Sons of Loki

So on Monday, I had my final exam, the one that I got a crappy mark on last time and led me to retake the module. I’d done a bit of revision, and I was feeling pretty confident after we finished the paper. As we went to take the oral test on the PCs there seemed to be a technical problem; after a few minutes our teacher just decided to dismiss us all, and with a cheer and a round of applause Integrated Japanese 300 was over.

To the beach! Jade really wanted to hit the beach in Japan, and I sort of did too, what with the beautiful weather we’d been having. No one else was around to come along, unfortunately, so it was just the two of us getting on the Yokosuka line down to Kamakura. We got there about 3:30pm, so I assumed the beach would be full, but thankfully it wasn’t too bad; a smattering of youths and worryingly tattooed fellows, plus surfers. Lots of surfers.

The tourists come to Kamakura for the temples and giant Buddha, as what I have previously writ, but the surfers come for the waves generated by the cove. So it’s not really a beach to go paddle in.

So we bought loads of food and found a spot and got sand everywhere and in our valuable electronics (hence the lack of photos, not willing to get my camera covered in sand – luckily I wasn’t stupid enough to bring my laptop), then rented an inflatable alligator and hit the waves. Big, big waves. Bobbed around, had a swim, dodged surfers, tried forward rolls as the waves rushed towards us. Great fun. We bought watermelons (which the big ass ravens devoured happily when we were in the water). A guy got buried and a dog sniffed at him. A group of young people played that game where you blindfold someone and hit a watermelon (something like that, it’s a Japanese tradition). As the sun went down, I dug a trench and stared up at the sky. Bliss.

The next day, we got our results. I passed with 80/90 or something, having made some silly mistakes, and my grade for the year came to a B, which …
I’ll be honest, I didn’t really care. I realised very soon during my year abroad that I wouldn’t be learning anything of value from classroom work, so I don’t know what that mark means. It was my second time round, so I probably should have done better. But I feel like for the amount of work I put in, it was a pretty good mark. In the end, all I really care about is actual language ability, not marks.

So, that was the end. We went out in the afternoon to Nakano Broadway, where I picked up a few souvenirs and presents, then went out that night to Shinjuku with Rob and a few friends for monjayaki, where I astonished all with my amazing monjayaki skills (having done it, um, once before).

That night we would be taking a night bus to Osaka, so we had an hour to kill. I fancied a bit of final karaoke (it did turn out to be the last karaoke I went to in Japan) so we went to the cool-looking Karaoke-Kan on the corner near the Shinjuku Center Building and sang a bit of Kimura Kaela and Utada Hikaru, before stocking up for the journey and catching the Willer Travel coach.

The journey was a little hellish. I’d gone for the Standard coach, whereas before I think I’d splashed out on the slightly nicer one with better seats, so sleeping was pretty much impossible. I tried listening to Brian Eno’s Apollo and remember thinking something about how ambient music soaks up the mood and feeling of whatever situation you’ve listened to it in. Something like that.

Jade was a little worse for wear from the trip, and when we arrived in Osaka at oh-dark-hundred I wasn’t feeling fantastic either. Luckily, shortly before either of us crumbled and died we found the one damn cafe open at 8:30am and got some coffee, and after that we felt more up to tackling the day.

For some reason or other we decided to go hit Kobe, so off we went to get the Hankyu line, which comes in ornate varnished mahogany.

Kobe was nice. The last time I went it was pissing it down, so it was nice to explore the old foreigners’ district of Kitano in the sunshine.



Then we took a wander down to the port. I really wanted to visit the Maritime Museum one more time, but time was not on our side, alas.

For lunch, what else but…

Kobe beef?
We found a little restaurant above a butchers that did sukiyaki and something else (a kind of shabu shabu?) for 1,500 yen, which is well cheap for Kobe beef. Suspiciously cheap, actually, but it looked like a classy place.

After that we got back to Osaka and visited the lovely castle and environs. At the nearby stadium crowds of fans waited for some talentless boy band, waving those damn fans. Man, I’d hate to be a girl in Japan.

I fancied heading back to the Osaka Aquarium I’d been to in 2007. I was slightly worried about how long we’d have, but seeing as it was summer it was open until 8pm, and we also lucked out with the After 5 Pair Ticket which meant it was only 1,700 yen each, not 2,000.

