Sons of Loki

It’s always slightly weird, waking up in the morning and going someplace. Usually, if I’m going out for the day I only get into Tokyo about midday at the earliest. But today I was up at 7am, quick shower, and onwards to Nippori station to catch the Keisei Limited Express to Narita Airport to meet my sister Katie and her partner Chris, who were landing on a Virgin Atlantic flight at 9:55am. The weather today has, for a change, been actually warm, and they couldn’t have picked a nicer day to arrive (considering five days ago it was snowing).

I’ve never been to meet anyone at the airport… apart from once or twice to meet my sister home from her travels. So it was a little novel to be checking the flight times on my mobile as I sped through the weird countryside of Chiba. At Terminal 1, I had a quick wee before coming back out to the (almost empty) arrivals lounge to see Katie and Chris standing next to a ticket counter looking lost as if they’d just been plucked straight from Sheffield and somehow wandered into my life in Japan.

So much to explain! There were guffaws aplenty at “Pocari Sweat”, yappari. Down at the JR Pass counter they got their magic rail passes (truly envious of that, but as a resident I can’t buy one) from a very polite gentleman who spoke English to them and, realising that I knew Japanese, was entirely forthcoming in speaking Japanese to me. I found that really refreshing, that he didn’t balk at a foreigner speaking Japanese, and that he didn’t patronise me by switching to English.

On the way out we got stopped by the fuzz. I’ve heard about the duo who patrol Narita Airport; they only check foreigners. Well, foreign-looking foreigners. Even if you’re just waiting for somebody they’ll come by and check you out – and they’ll be very polite and friendly about it, of course.

My last encounter with the police fresh in my mind, I resisted flashing my gaijin card as my sister and Chris showed their passports. Ah, it’s only a small thing, but they had no reason to see my ID, and when they asked for it, I simply said “Passport ga motte imasen. Ai ni kimashita.” (“I don’t have my passport with me. I came to meet these guys.”) We had a brief chat and I explained that she was my sister and I was an exchange student and he only wound up asking for my phone number, which I couldn’t be bothered to argue about. (They were nice guys, the cops usually are.) But I didn’t show my ID. A tiny victory for civil rights!

Tickets in hand we boarded the Narita Express – very swish and very comfortable, although I’m not sure it’s worth the extra 2,000 yen over the 1,000 Keisei limited express.

In Shinjuku, I escorted them to the Hotel Rose Garden, which looks like a reasonably swish place (although the rooms are tiny).

I gave them the usual tour of Shinjuku; up the Tokyo Metropolitan Towers to the south observation deck, then over to Kabukicho and lunch in a little ramen joint, before a wander through a games arcade (where I pulverised “Train-Train” on Taiko no tatsujin and got like a billion points) and backstreets and to a Starbucks to plan the next day. I was amazed how tired I was, but I did get up at 7am. Tomorrow, one hopes, I shall awake refreshed for another day of tourguiding. It’s tough work.

After an impromptu meeting with Suzuki-sensei at 6pm today, it was established that due to my low mark of 63.9 (C) I will be repeating level 300 instead of moving up to 400 with everyone else. Also, I think I was advised to do all the auxiliary lessons (the speaking, listening, reading and writing classes) and the kanji class too. There goes my free time!

That’s not set in stone. I could still push for 400, I reckon. But, I dunno. It might be best to cut my losses and concentrate on the Leeds exam.

I’m doing joint honours English and Japanese at the moment. I am informed that there is a possibility of applying for straight BA English in May, which would entail basically dropping Japanese and reverting to my remaining two years of English in 2010/11 and 2011/12.

Do I want to do that? Not really. I do want to finish Japanese, but at the same time, in all honesty, I’m just not putting the work in.

Suzuki-sensei asked me today why I’m doing Japanese, and for the first time I gave the honest answer: I like living in Tokyo. I adore this city. I always tell people “Well I liked anime when I was younger,” or “I like Japanese culture”, but the simple truth is I like living here more than England. (In some respects. I do miss home.) No crime, great transport, exciting events, the bustle of a megapolis; it’s everything I want. I mean, you can walk the streets at 3am and never, ever feel threatened. You know how much more pleasant that is than in England? I don’t want to go all Daily Mail, but it’s little things like that.
And I don’t really need a degree to live here: obviously it would help with getting a job but right now, I know enough Japanese to survive here. I realised that when I went to get my bike fixed – just a minor errand, and my Japanese went off without a hitch, and it was sorted. I know enough to get anything done. I’m pretty much illiterate beyond kids’ manga and I can’t really hold an interesting conversation, but I can Get By.

