and not like in US where there were heavy looting. We are no better, and we should remember the accident that happened on the hiway with hundreds of thousands of coins spilling on the hiway.

Many motorists had a field day then!

The end of our training at Tokuyama during one of my
visits there in 1988.

During my training days in Tokuyama, with nothing much to do after office hours, I would listen to Japanese music especially the traditional songs on the telly, obviously without knowing the lyrics or a single Japanese word.

Well, not quite, but close I guess.

And I love most of them. Typically of course they were sung by female singers, and I must say they sound so fragile as the songs would typically be so melancholic. I think the songs was probably about yearning for love or home or the country, I don't know. And coupled with the fact that the Japanese language is such a soft and melodic, they sound like they were in such much pain - not unlike our Asli songs, I must add, and that in turn made them so beautiful to my ears.

So I decided that I need to bring a couple of them home - the songs I mean (not the singers, as I was already married by then). But not knowing the singers, and the songs' titles were not a deterrent to me. All I need to do was bring the lyrics as I had phonetically spelt them, and sing them to the instructors and luckily one of them knew at least two songs; so I was able to then buy a couple of cassettes of Japanese melodies.

I know that's the very reason I love those Malay songs that were adapted from the Japanese song in 70s. There are too numerous to mention, but one stands out even today - Ku Ingin Bahagia by Rina Rahman.

I jokingly told my boss then, when I reported back for duty after my many trips there, that the announcement over the loudspeaker (presumably announcing on the day's event at the office, or safety announcement) sounded very much like the whispers of two lovers in bed!

Soft and romantic.

Hahaha, since this is PG13 site, I don't think I can divulge anything beyond that. I'll just let your imagination run wild for now!

I remember walking to the JGC office many times from the train station and I would be greeted by the ladies from the office. One morning, I stopped by a convenient store and while browsing for some stuff - I was so engrossed and was in deep thought (I think I was thinking of what I was going to have for lunch), I was greeted by one of them.

"Ohaiyo gonzaimas, Hariri-san. How are you this morning?"

My heart skipped a beat that morning. It was too melodic for my ears. May be I had been away for too long!

They were so soft-spoken that they spoke in whisper mode, and like they were singing. For a moment, I thought that some Japanese gals were trying to pick on me, but luckily I quickly recognized them and returned their greetings. Aah, well. ;-)

In Malaysia, our announcers sound like she (or he) is having a fight with herself in an empty room!

But in any case, good on them; the Japanese girls. We need to learn on how physicals are not a imitation to winning football matches and in this particular case, at the highest standard of football world, albeit one for the women.

I wonder how our Harimau Malaya would fare against the Japanese team in a match at Bukit Jalil.

The gals one, I mean.

EPILOGUE

What's my point really?

Well, football is supposed to be a physical game and there have been many analysts who pointed out the different physical between Asian players and their European counterparts, and reckon that Asian countries would not win the World Cup any time soon.

I am sure their analyses are no longer valid.

If the Japanese gals can do it, why not us?

What say you?

My sympathy and condolence with the Japanese people

If there is one country I admire the most; a country that I think the world of; that country would be Japan.

When I graduated with an engineering degree in 1985, I first worked with Korean engineers. My boss was Korean. Most of the equipment were made in Korea; there were only a couple of items that were made in Japan.

But it was the Japanese who stole my heart with their brilliance, engineering ingenuity and sheer dedication. And it is a lifetime admiration. I got to know about them and their traits first hand when I was sent to Japan under the Japan Cooperation Centre for Petroleum (JCCP) in 1988, and in the early 90s I nearly made Japan my second home by going there every few months for nearly two years.

Me as a young engineer in Chiba on Sept 28, 1988. I was the youngest
engineer in the group 9 engineers from Africa and Asia being
trained in Japan by JCCP.

Tokyo, Yokohama, Chiba, Kobe, Kyoto and the southern city of Tokuyama were some of the cities I spent time in while I was in Japan.

My admiration grew every time I was there.

The Chiba refinery in the background in 1988. Chiba
will rise again, insyaAllah.

In this difficult time for Japan and her people, I would like to reminisce on my time in Japan and the sweet memories I have of friends and colleagues from the Japanese archipelago, and I would like to wish them all the best for their future in face of the devastating earthquake and tsunami.

I know in the end, they will be ok. In fact they will rise from the ashes of this tragedy.

They have risen before from the ashes, literally.

They are after all the Japanese.

China Beach - Reflections on Vietnam

This is one TV series that caught my attention due to the catchy song by Diana Ross and the Supremes - Reflections.

Never mind that this is one series is poorly rated, eventhough the critics loved it. It was screened for four fantastic seasons from 1988 until 1991, and I guess this is one series I would remember my life in Dungun in the late 80s.

Once I watched it, I was hooked. I thought that it was one series that depict the Vietnam war from the perspective of the civilians - the US Army nurses, officers, and volunteers and how the Vietnam war impacted the lives of the non-combatants. Despite the perspective of civilians, the show did not shy away from showing the gruesome of war.

But there weren't endless of gruesome, and certainly not just for the sake of it. In China Beach, it is the human characters, and relationships that count, and it made it palatable to my mind.

Of course the main attraction was Dana Delaney, who played Colleen McMurphy, a US Army nurse at the 510th Evac Hospital, in Vietnam. I thought she was one fine actress, and her character was always poignant. The show is almost always about human relationship, in the context of war, so I can always relate to it.

Hehe, but I think it is more like watching her ;-)

This is one show I would not mind buying the DVD set which I believe has not be released yet, for some reasons. I would love watching this again and again.

When I started frequenting Vietnam in 1995 - the early days of Vietnam opening her door and you can count on the number of visitors by hand, I asked the clients about China Beach and of course no one knew about it. China Beach refers to a beach supposedly located in Da Nang but it was a nickname given by foreigners, so obviously the Vietnamese themselves have no clue of the existence of this particular beach.

Then it was tough to travel in Vietnam - I have difficulty to ask a restaurant to cook me fried rice with just eggs and veggie. That was about the only thing I could eat. Of course now in Vung Tau there are many Indian muslim restaurants and I even met a Campa muslim waiter while dining at a restaurant in HCM City.

I have a lot of respect for the industrious Vietnamese. After a few trips in the mid 90s, I told myself that in 20 years, they could surpass us if we were to stay stagnant. They are certainly unlike the people depicted in many Vietnam war movies or even China Beach. In some ways they were - resilient despite the hardship of war. They were unlike those depicted in the flying letters in the 70s - the communist regime bent on spreading their ideologies throughout South East Asia.

They are nice, soft spoken people and very friendly and gracious as hosts.