Sons of Loki

I think most of my problems in life stem from being a determinist at heart. I’m not completely sure free will exists. I feel like innate personality (determined by biological and external social factors) determines your actions, not your consciousness and not free will.

This raises big, scary questions. Like, is it fair to punish criminals if they had no control over their actions anyway? Can a leopard truly change its spots? If I simply put my mind to something, can I do it?

More specifically, if I decide to work hard at Japanese, would I get better? Yes, but can I actually decide to work hard at Japanese? It’s like sleep paralysis; you’re awake and fully conscious and trying so desperately to move your legs, feeling like you’re suffocating, but it’s impossible. It’s physically impossible. I sit down to study Japanese, I get bored and do something else.

Is this an error on my part? Should I try really, really, really hard instead of merely quite hard? Or is it blind deterministic mechanics, that I am a product of my upbringing, that I will always pick the easy path, that I have no patience, that I get easily distracted?

I don’t know. It’s a philosophical question, anyway. The main thing is, do I want to keep doing Japanese?

I don’t know!

I think my honest feelings are: I’d like to do Japanese if I could just coast through like I always do, turning up to most lessons and doing enough of the homework and doing sorta okay. But it’s a damned hard degree, and I apparently just won’t do all the work that’s necessary to pass.

I think my honest feelings are: I don’t want to do Japanese. I know enough to get by, and I basically only took this degree because I wanted to live here for a year for free. I can read Yotsuba-to and that’s enough for me. I’d much rather do English or Graphic Design or something like that. I don’t really have any desire to learn the language.

I think my honest feelings are: I love Japanese. I want to become impeccably fluent. I want to watch films and read books and talk to interesting people. I want to learn all the kanji and all the words. It’s just the teaching style here I can’t get on with. When I think about it, I really miss the Leeds department. Somehow everything was easier there, more fun.

Indecision. What’s made my day is that I emailed Leeds to let them know of my possible intentions, and I just got a reply to say that I can put a request in to the English department in May if I want to switch to Single Honours, and they’ll decide in June by the earliest. Meanwhile, I get to finish my year here whatever happens.

That’s the best news I could get. (Well, realistically winning the lottery isn’t going to happen, especially since I don’t play.) I’d hate so much to go home early, to encounter enormous visa and financial wrangles, to possibly have to pay back all my JASSO (god that would ruin me) and generally ruin my year. I get to stay.

Kinda makes me want to start studying again…

In other news, I’ve put up the teaser page for Yoshida, my work-in-progress visual novel salaryman simulator. Demo someday. I worry I made the titular Yoshida rather too stylish, rather than the chubby sweaty salaryman I envisioned him as.

Well, it’s been another strange week, but like Sunny at the end of MGS4 it looks sort of like the sun is rising again, and … I still don’t know what I’m going to end up doing. And … well.

Anyway, election debate! I rather got more excited than I expected, staying up until 4:30am for the start. I even had some popcorn. It was a weird experience. Seeing the leaders all in the same room was weird. Actually, seeing them outside of press conferences and the Commons was weird.

It was hard to concentrate on the actual content of the debate when there’s a whole Twitter storm going on. I know it’s a bit naff to go on about social media, but it was a strangely social experience, to be plugged into the thoughts of thousands of other people watching the debate.

It’s more an opportunity to just get a sense of what these people are like. They’re all going to lie, and spin, but you can get a sense of what sort of person they are from how they act up there. Cameron spun out some Daily Mail-style anecdotes about “broken Britain” with an amusingly PC cast of women and blacks and druggies. Brown tried to point out policy successes and statistics, but sounded too much like he was on a script with some painful zingers shoehorned in.

And then Clegg. Clegg! From zero to possible hero, the clear winner of the debate with 43% on ITV. I liked him. He took no bullshit, and called out the other leaders, at one point asking exasperatedly: why do you say you’re for reform and change, and then vote against it?

I’ve always liked the Lib Dems, for the simple fact that I liked the underdog. Now I’m older and wiser, I still think they may well do a better job than the others. And they have policies I agree with. I’m not sure Clegg’s leader material, but he’s my favourite.

