Sons of Loki

Last time in my exciting tales, I was on a bus coming in to park outside the Subaru Building in West Shinjuku. Will I survive to catch my plane on Monday? Can I finish all the odd jobs I have left to do? Will the mysteries of the Nagano Sword be finally revealed? HERE I TELL ALL

We got back earlier than expected, so Jade and I got back to my room pretty early. She caught some kip; I caught up with the latest happenings on the interwebs and fretted about the impending rent payment and tried to work out how I was going to put the contents of an entire room and ten months of life into one suitcase and two bags.

We took a run to Musashi-sakai for gyoza and ramen with our friend Hime, who was sadly headed back to Korea that day, a few days before we headed home. After goodbyes we headed back to TUFS where I managed to get my rent shit sorted

Sort of. I mean, no one really seemed that bothered that I’d been given a day to pay £500, but I guess I was lucky not to have to pay it there and then. I’ll have to make an international payment which will cost me £7.50 out of me own pocket and christ, I don’t know.

Anyway, I asked myself: if I had one last free night in Tokyo – which I did – where would I go? The answer was, of course, the New York Bar at the Park Hyatt.

Haha! Who would believe that a penniless student loser like myself would sort of become a regular at the New York Bar? Some English tourists asked me for directions, and I was like – oh, it’s just up here, and you take a lift to the sky lobby … It must have been my fifth time, actually, and screw it if a martini costs £12 because there’s no bar more incredible, with that amazing view of Shinjuku and beyond out the window.

I came in shorts. There was a dress code. They sent a man to get me some black trousers to change into. Only in Japan.

Anyway, we had a drink and because we aren’t ridiculously rich (yet) we got out of there and rolled on down to Hanbey in Kichijoij, which is sort of the polar opposite of the New York Bar – noisy, cheap, and completely out of date. We managed to drag Katy out too, had a few beers and yakitori and a frog leg, which I’d actually got used to. And that was it. Last Friday night in Japan.

The next day, I finished off my year abroad report for Leeds. 2,000 words is actually quite a lot, although if Leeds hadn’t asked me to do it I probably would have written a blog post to the same effect anyway. Long story short: had some ups, had some downs, came away with a better understanding of myself. And a better understanding of how I study, too. Jade went out into town for a final wander, but I had no such luxury: after feeling strangely emotional listening to Marisa Stole The Precious Thing I caught the train to Fuchu. Technically I live in Fuchu City, but it’s a lot easier to get to Koganei City from TUFS, and so I’d only been to Fuchu twice: once at the start of the year for administrative procedures, and once in December to go see Avatar.

I was there to cancel my phone and return my health insurance card, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to cancel my phone the next day. So I headed down to City Hall for to settle my national health fees and return the card, as is required.

City Hall.

On a Saturday.

It’s only open weekdays.

So continued the miserable story of my attempt to leave the country.

Thus foiled, I gave up and went for curry one last time, then wandered down to the Fuchu shrine we visited all those months ago. I washed my hands at the trough, wandered inside. It was quiet. Went up to the shrine, tossed a few coins in, awakened the spirits. Asked for a safe trip home. Bowed, turned around, headed back to the modern world.

BOOM! KAPOW! We stumbled out of Asakusa station into a warzone; police marshalling traffic, explosions in the sky, the distant sound of mortars firing, the street streaming with refugees. Except it was the Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival, and we were dressed like this:


You can’t see the bow I tied in Jade’s obi. I was proud of that. It looked pretty bad, but it was the first time I’d even tried tying an obi, and the instructions were all in Japanese, and it may not have looked exactly proper but it was damn good for a first try, I reckon.

The place was packed, and we weren’t even at the actual site. And we were late (due to obi complications). And we were trying to meet up with Satomi, but it dawned that in the streets heaving with people in a neighbourhood neither of us knew, with the phone service overloaded in some parts and impossible to talk on due to GIANT BOOMS, meeting up wouldn’t be possible.

I got quite flustered, but then I realised – hey, しょうがない, and then tried to enjoy what was left of the fireworks. I mean, we couldn’t actually see anything because of the buildings, but I seen fireworks before. What was more exciting was the atmosphere.