So if I can get by, the question becomes what am I learning Japanese for? I’m not really sure. Obviously if I could be fluent I would. If I had a roadmap for fluency, I’d follow it. But that seems an awful long way away (and it is) and right now I’m sort of okay and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to get better, but that doesn’t really bother me, y’know? (And yet it does…)

Today is just day 160 of my year in Japan. Together with the 2007 expedition, that’s 232 days I’ve lived in Japan, or 3% of my entire life. And yet I fear I have missed something. The wood for the trees, perhaps.

You get so used to a country that you miss all the little things. My mum sent me an email asking what it was like, exactly, to live in Japan, and I realised I couldn’t really answer.

So I thought I’d go through a single typical day with a fine-toothed comb, highlighting all the mundane aspects of what makes life in Japan just so, the certain phenotypical aspects of the daily occurrences which one might miss without a measured examination.

I was woken up at 10am by my phone ringing. (Keitai, or mobiles, are ridiculously popular in Japan. Observe any youth or salaryman on the train and they can be on their phone for the entire journey, never looking up from the mail they are composing. Talking on the phone on the train is forbidden, and this being Japan and not the UK, everybody complies. In Japan, rather than SMS technology, all phones use email for “texting”, which means easy communication with PCs, attachment of files, thousand-character messages, etc. In English we speak of mailing somebody, not texting them.)
It was Dan’s student tutor/language partner Kazuki who I met way back in October, informing me that one of our Leeds lecturers, Mark Williams, was going to meet with us today at lunchtime. The conversation was almost entirely in Japanese, which is always nice, but Kazuki is very easy to understand. Certain conversations go without a hitch because we spent all year preparing for them; for example last week I went to get my bike tire puncture mended and turned up in some middle-aged guy’s garage (the smell exactly like my granddad’s garage back home, of sawdust and turps) and didn’t slip up once. But make it just a little faster, throw in a few more words I don’t understand, and I flounder completely. Such is the paradox of language comprehension.

I cycled to the post office, which is open only on weekdays, while listening to the Archers. (I got back into it just in time to hear the death of Phil Archer, which was genuinely rather sad.) In Japan, post works pretty much the same, except when you want to send a letter they weigh it and ask you for the correct postage. (I assume if you know what you’re doing you can buy the right stamp and post it yourself, but I most assuredly do not know what I’m doing.)
So I bought an envelope and posted my invoice and came back to pick up my parcel from the student office on campus. When a parcel arrives, you get a little note on your mailbox, and you bring the note to the student office and exchange it for a parcel after signing the little book. (The nice woman who works there seems to remember everybody’s name.)
The parcel was from my mum; it contained chocolate and, of course, forms to fill in and post. And two envelopes, meaning I didn’t have to buy one. Another trip to the post office, then.

But first! I went to meet Mark Williams at the agreed place, but he apparently wasn’t there yet. I met up with Fran, though, who told me that he was presumably attending this East Asian studies conference that was going on (meeting us was just a side benefit). We were told to come back at 4:30pm. As we got the lift, a guy came out and passed us with a quick look. Seconds too late, of course, I realised it was him.

Not to worry. I had four hours to do some errands in Kichijoji. I hopped upon my bike and cycled to Higashi-Koganei, which is our third nearest station (Tama is closest, but expensive; Tobitakyu is about 5-10 minutes away by bike, but doesn’t go to Kichijoji).
Bikes are ace in Japan. They’re cheap, you can cycle on the pavement, and you don’t need a helmet. I love my bike; I can get anywhere after a fashion (even Shinjuku, though it takes two hours).
The chain keeps coming off my bloody bike though. The first time it happened I was stuck because there’s a entirely pointless cover over the chain and I needed a screwdriver to get it off. Now I’ve taken to carrying a screwdriver around with me, but it’s still a bother.

Japanese suburbia is a strange mix. The backstreets are like some carefully-assembled shanty town; narrow streets, houses crammed together, the buildings all poured concrete and PVC ugliness, the cars all squat-faced Toyotas and Nissans crammed into double-decker driveways (I kid you not).
Then you get to the main roads, and it’s America suddenly; ugly chain malls and parking lots and family diners and empty pavements. It’s very strange how closely Tokyo’s suburbs are modelled after the US style of car-orientated consumerism.

I reached Higashi-Koganei in about 20 minutes, counting a maintenance break to put my chain back on. It was my first time there, and I got a strange sense of being near the sea. Perhaps it was the sun; perhaps it was the way the platform floats like an island above the sea of roofs around it. I parked my bike for free (not always a given) near the koban (the ever-present police boxes; Japan loves its cops, it does) and entered the station with my Suica (a IC swipe transport pass, similar to London’s Oyster card, that you charge up with cash which is automatically deducted by tapping it (or just your wallet with it in) on a sensitive panel at the ticket gates).

