Sons of Loki

The day after USJ, Tuesday 23rd March, we went to Nara.

I think that morning, my free gift at the capsule hotel was a capsule hotel voucher. I rather like the idea that you could check in at the capsule hotel on Monday a penniless man and slowly rebuild your life through the loyalty points system. A pair of socks. A free beer. 500 yen off your next stay. Then, shoes. A hat. A pass for the subway.

On the train to Nara, from Osaka, I was reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, which my mum had given to my sister to give to me but oh thanks sis why don’t you go ahead and read it first and give me it when you’re done, that’s fine, just like that time you bought me Obama’s autobiography and then decided you’d hang on to it for a while, oh when was that two Christmases ago you say? oh well it must be a pretty engrossing book I’m sure

and it was a good read, because he was writing about the Japanese train system (in 1975), and there I was on a Japanese train.

As a tourist, Theroux had a role in society, and he could play it out as he liked. It occurred to me that they say Japan is all about the role you play, and in Japan foreigners can have two roles; gaijin-san the Tourist

観光目当ての外人さん
カメラ片手に登る富士山
At tourist spots, the gaijin man
Climbs Mt Fuji, a camera in hand
– Teriyaki Boyz, “5th Element”

who goes to temples and wears backpacks and fumbles with the language and forgets to take her shoes off, and gaijin-san the Businessman, who is a teacher or businessman, invariably American and in his 30s or 40s, who is fluent and confident and married to a Japanese woman.

If you fit into those roles it’s fine – people excuse you for being a tourist, or they accept you for being a businessperson and leave you be. But as a young aimless student, I never can quite do either of those. I speak too much Japanese to let myself stoop to fumbling along in English and gestures like a tourist would, but I’m not at the level of proper ex-pats so I can’t really get anything done. I can’t wear a suit, but I can’t strap on a backpack, either. So I’m a kind of outlier, I guess.

Anyway, Nara was cool. They were celebrating their 1,300th anniversary. There were all these deer. We took a look in these old antique bricabrac shops, which I realised I an becoming enamoured with; it’s all old crap, but it’s interesting old crap. It was raining. I saw some temples. We visited a little tourist information place funded by the Okamura corporation, where I tried out their earthquake simulation and protection device. The old man was nice.

The day after, I went to see James and Eri in Kobe. It was a real shame, that it was raining; still, we got to see some of the old Western-style town, and there was a nice view from a small shrine.

Down by the port, the weather wasn’t any better. Katie and Chris peeled off for some shopping, so James, Eri and I went for karaoke and, later, an izakaya with Jayson and Simon. It was very pleasant to get a few drinks and just shoot the shit for a while with the guys.

That night, I wasn’t coming back to the capsule hotel. After inevitable panic, I got the right train back to Osaka, and found the night bus home. Contrary to what I’d heard, it wasn’t so bad; you’re not going to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep, but the dude next to me didn’t snore, and there was a little privacy cover to pull over your head. At one point I got out at one of the rest stops, just so I could have the experience of walking around a Japanese truck stop at 4am in the drizzling rain in the middle of nowhere, trucks as far as the eye could see.

Back in Shinjuku, at 8am, everybody was being miserable in the rain, but I was home.

So, Friday, Katie and Chris returned to Tokyo, and we met up for drinks at the hyper-prestigious New York Bar, which still boggles my mind whenever I visit. (I’ve been, what, four times now? Christ.)

The guy ahead of us, who could have almost been Hugh Grant, said he was with the Cameron Diaz group. (I swear that’s what he said, but she didn’t turn up.) We went in and sat down and I had a martini, the New York Bar special with Bombay Sapphire.

We were surrounded by foreigners in suits and expensive-looking couples and people who looked far more important than me. The thing is, I’d like to be those people. City bankers, top managers, assistants to movie stars; the people who come to the New York Bar and order something with no regards for cost and sit with a sense of calm detachment and not slack-jawed astonishment that they’re even allowed in.