There were a lot of girls wearing yukata – the only guys in them were boyfriends and a handful of gaijin like us, dressing up for the night. An old man turned to us and gave us a kind 「かわいい。」, which was sweet. Frenzied street sellers sold takoyaki, screaming 「サンビャク！さんびゃくえん！！」 at festivalgoers. I bought some cus – well, it’s what you do at festivals, right? – and it was delicious. We managed to avoid the crush of people leaving by walking down to JR Asakusabashi station – buying some highballs on the way – and got the train to Ogikubo to see Risako and Rob. What with it being our final night in Tokyo, we decided to go to McDonalds.

The next day, we left. And that’s a story for another day.

I cycled along Route 14 on my way back from Kichijoji. I can’t remember what I was listening to, but it seemed apt. I passed glowing family restaurants in the dark, catching a vignette of a store manager standing, alone, keeping a midnight vigil over rows of empty tables. Brief traffic flashes past. The night air whips past, cool and refreshing. This is my city.

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.

The word of the day is “crash blossom“. On Nippon Housou 1242 AM Radio, they are debating the relative merits of YouTube and Nico Nico Douga.

The day after – or was it the same day? – I’m on the 48th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. Actually, the 47th floor, where the toilets are. Away from the bright lights and monochrome carpets of the observation deck on the floor above, the oddly-lengthy corridor to the toilets is plain, a shade of industrial beige, unadorned. It seems impossible that this floor was once open to the elements, as big-muscled construction workers wearing blue bandanas hoisted great steel beams into place, laid cabling, built stairs up to a floor that had yet to exist. If you were one of those workers putting this floor up, twenty years ago, two-hundred and thirty metres above the ground, would you be able to imagine how it would look full of tourists and gift shops and with a grand piano? How’d they get that up there, anyway? The whole place seems impossible, a logical contradiction.

Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.

The next day – or it might have been today – Rob and I, sweltering from the heat, take a seat on a bench outside MUFJ in Kichijoji. We are killing time until the contact lenses we have ordered from the local opticians are ready, at 2pm. The lenses are made in Japan – it should be cheaper to bulk-buy them here and bring them back with us. I bought a collection of Otsuichi’s stories, Zoo 1, and the first The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya novel. I feel like we’re two old men, sitting on benches all day long.

Some time before, I’m at ICU for their end-of-term party thing. It’s a bright, sunny day. Someone hands out water pistols. I take a few photos, lie back on the grass, bask in the sun. It’s certainly summer.

Back in Shinjuku, we browse all seven floors of a branch of Marui, one filled with little boutiques for the stranger side of Tokyo fashion – gothic, lolita, punk, gothic lolita, steampunk, and various combinations of them all. Two middle-aged men dressed up like china dolls in pink frilly dresses and blonde curls stomp around on platform shoes. Victorian angels float through the merchandise. On the first floor, I buy a silkscreen print, which later covers my window.

Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.

Close to midnight, I get on the wrong train and end up on the Hashimoto spur. Luckily, I can still get home before the trains stop running. I am at a station called Keio Tamagawa with about three or four other people on the platform, all of us waiting for the last train.

A lot earlier, in the book shop of the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, I flick through glossy, enticing books on architecture. I ache with desire to become an architect and design sweeping facades of glass and pine, design for better living, live in Fallingwater and listen to jazz all day.

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2.

The night before ICU’s party, I’m in Koreatown with Kaz and Rob and Kanako and friends, feeling nostalgic at the PCbangs and noraebangs, mixing the egg into the bibimbap and wrapping up chunks of barbecued pork in leaves of lettuce with lashes of chilli sauce. This time a year previously, I must have been heading out to Seoul for a month. It seems like forever ago.

“”Every day I write the book”. Elvis Costello,” says the DJ on Nippon 1242.

Today, I’m back on Route 14, cycling back wearing my nice new climbing boots which I bought for scaling Mount Fuji in two weeks’ time. Everything is so perfect, so peaceful, and yet there’s an underlying current of discomfort. It can’t be summed up in words, that’s why. I’m overwhelmed by it all. The sheer beauty of nature, the overbearing unending joy of living, when everything’s going right – no one can quite write that down. It’s painful.