Japan’s trains are a by-word for punctuality. Though the Chuo line is one of the most popular places for suicide (tastefully represented by “Cause: Accident” on the delays screen in English and 人身事故 (“human body accident”) in Japanese), they can clear a body up in 20 minutes, or so I hear, and long delays are very rare.
The more modern JR trains on the Chuo and Yamanote lines have display screens by all the doors showing route and station information as well as adverts and news updates. On the train, you sit if you’re lucky, or mill about the doors if not. Kids, adults alike read manga. Everybody is on their phone. Old guys read newspapers or novels, hidden in plain covers so no one can see what you’re reading. (Which is the point of reading on the train, right?) People rarely talk.

I noticed some sakura by the station as the train left. Sakura is cherry blossom; it comes out in March and Japan goes nuts with patriotism. People go to parks for “hanami” (flower-viewing) and drink copious amounts of sake, a experience which I am looking forward to. Most sakura isn’t out yet, but you can see it here and there.

Tokyo is a very distributed city; life collects around certain hubs on the rail network like Ueno or Shinjuku, and Kichijoji is the nearest one to us. It’s reasonably well-known (Toru Watanabe lived here in Norwegian Wood) and you can get just about anything you need here. And it makes for a decent night out, too.

I decided I needed a haircut last night, so I went down to QB House, one of a chain of 10 minute haircut salons across Japan. For 1000 yen, it’s the cheapest haircut in the city, I’m sure. You go in and buy a ticket from the vending machine (like a lot of things in Japan) and wait for someone to become free.
Obviously you don’t get a great style or anything, and a haircut is one of those things which probably shouldn’t be rushed. But the guy was friendly (asking me where I was from and all that) and my hair looks alright and it was cheap and it was indeed quick (though a little longer than ten minutes). The hairdresser even took my coat and bag and put them in a special wardrobe so as to not get covered in excess hair, and then vacuumed my head to suck up the cuttings. Ingenious.
I found another post office, filled in my voter registration form (I was already registered, but perhaps because I changed it to Leeds I couldn’t proxy vote in Norwich) and student finance form (hooray for a realistic amount to live on, unlike first year) and got them posted to home with a sweet flower stamp, as the kind postwoman explained.

Next, Yodobashi Camera. Yodobashi is one of the biggest electronics chains in Japan; think Dixons or Currys (do either of those still exist?) but with mammoth, six-floor stores everywhere. I bought the cheapest hairdryer I could find and went up to 7F to Uniqlo to get some shoes and/or clothes.

Uniqlo is making increasing inroads into the UK as a kind of uber-chic Japanese brand, or so I hear. In Japan, it’s nothing special; like H&M or maybe Topshop (as it used to be) it has a reputation for decent modern mid-budget fashion, and it’s a nice enough place to shop (although the best deals and the best fashion are to be found elsewhere). I got some bright red canvas shoes that will hopefully fit (after worrying that it would be impossible to get gaijin-size shoes, I found out from Dan that Uniqlo do cheap shoes in sensible sizes) and a bright orange waterproof jacket thingy, which I hope has that whole mild cyberpunk thing going on. (There’s a jawdropping label in Japan called FOTUS which do all kinds of bizarrely beautiful futuristic vinyl jackets and florescent trousers, but I’m not entirely sure what kind of places sell it)

Starbucks is the same everywhere, of course, and you don’t even need to know Japanese to order. In Japan, students flock to Starbuckses and McDonaldses, buy the cheapest thing, and then chill out for a couple of hours doing homework. It’s rather pleasant.

This particular store was full of gaijin – when I say “full” I mean there were five or six of us, which is a lot. Two Americans sat near me chatting about aesthetics and translation – or rather one guy with a nice beard and a pleasing accent talked while the other guy listened. It’s funny that Americans have a reputation for being uncultured, because there’s a certain kind of north-ish middle-aged accent that reminds me of fine thinkers like Seale or the philosopher-dudes from Waking Life, and it sounds vaguely famous and reassuring. “If you burn your bridges, you can’t stay there and fight your corner!” he exclaimed, sounding like he was in some kind of interesting Richard Linklater film.

I confess to often worrying that people will think I’m a tourist or something, not a proper long-term resident. But you can sort of tell who is and who isn’t. The couples with backpacks, looking lost are always tourists. The confident-looking American guys are ex-pats. Plus, tourists don’t tend to hang out in out-of-the-way places like Kichijoji.