And at the same time, I’d hate to be those people. And I’d hate to be around those people. I wanted to be enjoying a drink with the high-cheekboned blond-haired businessman at the bar, and simultaneously knew that talking to him would be deeply unpalatable.

One day I will be a fifty-something English professor in Tokyo, with hordes of cash and a long list of bestsellers and oodles of fans, and I will come to the New York Bar for a drink and still feel like a little man let into the big boy’s club for an hour or two.

I kind of got a similar feeling at the Roppongi Art Night, held at the incredible Roppongi Hills complex.

I shop til I drop in Roppongi Hills
But don’t follow shit, ain’t none free – chill
Pharrell, Teriyaki Boyz, “超 LARGE”

Roppongi Hills couldn’t be more different to sleazy old regular Roppongi; it’s a massive complex of boutiques and shops and cafes and restaurants, centered around the huge Mori Tower, where a 1BR apartment starts at 370,000 a month. (There’s also some kind of hackerspace called the Academy which I should check out.) This Art Night was a big art expo thingy. They had various acts and displays going on, though to tell the truth we were more just wandering around marvelling at the ultra-modern decor of the place. At an outdoor plaza, Verbal was doing a DJ set for a tiny crowd (though it was only 7:30pm), and I saw that RIP SLYME‘s DJ Fumiya and Ryo-Z would be turning up later. So kind of a big deal.

Everything looked so cool. We sat in Starbucks and thumbed through interior design magazines, while I thought about how I wanted my room to be next year. In a nearby Tsutaya, I flicked through some fashion magazines and checked out the graphic design books. I kind of want to do graphic design. And work in magazines. And be a writer. What do I do? Who do I talk to? Is it too late? Is it too early? What do I want to be?

Anyway, I said my goodbyes to Kate and Chris near the Hibiya line station. They would be flying back in the morning. I bid them farewell, and went off to get my train back home.

People call me a misanthropist pretty much all the time, but be honest: most people are feckless idiots who should never be allowed to do anything. I mean, hypothetically, just hypothetically for a second, imagine you’re queuing to buy a ticket for a busy theme park. There are hundreds of people queuing for a small number of ticket gates. Finally, the gate is in sight. You see the cashier. You see the price. What do you do now?

1. Get the exact cash out of your wallet in advance (or the closest, most convenient amount possible), step up to the counter, boldly ask for one ticket and hand the cash over; grab your ticket and change and proceed smartly into the park. [15 seconds]
2. Get to the counter, stare at the prices, remember you’re at a theme park and want to go in, fumble for your wallet or purse, get the money out, look up at the board again, ask the cashier if you can use these coupons – no, these coupons – forget where you are again, try to calculate the price for your six kids, go through your wallet or purse, get confused, ask if you can pay by card, ask if you can use the coupons with your card, finally pay by card, take the tickets and carefully distribute them to your kids at the ticket window, put everything back in your bag, forget where you are again, stand motionless for ten seconds, remember you’re at a theme park and proceed as slowly as possible to the park while a hundred people behind you wait patiently. [for-fucking-ever]

I mean, that’s what I assume was going on as we waited for the best part of an hour to enter Universal Studios Japan, in Osaka. I have no idea what anybody could be doing at the ticket counter to stay there for a full minute. (I know, I was bored enough to time it.) I thought, maybe there’s a lot of questions to answer, or perhaps you have to show ID, or the cashier’s really slow or the printer broke. But when I got there, it was as efficient as can be. Which leads me to blame people, mainly. I don’t claim to be some kind of superhuman ticket purchaser, blessed with ability to queue and buy tickets better than most, but … Anyway, no sense in bitching.

The park? Was cool. Stepping in, it’s an almost unbelievable simulacrum of Manhattan rolled into LA and continuing down the street to San Francisco; hyper-real, in a sense, far too clean and bright and accurate to be like the real thing. 1950s-style store fronts line big, empty boulevards, giant-old fashioned cinemas show posters for the latest Universal flicks, and there’s even a Japanese-style San Francisco-style Japanese-style restaurant – with long queues of Japanese visitors. In fact, I only saw a handful of gaijin in the entire park while we were there.