Following the conclusion of my mid-term exam, I decided to hit Tokyo again. Of course, all too soon, going to Tokyo will be a lot more difficult than hopping on the Keio Line from Tobitakyu station, and words like “Semi-Special Express” and “Keio West Entrance” will be distant memories – like a dream, even.

I hit my usual places in Shinjuku – a few rounds of Beatmania IIDX and Drummania (the latter I’m getting better at, the former I fail hugely at), the game store where I never buy anything (I only go back because I saw Drummania for sale there once, but didn’t buy it, and now I regret it) – then thought I’d check out this exhibition at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art in Chiyoda, something about architecture that I’d read an article about in Metropolis.

Regrettably, it turned out to be closed on Mondays, but no worries: instead I enjoyed a relaxing stroll around the perimeter of the Imperial Palace, which is closed to plebs like me.
After a quick burger and a bit of kanji study in a Ginza Lotteria (about the least classy meal you can have in ultra-classy Ginza) I came to Tokyo Station (probably my favourite station in all of Tokyo; an important hub like Shinjuku, but not as inhuman and impersonal) and wound up, like I so often do, back on the streets of New York City, a dope fiend, a slave, then prison; then the madhouse; then the grave Akihabara.

Ah, I’ll miss that fucking place (I imagine in decades to come, travel guides to Tokyo will open the section on Akihabara with a quote from me along those lines). The hobby stores. The bizarre proliferation of home security stalls. The game shops, of course; the myriad electronics meccas, the maid cafes, the KFC, the Coco Curryhouse; the corner which valiantly tries to ignore the rest of the place by having trendy cafes and a Muji and a pâtisserie but lets the side down by including a (ridiculously popular) Gundam Cafe; the streets and alleys which I shamefully know like the back of my hand.

In Yodobashi Camera I listened to their hi-fi equipment, because I’ve got it into my head that, as a music-loving nerd, my room next year will not be complete without some big-ass floorstanding speakers and the cheapest best-sounding amplifier I can buy (probably the Q Acoustics 1030is and an amp from the Cambridge Audio Topaz range at the moment, he says, pretending he knows something about hi-fi systems). I thought I spied a bargain on a Marantz amp, but it turns out I can get it cheaper in the UK and it’s a bit pants anyway, so that saves me posting a 7kg amplifier back home.

So. 東京、また逢う日まで (until we meet again, Tokyo)…

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).

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…

It’s always slightly weird, waking up in the morning and going someplace. Usually, if I’m going out for the day I only get into Tokyo about midday at the earliest. But today I was up at 7am, quick shower, and onwards to Nippori station to catch the Keisei Limited Express to Narita Airport to meet my sister Katie and her partner Chris, who were landing on a Virgin Atlantic flight at 9:55am. The weather today has, for a change, been actually warm, and they couldn’t have picked a nicer day to arrive (considering five days ago it was snowing).

I’ve never been to meet anyone at the airport… apart from once or twice to meet my sister home from her travels. So it was a little novel to be checking the flight times on my mobile as I sped through the weird countryside of Chiba. At Terminal 1, I had a quick wee before coming back out to the (almost empty) arrivals lounge to see Katie and Chris standing next to a ticket counter looking lost as if they’d just been plucked straight from Sheffield and somehow wandered into my life in Japan.

So much to explain! There were guffaws aplenty at “Pocari Sweat”, yappari. Down at the JR Pass counter they got their magic rail passes (truly envious of that, but as a resident I can’t buy one) from a very polite gentleman who spoke English to them and, realising that I knew Japanese, was entirely forthcoming in speaking Japanese to me. I found that really refreshing, that he didn’t balk at a foreigner speaking Japanese, and that he didn’t patronise me by switching to English.

On the way out we got stopped by the fuzz. I’ve heard about the duo who patrol Narita Airport; they only check foreigners. Well, foreign-looking foreigners. Even if you’re just waiting for somebody they’ll come by and check you out – and they’ll be very polite and friendly about it, of course.