My journey back to TUFS was much like the journey from there, only in reverse. I stopped in at my local combini, 3F, to get one of their delicious pasta salads.
Combini is short for “convenience store”, but they’re somehow more than a regular Spar; they’re like a hub of local activity. You can get snacks and bread and milk, but you can also get fried chicken or nikuman, buy concert or sports tickets, a ridiculous array of sandwiches and onigiri and Japanese bread snacks and hot drinks and magazines. They’re all open 24/7 and invariably staffed by two students who will give you exactly the same “IRASSHAIMASEEEEE” (“WELCOME.”) at 3am as they will do at 3pm.

Then back for a conversation with Mark Williams, which was pretty enlightening. Apparently we shouldn’t be that worried about the Leeds exam, which is reassuring but it is still very, very worrying. And Dan was telling me about how he’s got into all this modelling work in Japan just by signing up for a few agencies, which sounds like a decent racket and which I will look into.

And there you have it. A day in the life in Japan. It’s kind of the same as living anywhere else, except very, very different. And better.

Free ice cream aside, my enthusiasm for the manga-kissa faded somewhat when trying to sleep on a sofa covered by a tiny blanket under the hot glare of halogen lamps and the dry suck of the air con. After one or two hours of not quite satisfying sleep it was time to get up; time to leave my enclave, pay the bill, and head out into the world.

Homeless people were sleeping in the station at 5am; perhaps I should have joined them. Instead I followed my nose to one of the ever-present McDonalds and bought a coffee from a girl with the biggest eyes I ever saw, sat down to drink it and lament the sorry fatigue of the traveller. It’s lonely stuff, travelling, and doubly so in a foreign country when you don’t have the benefit of any roots to anchor you down. I thought about turning back, perhaps; Ueno and a warm proper bed were only a couple of hours away. But no. Onwards I must struggle.

Takasaki seemed oddly busy for 5am. Obviously compared to Tokyo it was utterly dead; still, the McDonalds was pretty full with people sleeping or waiting for the first train. Perhaps some of them were on the Seishun 18 like me. I looked at my cluttered schedule on Outlook with a mixture of admiration and fear; it is a clear roadmap for visiting dozens of towns and cities in four days and reaching Hokkaido, the city of Hakodate, where I have promised myself a proper hotel and a proper bed.

I wonder why I’m doing this. To prove it can be done, I guess. The train journeys are taking up most of my time, so it’s not like I’m doing it for the sightseeing … it’s more because I want to hit the road, roam about. Wanderlust. Fernweh. I kind of like the idea of having everything I need in one bag, always accessible, even just seeing myself in the mirror as a proper backpacker (though with a satchel bag), with no real plans and no reservations.

The train from Takasaki takes me to Minakami, where there’s snow on the ground, and there I change to continue on to Nagaoka, after passing through a colossal 13.5km tunnel through the mountains, complete with several spooky underground stations with cavernous entrances and exits where no one gets off and no one gets on. The trains at Nagaoka have this old time feeling, evoking images of travelling through post-war Europe on the train networks in the good old days.

This is the north alright; a fuckton of snow, and when it snows here it really knows. Like, more than a metre deep. Enough to bury me, perhaps.

I found out later that this is the setting for a classic of Japanese literature, Snow Country. The first line famously reads “The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The tunnel Yasunari Kawabata was writing about was the 13.5 km one I’d just come out of, the Shimizu tunnel. A little bit of literary history there.

After the train came out of the mountains the thick snow abated. Nagaoka is a few fashion stores and a branch of Muji. I get to Niigata, where I have about four hours to kill before catching the succession of trains to Akita tonight. When I walk out of the station, I’m a little bit taken aback; the station area is identical to Takasaki, although as I get deeper into the town it feels different. I catch hints of Seoul, Chicago; funny how cities can all be similar and different at the same time.

Thought about getting a haircut, but 5,500 yen? No thanks. So I walk to the north coast, the Sea of Japan, past concrete uniformity and pointless towers everywhere. I take a few half-hearted photos but Niigata is difficult to get excited about, especially on a grey foggy afternoon. The Sea of Japan is the same as it ever was. I sit down for a minute, trying to make the most of it, and then realise I have.

Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea about “travelling”. Like, I’ve heard that exciting and interesting people spent their youths travelling, so I try to do it too, but I take it a bit too literally and just spend my time travelling from place to place. The key to exciting travels is probably meeting interesting people and visiting novel locations. Need to brush up on that.            