We made a beeline for the Back to the Future ride, which took two long hours to queue for and was – well, pretty cool, but not worth two hours. (You could watch the first film and make a start on the second in that time!) I almost feared a long, dull day of queuing, but the funny thing about theme parks is that your brain kind of forces you to ignore the queues in pursuit of a fun time. Next up was T2:3D, which I vaguely remembered reading as being very well received as a theme park ride. And it’s a real spectacle; after a not-too-long queue, we were ushed into an entrance hall where a suitably over-excited Cyberdyne representative excitedly asked everybody where they were from and squealed and engaged in a little banter with the audience and generally did a very amusing job of acting. Then it’s into the main auditorium – a huge, huge cinema – where we slip on our “safety visors” (3D glasses) and marvel at some cool Terminator animatronics before Arnold Schwarznegger! (or a slightly-too-short Japanese guy in sunglasses) appears, bursting through the screen as John Connor rappels down from the ceiling and together, on a motorbike, they ride into the screen and straight into a well-made ten-minute action sequence (directed by Jim Cameron himself, I hear) with Arnie and the kid (whatever happened to him?) fighting off Skynet in the future in 3D. I mean, after the spectacle of Avatar anything else in 3D seems a little flat, but there’s a very impressive boss fight in the end where the live actors come back on stage in a huge chamber that makes good use of the 3D effect.

After pizza, Backdraft – which I didn’t even realise was a film, but which is apparently a little-remembered early 90s film with Kurt Russell and Robert de Niro as firefighters, or arsonists, or something. The queue wasn’t too long, so we went for it. After watching Ron Howard speak fluent Japanese about his job as director, and then Scott Glenn talking about fire or something, you get to see the main spectacle – a big-ass pyrotechnic display in a warehouse mock-up, with explosions and fire and barrels crashing off gantries and all in all, quite an impressive scene.

It was getting quite late – and cold – by the time we got to Jurassic Park, which is a log flume/animatronics spectacle through the titular park (wait, wasn’t Jurassic Park the place where those dinosaurs escaped and ate everybody a few years back? And come to think of it, wasn’t there some bizarre thing in the 80s where a Cyberdyne robot came back in time and killed a bunch of people? I swear I saw a documentary about that. I think Universal Studios need some better ride sponsors.) It was a good lark, with a genuinely scary final T. rex and huuuuge drop.

Then the final ride, USJ’s big coaster, Hollywood Dream (presumably themed as a metaphor for the ups and downs of life in LA). Nothing too special – a couple of good drops, a upwards helix, no inversions sadly – but for the (unique?) feature of letting you pick your own music with a keypad in front of every seat. There was Bon Jovi, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”, The Beatles’ “Get Back”, and two j-pop songs I’d never heard of. I went with old Shady, and I don’t know if it’s deliberately synced up but the chorus seemed to be timed with the drops, so it’d be all “but the beat goes on” at the crest and then “you better LOSE YOURSELF!” just as you hit terminal velocity. A nice addition. As we rolled into the station at the end, the staff stand around the train, applauding as you dismount and grab your possessions.

Afterwards, there was a parade of light with Snoopy and shiny things, which was pretty and visually impressive. Then we ate some shrimp at Bubba Gump’s Shrimp.

So that was Universal.

A lot of things terrify me. Spiders. People who are ‘cooler’ than me. Being exposed as a phony. Turning back into the nerd I was in high school. Daddy-long legs. People in general. But then, I feel absolutely no fear at things most people would find terrifying, like public speaking, or karaoke. (In fact, I love doing both.) Maybe this dissonance between wanting to be seen and being terrified about being seen led to the mixed emotions I felt on the train to sign up at a Omotesando-based modelling agency today.

