Sons of Loki

Japan isn’t as straightlaced as you might think. (Also, on a random whim I looked up that “BNE” sticker, and it has a surprising history and no one quite knows what it means. Fascinating.)

I was gearing up for a tortuous day of three straight periods today, but I was surprised to find that only the first lesson was mandatory, and everyone else was heading off to do other stuff, so I went to Shinjuku for to pick up these kanji books we need for the Leeds kanji test.

Kinokuniya is practically the biggest book store in Tokyo, but it took me ages to find it. I was ready to give up when I finally stumbled across it, and I melted a little when I discovered the small-yet-well-stocked English-language section.

“It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.” The Complete Essays III.3.932, Michel de Montaigne

Since finishing The Tipping Point I’ve hungered for new non-fiction books, but all I’ve had to read is manga, which is barely readable for someone of my level after much effort, but it’s still more like hard work than something to lose yourself in on the train or on the bog. So it was great joy that I picked up an interesting tome by recent science hero Simon Singh (currently fighting the good fight against chiropractors and UK libel laws) all about the Big Bang. Oh, the kanji books. I’m not entirely sure if I even really need them, given that it just seems like a kanji dictionary and I’ve already got a good one of those (the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary), but I did also get Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1. For years we have been told that kanji are all but impossible to learn, that we should give up, that the only way to do it is slog through them with the utmost misery. Heisig just says “Why not use a system?” And it sounds like a very good system indeed – mnemonic pictorial cues, similar to what I’ve been using before, but codified and refined. And best of all, he concentrates on meaning, not the particular reading/pronunciation (which is something that comes naturally anyway).

So, being all geeked up, I decided to head to Harajuku to see if you really could get cheap clothes there, as I’d been told. Harajuku is a place, like the rest of Tokyo, which is hard to pin down. It’s not quite as achingly, effortlessly hip as Gwen Stefani might think it is (that’d be Shibuya) – it’s a little rough around the edges, a little too self-conscious. Of course, you’ve got the truly cool and fashionable gliding through the crowds like they’re too hot to touch. Then you’ve got the freaks in bizarre costumes, gothic lolita, or a dozen piecings and pink hair. And finally you’ve got everyone else, the normals, the Japanese public and the kids hanging out with their friends and the permamently bemused tourists and the coolhunters.
Coolhunting. It’s such a postmodern concept, the idea that cool is a natural resource that flows out of the ground in Harajuku and Shibuya and can be tracked and collected and distilled and sold to the public at large. So you’ll see these Japanese kids with SLRs stalking the streets, hunting down the latest fashion to be transmitted down the line to the boutiques of New York and London in a few months’ time. Or so I like to think; they were probably just photographers like me.

In the end, cheap clothes were nowhere to be found except in the vintage and used clothing shops, which smelled funny and didn’t really have anything I liked (nor which would fit), although I did pick up a ironically retro Swissair manbag for 700yen.

I’m not quite sure what I want to be. A house DJ? (Been screwing around with this DJing app I downloaded, and mixing is hard, but when you get two songs that really work together it’s nowt but pure joy.) A geologist? (For some reason, I found myself trawling through geology articles on Wikipedia recently. It’s fascinating!) An author? A photographer? (It’s so fantastic to just go into Tokyo and take photos of stuff, which is one of the reasons I want to splash out on an SLR for my birthday hint hint ma and pa). Ah, what a time to be alive, when it’s so easy to dabble in various fields (even if it’s a case of jack of all trades, master of none.)

Being a Japanese holiday yesterday, I resolved to take a trip to my old stomping grounds of Uguisudani, Taito-ku.
It seemed awfully like it used to. Had the ATOS pronunciation of Uguisudani on the train station announcement changed? Was that Doutor Coffee always there? Had those lockers been electronic for long?
I realised that for the first time in my life, I was returning to somewhere I used to live.

Old Sakura House Uguisudani-A remained, but I didn’t have much of a desire to see my old cockroach-ridden room, not that I’d even know if any of my old flatmates still lived there.

In a grim sign of the times, my beloved Shop 99 had ballooned to a Lawson 100. Nevertheless, I bought a few things for old times sake.
When I mention I used to live in Uguisudani to Tokyoites, they either nod in vague recognition or burst out laughing. I suspect it’s something to do with Uguisudani’s ridiculously large love hotel district, which went on for further than I remembered.

I stopped by a temple to light some incense. Louis Theroux was there, for some reason (or, uh, it may have just been a guy in glasses). The Ueno area is so peaceful.
I wandered down to Ueno station via the park, past Rodin:

and wandered down to a local Book Off, intending to see if I could get our kanji textbook, but instead I found a copy of Bar Lemon Hart, an obscure manga about the regulars at a Japanese bar and the sage-like barkeep.

Then a brief browse in Akihabara, where I was bemused to find that you can buy a Xbox 360 for the same price as a Wii, and that the PSP is cheaper than the DS.

Today, lessons began in earnest. Dan, Hattie and I started off in level 200, but it was reassuringly obvious that it wouldn’t be for us – we were studying stuff we’d covered back in January. So after the first period (a gruelling 90 minutes – have to get used to that) we upgraded to level 300, which was more challenging but definitely a good fit.
It’s good, because we now have an incentive to do well – having been given this opportunity, I’m determined not to show myself up, and I have to keep up with the others.
After lunch with my tutor, I wandered along to one of our ISEP modules (in these first couple of weeks, we can try out a few of the non-language modules before making a decision on which to take) – Topics of Contemporary Japan. The lecturer, Mir Monzurul Huq, stressed that the recent victory for the Democratic Party in the elections has meant he’s had to radically alter parts of the module, which sounded good – I’d rather learn cutting edge developments rather than stuff that’s out of date.
So, here it all begins. Hope it goes well.

