Sons of Loki

It’s my last day alone in the house and I’m basically just clearing up my mess before the guys get here and thinking about my interview/assessment tomorrow. Removed a big hairy Tegenaria domestica from the sink all by myself. Got Ken Bruce on, at least until he’s replaced by the sneery Jeremy Vine in five minutes. (“Is there actually anything to object to here?” he asks of the latest controversial non-story, but I’m sure callers will provide.) Coffee in the pot. Funny how it’s sort of nice to be alone in the mornings, but it’s terrifying at night.

I didn’t have time to play Red Faction Guerrilla last year, so I’ve been wasting my September days here on it. It’s certainly full of fun – the building-destruco-tech is a remarkable if flawed gimmick. Can there be anything better than planting explosive charges on a chimneystack, Fred Dibnah-stylee, and watching it tumble to the ground, crushing flimsy shacks as the pipe rolls down a hill? Well, yes. It would be better if the buildings weren’t often just held up by a single bit of wood after all the other walls were taken out, but it’s still satisfying when you take out the last bit and the whole thing tumbles down.

There was something really bothering me, though, but I didn’t realise what it was until Yahtzee pointed it out. You can’t play as a guerrilla. There’s no stealth whatsoever. The second you turn up anywhere, you get gunned down mercilessly. No sneaking around enemy bases, planting charges before retiring to a nearby hill and watching the fireworks – you have to go in guns blazing, throwing explosives aimlessly, which kind of takes the fun out of carefully demolishing buildings.
The game encourages you to ambush convoys, which would be really cool – planting mines on the road and hiding behind a rock – if not for the fact that the second the convoy gets within a hundred metres of you, they drive off the road and try to run you over while your carefully placed mines lie fallow. And you can only carry about six bullets and you die really quickly. And the AI guerrillas who spontaneously rise up to aid you in your one-man revolution die very, very quickly. I felt like shouting at them, Life of Brian style, that I wasn’t the messiah, that they should stop following me around because they’re just going to die horribly. (Although nothing’s more amusing than when you get involved in a minor road accident and knock over a wall, and a crowd of wannabe Ches turn up in a truck assuming the great uprising against your oppressors has begun.)

It also got me thinking about something that bothers me in just about every work of fiction where killing people is presented as entertainment. It’s the way heroes can do no wrong when they’re gunning down legions of faceless enemies. The villain is demonised for massacring thousands of peasants, but the hero slices through thousands of rank-and-file soldiers whose only crime was accepting the king’s shilling, and no one stops to complain. I mean, obviously the end goal is good, but it would be a better story if you introduced some depth to it. I mean, Red Faction is basically a big Iraq War allegory, with an insurgency fighting an occupying force there to grab all the natural resources, but the guerrillas/terrorists (depending on your view, of course) are presented as noble freedom fighters fighting an evil totalitarian empire. It would be a lot more interesting if your side was doing some morally questionable stuff, because that’s how war works.

The old James Bond killed plenty of people and was still a hero. The new guy, and the one in the books, is basically a cold-blooded murderer, and it’s a lot more interesting that way. There’s the bit in Metal Gear Solid 2 (I think) where the Colonel calls you out if you kill a certain number of enemies, saying “You seem to get a real thrill out of slaughtering the enemy. Are you frustrated about something?”, and in the sequel one of the bosses taunts you by making you face the ghosts of every single person you’ve killed in the game so far. And then there’s that Ultima game (?) where in an act of genius, it turns out that the faceless monsters you’ve been killing in all the other games in the series were actually intelligent and harmless all along. (Something along those lines.)

And there was this bit in Modern Warfare 2 that made me think. Now, I hesitate to attribute artistic merit to such a by-the-numbers blockbuster as MW2, but Call of Duty 4 did have that clever AC-130 level which quite subtly (subtly for video gaming, anyway) compares modern warfare to a video game, all point-and-click and detached from the actual slaughter.
It comes after the first half of the infamous “No Russian” level when you’re shooting Russian FSB troops as an undercover CIA operative. You have to shoot them to finish the level, whereas in the first half, the game wisely doesn’t force you to shoot any civilians in the controversy-inducing terrorist attack. And I thought why is it killing civilians is presented as wrong, but killing FSB police is just treated as part of the mission? Aren’t they just civilians behind their riot shields? And that’s when I realised I’d been killing plenty of Russian soldiers in the previous mission without batting an eyelid. I had an epiphany. If killing civilians was wrong, then killing police was wrong, then killing soldiers – even if they were the enemy – was wrong, surely.

But, then, this is Call of Duty we’re talking about, so I doubt it was the intended message. I’m probably thinking about this too much, and I doubt we want a world where every hero is tortured by the horrible things he has done to protect his family and way of life and stuff, but it would be more interesting, is all I’m sayin’.