And the most exciting thing is that a lot of people around me feel the same way. It’s a biased sample of 20-something students, sure, but I’m sure there’s enough of us to sway the election. It’s damned exciting, the prospect of real change, of a historic upset. It happened with Rage Against The Machine, even though it seemed ridiculously impossible at the outset. Could we be in for the first Liberal Democrat government ever? Probably not. But I’ll be interested to see the polls.

(And I will kick myself if my proxy form’s got lost in the post and I miss my chance to take part in an a historic election.)

I’m back in McDonalds. No idea why I come here; it’s certainly not for the overpriced food. But I guess it’s the familiarity. I know what I’m getting. I know that the staff will say “<Welcome>”, “<What drink would you like?>”, “<Are you eating in?>”, and “<Thank you please wait>”. In fact, when I ordered today, the cashier was mute for some reason, so I just said “Big mac setto. Orenji juusu. Kochira. Hai.” without the other side of the conversation.

Woke up this morning afternoon feeling glum as usual. Then I went out on the balcony and the sun was shining, the air was warm, the sakura was in blossom and there was a scent of spring in the air. I always find smell induces nostalgia in me. There was a particular smell in Uguisudani, where I used to live, and today it had returned to Fuchu-shi.

I thought I’d cycle to Musashi-koganei for a coffee and a bit of study, to try and begin gearing up for the big test in a month. (A month!) But then I got out on my bike, the weather was beautiful (easily matching an English summer day), I had “Katamari on the Rocks” in my ears and I cycled past the baseball teams practicing and under the falling blossom petals and past the big bowl of Ajinomoto Station and thought life is beautiful, I’m going to cycle to Shinjuku again.

So I did. There’s not much you can say about Route 20 from Fuchu-shi to Shinjuku-ku. It’s got bike shops and family restaurants and bric-a-brac shops and PC depots and houses and more family restaurants. I made pretty good progress, reaching Meidaimae within an hour. As I got closer to Shinjuku, though, and as the NTT DoCoMo building loomed on the horizon like … uh … the Empire State Building looms over Brooklyn, the crowds on the pavement increased and I had to cross the road. Through the whole journey my chain came off seven times, seeing as it’s pretty old and rusty, I only have one gear, and that I tend to push my little old lady’s bike past its capabilities. In one case the chain came off the pedal gear, resulting in me having to grab my emergency screwdriver (thank god I had that with me), partially disassemble the chain case, and thread it back on.

Then I saw the cops. A group of three, obviously bored. Hey, what’s this? A gaijin on a bike! I had the misfortune to stop at a red light, so the three of them come bumbling over.

Cop 1: “<A bike.>”
Cop 2: “<A bike!>”
Me (removing earphones): “Huh?”
Cop 3: “<The bike.>”
Me: “<The bike…?>”
Cop 1: “<Whose bike is this?>”
Me: “<My university’s bike.>”
Cop 2 (into radio): “<Registration six-three-four-eight-nine-seven-zero…>”
Cop 3: “<What university?>”
Me: “<Tokyo Gaidai.>”
Cop 2: “<…four-four-three-one-seven-one…>”
Cop 1: “<Oh, Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku? Ah, it says on the bike, here.>”
Cop 3: “<Oh, Tokyo Gaidai.>”
Cop 2: “<…nine-six-five-six-eight…>
Me (exasperated, pulling out wallet): “<Here’s the bike registration and my student card.>”
Cop 1: “<Oh, I see.>”
Cop 1 (apparently losing his mind): “<Say, what country’re you from?>”
Me: “<Ah, England.>”
Cop 1: “<Oh, England.>”
Cop 2: <”…eight-four-two-one-six, over.”>
Cop 3: (not at all sorry) “<Sorry for interrupting you.>”
Me: “<Everything’s alright, then?>”
Me: “<Turns out that just because I’ve got a beard and no epicanthic folds and I’m on a bike, I’m not necessarily a criminal?>”
Cop 1: “<Yes, excuse us.>”
Me: “<No problem! Excuse me!>”

At least it’s funny in hindsight. And I didn’t show my gaikokujin card, though I did kind of fold by showing them my student ID. I just wish I’d had the guts to ask, “Why have you stopped me?” because the answer is “Because we think this bike is stolen,” and … Yeah, racial profiling in action. I have never seen a Japanese person on a bike being stopped.