It’s a really good aquarium, with some fascinating creatures and habitats there.



They had interactive audio guides supplied in the form of downloadable DS software, which meant just switching on your DS and connecting to the aquarium’s wi-fi. Neat.

As the aquarium closed we were politely chased out. Consequently, we headed down to Dotonbori, the big canal that runs through downtown Osaka (and gives the place a very different feel to Tokyo). I wanted to get some photos for my visual novel Yoshida, it being set partly in the section of the canal where the infamous events of one night in 1985 took place.

After getting photos of the amazing Glico man (and being tutted at by some snotty-nosed local!) we found some little eatery for curry rice and wound up back at the Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza for a well-deserved sleep. I had a nice soak in the baths, struggled through a few pages of Kacho Shima Kosaku, then retired to my capsule for the night.

The next day, we hit Kyoto! Ah, Kyoto … First time I visited, in 2007 I spent several hours straight off the shinkansen lugging all my worldly goods around for the best part of an evening, searching for a hotel and eventually winding up in a capsule somewhere. The key lesson being, of course, book your accommodation in advance. Anyway, while I love Tokyo, and sort of like Osaka, Kyoto’s always been a bit more complicated.

My main goal was to visit the famous Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but first we went to Daitokuji. Well, I think we did. It was pouring down with rain that cold morning, and I was about to turn back in wet misery when we found the tiny entrance to a group of five Zen gardens. The woman on the door was very kind, bringing us towels to dry our wet feet. Well, kind, or just not interested in having wet foreigners drip over everything, which is certainly understandable.

So, Zen.

I like Zen. As a school of philosophy, it really seems to hit the nail on the head.

It occurred to me that with these rock gardens, the monks had captured the uncapturable, from a ripple in a pond to a rolling landscape – all frozen in moss and rock and gravel.

I was really looking forward to Kinkakuji. Since I read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (and seen part of Mishima) I wanted to see the beauty that obsessed Mishima and drove one young monk to burn the place down in 1950 because true art, as everyone knows, should burn down at least once.

I dunno, it was sort of a letdown.

It’s just a gold box. A tacky gold box. Surrounded by tourists.

We went for matcha and cake, though, which was nice. I’ve never had proper matcha before, and it was delicious. Hot and bittersweet and frothy.

Then Fushima Inari, again, and the beautiful little outlook over Kyoto, again… No cat this time, though.

Back to downtown Kyoto, and we stop for a coffee. I get a phone call asking me to pay 70,800 yen by tomorrow. It appears that TUFS have failed to take my rent out of my account for the past four months. Or I’ve failed to pay them for four months but they haven’t told me. Either way, I have a day to pay. This is ridiculous. This is straight-up bullshit. They’ve been nothing but helpful for ten months and then they totally screw me over.

I swallow my rage and we go in search of old Gion.

I don’t know if we found it or not, but we had a fun wander around Kyoto, hitting Book Off and dodging past the dodgier places. Rain fell, occasionally. No geisha, but we did find some of the old timey wooden houses, which was nice. And so once again I left Kyoto, sort of forgiving it for screwing us over in the morning. We went to the train station, found the one cafe left open for a quick coffee (feeling like an inconvenience on the staff the entire time), drank lots of water and sat waiting for the bus with all the young peeps and backpackers. It made me smile to realise that while the rich and the old ride the shinkansen, the young and the poor get the nightbus. Solidarity of the youth, innit.

Some asshole was sleeping in our reserved seats. The old me would have sat somewhere else, but the new me was very angry with TUFS, and slightly angry at this man. I talked to the driver. The driver talked to the 邪魔. He moved. We sat down, and I swear he glared at me for ten minutes, but I was probably imagining it. The trip back to Shinjuku was a lot more comfortable, that time.

So what’s been going down? Not much, I don’t think. Due to my poor long-term memory, I generally have to reconstruct my life from photos I took and mails I received, Memento-style. This will probably be quite rambling.

