Sons of Loki

…which is the only Beatles track to feature Yoko Ono on vocals, incidentally.

I’m a completionist at heart. Or something like that. I never like to leave anything out, and I always fear I’m gonna forget interesting stuff, and I have to blog obsessionally lest a part of my life go unrecorded. So here’s basically what’s happened the last couple days:

• Visited scenic Meiji Shrine in Yoyogi Park for the first time and had a look at all the prayers written on the wooden tablets. Most of them wished for providence in family health, for fame(!), and for success in job hunting (and there’s a good rundown of the basic Japanese ambitions), except for one nasty one in English which spoke glowingly of Jesus’s coming wrath and destruction of the unbelievers. (Ugh.)



• And Meiji Shrine provides easy access to weird and wonderful Harajuku, which continues to be unpredictable. We stumbled across a massive St Patrick’s Day parade, which was a confusing moment of green and Guinness in the midst of downtown Tokyo, but probably the closest we’ll ever get to a Gaikokujin Festival.



• On the road to Shibuya we stopped off in Design Tshirts Store graniph, which makes the kind of t-shirts I find irresistible (except for the price tag); plain colours, Helvetica font, bold slogans, very po-mo. (Or plain modernist. I don’t know.) And the documentary Helvetica on DVD.

And rather wonderfully (in a post-modern modernist in-joke) a t-shirt with just the word ‘Helvetica’ rendered in Helvetica.
We also saw a cat cafe, a particular kind of drinking establishment unique to Japan where one drinks coffee and pets cats. I was missing cats, seeing as all the cats in Japan run away when you approach them.


• After that we went for delicious MEAT at a BBQ joint in Shibuya and had horse sashima (mmm, taboo meats). After chatting to a drunk guy about my weird-ass 魔手・蛇乱道 hoodie and eating old-timey cabbage in awesome Showa-period theme bar Hanbey
  we returned to our abodes.
  
• The next day we went down to Kamakura, a nice little beach resort/temple place I’ve written about previously. We visited the pigeon temple (fulla pigeons, dontcha know) and stumbled across a beautiful little coffee shop, Thomnecogo, in the middle of a residential area with high-class jazz and freshly ground coffee (that I might give a write-up, me being such an internationally renowned journo now).
  
  
  
  
• Next, Odaiba on the Yurikamome monorail (cool as ever) and back on the plain old JR line to Shinjuku.
  
  
• Yesterday we went to Takao, the mountain that marks the end of the massive 35 million people Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama (千東横?) sprawl. It’s a nice little day trip from Tokyo, a bit of a hike in the autumn air.
  
  
  
  
  
• And today we have come to Hakone, which is my third time here. No coin lockers at the station, so we came straight to the Fuji-Hakone Guesthouse where I chatted in Japanese to the staff about having come in January and name-dropping my famous friend, Ella May Blake, who’d just stayed a week or two ago. Then a bus to Gora, where we ate in an out of the way restaurant; this guy started chatting to us in that way old Japanese guys do, but he was a real laugh, a true ojiisan, and it was great to practice my Japanese with him. He made me promise to come back before I leave, and I really will.I’m getting so much practice guiding these guys around! If only to show off, I seem to be getting in more conversations and the fact is I’m fine in most any conversation. And it’s so much fun, such a good feeling to successfully have a chat with a complete stranger and understand and be understood. If there’s anything I want to keep studying for, it’s stuff like this.

  Anyway, by the time we’d finished it was raining. The obaachan gave us some little tea cups as a present (so kind!) and an umbrella, and we hurried out of that little wonderful den of hospitality into the rain and got the cable car and ropeway up to Owakudani, which today was a pretty close approximation to hell: rain, ice, gales, smoke, and sulphur. I’d never come the reverse route on the ropeway from Gora before, and so it’s quite a surprise when you crest a hill and come out over … absolutely nothing, just a distant quarry below you, the cablecar swaying violently in the wind and rain pelting the windows. These photos do not do it justice.
  