My last encounter with the police fresh in my mind, I resisted flashing my gaijin card as my sister and Chris showed their passports. Ah, it’s only a small thing, but they had no reason to see my ID, and when they asked for it, I simply said “Passport ga motte imasen. Ai ni kimashita.” (“I don’t have my passport with me. I came to meet these guys.”) We had a brief chat and I explained that she was my sister and I was an exchange student and he only wound up asking for my phone number, which I couldn’t be bothered to argue about. (They were nice guys, the cops usually are.) But I didn’t show my ID. A tiny victory for civil rights!

Tickets in hand we boarded the Narita Express – very swish and very comfortable, although I’m not sure it’s worth the extra 2,000 yen over the 1,000 Keisei limited express.

In Shinjuku, I escorted them to the Hotel Rose Garden, which looks like a reasonably swish place (although the rooms are tiny).

I gave them the usual tour of Shinjuku; up the Tokyo Metropolitan Towers to the south observation deck, then over to Kabukicho and lunch in a little ramen joint, before a wander through a games arcade (where I pulverised “Train-Train” on Taiko no tatsujin and got like a billion points) and backstreets and to a Starbucks to plan the next day. I was amazed how tired I was, but I did get up at 7am. Tomorrow, one hopes, I shall awake refreshed for another day of tourguiding. It’s tough work.

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.

I got into the Teriyaki Boyz recently, this Japanese rap supergroup comprised of Nigo (founder of A Bathing Ape), a dude called Wise, Verbal from M-Flo, and Ilmari and Ryo-Z from j-rap superstars RIP SLYME. I thought I’d expand my burgeoning interest in J-hip-hop by checking out Rip Slyme, who I was vaguely aware of before. So, first of all, listen to this. Listen to that synth bassline when it kicks in at 0:30. Isn’t that just the best thing you ever heard? Don’t you want it injected into your blood to harness the supreme sunny glory of that synth? Don’t you want it to be played from all the rooftops of all the houses across the land?

Saturday I was thinking about heading down to Shibuya to check out the BAPE store (as a child of 00s hip-hop rather than 90s rap I have been subtly brainwashed to buy designer clothes rather than shoot cops) but I ended up doing the complete opposite and shopping Akiba for DVI cables and cheap monitors (you can pick up a second-hand TFT one for 2.5k (£15), which is nuts). After that I met up with the guys in Shinjuku for nomikai, literally “drink-meet”. We found a izakaya which we thought was deliciously cheap. However, we had been burned. The izakaya was not offering cheap nomihoudai, as represented. It was some kind of gypsy grifter establishment … sorry, I’m channelling Philip K Dick here. Anyway, we ended up with a lot of food we didn’t want and a bill for 3,500 yen each and some dangerously watered-down cocktails. I wanted to use my gaijin smash to escape, but in the end decided to save it for another day.

Luckily, the club we went to was free.

We decided – well, the girls decided – to take Miles to his first ever gay club. And the place for gay clubs in Tokyo is Nichome in Shinjuku, so that’s where we went.

Man, it was gay. Nary a woman in sight. Bars with hilarious names. Men holding hands. Sunkus (truly the gayest combini chain). It was kind of exciting, in a gay way, like I imagine San Francisco to be. We met a Australian girl with her male friend (gay, no doubt) who was trying to find the same gay club as us (“Arty Farty”, which sounds pretty gay). Eventually we found it, went inside, and bought our mandatory gay drink (mine was a gay Vanilla Mule). Unsurprisingly, the place was packed with men. From what I hear, Arty Farty is the only place to attract a sizable gaijin (or should I say “gay-jin”? no, perhaps not) crowd, so there were quite a few foreigners about. And so we drank our drinks and entered the gay dancefloor, fittingly as “I Will Survive” came on.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. No, actually, I had a really good time. There was just a different vibe to other clubs; everyone was there to have a good time, not to get pissed or start a fight or hook up with girls. (Uh, you know what I mean.) The music wasn’t too bad, and it was a whole lot cheaper than other places in Tokyo – and you got access to their other branch for free, which means basically two clubs for the price of none.

