Sons of Loki

Hakone is a pleasant little weekend out of Tokyo; a chance to get back to nature, soak in an onsen, feel the cool, clean air customary to places that aren’t the Big Toke.

I went there back in 2007, and it’s a cheap enough little excursion that I decided to do it all over again, even the same onsen I stayed at (and thoroughly enjoyed). Really could have done with it a few weeks ago during winter break, but I just didn’t have the money.

But I got the tickets yesterday and booked the room and today boarded the smart Romance Car Limited Express and reclined in my smart chair with a view of the beautiful Odakyu line from my window. (Okay, less than beautiful in the suburbs.)

It’s kinda sweet how all the Tokyo private lines are the same except for little differences, like how Keio has Hello Kitty on its “the doors will remove your fingers” warning signs and Odakyu has a tanuki. (Obviously my train, being the ROMANCE CAR, didn’t have such frivolities.) Ah, how pleasant to watch the sardines packed into the regular express trapped in the station as we roll past without stopping. (If I had Microsoft Train Simulator I could drive this train virtually! but perhaps best if not)

At Hakone-Yumoto I leisurely sauntered out into the chilly winter air and caught a bus down to Moto-Hakone.

I was going to get the fake pirate ship straight across Lake Ashi, but I was wary of going through everything too quickly (it had just gone 12) so I strolled down to the floating tori by the Hakone shrine, where I hadn’t gone last time. Along the way, I noticed icicles had formed on the chains by the water. Chilling.

Someone’s dad said “Samui!” (“Cold!”) to me, possibly unintentionally, but I replied with an earnest “Sou, ne.” The shrine was pretty, and peaceful, and I threw my coins in the little box and rang the bell. Then back to the boat and across the lake. I wrapped my hood around my head to try to stave off the chill in the air.

At Togendai I disembarked, but I wasn’t quite ready to go straight to the cable car into the mountains, so I flipped through my little coupon book I’d got from the guy at the Odakyu service counter in Shinjuku (how very distant that feels now) and found a nearby sento hot spring for 600 yen. Bargain.
(In the Togendai tourist information booth they had a poster of Rei and Shinji from Evangelion looking smart with the words  “yokoso Togendai e” (“welcome to Togendai”) which threw me a little until I remembered that in about five years’ time Togendai is scheduled to become Tokyo-3, according to the series’ chronology, and is thus the setting for much of the action in Evangelion. Quite a cute little thing to have up in the window.)

The hot spring was in a nearby hotel called the Lake Hotel, and as I crossed an empty car park with no one else in sight towards this building that bore more than a slight resemblance to a nursing home, I felt something I haven’t felt since the last time I was in Japan; that heady joy of not knowing what you’re doing, where you’re going, if there’s anyone here who you can communicate with, if there’s anyone here at all, if you’re meant to be here cus I don’t see anyone else uh shit help kind of feeling. It was nostalgia-inducing.

The bath was open and it was pleasant enough. Shared it with a couple other Japanese guys who didn’t seem to mind me. There was a nice view of a tiny garden outside with a bird fluttering about, which was nice too. I soaked awhile, then dried and weighed myself (I apparently lost a kilo in sweat since this morning).

Then back for the old cable car up to old Owakudani, land of fire and ice.

And it really was; I’d already seen patches of snow on the way up, and in the car up we had not only an impressive vista of Fuji-san (I know the “san” in Fuji-san means “mountain”, not the honorific title as in Daniel-san, but it amuses me to think of an actual Mr Fuji) but also of snow and boiling clouds of sulphurous gases erupting from the volcanic vents. (I’m sure Japanese and British people have a kinship because we both love to talk about the obvious. The two women in my car noticed some snow on the ground. “Yuki ga futtandesu ne.” “(Snow has fallen, hasn’t it.”) “Sou da ne.” (“Yup.”)

Fuji-san was beautiful as always:

Anyway, on the ground in Owakudani there was the beautiful contradiction of icy boulders and bubbling 80 C pools of clay-dirtied water. I grabbed another pack of the famed black eggs of Hakone (they add five years to your life, so with the ones I ate last time I must be a centurion at least by now).

