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Edinburgh Reporter
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Restless Natives
There are those of us from a certain generation that grew up with Restless Natives. I remember it being screened on Channel 4 while still at St Mark's Primary School in Oxgangs. The next day my classmates were buzzing with tales of the Clown and the Wolfman riding on a Suzuki motorbike and holding up buses. They presented a new kind of Scottish hero from just down the road in Wester Hailes. Part of it was seeing characters with accents like yours, they were modern day folk heroes robbing the rich to literally throw money around Edinburgh council schemes. Forty years later the story returns with a new stage production which arrives in Edinburgh this month at Leith Theatre exactly four decades after the film premiered in Edinburgh's ABC cinema in June 1985. Original Restless Natives screenwriter and now lyricist Ninian Dunnett and director Michael Hoffman invited Sarah Galbraith to be part of an original workshop for the new musical version just after Covid-19. The role she was invited to play had a certain amount of heft thanks to the great character actor Ned Beatty who played American cop Bender. In the original film he gets involved in the police chase to capture Will and Ronnie. (This time around Bender remains American but he has changed gender.) 'I didn't know they were going to switch the role' said Sarah of Bender's transition from male to female, 'but like the character, I was an American in Scotland.' Galbraith is now based in Falkirk with her husband and daughter. 'Later I asked Michael Hoffman and he explained that he hadn't really thought about it, but decided it would be great for this version. They've developed this brilliant story around her and the reason she really wants to catch these boys is because of issues with her dad. It's a cool transition.' While the original film is packed with Scottish banter and humour, it was also political with an undertone of Scottish nationalism. It's fair to say anti-Thatcherite themes were more obvious. Ms Galbraith said: 'The production does have a moral compass, there's dialogue where the characters talk about tourists spending £20 on a pair of plastic bagpipes while they are underpaid. Will's moral compass kicks in and he wants to give the money away to help people. The scene where money is fired out of these cannons to his community with people picking up the money is very powerful. Ronnie goes more off the deep end and is more into the badness (of robbing). It's really all about how you 'stick it to the man' and make more of yourself than what was ever expected of you.' The production has been successfully touring Scotland where certain audiences have cheered when the classic line is recited 'I hold up buses'. Edinburgh is central to the story with locations such as Wester Hailes, Princes Street, North Bridge and Salisbury Crags all included in the original film. The bus station scene was said to have been filmed in Glasgow but the yellow Bar-Ox (a teenage gang from Oxgangs) spray paint on the escalator suggests otherwise. Now north Edinburgh will become part of the story when Restless Natives arrives at the regenerated Leith Theatre. Sarah said: 'We are looking forward to arriving in the capital where the story is set. It's a home-grown Scottish musical, there are lots of jukebox musicals now but as well as the original Big Country material there's new music written by Tim Sutton. The sounds very much belong in the 80s in terms of the Big Country guitar riffs as well as the kinds of sounds you might recognise from an advert or something that could only be from that time.' The much loved Big Country soundtrack amplified the Scottish underdog spirit of the film, and Will's fascination with Rob Roy also added a further swashbuckling romance. The musical, much like the original film, suggests it's time for Scotland to produce new stories and heroes. Sarah added: 'The tourists are no longer interested in the original Scottish heroes. They want to know about these new ones. As the policeman says at the end 'spending is up, tourism is up; you're bigger than the Loch Ness Monster'. These boys become the Scottish heroes of the times'. Ned Beatty was persuaded to take on the original role of Bender for £25,000, a kilt and a Scottish holiday. Ned Beatty Photo courtesy of Studio Canal Sarah agrees there are resonances with herself and the character. She arrived in Scotland after growing up in New Jersey and meeting her husband while singing on a cruise ship. She said: 'I was about 15 minutes from New York and my thing growing up was Broadway shows. In those days you could get tickets for the last row for around $15. My idol was Lea Salonga who was the original voice of Jasmine in the Disney film Aladdin, I would go and see her in Miss Saigon and Les Misérables, really anything she was in'. Sarah achieved something of an American dream when she met Lea and became her backing singer for UK tours and a subsequent Christmas tour of the states. She will carry on in that role later this year. 'I met my idol and now I sing backing for her'. Sometimes dreams do come true. Restless Natives is at Leith Theatre from June 7 to 21 2025 A still from the original film courtesy of Studio Canal Sarah Galbraith – an American in Scotland 'Restless Natives' Musical Scotland Tour 40 years on from their last ride (the original film was released in 1985), this hilarious and faithful new adaptation is produced by the same creative team behind the beloved classic Scottish film. PHOTO Colin Hattersley Like this: Like Related
Japan Today
01-06-2025
- General
- Japan Today
As a society we seethe with irritation: What can we do about it?