  
  Anyway, there was no point freezing our asses off there, so we went inside and I failed terribly at the gruelling Kagekiyo

(truly the “Through the Fire and Flames” of Taiko no Tatsujin and drank some milk tea (fun fact: first time I ever drank milk tea was Owakudani, 2007) and then we sensibly went back down to Togendai and arrived back at the hotel after shopping at Lawson (which had a poster up detailing all the appearances of Hakone in Neon Genesis Evangelion, from the ropeway to gorgeous Tokyo-3 (compared to a image of the real-life area as it is) and even Hakone-Yumoto station (where Misato comes to find Shinji in episode four(?) – I think if you told my 14-year old self as he watched his prized Evangelion VHS second volume (ordered from MCV, back in the day) with that scene that one day he would pass through that very station, he wouldn’t have believed you) It’s weird how Evangelion has ballooned over the last couple of years from a landmark/slightly niche/incredibly deep and philosophical/deeply twisted and dark anime series made by a crazed auteur coming off four years of clinical depression into a catch-all media franchise, from pachinko to sexy pin-ups to tourist marketing boards, but that’s commericalism for you.).

• Anyway, that was a long digression. Tomorrow, Osaka beckons on the shinkansen. Ah, my beloved New Trunk Line. Exciting times.

It’s always slightly weird, waking up in the morning and going someplace. Usually, if I’m going out for the day I only get into Tokyo about midday at the earliest. But today I was up at 7am, quick shower, and onwards to Nippori station to catch the Keisei Limited Express to Narita Airport to meet my sister Katie and her partner Chris, who were landing on a Virgin Atlantic flight at 9:55am. The weather today has, for a change, been actually warm, and they couldn’t have picked a nicer day to arrive (considering five days ago it was snowing).

I’ve never been to meet anyone at the airport… apart from once or twice to meet my sister home from her travels. So it was a little novel to be checking the flight times on my mobile as I sped through the weird countryside of Chiba. At Terminal 1, I had a quick wee before coming back out to the (almost empty) arrivals lounge to see Katie and Chris standing next to a ticket counter looking lost as if they’d just been plucked straight from Sheffield and somehow wandered into my life in Japan.

So much to explain! There were guffaws aplenty at “Pocari Sweat”, yappari. Down at the JR Pass counter they got their magic rail passes (truly envious of that, but as a resident I can’t buy one) from a very polite gentleman who spoke English to them and, realising that I knew Japanese, was entirely forthcoming in speaking Japanese to me. I found that really refreshing, that he didn’t balk at a foreigner speaking Japanese, and that he didn’t patronise me by switching to English.

On the way out we got stopped by the fuzz. I’ve heard about the duo who patrol Narita Airport; they only check foreigners. Well, foreign-looking foreigners. Even if you’re just waiting for somebody they’ll come by and check you out – and they’ll be very polite and friendly about it, of course.

My last encounter with the police fresh in my mind, I resisted flashing my gaijin card as my sister and Chris showed their passports. Ah, it’s only a small thing, but they had no reason to see my ID, and when they asked for it, I simply said “Passport ga motte imasen. Ai ni kimashita.” (“I don’t have my passport with me. I came to meet these guys.”) We had a brief chat and I explained that she was my sister and I was an exchange student and he only wound up asking for my phone number, which I couldn’t be bothered to argue about. (They were nice guys, the cops usually are.) But I didn’t show my ID. A tiny victory for civil rights!

Tickets in hand we boarded the Narita Express – very swish and very comfortable, although I’m not sure it’s worth the extra 2,000 yen over the 1,000 Keisei limited express.

In Shinjuku, I escorted them to the Hotel Rose Garden, which looks like a reasonably swish place (although the rooms are tiny).

I gave them the usual tour of Shinjuku; up the Tokyo Metropolitan Towers to the south observation deck, then over to Kabukicho and lunch in a little ramen joint, before a wander through a games arcade (where I pulverised “Train-Train” on Taiko no tatsujin and got like a billion points) and backstreets and to a Starbucks to plan the next day. I was amazed how tired I was, but I did get up at 7am. Tomorrow, one hopes, I shall awake refreshed for another day of tourguiding. It’s tough work.