After deliberation, I’d decided to go sort of smart – slightly-too-small Muji jacket, slighty-too-fancy white dress shirt, plain black Uniqlo jeans and my red canvas shoes. A little bit 90s-early 00s pre-’tache Nick Cave, perhaps. I wasn’t sure about the red shoes, but they didn’t seem to clash, and I thought upgrading to my proper black shoes would be a step too formal. Off I went, a little late on the Keio line, listening to the most bombastic hip-hop (i.e. Kanye) to pump myself up. I had a reasonably good idea of where the agency was, but it still took me five minutes of frantic searching around a bizarrely-shaped complex of shops and small offices before I even found the right lift.

The office was small. A woman at a desk spoke to a phone about importing face-care products. Another guy, dressed down, stood at a PC. Lady Gaga played. A friendly woman guided me through the sign-up sheet; name, address, height, skills. (I put down my ten years of guitar and my Japanese, because I guess being able to disassemble a Sony a 18-70mm zoom lens or jump-start an ATX PSU with a paperclip are not skills anybody’s looking for in modelling.) Then, the photos.

It was (sort of) my first modelling shoot. Visions of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation flashed in my mind as I leaned up against things and rested on ledges and tried to imagine what position my face would look best in. “Relax!” she asked. I thought I was relaxed! “Smile!” Oh god. I entirely forgot how to smile, as my cheeks rose up, my lips contorted, my tongue forgot where to go. That’s a smile, right? I vainly hoped. I cursed myself for not practicing smiling earlier. I generally don’t care what I look like in photos (I can’t help the way I look, anyway) but these ones would determine whether I got work or not.

And then, it was over. They send my photos out to clients, you see, and then if they like the look of me I’ll get a call to audition, and then I might get the job and be seen all over Japan touting shirts or hats or strolling through the background of a Ayumi Hamasaki video, perhaps. It might work out, it might not, but nowt ventured, nowt gained, right? And registering was free, too, so I have literally ventured nothing.

And, uh, may well gain nothing.

I’ve never been a huge fan of hostels if I’m alone. Never been a huge fan of being alone, either, but the thing with hostels is that everyone else is having fun in big groups and you tend to feel like Johnny Nomates and paranoid that the loud Yanks are laughing at you! and having more fun than you! Plus this capsule hotel is in the party district, so outside it’s all gorgeous-looking young people standing around and being cool and having more fun than me! and it’s a little depressing.

Luckily, the capsule hotel is full of single losers like me, both Japanese and gaijin, whiling away their lonely lives watching Pirates of the Caribbean or reading manga or writing blog entries on laptops. Today we went back to Kyoto, a city I didn’t quite enjoy the first time. Way back in November 2007, I’d just got the shinkansen in from Tokyo and was confident that the hostel listed in the Lonely Planet would have beds free. Obviously, it didn’t, which meant me traipsing about for four or five hours until finally checking in at a (admittedly decent) capsule hotel that wasn’t really a capsule hotel, and having been surrounded by concrete and traffic lights for most of that first evening I was feeling far removed from “historic Kyoto”. (Still, I grew to like it, and when I finally got a bed I very much enjoyed the hostel, K’s House Kyoto, so I recommend it.

This time it went a little more smoothly. We went out the south exit, which is remarkably a world away from the massive, urban, airy north exit; suburban homes and small businesses until we reached Touji temple, which is where this big Sunday flea market is held. Immediately I was transported back to the car boot sales of my youth; the sheer boredom of antiques and clothes until you reach one store with a fascinating array of old, cheap crap. This time, I was enraptured by stalls selling old Showa-era stuff, like antique postcards and photo albums and Japanese jazz albums and clunky SLRs and even vintage porn mags from the 70s. Ever since visiting Hanbey, I’ve felt a sudden affinity with Showa-era stuff; sepia postcards with LAKE ASHINOKO, HAKONE. written in that old-timey copperplate for 1930s tourists sending postcards across Asia; wartime and post-war austerity and poverty; the first faltering forays of Westernisation; jazzy tunes before enka and j-pop; and the bright and cheery advertising hoardings. One store had all these old photo albums, which were heartbreaking; two soldiers grinning over lunch, smiling children, nameless men in Imperial Army uniforms ready for war. “Grandmother.” “The tour leader on the bus from the school trip.” And all those carefully collected moments, arranged in albums by mothers and daughters and fathers and sons, taken in wartime and in peace, had ended up sitting on a table in a Kyoto flea market.