I wound up in a Starbucks underneath Niigata’s shiny NEXT 21 skyscraper drinking their new Sakura frappuchino (delish). They were playing “Slippery People” by Talking Heads, which is a rather obscure choice. Oh, and “Hand in Glove”. I must say that Starbucks’ music is infinitely superior to that McDonalds yesterday. And they played Squeeze. And The Cure. It was like they were streaming it straight off my iPod.

I take the long walk back to the station and I realise I can’t push on. Yeah, I could have got to Akita after another five or six hours and catch two hours sleep in a manga-kissa and start the journey to Hakodate and have an evening there before I have to start back again … but I’m travelling for the sake of it. It’s still barely possible, I calculate using the train thing on my phone, to trace my route back across the spine of Japan to Ueno and end up on my doorstep the same night.

And so I find myself on that lovely, rare object: the homebound train. There’s only a dozen passengers; the warmth and light of our carriages contracts with the frozen wastes outside the window. Now I find myself past Akabane, rolling into Ikebukuro, the beautiful city outside the window as I listen to Kevin Shields’ “City Girl”. It’s insane. Every time I leave this city I come back more in love with it than ever. I can’t explain why.

So I’m back home, but the best bit is I still have three days of the Seishun 18 to use over the next month. Watch this space, dear friends.

I swear man, this is the only way to travel. Working my way back from Yokohama to Tokyo station, where I stopped off at the Travel Centre for a quick chat entirely in Japanese regarding the status of any Moonlight night trains (conclusion: nai) and then on to Ueno where I took my last remaining option; getting any train heading in a sort of northerly direction.

It was fantastic. I got to the platform and saw that I had a choice between somewhere called Koganei (same kanji as the one near where I live, but about two hours away from Tokyo) and a town called Takasaki, both of which I’d never even heard of. I pulled out my trusty map (which served me so well back in 2007). Where shall I go? I found Takasaki on the map and it looked to be in a good place (on the way to Niigata, Akita, and ultimately Sapporo) and the train was leaving in 15 minutes, so I hopped on and grabbed a seat.

Part of the fun of this ticket is the whole Hoffman transfer orbit system of getting around; bumping from station to station, it requires an intricate understanding of the train networks, and you really get a sense of how the railroads spread out throughout the country, interconnected and interchanging. I do find something so wonderfully romantic about trains, and though this ticket is very inconvenient for getting anywhere in a hurry you see a lot more of the country than you would otherwise.

The night is coming on. I’m listening to my recent purchase, Ali Farka Toure’s beautiful African blues on In The Heart of the Moon. I’m on a train bound for some place I never heard of and I think there’s hotels and stuff (it’s a stop for the Shinkansen at least) but I’m not sure if I’ll find one and man it’s all so terribly exciting!<

I’ve got a set of four seats to myself now, which is a welcome change from being cramped in with three others earlier. I’m reasonably confident I’ll have a room for the night. I don’t want to pay too much, but I’m looking at perhaps 4,000 and up. Tomorrow I should be able to make a good start on getting up to Sapporo, or if not at least Akita. Ah, the night scenery flashing past outside is so romantic…

Rolled into Takasaki and into a light drizzle, the traffic lights reflecting off the mostly empty boulevard. Takasaki is one of those nondescript Japanese towns, all grey featureless hotels and cars sluicing through the night. There were a few hotels dotted around, including one for 4,000, but I hoped that there might be a capsule hotel somewhere, so I asked in at a Lawson. There wasn’t one, but the guy at the desk asked the junior assistant and he recommended a little manga/internet café just down the street, next to a cinema. (I was going to go properly Holden Caulfield and catch a late flick, but the last showings had already started).

So, hopefully I should be able to get some sleep and internet there. In the meantime I’ve stopped in at a Gasuto diner, where I got things off to a great start by repeating “Irasshaimase!/Welcome!” to the waitress as I came in. Argh. Oh well, at least they’ll never see me in this town again. They are playing a orchestrated version of “Michelle” that took me a while to recognise.

It’s a little bit scary, though. I’m only two hours from Tokyo if anything goes wrong, but the further I get out, the longer it takes to get back … and if I really balls things up, it might take a shinkansen to get me home. But then in another way of looking at it, I’m already a continent away from my other home…

I’m at the place now, and it’s just far too awesome. Massive screened PC, big telly, PS2, every manga you could possibly want to read, a few DVDs and games, a big comfy sofa, and free drinks and ice cream for 1,500 yen. Although it’s hardly a proper hotel, it’s decent enough for me. I spent an hour or two trying to work out how, exactly, I am to get to Sapporo … and I don`t think I can, but I might be able to reach Hakodate. We will see.