After an impromptu meeting with Suzuki-sensei at 6pm today, it was established that due to my low mark of 63.9 (C) I will be repeating level 300 instead of moving up to 400 with everyone else. Also, I think I was advised to do all the auxiliary lessons (the speaking, listening, reading and writing classes) and the kanji class too. There goes my free time!

That’s not set in stone. I could still push for 400, I reckon. But, I dunno. It might be best to cut my losses and concentrate on the Leeds exam.

I’m doing joint honours English and Japanese at the moment. I am informed that there is a possibility of applying for straight BA English in May, which would entail basically dropping Japanese and reverting to my remaining two years of English in 2010/11 and 2011/12.

Do I want to do that? Not really. I do want to finish Japanese, but at the same time, in all honesty, I’m just not putting the work in.

Suzuki-sensei asked me today why I’m doing Japanese, and for the first time I gave the honest answer: I like living in Tokyo. I adore this city. I always tell people “Well I liked anime when I was younger,” or “I like Japanese culture”, but the simple truth is I like living here more than England. (In some respects. I do miss home.) No crime, great transport, exciting events, the bustle of a megapolis; it’s everything I want. I mean, you can walk the streets at 3am and never, ever feel threatened. You know how much more pleasant that is than in England? I don’t want to go all Daily Mail, but it’s little things like that.
And I don’t really need a degree to live here: obviously it would help with getting a job but right now, I know enough Japanese to survive here. I realised that when I went to get my bike fixed – just a minor errand, and my Japanese went off without a hitch, and it was sorted. I know enough to get anything done. I’m pretty much illiterate beyond kids’ manga and I can’t really hold an interesting conversation, but I can Get By.

So if I can get by, the question becomes what am I learning Japanese for? I’m not really sure. Obviously if I could be fluent I would. If I had a roadmap for fluency, I’d follow it. But that seems an awful long way away (and it is) and right now I’m sort of okay and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to get better, but that doesn’t really bother me, y’know? (And yet it does…)

Today is just day 160 of my year in Japan. Together with the 2007 expedition, that’s 232 days I’ve lived in Japan, or 3% of my entire life. And yet I fear I have missed something. The wood for the trees, perhaps.

You get so used to a country that you miss all the little things. My mum sent me an email asking what it was like, exactly, to live in Japan, and I realised I couldn’t really answer.

So I thought I’d go through a single typical day with a fine-toothed comb, highlighting all the mundane aspects of what makes life in Japan just so, the certain phenotypical aspects of the daily occurrences which one might miss without a measured examination.

I was woken up at 10am by my phone ringing. (Keitai, or mobiles, are ridiculously popular in Japan. Observe any youth or salaryman on the train and they can be on their phone for the entire journey, never looking up from the mail they are composing. Talking on the phone on the train is forbidden, and this being Japan and not the UK, everybody complies. In Japan, rather than SMS technology, all phones use email for “texting”, which means easy communication with PCs, attachment of files, thousand-character messages, etc. In English we speak of mailing somebody, not texting them.)
It was Dan’s student tutor/language partner Kazuki who I met way back in October, informing me that one of our Leeds lecturers, Mark Williams, was going to meet with us today at lunchtime. The conversation was almost entirely in Japanese, which is always nice, but Kazuki is very easy to understand. Certain conversations go without a hitch because we spent all year preparing for them; for example last week I went to get my bike tire puncture mended and turned up in some middle-aged guy’s garage (the smell exactly like my granddad’s garage back home, of sawdust and turps) and didn’t slip up once. But make it just a little faster, throw in a few more words I don’t understand, and I flounder completely. Such is the paradox of language comprehension.