Snow began to fall. The sun began to tumble down from the sky. Fuji wrapped up warm, in a blanket of clouds. A voice on the loudspeaker yelled about the last cable car being in 15 minutes, so I hurried to go.

I got on what I thought was the right bus and happily ended up back at the Fuji Hakone Onsen, the place I stayed at in 2007. The kind woman showed me round the place, and by the time she’d got halfway I hadn’t the heart to tell her I’d done it all before and I knew here everything was, so I just nodded.

So I’m back in what I think is even the same room, just filled up on ramen at the local Chinese place (it’s weird eating alone in a strange town), pretty pooped. Jus’ wanna unwiiind in a hot bath or two. (I just installed the new Picasa and it has face detection, which is awesome, except when it picks up on people you don’t know. I have a gallery of the grinning faces of all the complete strangers who have ever been in the background of my photos. All unique. All nameless. Who are these people? Why were they there, passing as I happened to take a photo? It’s far out.)

Okay, I’m not seriously considering giving this thing up. I guess for the sheer inconvenience of it I won’t be quitting Japanese. Plus I would feel really bad about it. But I will reflect on the struggles of learning this damn language.

Stuff I like about Japanese
I get to live in Japan. No, seriously, I love it here, from the vending machines to the punctual transportation to the delicious milk. Obviously speaking Japanese makes it much easier to live in Japan, which is the best motivation I can think of.
I get to use Japanese. That’s kind of obvious, but still, it’s a pleasing feeling. I can sort of read manga and play video games, and engage in conversation occasionally. (Actually getting speaking practice is harder than you’d think.)
The language itself. I guess there’s a certain neatness to the language, a pleasing logicality to it. I like kanji too, sort of, once I’ve learned them, the way radicals combine to create aesthetic and semantic beauty from a few lines.

Stuff which makes it difficult to learn Japanese and leads to frustration
I’m not fluent. Okay, this is largely my own impatience, but I’d thought that after a year and a half (more, if you count pre-uni study) of Japanese I’d be at a point where I’d understand most day-to-day stuff. I do not. Even trips to the convenience store are fraught with confusion because I have no idea what they’re asking me. I like the pretty pictures on TV but I only understand it about 5% of the time. It makes you feel so impotent and useless, to have done so much work for no tangible benefit, and it puts you off further study.
In Tokyo everyone speaks English. Not so much frustrating, but it definitely hampers my actual daily use of the language. Either shop staff will just use English straight off the bat when they see me, or I’ll try Japanese, flounder horrifically, and the assistant will step in with English to sort me out and I’ll be too panicked to do anything but mumble back in English.
I can’t read manga. I think manga is a great way to learn Japanese, but I’m not quite at the level you need to be to get the benefit. I know I said I could up there, and I can to an extent, but it’s a hard slog which saps all enjoyment out of the experience. By the time I’ve finished looking up all the new kanji and vocab on Japanese on my iPod, it’s taken me ten minutes to read a single page and I’ve forgotten the plot. Same for video games.
Everyone else is better than me. Well, I imagine. My fellow students are lovely to a (wo)man, and no one ever flaunts their ability in my face. But when I hear someone else speaking Japanese fluently (or at a level that I can’t understand, anyway) it kills me a little inside. It shouldn’t. I should pay no attention to whatever level they’re at. But nevertheless.
I don’t have the knack. Well, who does? But it feels like a lot of my fellow students seem to find it considerably easier to pick up new vocabulary and grammar than I do. When I learn new words, it feels like it goes in one ear and a few days later out the other.
The classes are… I feel like I may as well not turn up to classes for all the benefit I get out of them. They’re 90 minutes long, and I just can’t concentrate for that long in English, let alone Japanese. And the classes are entirely in Japanese, and I’ve said this before, but I don’t know enough Japanese to learn in Japanese. The textbook is no help, because it doesn’t explain anything, and all we seem to be learning is … Actually, I have absolutely no idea what we have been studying over the last three months. I think we did keigo honorifics, and a million different ways to say は, and … I’m at a loss, I really am.

