Sons of Loki

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.

And it’s all coming together, just a little bit more. I’ve been here two months today. Can you imagine it? And we all have something to show for it; Ella’s off giving speeches to Imperial princesses, Dan’s hanging out with Japanese actors, and – well hey, let’s just say it’s been an interesting weekend.

Today I did some weight training with Rob at ICU, which was draining work, but we rewarded ourselves with a trip to Book Off (owners of the amusingly-named Hard Off chain of second-hand stores). I bought Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask in the original Japanese, which I will probably struggle with for a few days before giving up on and parking on my shelf to look good for the rest of the year. Then I got lost took a scenic route home, along the Nogawa river, marvelling at the birds and trees and how pleasant it all was, despite the chilly weather. I cut through Tama Cemetery (which I always feel a little guilty about) and saw a colony of cats staring suspiciously at me, and then later after a stupidly tight and low turn on wet tarmac I fell off my bike, grazing my knee and turning it a lovely shade of purple. Hurt like hell for a while, so I sat and rested it before moving on.

On Saturday my dear friend James came up from Kobe with our friend Eri, and I gave them a haphazard tour of Tokyo. Well, Shinjuku. Well, a bit of it. Returned to the New York Bar (“I’m practically a regular,” I said wittily, with the kind of wit I am valued for at the New York Bar, where all the staff probably know my name, maybe) for another £11 martini, then a meal at a Chinese restaurant (where the food is nothing like good, authentic, British Chinese food).

The day after I’d signed up for this 300 yen sightseeing do, run by the International Office. It was rather enlightening. We saw the Diet, the seat of the Japanese government, and the House of Representatives.


Then a westward jaunt to the Edo Tokyo Museum. Not the best museum I’ve seen lately (that’d have to be the National Museum of Korea) but a nice place to while away a Sunday afternoon. A lot of meticulously-crafted little models, which were gorgeous.

Stages in woodblock printing.

Wartime sketches of the USS Saratoga and Yorktown.

There was quite an interesting point in the exhibition where you passed out of the war-era Tokyo, with the bombs dropping all around and fires raging and desperation looming only to find yourself in the post-war section, surrounded by modern automobiles and inane 50s TV commercials. I like to think that this somehow reflects the shock to the national psyche after Japan’s defeat, or it might just be poor planning on the part of the museum.

After that, we went to a nearby chankonabe restaurant which serves the shabu-shabu so beloved of sumo wrestlers. “I can tell why they’re so fat,” I wittily quipped quippily, confronted by mounds of fish and veg and meat.

And did I mention, I finished Nanowrimo? Yes, behold the snazzy winner’s web badge to the right there (unless you’ve got this on a RSS feed, you clever person). It seemed an impossible task thirty days ago, but whether by accident or design I did about 2400 words this morning after class, leaving just another 100 in the afternoon (50,000th word was “to”) and then a few hundred just for good measure.

I eagerly await instruction on what to do next from the Nanowrimo team.

It sounds ridiculous, but getting this TV – even with all its faults　(the v-hold is all screwed up, so it’s just reverted to filling up a quarter of the screen) – has heightened my mood considerably. And I think I know why.
Japan has this culture of “insider” and “outsider”, and if you are not inside the group you are outside the group. In my room, I’m disconnected from the outside world. The only connection I have is the internet – which for all intents and purposes is connecting me to Western culture. I am not in Japanese culture. I don’t read Japanese newspapers or the magazines, I don’t talk with the average Japanese person (not counting students and young people), I have no idea about the zeitgeist (時鬼？）.

But a TV is a magic box; it gives me a steady feed of what Japanese people are saying or doing or thinking about, 24/7. Like it or not, TV defines culture more than anyone would like to believe. And now I have a direct connection to Japanese culture, even if I don’t understand 90% of it. I can turn on the TV in the morning and watch the news and see the weather, and somehow that changes everything.

Today is 文化の日, which means Culture Day, which means another day off school for our lazy asses.