Obviously when I need to get up at 8am, I can’t. When I want to sleep solidly and awake at 8am, I wake up at 7 and can’t get back to sleep. Sho ga nai. I spent about an hour and a half cooking up some rice for breakfast, showering and checking up on the state of the world; then it was packing my bag with a good supply of books and pens and no less than three chargers.

At Musashi-sakai, I proudly asked the ticket fellow at the green window for a 青春18きっぷ (seishun juuhachi kippu, Youth 18 Ticket), a fantastic deal that gets you unlimited travel on any JR local or rapid train for a bargain 11,500 yen for five days (non-consecutively and transferable, so five people can use it on one day, or you can use it for two days and then leave it for a week; it’s cho flexible). Ticket in hand, I boarded the Chuo line to Shinjuku, and asked at the information desk about getting a night train, the Moonlight Echigo, to Niigata (special “Moonlight” overnight trains are covered by the Seishun ticket). After flicking through a dozen JR timetable tomes, the young woman told me that the Moonlight Echigo didn’t run until later in the month. Not to worry. Were there any other night trains, I asked. Oh, there’s the Moonlight Nagara to Kyoto, she said. More timetable tomes. “But not until later in the month.”

Oh well. I’m hoping I misunderstood her, and maybe if I go to Shinagawa tonight I can get to Kyoto. Maybe not. No worries. My original plan, anyway, was to head to Kamakura, a historic city on a peninsula south of Tokyo. As I got further from the Big Toke, you could sense a change in the air; cleaner, fresher, a different aroma. As I got off the train in the pleasant March sunshine I saw a sign inviting me to the beach, so I went there.

Kamakura is famous mostly for its temples, making it a big tourist spot (and an easy day trip from Tokyo). But it definitely has the feel of a seaside town; the pottering elderly types, the surfer youths, the cute little cafes and surf gear emporiums and independent fashion shops made it feel like you could be in Hawaii or Cornwall.

Except Kamakura has giant hawks.

Huge things, screeching and gliding in a strangely serene beauty, or perching on phone cables. I paid them little mind and went down to the beach, which was alright; greyish, coarse sand, but a nice view and rolling waves. I passed a man merrily urinating on the sand and sat down a long way away from him, took off my coat, rolled up my socks and for the first time in my life, waded into the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately I didn’t have a handkerchief to knot up and place on my head in time-honoured fashion, but I felt like I was bringing a bit of old fashioned English class to distant Kamakura.

I had a pee in Lawson and bought an ice cream, which I ate while wandering through a little green and trying to find a bin (you’d think Japan would be overflowing with bins, but there’s never one when you need one). Something swooped past my head. A second later, I realised it was a hawk. A second after that, I realised he was after my ice cream. A second after that, I panicked and imagined hawk claws digging into my flesh or pecking out my eyes and very quickly finished off the ice cream and started the walk to see Daibutsu, The Giant Buddha. The road to it was paved with the typical Japanese souvenir shops and tourists, both native and foreign. I was reminded a little of the long trail to see God’s Final Message To Creation in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Now I reckon I’ve seen a bigger Buddha in Kyoto at a oddly obscure shrine (obscure because despite the gigantic Buddha it’s not in any guidebooks and no one was there), but hey, who am I to judge size of Buddhas.

After you’ve seen one temple you’ve pretty much seen them all so I thought I’d head back to the station. On the way, though, there was another temple for the Great Kannon (I rather think having gods in Buddhism runs rather counter to the spirit of the whole thing, but again who am I to judge) so I stopped by for a poke around. The view was quite nice, so I had a tea and a rest, before checking out the big statue of Kannon and making a wander through a cave filled with tiny statues and a man who looked at me funny.

Back at the station, I wondered briefly about going to Miura at the very bottom of this peninsula, but it seemed a long way for nothing much and I ached to start my journey north. So I got the train back towards Shinjuku, getting off at Yokohama.

Yokohama is one of the three metropolises making up the enormous Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama megacity, easily the biggest urban area in the world. As a consequence, there’s nothing you can do here you can’t do in Tokyo, except visit the tallest building in Japan. Still, it feels a little different to Tokyo; more open, perhaps, more authentic. I was surprised to find myself on a pedestriannised street that could have been in Cardiff or Leeds, for example. I popped into Don Kihote to check out rucksacks (1990 yen? Tad steep) and was glad to find a McDonalds where I could steal electricity and internet and listen to quite possibly the most awful music ever recorded (if you can call mushy pap like this “music”). I’m testing out using Word 2007 for my blog posting, and I think it might just work perfectly for offline composition, including photos, and then one-click uploading. This is grand technology. If I could blog from the top of a mountain I would.