Of Kyoto’s many temples, there was only one I really wanted to see again. Fushima-Imari, dedicated to kitsune fox spirits and the kami of rice and sake (good bloke) is famous for its long lines of orange torii gates, and if I had my camera down here I’d upload the photos, but perhaps at a later date. We found the spot I loved last time, a little clearing nobody bothers to go to where there’s the most wonderful view of Kyoto through the trees.

On 29 November 2007, two (getting on for three!) years ago, I wrote:

Something compelled me to sit down there, sit and meditate. So I sat down on the dusty ground and just stared at Kyoto, soaking it all in. I considered starting a religion, called Kyotoism, which would basically be a rip-off of Buddhism except you had to make a pilgrimage at least once in your life, by bicycle, to Fushima temple, come up to this spot on the mountainside, and sit and contemplate Kyoto. I imagined that in a century the spot where I sat and founded Kyotoism would possibly because a historical site. I was alone, but then someone else came up and just stood there, looking at Kyoto, for almost as long as I did. I didn’t know her name, or who she was, but we were both Kyotoists. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a white cat appeared and said “miaow”. “A sign!” I thought, though I didn’t know what of, so I decided that in Kyotoism white cats are sacred for arbitrary reasons. In years to come, people will talk of the white cat that appeared to me at Fushima Shrine. Possibly.

I almost wished I’d left some graffiti to come back to, but I am obviously too public-spirited. So I scratched on a stick: “2010-03-21 Matt Durrant. 東京外大　おいてください！ (TUFS Please leave!)” and hid it carefully and it will probably have disappeared next time I go, but at least I tried.

On the way down we ran into a white cat climbing the long, long staircase to the top, carefully putting one foot before the other as he ascended. I reached down to stroke him but he just kept on going. “Maybe he was a forest spirit, a kami” I said, and then in an epiphany remembered the cat from last time … He had returned! The cat spirit nekonokami, deity of Kyotoism. It was beautiful.

After that we visited Gion, home of geisha. I was sceptical that we’d see any. We saw some beautiful sakura along a series of bridges and some genuinely beautiful streets with old buildings. Gion – or at least parts of it – really has the spirit of classically traditional Japanese streets.

But there are a few girl bars dotted about, remnants of the centuries-old water trade. We ate ramen in a decent little ramen joint (seriously, is there such a thing as a “bad ramen shop”? I think not) and then wandered about the streets at dusk, when Gion achieves a new kind of twilit beauty. And, clopping past as I shot a photo of the moon above a old-fashioned wooden inn, in a kimono and white makeup … that rare thing, a geisha.

On the train back I bumped into Juni, my friend from Leeds, currently in Kansai. I mean, it just happened that we were in the same city, at the same station, on the same line, queuing for the same train, at the same carriage, outside the same door, on this given day at 5pm. Coincidences like this happen all the time in Japan.

Anyway, tomorrow UNIVERSAL STUDIOS! Which will be my first theme park in Japan. Hopefully it won’t be too crowded… but it will, inevitably.

Well, I’ll say this for capsule hotel beds; when you wake up, you don’t want to go back to sleep. Either this means that they do a great job of refreshing and rejuvenating you with a good night’s sleep, or that they’re not exactly the height of luxury. The truth’s probably somewhere in between. Anyway, it’s a clever design. When you have to wake up for that 9am meeting, you don’t want to be distracted by a big, comfortable bed.