Today I went to the Tachikawa immigration bureau to get a student work permit. It was my first interaction with the machine of Japanese government bureaucracy by myself, so I’m surprised it went as smoothly as it did. I brought my documents and the form from TUFS authorising me to work, waited patiently for my number to come up, went up, was told by a scary man to fill out a form, filled out the form, waited for my next number to come up, went back up and – yes! – hadn’t done anything wrong. Japanese efficiency applying to everything but government, I should receive my permit in three weeks.

It was quite interesting, the ethnic mix in the waiting room. I know it’s not so, but always I tend to assume that the majority of gaijin in Japan are Americans, followed by Europeans, but that’s a colossal mistake. Of the zainichi (from zainichi gaikokujin, lit. “living in Japan foreigners”) the vast majority are ethnic Koreans and Chinese, who have quite an interesting place in Japanese society – they were born in Japan, have lived in Japan their entire lives, speak only Japanese and are to all intents and purposes Japanese, and yet just … aren’t. It’s an interesting subject.

Playing a stolen guitar along to an old Brian Eno track, and it is Christmas! Tokyo has gone in for it in a mildly big way: there are lights everywhere, and Christmas cheer, and Mariah Carey bellows forth from every shop. The day itself here is more of a thing for couples to get together and go down to Odaiba or Shibuya or wherever, which is kind of sweet, even for hopeless singles like myself.

So while my stomach has been grumbling for roast pig and potatoes and stuffing and gravy and carrots and maybe peas and trying to cram ourselves round a tiny table in a room that is slightly too cold with 60s Christmas hits playing and everyone’s wearing hats and reading out lame jokes before the customary slouch in the living room watching whatever crap’s on and gorging on more food – ah, Christmas! – my friend Zo’s been visiting from Leeds and sleeping on my floor and other people have come in from other parts of the country and it’s been an exciting and very expensive week.

Saturday saw a trip to Shinjuku with Rob and Zo, where we dined on fine okonomiyaki (Japanese omelette-y fried noodles … like a pancake … or maybe pizza but not really anything like pizza) in a fine-enough department-store food-court establishment. My coursemates Hugo and James had made the trip up from Nagoya, and our friend Emily was in from England staying with her relatives, and then Kaz turned up, and it was like old times.

You wouldn't like Rob when he's angry.

Then up to 5F in a nondescript tower to a branch of Hub to meet up with Zo again, who was with a few of his friends – Hosei graduates who came to Leeds a few years back. Zo’s been at Leeds for six or seven years now on various degrees, so he’s like a constant Methuselah of the Japanese Society, familiar with many years of graduates.
I couldn’t help but be amused by an incident in the lift as we left, when it stopped on 3F and we were confronted by a Hooters-style semi-girlie-bar, with scantily-clad waitresses and two Japanese men waiting for the lift. There were a few comedic seconds of silence at we stared at each other, each bamboozled by the scene before our eyes – the apparent respectability of the two men, the half-naked waitress, the lift packed with gaijin sardines – before both sides of the divide erupted into astonished conversation and the doors mercifully closed.

On Monday we all met up again in Akihabara, for some serious geekage. In Yodobashi Camera, I played an electronic guitar with no strings (verdict: the most pointless instrument in the world) and made Bach-aficionado Hugo play the JR station jingles from a book of sheet music we found in the keyboard section. Then a wander round the hobby section, where the rows and rows of Gundam models stirred some long-forgotten otakuness in me, but ultimately failed to cause a relapse of my condition, thankfully.

We then headed to Odaiba, the Tokyo waterfront area, which I must admit is growing on me. We had a wander around the shops, a gaze at the skyscrapers of Minato Ward glittering across the Bay, and then (in bitterly cold windswept conditions) watched the waterfront lightshow, which was pretty cool (even if it is essentially a sprinkler on a pier with a projector pointed at it).

Tuesday saw a trip with Zo to the famous Starbucks over Shibuya Crossing for a eclair latte thing(?).