By Michael Hoffman Come, let's be frank with one another: what irritates you? This person, that thing, this situation, that sound – oh, that sound, that grating sound! 'We're losing control of our emotions,' writes psychiatrist Hideki Wada in a booklet, published by President Books, titled 'How to Cultivate an Unemotional Heart.' 'Emotional' is a literal but somewhat misleading rendering of kanjoteki, whose meaning here seems to be 'prone to' or 'vulnerable to irritation' – which emotion, together with its kissing cousin, anger, are corrosive, physiologically (they weaken the immune system ) and psychologically (they make us miserable). Who wouldn't be free of them, if they would but free us? They won't. 'Anger is the emotion that surges most readily in us,' writes Wada – 'more than happiness, more than sadness. Moreover, anger is the emotion that translates most readily into action' – to our ultimate chagrin if not ruin, for actions performed and words uttered in anger are seldom well chosen and often blow up in our faces. It so happens that as I write this my neighbor across the lane is attacking his lawn (and me) with one of those unmuffled naked-motor grass-cutting blades that raise the most head-splitting, soul-crushing racket – disturbing him, it seems, not at all, which is odd, given what it's doing to me. There he is, calm personified in the eye of the storm, the very picture of leisured serenity, you'd almost think he was in Zen meditation, so unhurried are his movements, and as for progress, that hardly seems to be the goal at all, so little is he making. Curious enlightenment. Advise me, Dr Wada! (You are right: anger surges very readily indeed.) What should I do: Go out and give him a dose of my rage? Oh, the pleasure it would give me to jolt him rudely out of his trance! The more rudely the better. But it's hardly neighborly, maybe not even civilized; pleasure would give way to regret, regret to pain, and who's the loser in the end? – he, armored in tranquility and laughing at me for 'losing control of my emotions,' or me out of control and all too keenly aware of making a fool of myself? Better perhaps to go for a walk and come back later, after he's done. But isn't that being a little too easy to get along with? Or – a third possibility – approach him with rage suppressed and sweet reason foremost, appealing to his humanity, his understanding, his sense of community, in short all the higher faculties said to characterize our species, suggesting maybe some grass-cutting alternative, a manual lawn mower or even a newer quieter model of motorized blade. That's probably best – but those of us prone to irritation wouldn't be if that came easily to us, would we? No, rage begets enraged speech or no speech at all. (Or how about this: say, with scarcely concealed sarcasm, 'I'll even pay for it myself!' – if that doesn't shame him, nothing will. But what if nothing does?) What does the doctor say? 'My first defense against irritability,' he says, 'is' – if possible – 'to avoid irritating situations.' Take a walk, in short. It's in fact what I do, coming back to quiet restored. Good. And yet not. Something's missing; the challenge issued (unconsciously but still) remains unanswered, irritation persists, less edgy but not much less irritating. And what of all the other provocations out there? We'd be walking all day 'avoiding' them, avoiding one only to blunder into another no doubt, drawing the only conclusion possible: irritation is unavoidable. As a society we seethe with irritation. Wada cites road rage, an increasing hazard. Today's rager might be tomorrow's victim and vice versa. Whose character is proof against it, in a mass society that has no time for nuances of individual character? Everyday life plants us cheek by jowl with masses of people who mean absolutely nothing to us and to whom we mean nothing. How can perfect strangers' little ways fail to irritate us – he jammed against you in the train with his face that, for no good reason but no less for that, rubs you the wrong way; she at the supermarket checkout extracting coins one yen at a time while you grind your teeth waiting your turn behind her; the boss, subordinate or colleague at work who in all innocence (or perhaps not) says just the wrong thing at just the wrong moment in just the wrong tone with just the wrong expression on his or her face, and so on and so on, instances multiply faster than the typing fingers can type them or the tongue give them utterance. If one could only be alone! But isolation is no defense. The three years of the COVID epidemic proved that. 