Sons of Loki

Roppongi Hills (六本木ヒルズ) is a multipurpose entertainment, residential and commercial development located in the neighbourhood of Roppongi in Minato Ward, Tokyo. Designed by property tycoon Minoru Mori, construction started in 2000 and finished in 2003. Over a 27 acre lot, the complex incorporates offices, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafes, the Grand Hyatt Tokyo, an art gallery and observation deck, the headquarters of TV Asahi, and several parks.

Frustratingly, Roppongi Hills lacks an obvious street entrance approaching from the Oedo Line station. Visitors may be drawn towards the landmark 238m Mori Tower, but the cheesily-named Hollywood Beauty Salon building blocks the entrance and the entrance to Roppongi Hills’ central plaza is not obvious.

Rather, the grandest entrance is from the Hibiya Line station, with a enormous three-story escalator inside a central atrium.

The centrepiece of Roppongi Hills is Mori Tower (森タワー), a 54 story, 238m skyscraper that incorporates cafes and restaurants at the base, offices in the middle, and an art museum and observation deck at the top.

Before Mori Tower lies Roku-Roku Plaza (66プラザ, a reference to Roppongi Hills’ address in the sixth district of Roppongi (literally ‘six trees’)). Designed in modernist steel and glass, this side of the complex has a feel of some futuristic metropolis.

Tempering the glass facade of Mori Tower is the stonework incorporated in the more post-modernly designed surrounding buildings.

The layout allows vistas of nearby Tokyo Tower, which pops into view as you move about the complex.

Throughout, a fusion of various building styles creates an almost theme-park like ambience. Roppongi Hills is designed as a destination as much as a shopping mall, a place that in itself provides an enjoyable experience. Exploring the different zones helps to create a sense that this place is more than the sum of its parts.

The roads that cut through the complex are themselves part of the whole assembly, with a boulevard feel that is worlds away from Tokyo’s more dense, cramped areas.

Compared to the rest of Roppongi, the Hills area has a distinctly more upmarket feel. Beyond Roku-Roku Plaza are areas which feel like the backstreets of some quaint French town, lined with boutiques and restaurants.

One of the hearts of the complex is the Arena, where today a Sony 3D presentation was being held.

Trees and greenery can be found throughout.

Multiple levels provide expansive views and break up the structure of the outdoor areas.

Even the most remote corners have been designed with attention to detail.

The residential towers feature commercial spaces on the ground floor, with everything from upscale restaurants to dog-washing salons. Apartments range from 450,000 yen (£3,462) to 1,720,000 yen (£13,326) per month. (For comparison, most one bedroom apartments in Tokyo start at around 80,000 yen (£615).)

There’s even a Lutherian church on site.

The shopping side of the complex is expansive and sprawling, but easy to get lost in.

Each floor has a different layout to the others; escalators are separated, making it hard to ascend or descend several floors at a time.

However, the mixture of expansive and narrow spaces helps to give Roppongi Hills a different feel to most malls, and makes browsing with no particular intention a delight. Most of the stores sell fashion and accessories, including a shop dedicated to umbrellas.

Reflecting Roppongi’s large foreigner population and as a popular tourist attraction, all signage is in Japanese and well-translated English.

Art installations can be found across the streets, including a giant LED counter by the Gate Tower. In the Gate Tower itself, a branch of Tsutaya and Starbucks attracts browsers for its selection of arty magazines and books on design, including glossy coffee table books on Roppongi Hills itself.

Most shopping malls are rarely anything to get excited about. However, Roppongi Hills succeeds where others fall to mediocrity by imposing its own identity on the paradigm of recreational complexes, rather than simply being a venue for shops. Areas of natural beauty integrate with 21st century architecture; visitors congregate in beautifully-realised public spaces. Roppongi Hills is less like a mall and more like a self-contained city: a kind of arcology dropped into a Tokyo neighbourhood.

I’m finally getting the hang of this Japanese thing! (How many times have I said that?) I’ve pretty much decided that I’m never gonna be an accomplished conversationalist in either Japanese or English, but that if I honestly do have a knack for the skills of reading, I might as well concentrate on that. I’ve started reading the news (almost) daily in Japanese, and it feels rather remarkable to be taking in a Japanese newspaper, getting most of the kanji to some extent, even if the overall meaning of each sentence remains murky and uncertain. Fiction, too – I finished the first story in Read Real Japanese and I ought to make a good start on the next.

