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I left the house at 0615 today on a cool and cloudy morning. As I was locking the door - a standard Japanese door, steel, with a spyhole and two locks - a rooster crowed. Yes - here in the heart of suburban Yokohama, in an area that is so quiet that sometimes the sound from the outside world drops right down to zero, someone is keeping a rooster.

Fortunately, the rooster-keeper is reasonably remote, and the bird's distance-diminished cry is so weak that I've never heard from inside the house. This is just as well, otherwise the impulse to indulge in an act of war might come bubbling to the surface.

The thing about roosters is that they don't just crow in the cool of dawn. In English literature, roosters are typically portrayed as birds that cry to greet the dawn, and in fact the word "cockcrow" refers to this fact. Dawn (cockcrow) is the time at which the rooster (the cock) crows. In theory.

When I was a child, I absorbed all this "the cock crows at dawn" literature and (unthinkingly) got the idea that the cock crows ONLY at dawn - or, at the very least, not until dawn. But this is wrong, although I didn't find out that it was wrong until I was in my early twenties.

(Though I grew up in a rural part of New Zealand, with a dairy farm just across the road, there were no chickens in my life, except for the ones that I ate. Some of these possibly came from the nearest chicken farm, which was forty minutes away by car.)

I discovered the truth about cockerels on a trip to Tonga. On the evening of the first day, I went to bed, and seemed to have slept for a grotesquely insufficient amount of time when a rooster in the neighborhood started to crow.

"The cock crows at dawn," I thought, groggily, and stumbled out of bed, meaning to get dressed - because this trip was for work not for pleasure, and I had a duty to be up early.

But it was uncommonly dark - no sign of dawn in the sky - and when I checked with my watch I found it was only four in the morning.

Today, however, the neighboring rooster was crowing at dawn (more or less) on a cool and cloudy day which, by the time I got into Tokyo, was starting to degenerate into a cold and rainy day.

I never go anywhere without my collapsible umbrella, and this was sufficient for the light rain that was falling as I headed for the office. En route, I passed a man in his early sixties, conservatively dressed, who had no umbrella. Instead, he had placed one of his gloves on top of his head. How remarkably extraordinary! Particularly so in Japan, where there is a set way of doing everything, and walking along with a glove on top of your head is definitely not a part of the Sacred Set Way.

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