Last week I seem to have watched Brother, by Takeshi Kitano (currently appearing in ads for some English teaching school), which was a bit pants, to be honest. It’s like Kitano has no idea how to direct Americans, so he asks them to wave their arms around and speak in expository dialogue at all times (it’s painful to watch the talented Omar Epps (of House fame) churn out such stilted dialogue). Nevertheless, the clash of Yakuza with LA is pretty fun to watch, even if it completely loses the plot in the last act.

Then I recorded a commercial for my speech class, where I played an influenza suffer who is cured by the magic of Japanese natto. I haven’t had natto in two years. It hasn’t got any better. I mean, it’s less of a vomit-inducing unpalatableness than I remember, but it’s just … unpleasant to eat.

I went to Shinjuku, where a chugger asked me for some money for charity. Now, don’t get me wrong, I give to charity and I think it’s the duty of everyone to make at least some kind of regular contribution. It’s just that I don’t give to charities I’ve never heard of. This guy, as most Japanese street collectors are, was collecting for places hit by heavy snow in Japan and while I certainly wouldn’t wish natural disasters on anyone, the fact is that I’d rather give my money to third-world nations rather than a first-world country with the second biggest economy in the world.

They obviously only pick on foreigners, because he called out to me in English. I feigned lack of comprehension, so he asked if I was Portuguese. I waved my hands and then gave up and popped a handful of change into his box.

Speaking of charities; you may wish to consider a donation to whistleblowing site Wikileaks, who have found themselves in a spot of financial bother. These guys are fighting for free speech, and not just in an abstract way; this site has brought about a lot of exposure on everything from Guantanamo Bay doctrine to the recent Carter-Ruck super-injuction.

The weekend was fun. Went for karaoke in Kichijoji with Kanako, Katy, Miles and Rob, sang the usual; bit of 80s Japanese punk, 90s Britpop, 00s rap.


Saturday wandered about Shinjuku with Katy and (eventually) went for ramen. I believe Chris wanted to see what people wear in Tokyo, so here we go:



(and isn’t Flickr so much nicer than FB’s ultra-JPEG?)

In the evening, headed to Musashi-Sakai to meet Rob and Miles where we feasted upon Subway sandwiches and bought dairy products from a local combini and ate them on a bench outside a hairdressers for reasons I can no longer remember.

And now it’s today! It snowed last night, so I went to ICU today and we had a little bit of a snowball fight. Then I got the Specials album off iTunes (it makes it so easy to whittle away all your money in tiny chunks, doesn’t it) and am thoroughly enjoying all the tracks I have sort of picked up from cultural osmosis.

For a change, I did my weekly shop yesterday in Musashi-sakai, one of the endless identical urban centres dotted along the Chuo line in West Tokyo. Did a little Christmas shopping, too, just a few things for the folks back home.

(On Gizmondo recently I saw a post about the amusing “please do it at home” signs fostering good behaviour on the Tokyo Metro, and it occurred to me the things in Japan I now take for granted are genuinely novel and “Japanese” and worthy of note for Western audiences. For example, today the woman on the till at the supermarket put my frozen veg in a paper bag with a plastic bag of ice to keep it cool. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And yet these little things are so commonplace that I barely notice them, and struggle to come up with other examples. Yesterday I noted down just a few: the marks on station platforms indicating where the doors will be when a train stops; the way everyone forms a line on either side of the train door to let passengers get off first; underground bike parks; in restaurants, a bag for your coat so it doesn’t end up smelling of smoke; free water by default; moist towelettes before you eat. And this is just stuff I noted in one evening.)

So as I popped into the bakery on the way back to the station, and as I popped a three-cheese pastry and a chocolate muffin on my tray, I was struck by a sense of … adult community. Like I fit in, like a real person, like this is my city, Fuchu-shi (although I was technically in neighbouring Koganei but it’s still West Tokyo). It’s all part of the fun of growing up and being a crusty old twenty-one years. Like, hey, I’ll do my shopping, and then run some errands like a real person! Obviously I had that independent living thing going on last year, but I never entirely felt like a Leeds resident; I was in halls, still on training wheels, always a train ride away from home. Now I have my own air conditioner and I shop in supermarkets and stop off at bakeries and they are all small things but they all add up to something like independent living, which is very exciting.