But as I said, what else am I gonna do?

I’ve been listening to a lot of Orbital lately. Obviously when their sweet brand of English techno was all the rage I was six or seven, so give me a break, okay? When I was that age I knew I liked indie and I liked britpop, and all this dance music seemed the complete antithesis to that. It took Laurent Garnier to open my mind a little, about two years ago. (I can remember downloading and listening to “The Man With The Red Face” in some nameless hotel in some city in western Japan (Hiroshima?) and thinking “hey, now this is interesting…”)

But I guess it must be weird for the people who grew up in that scene, who are now in their thirties, for me to be getting into the music of their formative years. It’s like in ten years time, in 2020, kids born in the late 90s will be discovering The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand and The White Stripes, and I will be terrified.

A few links I’ve picked up over the last week:

The Death of the Blog Post I’ve always liked bold graphic design, to the point where I sometimes get strange urges to run away from uni and become a graphic designer. Anyway, it’s interesting to see some of the new original magazine-inspired designs you can find on blog articles these days, and that article itself is a prime example. I’d stitch together such a thing for my own blog posts, but I lack the time and the knack and I really have nothing quite so interesting to say. It does make me want to re-jig this theme a little, though.

The remnants of Biosphere 2 When I was a kid I was fascinated by Biosphere 2, a great socio-biological experiment in the Arizona desert that aimed to create a sealed ecosystem. Now, like many things from the mid-90s, including East 17, it’s all a bit depressing and abandoned. Photographer Noah Sheldon documents the remains, which are ironically being taken over by the very nature the experiment sort to duplicate.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings”—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai.

What happened to the hominids who may have been smarter than us? It’s a little over-enthusiastic in its extrapolations, but this article presents a fascinating Scratch that. The idea of a super-intelligent hominid has been thoroughly debunked.

Watched The Big Lebowski the other day, and was thoroughly amused. I’ve been meaning to watch it for years, but the final impetus was the sublime Shakespeare version recently released, which does more than a straight “olde english” parody and hits the Shakespearean style right on the head with delicious puns and wordplay and oh-so-perfect writing.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the commode, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.

[They insert his head into the commode]

BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cooled thine head; think now upon drier matters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the money, Lebowski?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.

Yah, been a quiet couple of days. Well, actually no. Went out on Saturday night with the guys/girls for a cheap (1000 yen) night at Atom, a club somewhere in the backstreets of Shibuya (I’ll never find these places again). It was an alright place, especially for that sort of price.

I am freshly committed to finishing my novel, because I’ve realised that if I leave it a couple of years it will begin to look outdated, given that it touches on contemporary events. Almost without realising it, I’ve discovered that this third section is all about social media and social networking and the differences it will make to our lives. But I don’t want to go all technologically evangelistic, because despite the posturings of the Twitterati most of the web is about unintelligible #hashtags and braindead YouTube comments and bad spelling. I’m hoping that will work well as a thematic conflict of ideologies. Maybe. We shall see.

the sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead,
at the top of their poles

I said: “kiss me, you’re beautiful -
these are truly the last days”

In other news, sunny 11°C in Tokyo. Dammit.

I’d withdrawn the last of my JASSO for this month, so I thought I’d have one last jaunt before school starts again on Monday. I thought about a trip to Mount Takao, the first bit of nature you hit when you reach the edge of Tokyo which I’d gone to back in 2007, but then I thought I could go watch Jimmy Cameron’s new movie Avatar and the thought of trekking to Fuchu and watching a flick seemed rather more appealing than spending two hours hiking a mountain in the cold with no breakfast and little sleep, so I booked my tickets online (can you believe there’s no IMAX cinemas in Tokyo?) at Toho Cinema in Fuchu (excellent English support from them, so top marks), got a nice centre-back seat, and headed kino-wards at 12:30.

