Sons of Loki

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.

Me, I ain’t goin’ anywhere
Just sit and watch the sun come up
I like it here — Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Albert Goes West”

How to explain the subtle beauty of staring out of one’s window at the crystal white towers of downtown Fuchu-shi against the distant mounds of the Kanto Mountains some twenty-five kilometres away? The heady joy of seeing the buildings of the police academy lit up in sunset orange as a lone baseball pitcher stands in the middle of the sports field, the glory of the eastern sky glowing behind him?

I’m feeling so bipolar with Japanese. I wake up in the morning and struggle through the lessons and barely understand anything and think “oh god why am I even bothering with this I feel absolutely nothing for this language”. But I was talking to George on Facebook, and he basically said that the key is to find out what you enjoy about learning this language, because the second Japanese becomes a chore all is lost. And Rob echoed that the other night, when we went for gyoza with visiting-from-the-UK Emily in Shinjuku, especially when he said “I want Matt to get good at Japanese!” That touched me. That made me want to ganbarimasu.

I do want to get good at Japanese. It’s just I’m in a hard stage. Textbooks can’t really teach me much, but I am nowhere near good enough to read novels or anything like that, and conversation – well, it’s surprisingly difficult to actually speak Japanese here. Conversations with shop staff – even if they don’t immediately speak to you in English – are necessarily limited. Today I cashed a traveller’s cheque at MUFJ in Musashisakai, but I fumbled my opening line of 両替をしたいんですが and dropped back to English. I’m not sure I have the confidence to really speak Japanese as much as I should, because I don’t know the words, but the best way to learn words is by conversation, and so you get a catch-22 that has left me in these doldrums of Japanese study.

That kind of leaves manga, but again it takes a lot of effort to read at my stage. Still, it is perhaps the best way to learn, being real Japanese spoken in half-familiar situations, and you can take it at your own pace. People have recommended stuff to me – I have Naruto, One-Piece, and something called Hell Teacher Nūbē – but I’ve been trying to find a copy of a manga I barely know anything about called Planetes, which I heard about on this website dedicated to ultra-realistic space-based science fiction. This piqued my interest, and today I found a copy and started reading the first few pages. I was surprised to find that even though I didn’t understand half of it, I wanted to read on. The art is pretty, and the writing intrigues me. This is good.

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).