Popped down to the local combini to buy Shonen Jump for to practice my reading, and it took me back to the heady summers of buying thick Ranma paperbacks for a whopping £12 from Abstract Sprocket, only Shonen Jump has far more content for friggin’ 240 yen (£1.50). What a country.

Yet a country where beer costs £6 a pint, as evidenced by our trip last night to joy-of-joys Roppongi, which was fun in the bizarre dumb way that only Roppongi can be.

Last night started off with the TUFS international welcome party, which had free sushi and beer – always a good combination. Unfortunately, with the heady enthusiasm of freshers’ week long, long behind me, I totally failed to meet many new people and forgot all the names, but this Leeds alumni who was at TUFS three years ago turned up and we had a very reassuring chat. It is fine. You can be put in level 200 and wind up in 500. Just study and read manga and you too can wind up graduating with a cushy teaching job, which is what he was doing.

So then I headed on down to Musashi-koganei to meet Miles, Rob and Katy, it being round about where they live, and we proceeded from McDonalds to Hub to the hour-long two-transfer journey to distant Roppongi. It was getting late. The trains would be stopping soon. There was no way back.

We picked up two highly excitable Australians, but managed to lose them by declining a taxi ride, and Rob rediscovered this club he’d been to last year. Typical Roppongi joint – ridiculously small and overpriced, with two or three confused looking tourists and misplaced salarymen – and yet with a heady enthusiasm that was strangely endearing, from the MJ-loving DJ to the gorgeous Michelle Yeoh lookalike behind the bar knocking back bottles of Corona and juggling limes (probably).

And so we partied until the early morn, left, found a Johnsons, ate some breakfast at 4am, got back to the station, and began the loong unpleasant train ride with the rest of the early birds back to the suburbs. A night out in Tokyo. Needed that, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again any time soon.

Rob and I were so ridiculously sleep-deprived by the end that we spent about ten minutes laughing at a poster with illustrations of the stuff you shouldn’t do on escalators – don’t run, hold the handrail, don’t be an old man who falls over on the escalator and drops his cane and gets kicked in the head oh god it was not funny in the slightest and yet it was the funniest thing I have ever seen.

Oh, and Obama’s been given the Nobel Peace Prize. Good for him, and I do like Obama, but … uh … what has he really achieved so far? I have no doubt that by the end of his term he’ll have brought about some worthy changes but he’s not even been in office a year!

Got a bit of rain last night, but I think most of Typhoon Melor burned itself out over Kansai. So it was that I awoke this morning to nowt but strong winds and decided to go for a bit of a cycle. Possibly to Shinjuku, I thought, if it was at all possible, but at 9am this morning cycling through the rain-swept suburbs of Tokyo, glossy Shinjuku seemed miles away. (And it was.)
Nevertheless, it was rewarding to see Tokyo go from the low-rise suburbs with their allotments and rows of bicycles blown over in the wind to slightly more built up areas with the gigantic bulk of Expressway No. 4 above running dual-tier with the avenues below it.

Upon the way I bought myself a cheap bike lock for 780 yen, having somehow lost the one that came with the bike the other day. I felt more than a little suspicious, being a foreigner on a bike with no lock (probably stolen) and no alien registration card and having forgotten my student card and wearing gloves and taking photos of things and believe me, foreigners in Japan have been stopped by police for less.
Of course, having no lock, I had to leave my bike outside the bike shop while I went in. Luckily, I relied on the Irony Lock, which says that the chances of having your bike stolen in Japan while you’re in a bike shop buying a bike lock are so hilariously ironic that it could never happen.

I saw from a map that Shinjuku ward was coming up and I thought “Well, I’ll probably hit some low-rise housing first, before I get into the heart of Tokyo.” Then the Park Hyatt appeared and oh it was beautiful.

The sky was clear and blue after the storm and I thought I might give the Tokyo Metropolitan Office observation deck a go to see if I could catch a glimpse of Fuji, but lamentably it was closed to due – ironically – high winds. So I says to myself, why not go for a coffee? Because Tokyo isn’t New York, that’s why not. In New York, in the heart of the business district, the streets are lined with hot dog carts and iced water sellers and coffee shops and delis and pastrami and gangs of suits talking about how many pension funds they raided today (probably). In Shinjuku, the streets are empty because everyone’s inside feverishly working. No wonder Tokyo has a GDP of USD$1.1 trillion.

But I find Cafe Lu-La in Shinjuku station, which does a decent cup of joe, and then I head back to find where I parked my bike and begin the 1.5h journey home.

I want this bike.

The word on the streets is taifu (which, fascinatingly, is a word that went from Chinese Hakka dialect tai foon (big wind) to English typhoon and then was imported from English into Japanese to taifu.

Either way, there’s a storm a-brewin’. Biggest in 10 years, so stay inside and drink tea. Except I have no tea, so I’m authorising myself an emergency trip to the supermarket for tea/milk/sugar/snacks/supplies.

Today we had our placement test, the results of which will be known in ten minutes (they’re fast here). I feel that I did as good as I could, so I’m not sweating it. It was, as Fran noted, weird to take a test where you weren’t supposed to know the harder stuff, and where guessing was a bit pointless.

After that we went into a big room to finally sign up for a MUFG bank account, and got some free wet wipes for doing so. In the end, it was a very smooth procedure. Also I signed something for JASSO, so should hopefully be getting that this month, too.

(update) Am in class 200, which is the slow readers group Elementary Japanese, along with Dan and Hattie. We are pretty sure we can get bumped up to 300.