You know, learning Japanese – it’s all about scrambling up the mountain using every means at your disposal. People will tell you “It’s better to do it with one hand behind your back,” or “You ought to use hiking boots”. Some advice you should listen to. Some of it you should ignore. The one true way to climb the mountain of Japanese is to do it whatever way works. For me, that’s making up stupid mnemonics and reading newspaper articles about minor party officials in funding scandals. I guess I’ll be alright.

I need to stop counting down my days left in Japan… though it be 72 days right now. Yeah, after a tense phone call with the JAL office in Tokyo (why do I find phone calls with strangers such an unmitigated terror?) I went ahead and changed my return date to the 2nd of August, so I’ll be with everybody else coming back on the 3rd of August at 4:35pm. (It’s cost me 15,000 yen to change, but then I would have had to pay 17,000 yen rent to stay here until the 10th (plus food and stuff) so it’s worked out fine.)

This is day 235, or thereabouts. It feels like a marathon, and part of me is glad that I didn’t go back at Christmas because the longer I stick it out here, the more insane it will be when I get home. Yeah, it will be insane.   I remember when I came back last time, after a paltry ten weeks, being blown away by the ticket machine on the London Underground. When I get back on the 3rd, it will be a whopping 308 days since I left. I’ll be a stranger in my own country.

Been listening to a couple of new good albums recently: Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s unlikely musical/song cycle collaboration on the even unlikelier topic of Philippines dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos, has an all-star cast of female singers (including Florence “+ The Machine” Welch, Cyndi Lauper, and …er, Steve Earle) and some surprisingly catchy tunes on the subject of Imelda’s rags to riches to unparalleled embezzler and shoe collector story, some of the best being the title track, “How Are You”, “Please Don’t”, and “Never So Big”. Also, LCD Soundsystem’s new album This Is Happening, with a stompingly awesome first track “Dance Yrself Clean”. James Murphy has this really interesting half-spoken, half-singing style on tracks like “Pow Pow” that puts me in mind of the old Jonathan Richman. A good album for the summer, methinks.

Finally, interesting thing of the day: The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover, a insightful look into one of the very first internet chat communities with a male psychiatrist undercover as a woman.

Today wasn’t an entirely wasted day! I went back to Shinjuku – that old tart – for the first time in a long time, only to find that I’d totally forgotten how to behave. I walked into people. I got lost. I barged into elevators. There’s a knack to getting through Shinjuku, and I’d entirely forgotten it.

But I found Kinokuniya once again (I always think it’s on the wrong street) and basked myself in its beautiful seven floors of books. Books! Books with words. Books with pictures. Books to educate. Books to entertain. Books that can, in a tiny package and for a small fee, change your very being. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books, as Michel de Montaigne said.

I bought Freakonomics, because everyone else in the world has read it by now and it was only 850 yen. I bought our super-dull textbook for next year, called New Approaches to Pre-Advanced Intermediate Grammar Solutions For Learning Japanese in Context (or something like that). And I got our recommended Japanese-Japanese dictionary, 小学国語学習辞典 (Primary School Japanese Study Dictionary). As the name suggests, it’s for primary school kids, but it’s full of cute pictures and I like my textbooks with cute pictures.
Plus, it gives a tiny insight into how Japanese children learn the language. Obviously the bulk is just natural acquisition, but I noticed things in the dictionary like a little box distinguishing the homophones 形 and 型 and the tiny semantic difference, which is something I was beginning to wonder about in my own study, and intriguing insights into how Japanese kids are taught kanji (by year, organised by theme, and the dictionary scattered with what seem to be pictographic representations of the components, as far as I can tell).

I also bought a book called Read Real Japanese Fiction, because it caught my eye with an appealing offer of six short stories from contemporary Japanese writers, together with grammatical explanations and a glossary. I strongly believe the best way to learn a language is through interaction with a genuine corpus of day-to-day use; having never read much fiction in Japanese (aside from manga, which has its own stylistics) I thought it would be good to have a primer in Japanese fiction so as to become more literate.