After I bought a polarising filter for my camera, Zo split off to elsewhere and I met Emily and the guys to watch the new One Piece film with the guys in Shibuya (coincidentally at the very same cinema I saw Evangelion 1.0 at two years ago). Knowing absolutely nothing about One Piece, and knowing not so much Japanese either, I wasn’t sure how much I’d get but it was an enjoyable romp, for sure. The others didn’t seem to like it so much (being One Piece fans, I imagine they find that the franchise is running a little out of steam) but I’m looking forward to starting on the manga that sits upon my shelf.

After that we met back up with Zo and assaulted a local game centre, where much fighting occurred and I played Taiko no Tatsujin (high score!) and Drummania (sort of getting the hang of it, even if I got a ‘E’ on “Through The Fire and Flames”).


We also bought some cream shoes (I am entirely unsure of the proper name, but that’s the katakana for you) in Shibuya, which are basically incredibly unhealthy cream puffs sold from a place by the station which cost ¥150 and are oh god so delicious, so sugary on the outside and so pastry-y in the middle and then so sweet sweet cream on the inside.

Finally, Zo, Miles and I wound up in Kichijoji to meet Kaz, who has a car, and promised to drive us aimlessly around Tokyo until the wee hours. He sped off on his Triumph to get his car:


while we loitered dangerously in a local Family Mart and laughed at the merchandise.

Kaz came back with his Toyota and we drove into Shinjuku – so cool – and picked up Rob and went barrelling downtown just as “All The Small Things” came on and it was sweet.


Tokyo was being gorgeous as ever, the endless streets, endless stores, endless people on their errands – it occurred to me that there are oh so many stories in the naked city – and I realised that you don’t really get as good a sense of the sheer mindblowing size of the Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama megacity from a train as you do from a car, where it’s obvious just how it keeps going, and going, and going, and every street you cross over at a junction has its own shops and homes and people just like the one you’re driving down, and then there are a hundred other streets after that one; and you slowly begin to build the resulting grid of streets up in your mind and you realise that this city is the biggest place you’ll ever see and it is beautiful. It made me go all funny inside, to see the salarymen and the taxi drivers and the couples flashing past in an instant, like I wanted to find the words to describe the beauty and the lonely existentialism of the night as we flashed across the Arakawa but just couldn’t. We put on the Akira soundtrack, which was great as the skyscrapers went by, and then the Teriyaki Boyz’ “Tokyo Drift” as we got into Ginza, which was good dumb fun, and then bellowed “LINDA LINDA!!” along with the Blue Hearts as we headed down to Yokohama. Yokohama seemed pretty nice: surprisingly different to neighbouring Tokyo, more open, more modern.

It’s getting better, sort of. After about a month too long and a few chats with teachers I have got the hang of the Japanese lessons, to an extent, just in time for our week-long break (school festival, which if it means no lessons is something I’m all for). And I’ve settled in, sort of. I still make the same kind of stupid mistakes I did at the beginning (I accidentally bought a second duvet cover instead of a bedsheet the other day, so I just hacked (literally) the duvet cover into a bedsheet and it’s worked so far) but they no longer bother me.

I love TV. Yesterday I watched a Korean language-learning programme on NHK Educational, and it’s in Japanese of course, and it’s a strange experience to learn a language in a language you do not yet know entirely. But it makes perfect sense in a strange way, seeing as Korean is far more like Japanese than English.

NHK is the equivalent to the BBC, and NHK Educational is what BBC Two started off as – the more highbrow intellectual counterpart to the entertainment-based NHK General. It’s touching (and telling) that even at prime-time, when BBC 2 is showing How Clean is Your MP? and Mastermindchef Extreme, NHK Educational is teaching people how to make a quilt and while ITV is sticking Simon Cowell’s fat mug on screen to gurn at hapless children, NHK is showing the sign-language news on at 8:45pm.

Yeah. So yesterday I decided to get out, fix up something highbrow like.

Had a wander around Shinjuku for lunch (been here six weeks and I still don’t think I will ever get tired of that place) and got the train to Rikugien, a lovely little garden tucked away by Komagome station on the north side. Birds tweeted. Couples walked around in kimonos. Salarymen entertained their compensated dates. It warmed the cockles of my cold, cold heart, to see the pretty trees and the swimming turtles. The light was doing lovely things.