I cycled to the post office, which is open only on weekdays, while listening to the Archers. (I got back into it just in time to hear the death of Phil Archer, which was genuinely rather sad.) In Japan, post works pretty much the same, except when you want to send a letter they weigh it and ask you for the correct postage. (I assume if you know what you’re doing you can buy the right stamp and post it yourself, but I most assuredly do not know what I’m doing.)
So I bought an envelope and posted my invoice and came back to pick up my parcel from the student office on campus. When a parcel arrives, you get a little note on your mailbox, and you bring the note to the student office and exchange it for a parcel after signing the little book. (The nice woman who works there seems to remember everybody’s name.)
The parcel was from my mum; it contained chocolate and, of course, forms to fill in and post. And two envelopes, meaning I didn’t have to buy one. Another trip to the post office, then.

But first! I went to meet Mark Williams at the agreed place, but he apparently wasn’t there yet. I met up with Fran, though, who told me that he was presumably attending this East Asian studies conference that was going on (meeting us was just a side benefit). We were told to come back at 4:30pm. As we got the lift, a guy came out and passed us with a quick look. Seconds too late, of course, I realised it was him.

Not to worry. I had four hours to do some errands in Kichijoji. I hopped upon my bike and cycled to Higashi-Koganei, which is our third nearest station (Tama is closest, but expensive; Tobitakyu is about 5-10 minutes away by bike, but doesn’t go to Kichijoji).
Bikes are ace in Japan. They’re cheap, you can cycle on the pavement, and you don’t need a helmet. I love my bike; I can get anywhere after a fashion (even Shinjuku, though it takes two hours).
The chain keeps coming off my bloody bike though. The first time it happened I was stuck because there’s a entirely pointless cover over the chain and I needed a screwdriver to get it off. Now I’ve taken to carrying a screwdriver around with me, but it’s still a bother.

Japanese suburbia is a strange mix. The backstreets are like some carefully-assembled shanty town; narrow streets, houses crammed together, the buildings all poured concrete and PVC ugliness, the cars all squat-faced Toyotas and Nissans crammed into double-decker driveways (I kid you not).
Then you get to the main roads, and it’s America suddenly; ugly chain malls and parking lots and family diners and empty pavements. It’s very strange how closely Tokyo’s suburbs are modelled after the US style of car-orientated consumerism.

I reached Higashi-Koganei in about 20 minutes, counting a maintenance break to put my chain back on. It was my first time there, and I got a strange sense of being near the sea. Perhaps it was the sun; perhaps it was the way the platform floats like an island above the sea of roofs around it. I parked my bike for free (not always a given) near the koban (the ever-present police boxes; Japan loves its cops, it does) and entered the station with my Suica (a IC swipe transport pass, similar to London’s Oyster card, that you charge up with cash which is automatically deducted by tapping it (or just your wallet with it in) on a sensitive panel at the ticket gates).

Japan’s trains are a by-word for punctuality. Though the Chuo line is one of the most popular places for suicide (tastefully represented by “Cause: Accident” on the delays screen in English and 人身事故 (“human body accident”) in Japanese), they can clear a body up in 20 minutes, or so I hear, and long delays are very rare.
The more modern JR trains on the Chuo and Yamanote lines have display screens by all the doors showing route and station information as well as adverts and news updates. On the train, you sit if you’re lucky, or mill about the doors if not. Kids, adults alike read manga. Everybody is on their phone. Old guys read newspapers or novels, hidden in plain covers so no one can see what you’re reading. (Which is the point of reading on the train, right?) People rarely talk.

I noticed some sakura by the station as the train left. Sakura is cherry blossom; it comes out in March and Japan goes nuts with patriotism. People go to parks for “hanami” (flower-viewing) and drink copious amounts of sake, a experience which I am looking forward to. Most sakura isn’t out yet, but you can see it here and there.

Tokyo is a very distributed city; life collects around certain hubs on the rail network like Ueno or Shinjuku, and Kichijoji is the nearest one to us. It’s reasonably well-known (Toru Watanabe lived here in Norwegian Wood) and you can get just about anything you need here. And it makes for a decent night out, too.

