Sons of Loki

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!