So: assuming I can’t get the Moonlight trains anywhere, I guess I’ll just try to get as close to Sapporo as possible and then hunker down for the night in a capsule hotel or manga café or, if all else fails, a bench. The adventure, she is just beginning!

Trying to get back into this writing lark, now I have some time. It’s what I want to do, more than anything – it’s what drives me. I think I possibly explained before, but if I was a famous singer, I could lose my voice; if I was good at piano, I might not be able to afford one; were I a playwright, I still need actors and a stage. But being a writer, and specifically a novellist, it’s like you don’t need anything. You can write on a train or write on a mountain. You can write on a PC or scrawl it down on a napkin. Even if you’re completely paralysed you can still write.

The last days have been a little hectic. I was worried that I’d have nothing to do this holiday, but it’s been quite the opposite; karaoke on Wednesday, nomikai (drink-meet) on Thursday and then again last night. Everyone else sensibly went home before the stroke of midnight but Kaz and I, determined to make a proper Friday of it, ended up wandering around Kichijoji in the rain.

Kichijoji is a nice place, and it can be a pretty good spot for nightlife, but by midnight everyone sensible has gone on to Shinjuku and it was raining, so the town was kinda dead. Went to Hub for a few drinks, then an izakaya I’d been to before for a few more drinks, then got waylaid in a bizarre tiny shisha bar I’d noticed before, one which spills out on to the street under a plastic awning. The drinks were expensive, and the girls – well, I suspect they weren’t there for the atmosphere, if you get my drift – but it was kind of fun in a seedy underworld kind of way, the ten of us crammed into a tiny space on wooden stools, me alternately getting dripped on from the awning and having my ass grilled by the portable heater. Had it been more inside with the burly Sly Stallone-lookalike (right down to the porkpie hat!) between me and the exit, I might have been a little worried, but if they were running a dodgy clip joint it was an honorable dodgy clip joint where we were free to leave any time.

So we did. It was about 3am, and we had some time to kill before the first trains, so Kaz took me to this place he used to drink, and it was beautiful. It was an old-timey, Showa-era place, with vintage posters on the walls and that beautiful jazzy old Japanese music (I think ryūkōka?); you could imagine that it was the 1950s and you’d just got the new-fangled Chuo-line locomotive back from your labouring job in up-and-coming Shinjuku and decided to pop into your favourite haunt for a glass of nihonshu. It’s like a long-forgotten Tokyo, the Tokyo you see in old photographs. It was cheap, too, and I tried frog for the first time (exactly as Kaz said: like fish, only … like chicken).

So in the end, I spent a whole lot of money, but it was worth it because I learned stuff! I think I learned more Japanese just chatting to Kaz for a few hours than I do in a week of lessons. And such is the point of language learning, no?

Here’s the sunrise over Chofu airfield.

A little bird keeps visiting my balcony, which is nice. I leave out thawed frozen veg for him.

Not a lot been happening here, though I’ve staved off holiday insanity for the last couple of days.

Friday saw a trip to the Tachikawa immigration office, which in punctual style I reached ten minutes before it closed. The staff were friendly for a change, although they started laughing at my file disconcertingly before putting a tiny sticker in my passport which entitles me to work 14 hours a week.
I got the train back from Tachikawa station to Musashi-koganei on the Chuo line (technically the Chuo Line (Rapid), the same thing and entirely different to the Chuo-Sobu Line, which is also identical to and nothing to do with the Chuo Main Line). I’d cycled to Musashi-koganei station to save the extortionate 150 yen fare on the Seibu Tamagawa line, which is the line we have to get from where we live to connect to the Chuo. It’s actually pretty quick to cycle to from TUFS (well, 20-30 minutes), and given that the Seibu Tamagawa line is such a ridiculous money-sink it makes a big difference.
Anyway, I studied in McDonalds for a while and then, not wanting to stay in on a Friday evening, met up with Miles and Ella for dinner and karaoke in Kichijoji. This was enjoyable. Saturday, I was going to go to this music bar in Shinjuku with Ella, Fran and our Korean friend Hime, but ultimately that was cancelled due to Expensiveness and we went to happy hour at Hub, the Japanese pub. Craftily, the pub had conspired to include some kind of chemical in our drinks which lowered our inhibitions and made us more likely to stay and purchase more drinks, even at post-happy hour prices, which we did. Nevertheless, a merry time was had.
Japan really doesn’t do the British pub culture thing very well, at least not in my experience. It’s all izakayas, where you sit in uncomfortable booths and have to eat stuff and then get cheated out on a service charge you didn’t know about. Hub’s nice, though. It’s a place to just relax and drink and watch the curling (where Japan beat GBR, although our team did look like they’d just wandered out of Asda).