I decided I needed a haircut last night, so I went down to QB House, one of a chain of 10 minute haircut salons across Japan. For 1000 yen, it’s the cheapest haircut in the city, I’m sure. You go in and buy a ticket from the vending machine (like a lot of things in Japan) and wait for someone to become free.
Obviously you don’t get a great style or anything, and a haircut is one of those things which probably shouldn’t be rushed. But the guy was friendly (asking me where I was from and all that) and my hair looks alright and it was cheap and it was indeed quick (though a little longer than ten minutes). The hairdresser even took my coat and bag and put them in a special wardrobe so as to not get covered in excess hair, and then vacuumed my head to suck up the cuttings. Ingenious.
I found another post office, filled in my voter registration form (I was already registered, but perhaps because I changed it to Leeds I couldn’t proxy vote in Norwich) and student finance form (hooray for a realistic amount to live on, unlike first year) and got them posted to home with a sweet flower stamp, as the kind postwoman explained.

Next, Yodobashi Camera. Yodobashi is one of the biggest electronics chains in Japan; think Dixons or Currys (do either of those still exist?) but with mammoth, six-floor stores everywhere. I bought the cheapest hairdryer I could find and went up to 7F to Uniqlo to get some shoes and/or clothes.

Uniqlo is making increasing inroads into the UK as a kind of uber-chic Japanese brand, or so I hear. In Japan, it’s nothing special; like H&M or maybe Topshop (as it used to be) it has a reputation for decent modern mid-budget fashion, and it’s a nice enough place to shop (although the best deals and the best fashion are to be found elsewhere). I got some bright red canvas shoes that will hopefully fit (after worrying that it would be impossible to get gaijin-size shoes, I found out from Dan that Uniqlo do cheap shoes in sensible sizes) and a bright orange waterproof jacket thingy, which I hope has that whole mild cyberpunk thing going on. (There’s a jawdropping label in Japan called FOTUS which do all kinds of bizarrely beautiful futuristic vinyl jackets and florescent trousers, but I’m not entirely sure what kind of places sell it)

Starbucks is the same everywhere, of course, and you don’t even need to know Japanese to order. In Japan, students flock to Starbuckses and McDonaldses, buy the cheapest thing, and then chill out for a couple of hours doing homework. It’s rather pleasant.

This particular store was full of gaijin – when I say “full” I mean there were five or six of us, which is a lot. Two Americans sat near me chatting about aesthetics and translation – or rather one guy with a nice beard and a pleasing accent talked while the other guy listened. It’s funny that Americans have a reputation for being uncultured, because there’s a certain kind of north-ish middle-aged accent that reminds me of fine thinkers like Seale or the philosopher-dudes from Waking Life, and it sounds vaguely famous and reassuring. “If you burn your bridges, you can’t stay there and fight your corner!” he exclaimed, sounding like he was in some kind of interesting Richard Linklater film.

I confess to often worrying that people will think I’m a tourist or something, not a proper long-term resident. But you can sort of tell who is and who isn’t. The couples with backpacks, looking lost are always tourists. The confident-looking American guys are ex-pats. Plus, tourists don’t tend to hang out in out-of-the-way places like Kichijoji.

My journey back to TUFS was much like the journey from there, only in reverse. I stopped in at my local combini, 3F, to get one of their delicious pasta salads.
Combini is short for “convenience store”, but they’re somehow more than a regular Spar; they’re like a hub of local activity. You can get snacks and bread and milk, but you can also get fried chicken or nikuman, buy concert or sports tickets, a ridiculous array of sandwiches and onigiri and Japanese bread snacks and hot drinks and magazines. They’re all open 24/7 and invariably staffed by two students who will give you exactly the same “IRASSHAIMASEEEEE” (“WELCOME.”) at 3am as they will do at 3pm.

Then back for a conversation with Mark Williams, which was pretty enlightening. Apparently we shouldn’t be that worried about the Leeds exam, which is reassuring but it is still very, very worrying. And Dan was telling me about how he’s got into all this modelling work in Japan just by signing up for a few agencies, which sounds like a decent racket and which I will look into.

And there you have it. A day in the life in Japan. It’s kind of the same as living anywhere else, except very, very different. And better.