So I retired to a nearby cafe with a maple latte and began reading 「神様」 (“God”), a short story by Hiromi Kawakami about a bear who moves in three doors down. I read quite slowly (I’m only three pages in), but it’s incredibly exciting to be reading an actual Japanese story, and I can already feel my comprehension increasing.

A little later, I joined Ella, Fran, and Hime for a visit to Kuu, this bar in Shinjuku I’m doing a review of. I want to save my thoughts for the review, but it was a nice place, I tried some ten-year old Yamazaki whisky, and we got free creme brulees (I think because I had a coupon).

One of Japan's ubiquitous white trucks, Kichijoji.

I feel – off, a little. After the doldrums of mid-March and the frantic-but-exciting exam cramming of the first week of May, I’m back to normal life, and…

It’s kind of dull. Which isn’t right. It’s very, very wrong. I’m in Tokyo. I should be doing ten exciting things before breakfast. And yet, when you’re a student repeating the last semester, stuck in a small room with not much money in the suburbs of Tokyo, it’s somehow …

empty.

And as my remaining days dwindle to insignificance, it becomes harder and harder to begin anything new. No point joining a club now; no point finding the cool bars, no point getting a job. I want to do so much with my time here. I wanted to do so much.

What am I?
What am I?
What am I in my own dear eyes?

It’s frustrating. It’s like I want to achieve so much, but I’m stuck with giant lobster claws for hands, and if I try to build a house or paint a self-portrait my giant lobster claws flounder uselessly and it’s hard enough just getting dressed and making breakfast in the morning when you have giant lobster claws, so I tend not to try to do too much. Which sucks.

Signed up for next year’s modules. Aside from the compulsory Japanese language modules, I’m taking an English Language module on the Language of Power, which I assume is about writing to persuade and influence, which sounds interesting enough. And, because I thought I’d better do some literature, a module on Civil War and Restoration literature. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but the only other options were Medieval lit (what I done last year) and Renaissance lit (which is basically Shakespeare, innit?).

None of the Japanese studies modules really appealed to me, so I decided to take a module on China since 1979 and also, in the first semester, a Short Dissertation. I’m not really sure what I should make it about, but I’ll have a good think.

It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon and the sports teams are on the sports pitch doing whatever the hell they do (they never seem to play sport, they stand in huddles shouting at each other) and I still have 94 days in Japan and the Leeds exam is increasingly in the past and I think I did alright and yet I can’t shake this strange desire to keep going. I want to learn it all. I doubt this’ll last, but I might as well go along with this feeling as long as it persists.

So many things to do, but nothing that I really need to do… Might go into town, later. I was watching the video for m’flo’s “Been So Long” (I can’t tell if it’s self-consciously ironic or not) and realised I miss the big empty streets of places like Minato-ku, so I was thinking of doing some arty night black-and-white photography down there, like every single photograph of New York ever taken.

I want to finish off Yoshida, at least the #gowife portion. Gotta pay my bills. Play 龍が如く, the Kabukicho-based GTA clone, which I picked up from (the hilariously named) Book Off the other day. Find an arcade and get good at DrumMania (seeing as the actual PS2 drum controller is nowhere to be found).

Cycled to Hachioji the other week – took about two hours each way, and I reached the edge of Tokyo, which is quite a feat. Here’s some pretty pictures.

Right at the limits of my camera's capability. Observe the Bay of Rainbows, the tiny line of light at the top left.

Dunno what this joker was playing at, but he was doing some neat stunts.

Yes, fateful days indeed! Apologies for not updating in a while (although most people I know update their blogs every year or two, so count yourself lucky). Only, it’s quite a turning point this week for me and the country.

Tomorrow is the big Leeds exam, and – you know what, it’s not cool to say it, but I’m not worried. I think I’m gonna pass. Most people are bricking it, but it’s only 40% to pass.

Which may come as a surprise, because literally less than two weeks ago I’d given up all hope. I was pretty sure I’d end up emailing to say I was dropping Japanese and taking up single honours English. And then a tiny, life-changing thing happened. Dan told me I could do it.