Rob tricked me on a night out last night with him and Zo (visiting from Leeds) wherein we visited some people from Hosei University (who were at Leeds last year) for okonomiyaki which was scrumptious, and then for larks did karaoke for the third time in a week and all-night karaoke for the second time in a week which was a bad idea but fun and I wound up joining the tired dregs of Shibuya in their hundreds streaming back to the station for home and bed and sleep.

I’ll leave you with this fascinating report on chimpanzee spirituality:

Gombe. At death of adult male Rix from fall from a tree, group members showed intense excitement, called, paused to stare at his corpse, then performed charging displays away from the corpse, and threw rocks in all directions, while other chimps embraced, touched and mounted one another. Later, some “spent considerable time staring at the body. One male leaned down from a limb, watched the corpse, then whimpered. Others touched or sniffed Rix’s remains. An adolescent female uninterruptedly gazed at the body for more than an hour, during which she sat motionless and in complete silence. After three hours of activity around the corpse, one of the older males finally left the clearing, walking downstream along the valley bottom. Others followed one by one, glancing over their shoulder toward Rix as they departed. One male approached the remains, leaned over for a final inspection, then hurried after the others” (de Waal 1996:56; Goodall 1986:330).

Yesterday continued our breakneck pace of getting stuff done. I was all ready to buy a bike for 7000 yen (£50) when Dan said he was sure that we could rent some, and lo and behold there was a meeting and a handful of us international students got to rent some lightly-rusted-but-working bicycles for the entire year for a bargain 1000 yen (£7). Mine is currently nameless, but I invite suggestions.

Fran and I were going to bike to Tobitakyu station to catch the train into Akihabara to see Katy, but her bike had a puncture, so she walked/ran while I biked. In the rain. Should have brought umbrella. At Tobitakyu station a genial attendent in the underground bike car park (as big as, you know, a car car park … I have just realised I wrote “Bike car park” which is essentially meaningless ignore this) talked to us very quickly in Japanese, leaving me bemused, but luckily Fran understood barely enough for us to ascertain that he was telling us that it was 100 yen for 24 hours, so I paid and parked up.

So we rolled into Akihabara half an hour late and got lost at the exit and couldn’t find Katy and then found her, extremely relieved and wet from the rain and grovelled apologies and then spent an unashamedly geeky couple of hours in Akihabara.

Laox was as overpriced as I remember.

It had changed a lot, and yet it was exactly the same. Geeks, technology, cameras, PCs, manga, anime, games, and every type of perversion lined the streets. It’s a million miles from the ultra-hip Tokyo of Shibuya, or the financial Tokyo of Shinjuku, or the historic Tokyo of Ueno.

Uhh yeah

I eventually ended up buying some Logitech – scratch that, here it’s “Logicool” for some reason – 2.1 speakers, which sound great for a mere 3,500 yen or so. Then we went to karaoke and sung stupid anime songs and accidently keyed in some obscure (to us) Japanese stadium rock from the 70s/80s, which will possibly become an unofficial theme tune, and then wound up with Wuthering Heights. Oh, karaoke, I’ve missed you. Oh, and Katy informed us that JASSO is definitely back on, the freeze being a minor hiccup.

On the train back there was a gaijin fellow who looked suspiciously like an older Lee Tergesen frowning and scribbling in a notebook. I wondered if he was making notes when he flipped a page over, caught my eye, and I saw he’d done a pen sketch of the carriage on the other side. Cool.

Today we went to meet our teacher Mochizuki-sensei at her little English conversation cafe not far from TUFS, and were served up some delicious sushi and dumplings and ice cream. After that Dan and I cycled to the nearest supermarket to finally stock up on provisions. Oh, how delightful it is to cycle through the quiet-yet-busy backstreets of Fuchu-shi at night! I bought far too much stuff, but the basics like noodles and soy sauce and curry blocks should last me a while. No room for beer, sadly. Japanese supermarkets are a bizarre experience, because they’re almost just like English ones but slightly different. There’s bread, but it’s all weird! There’s a fish counter, but it takes up half the store! The fish comes in a billion varieties and it’s all extremely cheap. The vegetables are gigantic, so much so that it’s like you’re suddenly shrunk and walked into a salad. I bought a huge apple. And so, I cycled home.