Sons of Loki

It’s been a busy few weeks.

Before I write about the epic struggle of climbing Mt Fuji, I feel like I need to keep up with the stuff I’ve been doing in the last month. This will mostly be an dispassionate list of events, but the Fuji post will hopefully be a doozy.

So … On Tuesday 29th, back in June, I went to Sweets Paradise – a Japan staple, an all-you-can-eat cake bar. I mean, loads of cake. And ice cream. As if filling up on cake wasn’t bad enough, the following day we – Hime, Katy, Fran, Ella, Miles and I – went to Yokohama to visit Chinatown.

Yokohama is part of the enormous Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama-Kawasaki conurbation, about 30 minutes south of Shinjuku by the Shonan-Shinjuku Line, and it’s quite famous for its Chinatown. It was a pretty surreal experience – it felt like London’s Chinatown, so in the end the overall feeling was something like having left Japan to visit London to visit Soho to visit Chinatown. Except, it was … a more real Chinatown?

We ate Chinese food – of course, there they just call it food – and it was pretty tasty, but … In all honestly, I’m not a huge fan of Chinese Chinese food. The tastes are a little too weird. I much prefer British Chinese food, as MSG- and fat-laden as it is. Still, the spring rolls and chicken soup was delish.

Then we took a walk down to the harbour, which was beautiful.

And then finally, a cup of “Relax Blend” tea in a charming little cafe. One of those tea/coffee houses that Japan does so well.

The day after that, I went on a ROAD TRIP. Rob’s been teaching English to this cool old dude called Abeshima-san, and he took us (Rob, Kanako and me) off to Fuji go-ko (Fuji Five Lakes), a popular tourist area to the north of Fuji, about two hours west of Tokyo. It was, as expected, very pretty, very picturesque.

We ate zaru soba, the dish of cold noodles served on a bamboo tray with a pot of sauce. I’d never eaten it before because it looked a bit … like cold, tasteless noodles, but my word, was it tasty! You pick up the noodles and dip them in the thin sauce, and they go down a treat. Later, we tried grass mochi, which were surprisingly nice.

We went to a few tourist-trappy places, like an expensive art museum (admittedly with some beautiful kimono dyed by a man called Itchiku Kubota) and the museum of – uh – music boxes.

But the coolest bit was the Bat Cave, a small cave in the infamous forest of Aokigahara (reputedly haunted, and sadly a top spot for suicides).

I love caves, but I’ve only been to a handful – the best being the famous Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. I’d really like to get into it properly – there’s something about clambering around in the pristine atmosphere of a rocky hollow somewhere deep underground.

OH SHIT WHAT IS THAT

Finally, we skipped stones down by the smallest of the lakes (the name of which escapes me).

The day after that (told you I was busy!) Rob, Kaz and I went to a little ramen shop called Ramen Jiro in Koganei to try out what I was told was a big, big bowl of ramen. I was pretty hungry, so I thought I’d get 大 (big) size rather than 小 (small), but Kaz warned me that “small” didn’t mean “small” here.

There was a big queue for such a tiny little ramen shop, but then ramen shops are serious business in Japan. After a while, we got seats and I got my bowl of ramen.

It was … Picture a big bowl of ramen. Then add the contents of another two bowls on top, until you have a massive tower of beansprouts, cabbage, and the juiciest, most tender pork you’ve ever tasted, layered on top of noodles and broth and – oh god, it was huge. I ate, and ate, and ate, and after thirty minutes I had a bowl of ramen that was still as big as the biggest portion you’d get anywhere else. So I ate some more. And I finished it – but only just.

After that, we went to the park with some drinks to just chill out. We chatted shit. Some cops stopped us because they thought we two big gaijin were menacing poor Kaz, but then we had a nice chat and everything was alright. (Ahaha, cops are so racist.) Our friend Risako turned out, and we stayed out in the park until dawn, just chatting and drinking. (Try doing that in England without getting stabbed or mugged.)

The day after, I went to Narita to pick up Jade, my old friend from Japanese class in Norwich. It’s her second trip to Japan after a week on an exchange trip to an art university in Asagaya, and she’s hoping to pick up a few contacts here for exhibitions and such. We went for delicious okonomiyaki at this little place near Tobitakyu station (seriously, what is it with Japan and tiny little restaurants that make the best food?). Sunday, we hit up my old hometown, Uguisudani (which hadn’t changed a bit since November) and walked through Ueno and the Ameyoko street market down to Akihabara, the place I will one day die in misery.

Monday we went for all-you-can-eat curry in Shinjuku (Tokyo seems to have as many curry houses as Britain, and the standard is generally pretty high) with Rob and a few friends, then stopped for coffee in Asagaya with Kanako and Risako as the rain battered the windows. Tuesday was my friend Miles’s leaving party – all-you-can-eat pizza (my stomach groans) and then karaoke. Man, I will miss karaoke.

Then Wednesday, Jade and I went with my friend Deky to see the Pokemon Store in Hamamatsucho. It was pretty cool, though largely just a standard merchandise store. No Nurse Joys or omnipresent Chanseys, though they did have the Pokemon Centre music. On. Continuous. Loop.


Then we went to the Miraikan, the MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE! in Odaiba. They had an exhibition of Doraemon and the real-life parallels in modern science. I love that kind of stuff.

One of the coolest exhibits was an actual honest-to-god Invisibility Cloak. It only worked from exactly the right angle (behind the projector that projected an image on to a cloak covered in retro-reflective material) but man, it looked cool.

Then we tackled another marvel of modern science, the Lotteria 10-story Tower Cheese Burger (タワーチーズバーガー). I saw this on a poster and thought it was just a photoshopped joke, but then I saw it on the menu, and knew I would try it one day.