Free ice cream aside, my enthusiasm for the manga-kissa faded somewhat when trying to sleep on a sofa covered by a tiny blanket under the hot glare of halogen lamps and the dry suck of the air con. After one or two hours of not quite satisfying sleep it was time to get up; time to leave my enclave, pay the bill, and head out into the world.

Homeless people were sleeping in the station at 5am; perhaps I should have joined them. Instead I followed my nose to one of the ever-present McDonalds and bought a coffee from a girl with the biggest eyes I ever saw, sat down to drink it and lament the sorry fatigue of the traveller. It’s lonely stuff, travelling, and doubly so in a foreign country when you don’t have the benefit of any roots to anchor you down. I thought about turning back, perhaps; Ueno and a warm proper bed were only a couple of hours away. But no. Onwards I must struggle.

Takasaki seemed oddly busy for 5am. Obviously compared to Tokyo it was utterly dead; still, the McDonalds was pretty full with people sleeping or waiting for the first train. Perhaps some of them were on the Seishun 18 like me. I looked at my cluttered schedule on Outlook with a mixture of admiration and fear; it is a clear roadmap for visiting dozens of towns and cities in four days and reaching Hokkaido, the city of Hakodate, where I have promised myself a proper hotel and a proper bed.

I wonder why I’m doing this. To prove it can be done, I guess. The train journeys are taking up most of my time, so it’s not like I’m doing it for the sightseeing … it’s more because I want to hit the road, roam about. Wanderlust. Fernweh. I kind of like the idea of having everything I need in one bag, always accessible, even just seeing myself in the mirror as a proper backpacker (though with a satchel bag), with no real plans and no reservations.

The train from Takasaki takes me to Minakami, where there’s snow on the ground, and there I change to continue on to Nagaoka, after passing through a colossal 13.5km tunnel through the mountains, complete with several spooky underground stations with cavernous entrances and exits where no one gets off and no one gets on. The trains at Nagaoka have this old time feeling, evoking images of travelling through post-war Europe on the train networks in the good old days.

This is the north alright; a fuckton of snow, and when it snows here it really knows. Like, more than a metre deep. Enough to bury me, perhaps.

I found out later that this is the setting for a classic of Japanese literature, Snow Country. The first line famously reads “The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The tunnel Yasunari Kawabata was writing about was the 13.5 km one I’d just come out of, the Shimizu tunnel. A little bit of literary history there.

After the train came out of the mountains the thick snow abated. Nagaoka is a few fashion stores and a branch of Muji. I get to Niigata, where I have about four hours to kill before catching the succession of trains to Akita tonight. When I walk out of the station, I’m a little bit taken aback; the station area is identical to Takasaki, although as I get deeper into the town it feels different. I catch hints of Seoul, Chicago; funny how cities can all be similar and different at the same time.

Thought about getting a haircut, but 5,500 yen? No thanks. So I walk to the north coast, the Sea of Japan, past concrete uniformity and pointless towers everywhere. I take a few half-hearted photos but Niigata is difficult to get excited about, especially on a grey foggy afternoon. The Sea of Japan is the same as it ever was. I sit down for a minute, trying to make the most of it, and then realise I have.

Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea about “travelling”. Like, I’ve heard that exciting and interesting people spent their youths travelling, so I try to do it too, but I take it a bit too literally and just spend my time travelling from place to place. The key to exciting travels is probably meeting interesting people and visiting novel locations. Need to brush up on that.            

I wound up in a Starbucks underneath Niigata’s shiny NEXT 21 skyscraper drinking their new Sakura frappuchino (delish). They were playing “Slippery People” by Talking Heads, which is a rather obscure choice. Oh, and “Hand in Glove”. I must say that Starbucks’ music is infinitely superior to that McDonalds yesterday. And they played Squeeze. And The Cure. It was like they were streaming it straight off my iPod.

I take the long walk back to the station and I realise I can’t push on. Yeah, I could have got to Akita after another five or six hours and catch two hours sleep in a manga-kissa and start the journey to Hakodate and have an evening there before I have to start back again … but I’m travelling for the sake of it. It’s still barely possible, I calculate using the train thing on my phone, to trace my route back across the spine of Japan to Ueno and end up on my doorstep the same night.

