Sons of Loki

It sounds ridiculous, but getting this TV – even with all its faults　(the v-hold is all screwed up, so it’s just reverted to filling up a quarter of the screen) – has heightened my mood considerably. And I think I know why.
Japan has this culture of “insider” and “outsider”, and if you are not inside the group you are outside the group. In my room, I’m disconnected from the outside world. The only connection I have is the internet – which for all intents and purposes is connecting me to Western culture. I am not in Japanese culture. I don’t read Japanese newspapers or the magazines, I don’t talk with the average Japanese person (not counting students and young people), I have no idea about the zeitgeist (時鬼？）.

But a TV is a magic box; it gives me a steady feed of what Japanese people are saying or doing or thinking about, 24/7. Like it or not, TV defines culture more than anyone would like to believe. And now I have a direct connection to Japanese culture, even if I don’t understand 90% of it. I can turn on the TV in the morning and watch the news and see the weather, and somehow that changes everything.

CHECK IT OUT.

There I was, about to host the first inaugural (what does that word even mean) Movie Night Tokyo (The Last Samurai (2003), snacks: Doritos, cookies), bringing Rob and Miles from Tama station when I passed the freecycling area on my way upstairs.

“Oh, man, a water boiling thingy!” (I don’t know what the real name is, but in Japan these electric kettles are popular where you have a nozzle like in a coffee machine and you press a button for hot water.) I was about to appropriate it when my eyes went past it to the RETRO-STYLE SHARP 20C-M4 20″ phat TV. She was a beauty.

And she works. The remote is from an entirely different model, so it doesn’t work, and there’s bugger all worth watching, and the buttons don’t work, but I can see television, which is probably a boon to my Japanese comprehension or something if I spend all day watching the endless programmes about food (there is nothing on Japanese TV except game shows, ridiculous variety shows and twenty-seven separate programmes about restaurants).

So what’s been going down? On Tuesday, as part of the Japan Music Week thing (for which we got special wristbands but only ended up going to one event but it was worth it anyway) Dan, Fran, Ella and I moseyed on down to the Shib to a little cafe called the Pink Cow, where the Singer-Songwriter night was going on. The artists were all foreigners, mostly American, and most of the audience were other artists, mostly American, but the place had a delightful ambience.

Aren’t Yanks funny? In a good way. Just so much more brash and loud than us limeys. It can be annoying, but it’s also quite endearing.

So we had the usual line-up of people – on piano, guitar, other weird instruments.

And then our very own Ella May Blake got the chance to go up after everyone else, and did her own set.

I’m not convinced anything else happened this week. I certainly can’t think of anything. There was a minor earthquake – I woke up briefly to a mild swaying and the sound of several tons of concrete groaning above my head – and we started a band.

Yes, Fran picked up a neat electric violin (together with all the accessories, as seems to be the norm in Japan) and Untitled Band (working name possibly Ichigo?), consisting of Ella May Blake (vocals, guitar), Francesca Wilks (electric violin), Matt Durrant (mandolin) and special guest Harriet South (plastic strawberry-shaped percussion) got together for a short jam, except we didn’t really know any songs. Nevertheless, it was fantastic, and with Ella’s newfound connections in the music business we might end up becoming underground superstars in Shibuya. Maybe.

Anyway, today I spent some time with Fran in Shinjuku meeting up with the local group of Nanowrimoers for the first time, typing away in a Shinjuku Starbucks. Ended up with 3,415 words, which means I’m only 6,292 words off today’s target!

As of press time, still writing.

I feel like a real-life version of Searle’s Chinese room sometimes. (here comes the philosophy lesson)

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

We read an entire page of Japanese in class the other day, and at the end I couldn’t tell you the meaning of any of it. Sure, I can read individual words, I know the sounds and maybe even the meanings, but then I get to the end of a sentence or passage and realise I haven’t grokked any of it. It’s like tunnel vision: I can see a tiny part of the sentence at a time, and it makes sense, but when I look at the whole thing it’s just a mass of characters.

This week has been up and down. I’ve had all these things to do, and I haven’t really taken the Getting Things Done philosophy to heart, because I’ve been struggling to get them done.
At any one time I have my three major tasks: a) study kanji b) do the homework c) write (either novel or Nano), which I can deal with, but add two or three tasks on to that and I freeze up like a computer with no free RAM and I can’t accomplish anything. It’s bizarre. The tasks themselves are small, wouldn’t take more than an hour to accomplish, and yet I find myself sitting in a haze for hours not doing anything.
The only way to solve it is to force myself to complete a few tasks and get back to a manageable level. So simply sending a postcard and getting a haircut on Tuesday made me feel a lot better. Then finishing a magazine article last night helped too. (I always panic a little when I get new assignments, but by the end I really enjoy writing these articles.)

This week has been musical. On Sunday I went to Shibuya for no real reason, but I found a smattering of musical happenings in the streets, including a brass band from Tokyo University (quite possibly the best university in the world).

Then a wander around the back streets, which are oddly Bohemian, oddly European. (This city never ceases to surprise me.)

I finally reached Yoyogi Park, which was absolutely lovely. I love parks. No one is ever miserable in a park. A man played the YMCA to himself on a trumpet in a secluded corner. Lovers loved. Salarymen stared at ducks. Performers performed. A blonde gentleman from the BBC was making a programme about something (didn’t recognise him at all, but he looked strangely familiar at the same time, like a walking parody of a certain type of blonde, frowny, uptight BBC person)

(Allegedly she’s singing “smoking cigars”, but you can never be too sure with Bjork)

Last night was my planned birthday celebrations, and I was genuinely heartened by just how many people turned up: old friends, new friends, friends who were sort of in between. A group of us set out from Shinjuku station to the Shinjuku Park Tower and the Hotel Park Hyatt. Oh, the sumptuous wood panelling, the carpets, the soft lighting and the overwhelming sense of sheer class! It’s another world in there, of luxury and considerable wealth, and it’s exciting just to spend an hour there.