We were told you had to start studying for the exam at the start of the year — in October — when you were on the plane. And there I was, with less than two weeks to go on a Monday evening – there was no way I could do it. That’s what conventional wisdom said. 653 kanji and 58 chapters in two weeks? No chance.

But Dan explained how over the past month, he’d gone through Kanji in Context (our workbook) with the help of Heisig’s mindblowingly-awesome Remembering the Kanji. He’d gone through Kanji in Context in order, looked up each kanji in Heisig’s book, and built a mnemonic story with the reading of the kanji built in.

This is not how you’re supposed to use either of these books. Kanji in Context is based around the old-school method of “stare at the kanji until it goes in, then write it a hundred times”. Its deficiency are obvious; it takes forever, the kanji are in a stupid order, and you can forget it in an instant.

Heisig (technically “Remembering the Kanji”, but everyone calls it Heisig after its glorious author James Heisig) is much more sensible; you don’t learn a complex kanji until you’ve learned the components that make it up (KiC has ridiculous things like teaching you 驚 a dozen chapters before you learn 句, and who the hell can wrap their head around that?) and the mnemonic system makes revising kanji actually scarily enjoyable. But it has its failings, too; you don’t learn how the kanji are pronounced, you can sometimes get confused with the mnemonic stories (you learn about fifty kanji in a row with the 人 radical and it all tends to merge together into a baffling mess) and you don’t learn any words, so you’ve got no grounding in the actual language. (It’s entirely possible to read Heisig cover-to-cover and know nothing about the Japanese language.)

But look at it this way; Heisig is a locomotive and Kanji in Context is the track. Neither are any use without the other, but put them together and shit, you can achieve so much.

So I look at something ridiculously complicated like 驚 and I break it down into awe and horse and I see myself in awe as a rock (which reminds me of the reading, odoroku) smashes through the window and a beautiful horse bursts in, causing me shock and wonder, which is what the kanji means. Do that 652 more times, and you are in a very good place to pass the exam.

It is election day.

I am voting for the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories (保守党: “Protect and Guard Party”) were out of the question. Even before reading Johann Hari’s article on the rotten borough of Hammersmith and Fulham:

A young woman – let’s called her Jane Phillips, because she wants to remain anonymous – turned up at the council’s emergency housing office one night, sobbing and shaking. She was eight months pregnant. She explained she was being beaten up by her boyfriend and had finally fled because she was frightened for her unborn child. The council said they would “investigate” her situation to find “proof of homelessness” – but she told them she had nowhere to go while they carried it out. By law, they were required to provide her with emergency shelter. They refused. They suggested she try to find a flat on the private market.

For four nights, she slept in the local park, on the floor.

They are the party of the few and the privileged; the party who will earnestly lie through Murdoch to get the vote of the people they will do the least for (the Sun’s front cover reminds me of the way Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia). So, in general terms, fuck that.

Labour – oh, I’m supposed to vote for Labour (労働党: Labour and Working Party), the party of the left and the impoverished and the working man, except they really aren’t the party of the left any more. They’ve done so much to advance Britain in terms of civic rights, with the minimum wage and civil partnerships, but I can’t vote for a party of the past – I have to vote on what they are now, and I just don’t agree with Labour’s tired, centrist policies any more.

So we have the Liberal Democrats (自由民主党: “Self-Action People-Rule Party”, which is ironically the name of the recently-ousted Liberal Democratic Party of Japan). Unless the pollsters have got it all wrong and dramatically underestimated the youth vote (which I doubt, because the polls are incredibly accurate these days) there’s very little chance of getting in, but the thing about the Lib Dems is that they’re tenacious – once they’re in, they’re hard to get out, so even a small surge here will build and build, and we have a generation growing up disheartened with Labour but not willing to vote Tory. Clegg seems a decent guy who really cares. Their policies – from the little stuff like protecting post offices, protecting the internet and sorting out unfair council taxes to the big changes like proportional representation, ditching Trident, and a fully-elected House of Lords (something Labour have failed to do in 13 years) are all things that make me excited.

So me, I agree with Nick.