They either never taught us this in history lessons, or I just wasn’t paying attention.

Thanks to a contributor on sammyboy.com, I found out that one of the heroes of the Japanese Occupation in Singapore was Japanese. Shinozaki Mamoru was a press attache with the Imperial Foreign Service and was assigned to Singapore before the Japanese invaded.

He was jailed by the British for spying (a charge which he denied), and was freed by the occupying Japanese, and given a role as a welfare officer of the civilian administration of occupied Singapore.

Among his heroic deeds included deliberate storage of food supplies in the Thomson area so that the Little Sisters of The Poor would have a steady supply of food; and his very liberal issuing of thousands of safety passes to members of the Chinese and Eurasian communities, an act which probably saved thousands of them from being rounded up and executed.

Shinozaki eventually testified at the war crimes trials against his fellow countrymen, and later wrote a book – Synonan, My Story, which is apparently still a source of information about life in Singapore during the Occupation.

You can read more about Shinozaki here.

Give shark’s fin a miss – you’re really eating chicken stock and cartilage anyway. Don’t listen to people who say all those stories about fishermen cruelly slicing off fins and dumping the shark back in the sea are false. You tell me, what do they really do with the rest of the shark? (OK, fish and chips, fish fingers, cat food… yes, I looked it up. But still!?)

I’m not sure what else we eat during Chinese New Year that are on the protected list, but please pause and ponder, because even if we Chinese are not the only ethnic group that thinks along the lines of “the more endangered it is, the more prized the delicacy”, we certainly are the largest ethnic group on the planet.

There’s a Facebook Group called Project:FIN and it aims to stop the consumption of sharks’ fin by debunking and questioning the very reasons we consume it. E.g.:

It is questionable why we are paying so much for a “delicacy” that we don’t even know what it actually taste like. Simply because the fins are tasteless. What we are actually enjoying, is the taste of chicken / pork stock, alongside other ingredients that gives flavor to the dish. And to think that the insistence of buying tasteless food and paying for them at ridiculous prices, is a mockery on its own.

Join it, spread the word, and help finish the fin trade!

There’s a wonderful toy shop in Ngee Ann City and Tanglin Mall called “The Better Toy Store”. You can find great toys which are generally eco-friendly and non-toxic, which is a good thing, because Kai’s at the age where he tries to eat everything including the foam mat we’ve assembled on the floor of his play area. But cute lah, our boy.

Anyway, The Better Toy Store has an online shop, which for some reason, is full of surprisingly bad copy and a standard of English you’d expect to find on labels of Chinese foodstuff and not sensible, educational products for children.

For example:

Playtime Ideas

* Children can use the mallet to pound the different colored pegs as they like and continue playing by simply turning the board; this develop fine motor skill and eye-hand coordination. Pounding also helps children release tension and teach them regarding disciplinary action.
* Parents should specify the color to hammer; this will help children learn to differentiate and recognize colors easily.
* Parents should praise children when they can do it and advice if they are not able to do so.

Children can use the mallet to pound the Parent’s head since the Parent already has a headache trying to figure out what the website is trying to say. Children can disregard disciplinary action in this instance.

I think maybe the copy might have been written by Jamie Yeo cos I have no frikkin‘ idea what she’s on about.

Seriously, we’re really not going to get the World Cup on television?

MSN did a survey recently, and out of over 5,000 people who participated, 69% said they weren’t willing to pay a single cent to to watch a game. I guess that’s the national stance that got us into this mess in the first place.

It’s alright by me, cos I’m happy sitting at home watching the rugby on several channels on Starhub.

Somewhere on the Amalfi Coast, some schoolchildren are sitting on the floor because the bench they used to sit on was used to hold the massive serving of antipasto we had last night at La Braceria Pizza & Grill.

As far as Italian restaurants are concerned, we’ve lucked out with two good locations in a row – both in the Bukit Timah area – the other restaurant being Valentino’s.

Both are family-run establishments, and both have gigantic dining tables on which to put school benches containing your hearty portions of home styled food. Just the sort of place last night to have a dinner with Naomi’s brother, his wife, and Kai’s 21 month old cousin Yasutaka, visiting from Shanghai.

OK, not quite. Because the transition from the relative cold of a Shanghai February to the al fresco of a Bukit Timah neighbourhood might have been a bit too drastic a change.

On a side note though, I was a bit peeved when I read some reviews on HungryGoWhere.com that I tweeted my displeasure, and this prompted a response from the site’s owners. I’ve got nothing against the site, and I think it works great as a directory of restaurants.

It’s just that some users post things that are not exactly useful. Take for instance this excerpt from a review of La Braceria Pizza & Grill:

Pizza – Pizza was nice, thin crusted. Seems to be the main choice for most diners!

But to be completely honest, it’s really because I’m just a grumpy diner who cannot understand how people can rate Ajisen Ramen higher than Ramen Santouka.