'The government response to it,' Wada writes, 'was shaped by epidemiologists who advised isolation on epidemiological grounds – not,' he adds, 'by psychiatrists who know the psychological price to be paid.' Soaring alcoholism and suicide figures bear him out. Stress, strain – it's everywhere. Whoever gets to the end of the day in a state of tranquil contentment has won the prize of prizes and deserves heartiest congratulations, but the facts conspire against it. Fact of facts: This world was not made to my specifications, or yours; it doesn't suit us, nor we it – in short, we have no control, or at most very little, over our environment beyond the four walls of our houses or rooms, retreat into which, as noted above, has its perils. We're barraged by sounds that make us cringe, sights that revolt us, words that offend us though not (most of the time) meant to. There's the parked car with the engine running, driver asleep oblivious; the motorbike hotrodders roaring by just as you're dropping off to sleep (or any other time!) – those irritations at least are justifiable on environmental and social grounds. Others are not: dogs if you don't like dogs, katakana English such as that which litters Wada's booklet (shichiuashon, furasutorashon, kurozuappu for close-up, mesodo for method, etc), ubiquitous background music filling shops, streets and heads whether your head likes it or not – what's more irritating than music you can't turn off? The very garbage trucks emit beeping nursery-rhyme melodies as they make their rounds. Stupid, foolish – why make mountains of a molehills? It's nothing. Surely a mature adult can learn to cope with – and all to too often must cope with – much worse than even the worst of these minor irritations? Surely you can reason down your feelings by recalling how very much more serious the real problems of life are? And surely there are enough of those to make inventing new ones out of nothing idiotic? True, true. But feelings are peculiar creatures. They refuse to be reasoned out of existence. They mock reason. They say, 'You're right, reason's right, I'm wrong – and I don't care, I win anyway!' And so they do. Wada's advice boils down to this: Take a deep breath, take a step back, take a walk here, have a talk there, look receptively outward rather than obsessively inward. The first of these, the deep breath, is physiological: The cerebral cortex, reason's seat within the brain, is fed, he explains, by oxygen; the symptoms of anger (the surging emotions, the loss of self-control, the loss for words, the reckless disregard for consequences) are 'the brain's warning that it needs oxygen.' Feed it. Is it that simple? Really? Maybe, maybe not. If it were, Wada and his fellow psychiatrists – they number an estimated 17,000 nationwide – would be out of business, wouldn't they? © Japan Today
Japan Today
12-05-2025
- Business
- Japan Today
True wealth is not what you have but what you get rid of
By Michael Hoffman Come, let us clean up our lives. Let us be as dandelion fluff, floating free and unencumbered. An unexpected invitation from an unexpected source – the business magazine President (May 16), whose core readership is precisely the possessing class, ambitious and upwardly mobile, who work to succeed, succeed to rise higher, rise higher – not as dandelion fluff! – to possess more, and so on and so on, no end in view. Yes, but… there comes a moment in life – in many lives – at the height of success it may be, or in the depths of failure, or somewhere in between – where the futility of it all stands starkly revealed to us and we say to ourselves, 'What's it all for? What do I need with all this stuff I own, these profits I've earned, these honors I've won? Away with it all! Is there a trash box big enough for this rubbish I've pursued all my life, thinking it treasure?' For Yoshihisa Nakano, who at 80 looks back on a career more varied than most – founder, manager and/ or CEO of various enterprises in Japan and abroad – the notion that true wealth is not what you have but what you get rid of was planted early, germinated slowly and blossomed late. He was 70 when it attained its full flowering and he understood what is really meant by the good life: 'I am as free as dandelion fluff!' Let the wind carry him where it will. He was born in wartime. His earliest memories are of the charred ruins of firebombed Tokyo, his house among them. He grew up with a grandmother, her character severe, her outlook traditional. She made him learn tea ceremony and flower arranging. 