Sunday, I found out that j-rocksters the pillows were playing the final gig of their current tour at Tokyo Dome or JCB Hall (or whatever it’s called) and nearly went. I cycled around to find a Lawson convenience store and struggled with their ticket-booking machine for five minutes, trying to find the gig before giving up. Plus I didn’t really have enough money. Plus there’ll be other opportunities to see those guys.

I’ve decided to start shopping at the Lawson 100, the logical successor to Shop 99 of my old 2007 days (though they’re owned by the same company, stock all the same products, and there’s a Shop 99 about five minutes away from my nearest Lawson 100). The eggs are tiny and the coffee disgusting, but the price is right.

And I’m trying to learn 20 kanji a day from Heisig. I tried 50 a day before and burned myself out completely. It’s pointless to do that many – you forget them as soon as you learn them. I should hopefully finish a few weeks before the Leeds exam in May, which I am plus unconfident about given that everyone else is worried.

Yeah, I still don’t know. I got it together briefly enough to barely pass the TUFS exam, but the Leeds one is an entirely different, more difficult thing altogether. I know my parents will be telling me to just get my head down and study, but it’s not that simple. It’s a language. It’s a wild, uncontrollable beast. You track it for a year and you’re no closer to catching it. You study it for hours and forget it all in a heartbeat. I don’t even know how to study it. And yet study I must.

Anyway, this is what I want my contacts to do in a couple of years.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

I let myself back into my room and had the strangest urge to listen to “Dope Nose” by Weezer.
It’s weird, but I’m still stuck in the mindset of 2001 or so, when I first became a big Weezer fan. If you ask me how many albums Weezer have released, I’ll immediately say “Three. No, four. Wait, five. Six. Oh man, it’s seven now, isn’t it?”
Like a retrograde amnesiac, Weezer will always be a band with only three albums in my mind, and 2002’s Maladroit will forever be the “new” album, until I remind myself that Weezer have released no less than three new albums since then, albums I’ve never really got into. I heard “Beverly Hills”/”Pork and Beans”/”(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To”, the first single from each, and on each occasion thought “hey that’s pretty good, but the album just won’t be the same”.

Anyway. Exam yesterday, results today. I panicked a little when I saw I’d got 40/70 for the grammar portion. That is 57%. 3% below a pass. I’d screwed up badly on the verb conjugations – I’d studied the auxiliary words that came after the verbs, but I had no idea about the correct conjugation, so that’s where I shed most of my marks. The rest of the paper wasn’t too bad, though, so that’s more an error of revision. I tell myself.
Lucky, the reading paper was a success – 18/20. I think if I have any skill in Japanese, it’s geared towards reading more than anything else. Anyway, that bumped me up to a more comfortable 64%, and a 9/10 on the speaking exam (seriously that was very, very generously marked, so it’s not as good as it sounds) gave me a final score of 67.

So, what now? Let me tell you what now. Um, I dunno. I want to burn through all the kanji I don’t know. Play some Civilization IV. Write some more – man, I haven’t written properly in ages. Sleep. Do some laundry.

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

–Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Bah! Who needs love? Here’s the top five anti-love songs (that I could find on YouTube. Depressingly, the fantastic “I’m Not In Love” by Talking Heads (entirely different to the 10cc song of the same name) couldn’t be found.)

Richard Ashcroft – A Song for the Lovers
I love Ashcroft’s counterpoint baritone mumble in the video as he sings along to his own song. Diegetic cleverness, there. This song beat out “Love is Noise” in the running, but both depict love as a kind of unpleasant anxiety, which is far more preferable to sentimental pap.

Pulp – F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.
Different Class is just all over a great album, and this is a fantastic love song that basically sums up the incomprehensible gut-punch of love.

Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog
This is probably my all-time most listened song, but I just can’t get over it. I think I first heard of it as the only B&S song at OK Karaoke in Leeds, but back then I hadn’t heard their album The Life Pursuit, so I just thought it was a song about, uh, a funny little frog, so I never sang it.
At first listen, it’s just about loving someone. Then you realise it’s about loving someone you can’t have. Then you begin to suspect it’s all about loving some ideal girl, some soulmate you have yet to meet and who may not even exist. (I read an interesting theory that it’s actually about the Virgin Mary, which puts a new spin on the lyrics, but I prefer the secular interpretation.)

Absentee – We Should Never Have Children
A title like that says it all, right? “Some people never should have met,” intones the gravelly-voiced Dan Michaelson.

Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t've?)
To which we can all answer, “Yes.”

Depressing!