Yesterday we toured Hakone properly. It was still a little chilly, and a thick, thick fog descended on Owakudani and made the ropeway ride up to the top of the mountain an extraordinarily surreal experience of floating without motion inside a cable car surrounded by a perfectly white sphere thirty metres across:

like that episode of Evangelion where Shinji winds up in the empty void inside the Dirac sea and has a mental breakdown where he encounters the spirit of his dead mother which now inhabits the freakish artificial human fighting machine Evangelion (and who unbeknownst to him was cloned as his fellow Evangelion pilot Rei in a bid to accelerate the final evolution of manki- oh I’m getting carried away with myself).

Speaking of Evangelion, I got the coolest, nerdiest thing ever. I saw they had this map up in the guesthouse, and I asked the receptionist Yuuka if they were available, and after filling out a little form I got my hands on one. (She said they were pretty limited edition; only four places in Japan distributed them.) It’s a map of Hakone collated with the various events of Evangelion, from when Misato meets Shinji at Hakone-Yumoto station to the place where they shoot the big angry diamond thingy in episode three(?). And the pampas grass field I wandered through on my first visit to Hakone and thought “hey, this is just like the field Kensuke plays in in episode four!” turns out to be the actual filming location! Or, er, inspiration for the animators.

So we saw Hakone, went to get our luggage back from the hotel, said our final farewells and caught the bus to Odawara before getting a HIKARI shinkansen to Osaka. Oh, man, the shinkansen. When the first Nozomi superexpress shinkansen burst past with a roar, I nearly shed a tear from sheer … train awesomeness.

And then we got to ride it! Scenery flashed past in the night. I bought a beer. A small child looked at me and I smiled and he smiled. We were both thinking “THIS TRAIN IS SO COOL”. (I have a new admiration for Japanese youngsters after reading Yotsuba&. I want to ruffle their hair and call them ojouchan or obocchan and buy them an ice cream.)

The first thing you notice in Osaka – and it’s seriously jarring for a while – is that people stand on the right on escalators! Also, they’re just so much more happier. They stand in groups on the subway, chatting and laughing and looking happy to be alive, whereas in Tokyo everybody just looks like they want to die. Osaka does indeed have a different feel about it; more leisurely, a little grubbier, but a little happier. The girls aren’t prettier, but they’re more attractive, if you get me.

We found a little izakaya and my gosh, it was the best I’ve ever been to. Lush yakisoba, delicious omerice, and gigantic tankards of Asahi.

Katie and Chris are staying in a proper nice hotel called the Brighton, which is all dark woods and glossy floors and polite staff. I’m in the Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza, which is all 70s carpets and PVC mouldings.

Now I’ve never been to a proper capsule hotel before. I stayed in one in Kyoto in 2007 (last option) but it wasn’t really a proper capsule hotel; more a regular hotel with capsules instead of beds. (For example, I had an entire sizable hotel room, which just happened to have two capsules instead of a proper bed.) Consequently, I kind of screwed up when I got here, the Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza. It wasn’t too hard to find, a 10 minute walk from Shinsaibashi (think I’ve got the hang of Osaka’s subway system which is, in the end, just the same as any other subway system) and I seem to be living in Osaka’s party district, which is exciting. I checked in (I was a little worried about being late but hey, it’s a capsule hotel) and went straight up to my “room”, which was my first mistake. The capsule is entirely for eating, sleeping, and maybe watching a little TV. A proper straight-up capsule, too; the second floor is laid out like the cryogenic freezing hold in some futuristic SF starliner, the walls painted with things like “SECTION C 200-220″ in massive letters, each chamber arranged with two double-decker rows of capsules. You go in. You switch the light on. You sleep.

But I brought all my stuff up there, and then realised that capsules don’t lock, so I went downstairs and found the locker room, which should have been my first port of call. Anyway, I dumped my stuff in the locker and changed into the brown pyjamas which give this place wonderfully cultish overtones, and then headed for a walk around. (I never feel comfortable in a place, especially not a hotel, unless I’ve explored every nook and cranny for interesting things.)