'Like a girl!' the kids teased him. It was good training in being different. Another lesson was soon to follow. His grandmother died and at age 12 the family moved to Hirosaki in Aomori Prefecture. The local dialect was incomprehensible to him. He was a marked boy, his speech betrayed him. He kept silent at first, then broke his silence. Let them mock. He mastered a good answer to mockery: laughter. His laughing photo in President shows us laughter undimmed by age. He grew up, went to college, was more interested in baseball than in his courses but graduated somehow and was hired by Isetan, the department store. Almost the first thing he did in his new office was remove his necktie. It bound him, stifled him. His boss remonstrated. 'It's manners,' said the boss, 'it's courtesy, it shows respect for clients.' He'd show his respect some other way, he said. No, you won't, came the reply. He was the sort of employee, in short, who makes a nuisance of himself until finally he gets sent down to a subsidiary, there to languish until he either repents or quits. Nakano quit. He drifted here, drifted there – dandelion fluff in embryo – until finally he decided on a bold step. He'd leave Japan and seek his fortune in Singapore. Why Singapore? He didn't know himself. It's where his impulse led him. But fate led him elsewhere. During a stopover in Taipei he left the airport and, wandering around, chanced upon a public lecture on business management. He dropped in, met the lecturer – and changed course. 'Not Singapore. Here.' The lecturer evidently saw something in him. He smoothed his path to employment with a major fashion outfit, and from the on it was one thing after another, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle raining down from the sky and landing as a fully formed picture, or letters of the alphabet arranging themselves into a novel. 'My life in a word?' he writes – 'random. I never made a plan, never set out to accomplish this or that.' Happening to meet people who happened to open this or that path which happened to be just the thing at just the moment, he made his way, up and up. 'I,' he says, 'possess a very rare gift – the gift of luck.' A gift indeed – and rare indeed, so rare one wonders: is he qualified to speak for the less fortunate masses, who must struggle to live and can scarcely afford the luxury of freeing themselves of everything that binds them to the conventional, work-a-day, acquisitive life, boring maybe, unfulfilling very likely, the sort of life you look back on as it nears its end saying to yourself, 'I haven't lived!' Nakano looks back and says, 'What other people see as my successes in life I came to see as my failures.' His enlightenment was long in coming; he was 70 before he faced the full implications of the thoughts germinating within him, giving almost all he owned to charity, to NPOs and the like supporting education in poor countries – had he not grown up poor himself? He'd in fact been a donor all his life, but a half-hearted one, he now decided, judging himself harshly. Calculating his own financial needs he concluded he could live quite comfortably on 500,000 yen a month, 200,000 going to a housekeeper whose help around the house he finds indispensable at his age. Speaking of the less fortunate masses – representing them in President's package is a young YouTuber calling himself 'Minimalist Takeru.' No preternaturally lucky life can he boast. Quite the contrary: his path to 140,000 followers of his Youtube channel on the minimalist life was rather a rocky one, pocked with all the pitfalls – perhaps not quite all – of 21st-century Japanese life as the century heads into its second quarter. What, we must first ask, is minimalism? Is it poverty by another name? Emphatically no, says minimalist Takeru. Far from it: it's wealth, true wealth. As a minimalist you'll have everything you need, only you'll need less – and want nothing you don't need, a discipline not easily acquired perhaps but, once acquired, easily pursued. You have less money but more time, and time that is not money is freedom. Freedom – the ultimate wealth! In his former, pre-minimalist life Takeru worked long, long hours, suffered stress to the point of ulcers and worse, soothed his stress with binge shopping, lived amid clutter that stifled, choked and stressed him into nervous collapse, which forced him out of work and just about to the brink, he writes, of applying in desperation for social welfare – when, browsing in a bookshop, he happened upon a book titled 'Minimalism.' He bought it on impulse, more or less forgot it, recovered his health sufficiently to return to work, broke down again and – remembered the book. Yes, yes, he said to himself. He looked about him; suddenly all the things filling his modest living space were like strangers forcing themselves on his hospitality – out with them! Trashing is in a sense like its opposite, acquiring – once begun it takes on a life of its own. Before he knew it he was living a