It’s kind of disappointing.

It’s just a big, salty, cheesy burger with ten layers. We split it between us, and it was alright, I guess. Only 990 yen, too.

We saw the amazing razor-sharp edge of enormous ad agency Dentsu’s HQ (a clever optical illusion – the path leading up to it is precisely the angle of the (invisible) wall around the edge) in rainy Minato-ku.

Finally, we went down to Roppongi Hills (like, my fourth time?) to go up to their observation deck. I’ve been up the Tokyo Metropolitan Towers deck so often, it was nice to see a different perspective.


Man, I cannot get over this city.

The day after, we climbed Fuji.

Obviously when I need to get up at 8am, I can’t. When I want to sleep solidly and awake at 8am, I wake up at 7 and can’t get back to sleep. Sho ga nai. I spent about an hour and a half cooking up some rice for breakfast, showering and checking up on the state of the world; then it was packing my bag with a good supply of books and pens and no less than three chargers.

At Musashi-sakai, I proudly asked the ticket fellow at the green window for a 青春18きっぷ (seishun juuhachi kippu, Youth 18 Ticket), a fantastic deal that gets you unlimited travel on any JR local or rapid train for a bargain 11,500 yen for five days (non-consecutively and transferable, so five people can use it on one day, or you can use it for two days and then leave it for a week; it’s cho flexible). Ticket in hand, I boarded the Chuo line to Shinjuku, and asked at the information desk about getting a night train, the Moonlight Echigo, to Niigata (special “Moonlight” overnight trains are covered by the Seishun ticket). After flicking through a dozen JR timetable tomes, the young woman told me that the Moonlight Echigo didn’t run until later in the month. Not to worry. Were there any other night trains, I asked. Oh, there’s the Moonlight Nagara to Kyoto, she said. More timetable tomes. “But not until later in the month.”

Oh well. I’m hoping I misunderstood her, and maybe if I go to Shinagawa tonight I can get to Kyoto. Maybe not. No worries. My original plan, anyway, was to head to Kamakura, a historic city on a peninsula south of Tokyo. As I got further from the Big Toke, you could sense a change in the air; cleaner, fresher, a different aroma. As I got off the train in the pleasant March sunshine I saw a sign inviting me to the beach, so I went there.

Kamakura is famous mostly for its temples, making it a big tourist spot (and an easy day trip from Tokyo). But it definitely has the feel of a seaside town; the pottering elderly types, the surfer youths, the cute little cafes and surf gear emporiums and independent fashion shops made it feel like you could be in Hawaii or Cornwall.

Except Kamakura has giant hawks.

Huge things, screeching and gliding in a strangely serene beauty, or perching on phone cables. I paid them little mind and went down to the beach, which was alright; greyish, coarse sand, but a nice view and rolling waves. I passed a man merrily urinating on the sand and sat down a long way away from him, took off my coat, rolled up my socks and for the first time in my life, waded into the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately I didn’t have a handkerchief to knot up and place on my head in time-honoured fashion, but I felt like I was bringing a bit of old fashioned English class to distant Kamakura.

I had a pee in Lawson and bought an ice cream, which I ate while wandering through a little green and trying to find a bin (you’d think Japan would be overflowing with bins, but there’s never one when you need one). Something swooped past my head. A second later, I realised it was a hawk. A second after that, I realised he was after my ice cream. A second after that, I panicked and imagined hawk claws digging into my flesh or pecking out my eyes and very quickly finished off the ice cream and started the walk to see Daibutsu, The Giant Buddha. The road to it was paved with the typical Japanese souvenir shops and tourists, both native and foreign. I was reminded a little of the long trail to see God’s Final Message To Creation in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Now I reckon I’ve seen a bigger Buddha in Kyoto at a oddly obscure shrine (obscure because despite the gigantic Buddha it’s not in any guidebooks and no one was there), but hey, who am I to judge size of Buddhas.

After you’ve seen one temple you’ve pretty much seen them all so I thought I’d head back to the station. On the way, though, there was another temple for the Great Kannon (I rather think having gods in Buddhism runs rather counter to the spirit of the whole thing, but again who am I to judge) so I stopped by for a poke around. The view was quite nice, so I had a tea and a rest, before checking out the big statue of Kannon and making a wander through a cave filled with tiny statues and a man who looked at me funny.

Back at the station, I wondered briefly about going to Miura at the very bottom of this peninsula, but it seemed a long way for nothing much and I ached to start my journey north. So I got the train back towards Shinjuku, getting off at Yokohama.

Yokohama is one of the three metropolises making up the enormous Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama megacity, easily the biggest urban area in the world. As a consequence, there’s nothing you can do here you can’t do in Tokyo, except visit the tallest building in Japan. Still, it feels a little different to Tokyo; more open, perhaps, more authentic. I was surprised to find myself on a pedestriannised street that could have been in Cardiff or Leeds, for example. I popped into Don Kihote to check out rucksacks (1990 yen? Tad steep) and was glad to find a McDonalds where I could steal electricity and internet and listen to quite possibly the most awful music ever recorded (if you can call mushy pap like this “music”). I’m testing out using Word 2007 for my blog posting, and I think it might just work perfectly for offline composition, including photos, and then one-click uploading. This is grand technology. If I could blog from the top of a mountain I would.

So: assuming I can’t get the Moonlight trains anywhere, I guess I’ll just try to get as close to Sapporo as possible and then hunker down for the night in a capsule hotel or manga café or, if all else fails, a bench. The adventure, she is just beginning!

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.