It’s kind of like a miniature version of my beloved Dragon Hill Spa jjimjilbang in Seoul, or perhaps an alternative version of a manga café for more sensible people. There’s lounge chairs, and TVs, and arcade games, and mah-jong; vending machines and a tiny canteen; and a sizable sentou bath area with a hot and cold pool, a jacuzzi, and a 92C sauna (phew!). I don’t think there’s internet (must investigate further) but you can charge your phone and stuff downstairs, for 100 yen. The place is populated by a) salarymans, who can be found in the locker room putting on white shirts and meticulously applying hair tonic and b) a couple of noisy foreigners like myself.

So I got a decent night’s sleep and checked out (I don’t think you can leave your bags there or anything) and went back to the Brighton to start our first proper day exploring Osaka.

We visited the castle, the most popular tourist attraction in Japan (possibly because there’s nothing else to see in Osaka, as the guidebook jests). It was pretty cool, set in a big park with lots of tourists, Osaka’s famous takoyaki, and some pretty sakura. I met a Korean couple and the man, after I impressed him with an “anyeong haseyo!”, turned out to have gone to Chung-Ang University, my summer school alumni! Small world. Also, a bunch of people looking remarkably like the Fleet Foxes walked past.

After that I was thinking about buying a new backpack, so I tried to find a branch of Don Kihote, which led us to the Umeda Sky Building. (On the way one of Osaka’s 1.6 million traffic policemen guided us with a “kocchi! kocchi!” and I replied with a stumbled “kocchi? hai, hai” which warranted a “nihongo jozu!“. People are definitely friendlier.

The Don Kihote turned out to be a cafe of the same name, so we went back to the station area and I got a very nice rucksack for 1,600 and then a plate of curry from a nearby curry house. And the owner was so friendly! People are nice here. Later, we wandered about south of the station, and I had a round of Guitar Freaks at an arcade, steadfastedly ignoring the bemania gods on Beatmania IIDX and the newest DrumMania. (ughh I really want to get DrumMania. I should have snapped it up when I saw it in that weird charity shop in Kichijoji that I will never ever find again)


After that, there wasn’t much left to do, so we headed back to the Brighton so I could use the internet and charge my various mobile devices. Now I have a 30 minute walk back to my coffin in the Asahiplaza, which I wouldn’t be looking forward to if not for the hot bath. Ahh, keep your dark woods and marble floors, I’ve got a jacuzzi.

On the road, he became anonymous, a nobody. Just another gaijin tourist; no more worthy of note than that the sky was blue or that birds sang. He didn’t so much blend in as simply not be present; he was discovered as a suitcase in a luggage rack, or seen as wallpaper plastered against walls, or spotted as a railing affixed to the pavement.

In Kyoto he saw the temples and the forests and the geisha. In a town called Yamaguchi, he brushed his teeth with the complimentary toothbrush, and ordered a cup noodle from the vending machine.
Down in the far south, from a city called Kagoshima, he took a train ride down the coast to the end of the world. The sea thrashed and boiled in a desperate frenzy as it poured over the rim. From the edge of the Earth, hanging out over eternity, a peninsula ran out into a thick grey fog; there he found himself as far from Tokyo as possible, surrounded by mountains and empty highways, vending machines and deserted high schools. There was a TV shop here, too: big-screened Sonys and Toshiba plasmas. A man was carrying wet cardboard boxes from a pile and tossing them over a railing off the edge of the world, where they tumbled down into infinity.
A little further down the coast there was a white-painted metal stairway leading down to an observation platform, proudly proclaiming itself as the most remote point on Earth, a kilometre out from the rim and into space. An elderly couple – the man in a grey coat and flat cap, the woman wearing a purple headscarf – were leading on the rail, staring out at God’s creation, enormous lilac nebulae and supernovae erupting across unimaginable distances.
“It’s cold,” the man said, in Japanese he could just about understand.
“It is, isn’t it?” his partner replied.