And so I find myself on that lovely, rare object: the homebound train. There’s only a dozen passengers; the warmth and light of our carriages contracts with the frozen wastes outside the window. Now I find myself past Akabane, rolling into Ikebukuro, the beautiful city outside the window as I listen to Kevin Shields’ “City Girl”. It’s insane. Every time I leave this city I come back more in love with it than ever. I can’t explain why.

So I’m back home, but the best bit is I still have three days of the Seishun 18 to use over the next month. Watch this space, dear friends.

I swear man, this is the only way to travel. Working my way back from Yokohama to Tokyo station, where I stopped off at the Travel Centre for a quick chat entirely in Japanese regarding the status of any Moonlight night trains (conclusion: nai) and then on to Ueno where I took my last remaining option; getting any train heading in a sort of northerly direction.

It was fantastic. I got to the platform and saw that I had a choice between somewhere called Koganei (same kanji as the one near where I live, but about two hours away from Tokyo) and a town called Takasaki, both of which I’d never even heard of. I pulled out my trusty map (which served me so well back in 2007). Where shall I go? I found Takasaki on the map and it looked to be in a good place (on the way to Niigata, Akita, and ultimately Sapporo) and the train was leaving in 15 minutes, so I hopped on and grabbed a seat.

Part of the fun of this ticket is the whole Hoffman transfer orbit system of getting around; bumping from station to station, it requires an intricate understanding of the train networks, and you really get a sense of how the railroads spread out throughout the country, interconnected and interchanging. I do find something so wonderfully romantic about trains, and though this ticket is very inconvenient for getting anywhere in a hurry you see a lot more of the country than you would otherwise.

The night is coming on. I’m listening to my recent purchase, Ali Farka Toure’s beautiful African blues on In The Heart of the Moon. I’m on a train bound for some place I never heard of and I think there’s hotels and stuff (it’s a stop for the Shinkansen at least) but I’m not sure if I’ll find one and man it’s all so terribly exciting!<

I’ve got a set of four seats to myself now, which is a welcome change from being cramped in with three others earlier. I’m reasonably confident I’ll have a room for the night. I don’t want to pay too much, but I’m looking at perhaps 4,000 and up. Tomorrow I should be able to make a good start on getting up to Sapporo, or if not at least Akita. Ah, the night scenery flashing past outside is so romantic…

Rolled into Takasaki and into a light drizzle, the traffic lights reflecting off the mostly empty boulevard. Takasaki is one of those nondescript Japanese towns, all grey featureless hotels and cars sluicing through the night. There were a few hotels dotted around, including one for 4,000, but I hoped that there might be a capsule hotel somewhere, so I asked in at a Lawson. There wasn’t one, but the guy at the desk asked the junior assistant and he recommended a little manga/internet café just down the street, next to a cinema. (I was going to go properly Holden Caulfield and catch a late flick, but the last showings had already started).

So, hopefully I should be able to get some sleep and internet there. In the meantime I’ve stopped in at a Gasuto diner, where I got things off to a great start by repeating “Irasshaimase!/Welcome!” to the waitress as I came in. Argh. Oh well, at least they’ll never see me in this town again. They are playing a orchestrated version of “Michelle” that took me a while to recognise.

It’s a little bit scary, though. I’m only two hours from Tokyo if anything goes wrong, but the further I get out, the longer it takes to get back … and if I really balls things up, it might take a shinkansen to get me home. But then in another way of looking at it, I’m already a continent away from my other home…

I’m at the place now, and it’s just far too awesome. Massive screened PC, big telly, PS2, every manga you could possibly want to read, a few DVDs and games, a big comfy sofa, and free drinks and ice cream for 1,500 yen. Although it’s hardly a proper hotel, it’s decent enough for me. I spent an hour or two trying to work out how, exactly, I am to get to Sapporo … and I don`t think I can, but I might be able to reach Hakodate. We will see.