minimalist life in a minimalist space, breathing minimalist air, a treasure in itself after years of suffocating in clutter. Eight years passed. He's married now, and he and his wife have a year-old son. They live in the Kanto countryside, paying little rent and living comfortably, he says, on 200,000 yen month. We're not told their combined income; we infer his YouTubing accounts for most of it, supplemented by lecturing, for he does that too, owing to his and his theme's appeal; plus of course whatever his wife earns. Minimalism is wonderful, certainly – beautiful in art, fulfilling in life. Is it sustainable? One hesitates to close this story on a note of doubt; but one would hesitate no less not to. The couple's child is now an infant. Infants live cheaply. Older children don't, still less teenagers. As they grow they eat more, wear more and want more. They are not, in other words, minimalist. The biggest child-rearing expense of all is education. Today's tech-heavy education is not cheap. Public junior and senior high schooling is relatively inexpensive, but most parents able to afford it prefer private schools for their supposed quality and links to the best (and most expensive) universities – often abroad, foreign study now considered an almost necessary item in any full curriculum vitae. Will minimalist Takeru say to his son 15 years from now, 'We're minimalists, son, we don't go in for that sort of thing!' Or supposing the boy has a special talent that needs developing? 'Forget it, we can't afford a piano, let alone piano lessons, use your fingers instead to grow vegetables in our garden!' © Japan Today
Japan Today
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
A boom in matching apps for married women
By Michael Hoffman Whoever you are, whatever you do, whatever you're looking for, there's an ap for you. What's the one thing everyone wants besides money and power? Love. A capricious flower, love. It blossoms or doesn't, withers or doesn't, hovers out of reach until, just when you least expect it, it lands in your lap – or doesn't. There's marriage. All cultures have it. Its forms vary but not its purpose. It channels the sex drive, presides over child-rearing, and governs inheritance. Some marriages begin with love, others end in love, others still have little or nothing to do with love. All cultures attach some degree of sanctity to it, fading in our own desanctified time but still felt. There are marriage apps, pre-marriage apps, post-marriage apps and extra-marital apps. Together they form a community of apps known in Japanized English as 'matching' apps – whose latest version, profiled by Shukan Gendai (April 28), has sparked a veritable 'boom' (yet another one), catering to married women in search of love, marriage having let them down without quite breaking down. The author of the report is its main character – a man of 52 with frankly confessed (under cover of anonymity; for convenience we'll call him Tetsuo) marital problems of his own. His 22-year marriage has run its course. It's dead in all but name. Must he die with it? But he's so very much alive! Where to go, what to do? Life and love, if not inseparable, are so closely intertwined as to make the loveless life a thin, dim, shadowy prospect, a joyless trudge into the questionable refuge of old age in which such things cease to matter. Meanwhile… what? Anything? Nothing? An extra-marital relationship? Why not? Divorce is foreseeable – after the couple's teenage daughter is grown; not before. Should he wait? Why? Life is here, now. To suppress it till there, then is surely to diminish it. He can force himself to wait, maybe, but it – life – won't wait with him, or for him. Confiding in a friend over drinks, he heard for the first time of matching apps. Tell me more, he said. He listened eagerly. Check it out, said the friend. Maybe I will, he thought. A little online research gave him the general picture. The first organized 'matching' events for the unhappily married, circa 2018, were non-app, non-virtual, face-to-face get-togethers: dinners, parties, outings – modern jauntier equivalents of the traditional omiai arranged marriage events. The COVID-19 epidemic put a stop to them, and apps arose to fill the vacuum. The three leaders in the field – 'Kikonsha Club' (kikonsha means 'already married'), 'Cuddle' and 'Healmate' – boast a combined client base of some 1.2 million, men as a rule paying a monthly fee of about 10,000 yen, women not charged. 