Contents This page: Nota Bene On Imagination The Yagô Technicalities Copyright

Nota Bene: Apologies, Excuses, and Disclaimers A few words of explanation: first, regarding my choice of name for this site, my apologies to anyone who may have been lured here on the basis of the Green Gables label; alas, outside the epigraph, the site has nothing really to do with Lucy Maud Montgomery's popular books. In fact, I don't think I've read any of her works since childhood. Why use one for the title of this website, then? Good question. This may seem awfully trite, but several years ago I rented the video version of Anne of Green Gables for my children, and watching it with them, something struck me about the way Anne (or Montgomery) emphasized the importance of having and maintaining a good sense of imagination. It's easy for children to learn—and they do all too soon after entering the system of institutionalized education—that an active imagination is not always a valued commodity. Even as an adult, it's not just easy, but even expected, to become stuck in ruts (but we adults call it "routine" or an "orderly existence"), and to ignore the other possibilities, adventure, and alternatives out there, outside the asylum (however you understand the term). Since our new house does have the requisitely colored roof ends, I decided to adopt the name Green Gables as an informal title for the house, and subsequently for the small English school which we operate here. Since then, we've even adopted a cat named Annie. The Yagô Admittedly, if I had really been using my imagination, I should've been able to come up with some other way of emphasizing the point without giving my house a name, and particularly without borrowing somebody else's, right? Whatever, it is a fact that when we first moved to Fujino, I was a bit surprised to find that most of the "old" residents in our neighborhood (those here since the early modern period) still use what in Japanese is called yagô, a word meaning the "homestead name" or perhaps "estate name" or "farm name." Similar to the practice of giving names to ranches in the United States, manors in England or farms in northern Europe and Switzerland, some Japanese rural locales still maintain the practice of using such "house titles." Instead of saying, "I'm going down to Mr. Yamazaki's place," one might say, "I'm going down to 'Yashiki,'" since that is his yagô. On the other side of town, the Yoshino family has the house title "Honjin" even today, because they were the masters of the "official inn" (honjin) during the Edo period, and so on. So on one level, since I intended this site as a personal expression, I decided to give it the same name as my adopted yagô, namely, Green Gables. But as I prepared the material for the site, I began to see the title might be additionally appropriate in light of what I wanted to do here: many of the problems faced by small Japanese towns like Fujino appear to be in large part a result of a lack of that same sense of imagination; old habits die hard and the machinery of many local Japanese communities continues to be excessively linked to the traditional politics of money and power, thus producing a resistance to change and an inability to imagine any alternative. Ideally, I would be most gratified if this site could stimulate a bit more imaginative thinking about potential responses to some of the issues facing the town. Yes, I know. Dream on. Technical Stuff Finally, the common technogeek disclaimers: I have tried to "optimize" this site for a minimum screen resolution of 800x600 (preferably 1024x768) with 16-bit color (64,000 colors), when using one of the two most common commercial browsers in their more recent incarnations; some undesirable horizontal scrolling will probably occur with 640x480 screens. To date, the majority of visitors to Green Gables have arrived with 1024x768 screens; combined with "small" fonts, this size produces the best overall visual balance, in my opinion. I have designed and tested the site using Microsoft Windows95(J), 98(J), and XP(J); Microsoft IE 3.01J, 5.00J, and 6.0.2J, Netscape Navigator 4.5J (the "J" represents Japanese versions of these programs), Mozilla 1.7, Homesite 3.01, and Paintshop Pro 5.01. Name dropping? More like letting my dirty laundry show, I guess—I don't know what good it is to give that information, but I was told some people find it useful. The Japanese language pages here are currently under construction, and even when available will obviously not display correctly unless you have the proper Japanese software. I've consulted a substantial number of excellent (and not so excellent) design and HTML sites on the Web, a few of which I've mentioned by name on my page of references and links. I haven't taken all the advice I found, though, and if you don't think much of my efforts, don't blame the people I pay lip service to. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and written descriptions are © my own. Unless otherwise attributed, all photographs were taken with digital cameras. Those dating before February, 2004 were taken with an Olympus C-1400XL (known in the U.S. as the D-620L), and those taken after February, 2004, mostly with an Olympus C-755UZ. All were manipulated as required using PSP 5.01 or PS 7.0. If you do encounter problems viewing the pages, whether relating to your browser, strange colors, dead links, weird formatting, unavailable fonts, slow-loading graphics, horozontal scrolling, or whatever, I'd appreciate your letting me know about the problem; if you do e-mail me, please tell me what browser (including language and version) you're using, at what monitor resolution, your modem connection speed, etc. I can't guarantee I'll fix things for you, but I love statistics. Now, on with the show! Next page: Fujino at a Glance

"there is so little scope for the imagination in an asylum" Green Gables a la Fujino Annie of Green Gables My Japanese Version of "Green Gables"

Green Gables: A Contemplative Companion to Fujino Township
by Norman Havens nhavens@gol.com
Updated: July 2, 2004

URL: http://www2.gol.com/users/nhavens/