I went to Yoyogi to try to find the Kinokuniya bookstore to get an English copy of this Japanese textbook, J301, but I wound up in a dead neighbourhood with no bookstore in sight (although I did find the curiously quiet site of the NTT DoCoMo Yoyogi Building). So instead of wandering around there (it was cold and windy and I stupidly hadn’t brought a jacket) I made yet another trip to damn Akihabara to buy a camera.

It is a Sony A300 with a 18-70mm zoom lens. It is lovely.

(There was a fun exchange in the shop. There I was, actually using practical Japanese in my conversation with the clerk, and I heard a tourist behind me ask a flummoxed shop assistant, in English, if there was a toilet. The assistant seemed bamboozled, so I stepped in and, cool as a cucumber, translated. “There’s no toilet, I’m afraid,” I said, before going back to my purchase. Oh yeah.)

So what better place to try out my fancy new camera than the Tokyo Jidai Matsuri, a uniquely Japanese parade of history from Asakusa to nearby Tawaramachi? I met up with Fran and Ella, and after a quick Mos Burger we staked out a spot. Oh, the things what we saw!

So after that we caught the metro to Asakusa (pointlessly, as we found out – would have been easier to walk) and headed to Sensoji temple to meet our (now mutual) friend Satomi. Sensoji has a special place in my heart, being one of the final places I went to before leaving Tokyo forever last time. Fulla tourists, but that’s pretty much the course.

The temple gate. (The temple itself was covered up for refurbishment or something, probably.)

It was pretty dark inside, but the A300 was up to the task.

And then a wander through the little shopping alleys and into Asakusa proper, Tokyo’s 下町 – literally “downtown”, but more “Altstadt”.

Asakusa's famed "golden turd", atop the Asahi beer building.

On Sunday Chris and I went along, with a few other students, to a small cultural festival at a community centre just down the road from our uni. It wasn’t anything big – just a few performances by the kids from the local schools, an audience of their parents and old people – but it was a fascinating look at the side of Japan we don’t really see as young students, the world of kids and their grandparents and well-groomed old men in suits who happily give you free beer at the end. Ah, beer, the great connector.

We had to give a short self-introduction in front of a small crowd of Japanese grandmothers, which we found out about thirty seconds before we had to do it, but as I’ve done about a million self-introductions in the last month it rolled off the tongue. I even got a tiny bit of applause at my self-deprecating “日本語が上手じゃありませんけど、がんばります” (At Japanese I lack skill but I will persevere).

On Monday our JASSO came in – 160,000 delicious yen. Then, for a long time nothing happened.

At Ochanomizu, I caught this lovely sight of a middle-aged couple stopping to admire the view from a bridge over the Kanda. They remind me of Noguchi and Kazu from Mishima’s Utage no Ato, I write, pretentiously.

Yesterday I trawled Yodobashi Camera, giving the cameras a try in my long quest for Durrant’s Next Top Model (of Camera), snapping a few pictures on my SD card for later review. Verdict: Pentax K-m was so horribly bad with and lack of detail and JPEG mush that I wonder if the settings were screwed up. The Sony alpha series were nice, but it is not a camera made for human hands, as several people have pointed out. The Nikon D3000 is fine, but picking up the Canon Kiss X2 and trying it out seriously endeared me to it. It just felt right, and the photos are lovely. (Only problem is the expense. May just plump for the next model down.)

After that I met up with the guys for a meal with Ella’s friend Satomi. Had a wander through Shinjuku – will never get tired of that – and wound up at a very exclusive-seeming restaurant with private rooms, dark lighting, muted dark woods, trickling water features with fish in – the works.

We had shabu-shabu, a Japanese dish very similar to one I had in Korea all the time (and may be the same thing) – a pot of boiling water at the table with stock into which are dropped vegetables and bits of meat which are left to boil, and then plucked out and eaten. It was nice, but a tad unfilling.

We wound up at an arcade where the girls did purikura and the guys KILLED ZOMBIES WITH KEYBOARDS AND SHOT GUYS WITH GUNS AND PLAYED DRUMS

YEAH TAKE THAT DRUMS

EAT BULLETS!!!

TYPE YOU DAMN ZOMBIES, TYPE

bah how is this manly

Anyway, after spending too much on the UFO Catcher trying to win a foam pillow for some reason, we went home.