'I started this service,' Healmate founder Taeko Isono tells Shukan Gendai, 'for those who want to experience the full richness of life. There are those who feel it's immoral for married people to engage in extra-marital relationships, and I understand their feelings. But those who feel differently have a right to choose accordingly.' A dead marriage is an awful thing. Some couples try in all earnestness to bring it back to life. Sometimes they succeed; more often not. Years take their toll. Love feeds on freshness, surprise; it withers in familiarity and routine. Some of her clients, says Isono, are reanimated, reinvigorated by the encounters her service fosters. Others, she says, find themselves going back to their spouses with fresh appreciation of their charms and virtues. Life is full of surprises – sometimes. Tetsuo urged himself on: 'Let's see what happens.' He had doubts. Yes, he owed it to himself – but didn't he owe something too to his wife and child? He felt them looking on, disdainful and reproachful, as he filled in his profile. Would it bother them to know? 'But they won't know.' Perhaps they'd laugh at him? Perhaps they'd have reason to. Mustering his courage, he stated in his profile a preference for a 'second partner' in her 20s or thirties. No one replied. It stung. It was a blow to his masculine pride. He put the best face he could on it. 'Well,' he thought, 'to a woman that young a man my age may well seem past it. I'm not, but…' – seeming trumps reality. He yielded. 'Alright, the 40s and 50s then.' There came a message signed Kayo. Real name? Not? Does it matter? No. Age? 54. They chatted, clicked, met for dinner, clicked again, had a few drinks, grew lively, checked into a nearby love hotel, and clicked there too. Tetsuo awakened to a smartphone sounding. Kayo slept on. It was her phone. He shook her awake. He caught his breath. Her husband? 'What?' Kayo asked sleepily. 'Your phone. Your husband?' 'What if it is?' 'But…' 'I don't care if he finds out.' You'd think Tetsuo would have been pleased – but no, quite the contrary, these were deep waters, maybe deeper than were good for him, it's one thing to look forward to doing something like this, another to face one hardly knows what but the human imagination is a vigorous thing, conjuring all kinds of possibilities, all kinds of complications, and his was already going into overdrive. He blocked Kayo's messages and never saw her again. A sad, perhaps unnecessarily sad ending – with one consolation: a reporter's consolation rather than a lover's. He got his story. © Japan Today
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Defense Leaders Gather to Drive the Future of National Security at Defense IT Summit
FAIRFAX, Va., Jan. 27, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- GovCIO Media & Research, a leading federal technology media company, is hosting its annual Defense IT Summit on February 27 from 8:00am - 1:30pm at the Ritz Carlton Pentagon City in Arlington, VA. The event will kick off with a fireside chat with Department of Defense (DOD) Acting CIO Leslie Beavers, who will discuss DOD's top priorities for the year, offering insights into the future of 5G, cybersecurity and more. Morning sessions will include experts from the Army, Navy, DOD Cyber Crime Center and more to discuss zero trust architectures, advancements in CJADC2, driving innovation within the DOD and leveraging IT capabilities to empower missions. Attendees will enjoy a networking lunch followed by a presentation of the Defense IT Flywheel Awards, where GovCIO Media & Research will induct five federal technologists into its Hall of Transformers for categories including Rising Star, Emerging Tech Innovator, Cyber Defender, Digital Transformer and Data Advocate. The summit will conclude with a panel on the role of AI in transforming defense missions. "We're looking forward to bringing together key leaders and innovators to explore the critical role of technology in defense," said Michael Hoffman, President, GovCIO Media & Research. "This event will provide a space to discuss collaborations, exchange ideas and discuss the future of IT in supporting our nation's security and defense priorities." Visit GovCIO Media & Research's Defense IT Summit event page to view the full agenda, speaker lineup and register for this must-attend annual event. About GovCIO Media & Research GovCIO Media & Research, an independent media company owned by GovCIO, provides insights and analysis on federal IT innovation and is the leading industry solutions resource. Our team utilizes a multi-platform approach to today's most pressing issues through video, podcasts, events, articles and special reports that keep federal IT decision-makers informed of technology's impact on government. Visit for more information. Media Contact Jules PatelContent View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE GovCIO Media & Research Sign in to access your portfolio