We brought Kai to a trial class at a child learning centre (that’s what they call playgroups here) at the old Police HQ at Phoenix Park, but we’re not so sure about signing on. Not because of the location, of course. It’s pretty and quaint, and bears no traces of the old usage of the Internal Security Department and their powerful air-cons.

It’s really nice that they’ve upgraded and moved the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Police HQ away to spunkier, more modern digs at New Phoenix Park – the Home Team is not here to be creative with names, we’ll just copy Scotland Yard and New Scotland Yard – on Irrawaddy Road. I can’t imagine the civil servants and cops doing even an hour of hard work at the old location. I’d be putting my feet up and lazing under the canopy of an Angsana tree with a gin sling and a newspaper.

Where there are other languages apart from English on them, to be precise.

Does anyone know if they’ve put back Tamil on the directional signage at Changi Airport? Or are they still in three of our national languages plus Japanese, as they have been so since 2007?

And how true is it that the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore, which runs the airport, replaced Tamil with Japanese on advice from the Tourism Board, whose rationale for doing so was “English is the 2nd language of India”?

Apparently, the Tamil directional signage at the Botanic Gardens have also suffered a Japanisation, according to a message left by a member of the Facebook Group “I Want Tamil Back in Changi Airports Signboards”.

If that is true, then the people working at some of our statutory boards have very, very little respect for our national customs and languages. If you’re Singaporean, you should feel affronted. So, I urge you all to join that Facebook group, and sign a petition when they do set one up.

I want to see all four of my nation’s official languages back on signboards.

Then I realised that they really should have a promo/announcement that says something to the effect of “Radio Singapore – Home of Brian Richmond”, for he is nothing less than a living legend, an institution, and a life story that mirrors this country’s own history – an Englishman, an orphan of Empire, adapting to local climes, flourishing, maturing and evolving into the voice of Oldie Goldie Radio, with his slow, deliberate sentences and flat vowels that bely his enthusiasm when he introduces Glenn Campbell’s and other country songs.

If I had a hat, I’d tip it to you, Uncle Brian.

Brian Richmond sings Elvis

The sales tactics of Vardi & Migdal – the Israeli company with pushcarts in malls all over the island – used to work. They use pushcarts instead of renting a shop space because if you were a salesman in a shop, you wouldn’t be able to roam a mall’s thoroughfare and accost passers-by.

We have some nail buffer thing we bought about two years ago thanks to a salesman who insisted on buffing Naomi’s and my nails. I agreed to buy the item just so he’d stop holding our hands like we were conducting some seance.

One of their (presumably Israeli, I don’t know for sure, I’m just assuming based on my racist profiling of what they look and sound like) salesmen struck again yesterday with the same aggressive approach.

Well, not quite the same. He approached Naomi and startled her by declaring, “Your skin has a lot of blemishes!”, followed by an enquiry, “What skin care product do you use?”

Thankfully for him, before I could smack his presumably Israeli head with my shopping bag, Naomi brushed him off, telling him she didn’t use any skin care product and didn’t care for his Dead Sea mineral-enriched jars of mud and crap.

Vardi & Migdal, your time is up. Pack up your pushcarts and traverse back to whence you came! (After you wind up your local registered company and pay your taxes).

I was shocked to learn from Naomi yesterday that female circumcision is practiced in Singapore. I had no idea.

You learn a lot from motherhood forums, where Naomi stumbled upon discussions on whether to circumcise, where to circumcise, how to do it and how much is done and how much is charged.

I’ve always thought that female circumcisions were only carried out in some tribes in Africa, and that there was never any religious basis for doing so.

Further googling the subject:

In Singapore’s small Muslim community, female circumcision involves nicking the prepuce, the skin covering the clitoris.

It is markedly different from the practices of some Muslim communities in Africa and the Middle East decried by human rights activists as female genital mutilation. In those cases, a young girl’s clitoris is clipped and burned. In a few communities, all the external genitals are cut off and the remnant tissue is sewn up to leave only a small opening.

Those practices originated 1,400 years ago, before the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, says Noor Aisha Binte Abdul Rahman, a professor at the National University of Singapore.

Singapore’s milder form is viewed as symbolic of this tradition.

But anyway, I’ve always known male circumcision to be ‘compulsory’ among Muslim males, and I’ve a story of a friend of mine who’s Muslim, but whose mother managed to hide him from the circumcisor’s (is that what they’re called?) scissors until he was about eight or ten years old, when he was found out by his mosque mates, presumably when they went to the loo together.

My friend was dragged kicking and screaming to the circumcision table and given the sunat. His mother, heartbroken and guilt-ridden by her only son’s wails and pleas, bought him an Apple computer to help soothe him as he recovered.

A few years ago this friend and I were talking about computers, and he was complaining that his laptop was on the blink. He couldn’t afford a new one at the time, and said that he thought about asking his mother for a loan, but decided against it eventually, because “I think my mother will sunat me again”.