I’d vaguely heard about Avatar last year as the movie that was supposed to change filmmaking forever or something, but I think everyone assumed it wouldn’t live up to the hype. I was surprised, then, when Mark Kermode enjoyed it, and then I started seeing the results on Twitter and Facebook, people saying how incredible it was, so I thought I’d better catch it.

Now, 3D films have been around for a year or so now, but this is the first one I’d seen (disregarding stuff like IMAX and theme park shows), so I was interested in how the 3D effect worked over a proper, 140 minute feature film. And – well, it’s a gimmick, like everyone says. I think it works well in a blockbuster like Avatar, though, where the focus is mainly visual.

I am, at heart, a SF geek, and Avatar captured me right away with its depiction of how stuff might look in the future; there’s a beautiful opening scene of everyone getting out of their cryostasis pods and floating in zero-g. I thought the facemasks were a nice touch, too; spacesuits are so 20th century. Even the spaceship was better designed than most sci-fi hulks (based on a weird but realistic design, and the geek in me squirmed that the radiator panels were glowing red with dissipated heat, something that real spaceships would do but no one has ever put in a film before).

But Avatar is a movie in two worlds; the action-packed space marines with their cool toys and gunships and grenade launchers, and the peaceful, tree-hugger Na’vi. And the 12-year old WH40K fan in me loved the Marines and all their bombastic splendour, which I know is wrong, but I just can’t help but get excited about giant mecha battlesuits on the big screen. It’s a strange guilt.

It reminded me of Cameron’s Aliens, in fact, right down to the no-nonsense spunky female dropship pilot. (And indeed, who’s to say that the sketchily-defined, morally-dubious Company doesn’t grow up to become Weyland-Yutani, that the Marines don’t become Colonial, and that Sigourney Weaver’s character in the film doesn’t have a oddly-reminiscent granddaughter called Ellen? I smell prequel) And while everyone knows Aliens was all about Vietnam, Avatar is clearly about Iraq. Big business wants a valuable resource that happens to be buried underneath all these hapless villagers. If you provoke them, they’ll start a war, and you can roll in and grab the spoils… One of the characters basically says this half-way through. It’s hardly subtle, but it’s something to chew on.

So? I loved it. It created a world. It looks stunning; some of the best CG ever committed to digital celluloid. It’s got a little more depth than most blockbusters. It’s a fun watch. It’s a classic. Okay, so it’s not great in the sense of Citizen Kane great or Godfather great, but it’s a solidly good movie.

My main problem was the Na’vi. They’re a little lame. The only original aspect of them is that cool brain-link thing, and even that is the old telepathic talks-to-the-animals thing. They’re basically Space Indians, or Noble Savage Aliens, and I thought they were a little lazily thought-out. Why would alien beings use bows and arrows ? Why would they wear bikinis? Why would they kiss to express love? (Hell, many human cultures don’t do that.)

They’re such a big part of the film, it depresses me that we get the same old brave warriors and mighty chief shit. Alien cultures can be fantastically weird; like Niven’s Puppeteers, who have scientifically proven that they have no soul and hence for whom cowardice, not martyrdom, is the noblest virtue; or, I don’t know, a certain alien species Cameron may be familiar with, which reproduces by jumping on your face and laying a foetus in your chest. I mean, just an idea off the top of my head; the moon Pandora is in orbit around a massive Jupiter-like gas giant. Which means that every time a Na’vi looks at the night sky, there is a gigantic broiling sphere of cloud staring down at them and taking up half the sky, and all its children circle around it changing phases. If I were Na’vi, I’d worship the huge thing in the sky, not a tree, but I digress.

Anyway, I promised myself that after this treat I’d finish the damn sakubun, so I found a nearby branch of Starbucks and chilled out (literally – there was no room inside so I had to sit outside in the cold until a seat opened up in the warm). I spoke a little Japanese to the barista, was reminded of Sully’s struggles with the Na’vi tongue, then sat down and ploughed through the sakubun. I put in a few cool phrases I’d noted down from Planetes, and I suddenly realised I was enjoying Japanese again. The simple joy of writing is the same in any language, of stringing together the right words in the right order to get your point across. Strange.