So, up to the 54th floor, home to the New York Bar: I had cocked up slightly, telling people we’d dodge the cover charge if we got there before 8pm, but (probably to combat people like me) it turns out that it’s only if you leave before 8pm. But there was a general consensus of “hey, when will we next be here”, and so we settled in at our table and I ordered a bourbon and soda and after coordinating plans with the people who would be coming later/were already there/were lost basked in the general atmosphere. A jazz band came on. The lights of Shinjuku twinkled. Bar staff hurried to and fro. People drank. The bar was being all marbley and mahogany-y and muted and sombre and classy and I wished I could have just bottled up the ambience because it was so ridiculously cool.

Entry, service charge and one drink? 5,000 yen – £33. Yeah. Obscene luxury comes at a price.

So we ditched the Hyatt and met up with the others at Shinjuku, and then got to Shibuya to meet yet more people, so that in total we had me, Ella, Fran, Dan, Hattie, Satomi, Rob, Miles, Katy, Chris, Jan, Yuta, Tom, Kat, and Ruben, and it was so awesome to have all my friends there and to have everyone turn up, and that was what made it such a good night.

We split up: half of us went to get some drinks in, the other half went to get some food, and I hadn’t eaten so I went with them. Round about 11:30pm it was last trains, so most people headed home, leaving the Mancunians (Tom/Ruben/Kat), Jan, Rob, Dan, Satomi and Verity to PARTY HARD UNTIL DAWN. In theory. We couldn’t quite work out where we wanted to go, and Shinichi Osawa was playing in Roppongi but that was kinda expensive and then we missed the last train, and we could have gone to WOMB, but then I thought hey, Club Air is only 3,500 yen and I’d like to see what that’s like, so we marched through the backstreets of Shibuya and eventually stumbled across Air, a house/techno club hidden underneath a bohemian restaurant in a residential area. They were IDing, which meant Satomi and Verity couldn’t get in, unfortunately, so they went their separate ways with Rob while the six of us left headed down the flights of stairs into Air. And it was pretty good. Drinks weren’t too pricey (although anything isn’t too pricey after the Hyatt), and after a year at Leeds of Halo and Oceana I’d forgotten how much I enjoy house music. Some bald British chaps called Shapeshifters were DJing, which Tom was excited about. And so we partied into the wee hours, some Japanese girls we’d just met spontaneously erupted into singing “Happy Birthday” for me, Dan had his smuggled-in bottle of scotch plucked from his hand by one of the staff, some Spirytus was downed (96% – I was not touching that stuff), we exited merrily at 4:30am or so and got back to the station largely without incident (he says, glossing).

Funny thing on the way back: a trio of homebound musicians (judging by their instruments) on the train were talking in Japanese about De La Soul and Marvin Gaye, and I caught Tom’s eye, and he was like “Are you hearing this?” and suddenly the musicians went silent and the girl said “聞いた?” (“They heard?”) and an awkward moment was avoided when quick as a flash Tom launches into a conversation with them about Marvin Gaye, which lasts a merry serendipitous ten seconds before it’s our stop and we have to get off. Ah, those little connections you make with complete strangers, sometimes. It’s really rather wonderful.

Got an email the other day from my editor saying about how there was a new capsule hotel starting up in Kyoto and that I could go along to the opening and do a piece about it if I wanted, and I was like hell yeah. One is never truly a journalist until one starts getting freebies.

Read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity recently, and it made me laugh, and I identified with portions of it quite a lot, and what more can you ask from a book, really?

Yesterday after class I headed down to Shinny-Shin Shinjuku (as it will hereby be known) and walked down to Kinokuniya’s South store, the one I tried to get to the other day and missed by about a minute’s walk, in hindsight. (I took the train to Yoyogi that time, which is actually about five minutes walk from Shinjuku anyway, but a totally different neighbourhood.)

I picked up my reserved copy of J301, and then browsed the English-language fiction, and got William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, which – hey! – is set in Tokyo, and is the sequel to Idoru, which I read last time I was here and tragically, just after finishing it, I left it next to an ATM in Kobe and never saw it again.

God, William Gibson. The writer I want to be. Everything I want to write about is pretty much summed up in his works, and he keeps saying things which make me nod my head and make me angry that I didn’t think of it before. Doubtless, in ten years’ time I will look back and laugh at my angry adolescent love of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk and nascent post-modernist evolutionary self-facilitating technological underground networking media nodes, but right now it still fascinates me.

I thought I’d do a bit of photography around Shinjuku, but it was cloudy and the light was bad and nothing quite worked.

shades of SimCity

So I went to Starbucks (where all those chairs are in the above photo) to buy hot chai and catch up on NaNoWriMo, as I was a couple days behind. I wrote and wrote. Then I went to the cafe next door, which sold me disgusting coffee but it was only 200 yen and I wrote some more. In total, 3,800 words, almost bringing me back on track.

I realised about fiveish or sixish that I was going to hit the rush hour of a million Tokyoites passing through Shinjuku on their way home via the westward arteries of the Chuo- and Keio-sen, so I left, straight into a glorious illuminated wonderland. Oh, Tokyo, how I love thee.

I believe that this may be the karaoke place in Lost in Translation, though I'm not sure.

HDR was presumably intended to make photography more realistic, more akin to the human eye, but it’s far better for doing hyperrealistic, almost-CG scenes. Here’s the view from my balcony. Clicken zu embiggen.