Anyway, these things happen. No sense in letting it get you down…

Just ran some errands; posted some letters, signed for JASSO, paid some bills. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Well, not really, but there’s a strange sense of satisfaction in getting small things done.

I was talking to my friend Emily about this. She wants to stay in education, do a Masters. Me, I kind of just want to get out there in the real world. Like Rob Fleming or Jesse (Hawke?) I don’t feel like a real person, living in a single room and eating combini food and scripting visual novels no one will ever play. I want a job – something interesting, mind – and a proper apartment or a real house with more than one room and beanbags and big giclée prints (bizarre fact: the development of giclée printing was spearheaded by none other than Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash) on the walls and a cat called Noboru Wataya.

Obviously, when I’m working my 9 to 5 in Sainsburys and living in a quiet backstreet in Leeds I’ll miss the student life, so basically the lesson here is never try to do anything, ever. (I’ve become a nihilist, lately. Does it show?)

Last week was a bit of a fugue, a blur of hanami and hikikomorish tendencies. Yesterday, after a sake-induced hangover I kind of snapped out of it and went for a walk in Yuutenji, which Emily told me was a pretty nice area. And it was. I had a proper coffee in a proper coffee shop, visited the temple (awash with sakura, obviously) and wandered through the city of Meguro, which reminded me awfully of some area of Leeds.

I love cities. It’s interesting, though, that all cities are kind of similar… all built from offcuts of each other. Parts of Higashi-Shinjuku are identical to New York (round about the corner of 47th and 6th, near the NHL store). I stumbled across Chicago in Niigata, found Norwich in Harajuku, and this bit of Meguro really nailed that “concrete Holiday Inns and big roundabouts with hundreds of road signs and a dozen pedestrian crossings” bit that cities like Leeds do. You know what I mean – designed for cars, not people.

Down by a weird riverside bit (it had the feeling of a riverside area with cafes and bars, but it was built on a five story embankment above a feeble drainage ditch) there was loads of sakura and a big matsuri (festival), with food stalls and huge throngs of Meguro residents and a fat lady (who did indeed sing, to a large audience) and a wonderful, rejuvenating sense of life.

Of course, it couldn’t stay sunny for long, and now Tokyo is overcast and rainy again.

Stay inside and drink tea, as the Bryce 2 materials browser would commonly recommend. In conclusion, I have one goal in life now, which is to play “Black Out Fall Out” on electric guitar in front of a billion fans and then spontaneously combust, because nothing can top how awesome this song is.

音がない (No sound)
泣き止まないずっと (Don’t cry your heart out)
もうCRY OUT (Keep crying out!)
I know I know la la la la
もう止まらない！ (Don’t stop!)

(oh cool, previously unheard original 2002 version, though I wager the version on 2005′s Polysics or Die!!!! is better)

Well, it’s been nice with the hanami.

Anyway, here’s the two finest minutes of animation ever produced (the first 30 seconds is cut off, but it’s toe-curlingly good up to the 1:30 mark, although your tastes may vary)

The voice acting by the sublime Norio Wakamoto just makes this scene mint.

「どうか？うまいか？トマトがうまいのか？」
“How are they? Are they … delicious? Are the tomatoes delicious?”
「うん！おいしいよ！」
“Yeah! They’re tasty!”
「こんなに赤いのに、ちよは美味しいという…！」
“Despite their being red, Chiyo says that they are delicious…”

｢本当の猫…」
“A real cat…”
「私は偽者の猫だと？」
“Did you just say I was a fake cat?”
「ごめんなさい！すいません！」
“I’m sorry! Please forgive me.”
「いや！」
“No!” (the delivery of this line alone is sumptuous)
「私は偽者ではない。」
“I am not a fake.”
「まあ、本当の猫と、そうでない猫が、いると言うことだねぇぇ？！」
“But, there are real cats, and cats that aren’t so; …Did you just say that?”