Having assembled my life into a bunch of cardboard boxes, binbags, and guitar cases, my dad and I hit the road at about 9:30am and after an uneventful trip through the heart of England, we got to Leeds. Which is where we spent half an hour getting lost in Meanwood before finding Pickerings, my letting agent. Signed the contract, picked up the keys, and then another thirty minutes getting lost in Headingley before finding my house and my sister and Chris waiting outside.

My house is a lot further out than I thought – roughly halfway between Headingley and Meanwood, and a bit of a hike from the shops in Headingley. (Google Maps made it look practically next door to my old halls at James Bailie Park – which is sort of is, only not by car.) But it’s brilliant. I love it. Big, airy living room, a big spare room just dying to have a nice coffee table and big TV in it, nice old fashioned houses out the window, and a wonderfully creepy cellar that looks like some secret police’s secret interrogation room. (I love hidden rooms – you know, big spaces that no one goes in. Maybe it’s the mystery of it.)

Anyway, we had a meal at a nice little restaurant nearby and a few drinks before retiring to my house – my house! – for bed. In the morning, my dad headed back for Norwich and I had morning coffee at my dining table in my house while listening to the Archers and then mopped the floors (they’re still ingrained with dirt, but apparently we’re just gonna cover it up with rugs, so that’s okay).

Down to IKEA, then. It’s the first time I’ve ever been to the Swedish furniture megastore, but it was quite a remarkable experience – I feel that most of modern culture can be explained by the cheap, mass-produced mass-market designs there. It’s brilliant. It’s cheap, but stylish. It’s stylish from being cheap. It’s making a virtue of a vice.

Bought a laundry basket (I do not want clothes strewn across my floor), a hanging clothes hanger thing, a few tealight holders (essential) and a nice full-length mirror for £15. Thus bought, we had hot dogs (when you exit the store, they sell hot dogs! What a country) and headed back to my house.

And then I waved goodbye to them from the front door of my house. Which was a first. I mean, usually people are waving goodbye to me, or I’m waving goodbye from the door of my room, but here I was, homeowner (sort of), standing on the front step of my house and waving as Chris and Kate drove off.

And so I turned and headed inside.

I made some coffee and set about unpacking my my PC, dragging the desk over to the window (it was tucked up at the end of the room) and plugging my speakers in. Then books, clothes, decorations, until I was pretty much sorted.

I began assembling an array of toilet literature, starting with a wet copy of the Big Issue and Mumon’s The Gateless Gate, a collection of koans which are perfect for meditating on whilst sitting upon the bog.

A monk asked Nansen: `Is there a teaching no master ever preached before?’
Nansen said: `Yes, there is.’

`What is it?’ asked the monk.

Nansen replied: `It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not things.’

Feeling peckish, I went to cook up some pasta, only to find that the hob is gas and the lighter was dead. Not to worry! I went down to Sainsbury’s. Sainsbury’s was closed! I went to KFC instead and bought a burger, then found a newsagents and got a lighter for good measure. (How I miss the humble combini.)

I underestimated how scary being alone in a big four-bedroom house might be. I was terrified when I heard whistling from inside the house! only to realise it was just on BBC iPlayer from my room upstairs. I have a big stick to hit intruders, though for now I securely lock my door at night.

Today, Monday, I set about getting all the rest of the stuff I needed: an overdraft from Halifax (denied!), a haircut from the usual place on the Otley Road, next to Oxfam (stylised!), a secondhand novel from Oxfam (I just walked in thinking “I wish they had the New York Trilogy, but they won’t” but to my surprise, there it was on the shelf, as if it had been waiting for me all summer) and got a bus into town proper. (Bus’ only £1.70 now. Actually, that might be the same as last year.) At Argos, I bought some bathroom scales and their cheapest exercise bike before riding the bus back uptown with 13kg of exercise bike under my armpit. Dragging that thing back home, I set about assembling it and fixing myself some lunch when a man arrived to check the kitchen electrics. I busied myself clearing up junk from around the living room. (In hindsight, I probably should have offered him tea, but I’m new to this house lark.)

So out I ventured again to Wilkos, where I got some razors and conditioner and a cork noticeboard (false advertising on the label, as there were no pins inside and now I can’t pin anything up) and some blutac (so I can finally stick stuff to the walls) and coathangers (so all my stuff ain’t lying over the floor), before finally stocking up on edibles at Sainsbury’s (man, that place is expensive). Decorated my room. Felt less guilty about watching two episodes of the Wire back-to-back by cycling all the way through them.

And so here I am. Installed in my house. Ready for term. I am still woefully unprepared.

Me ma’s been watching Swedish smash-hit crime drama Wallander and, on another of her crackpot schemes, picked up a book on Swedish grammar. Clearly, my mother was never meant to learn Swedish, but I thought I’d have a flick through and it’s interesting stuff, you know.

You know how athletes will run at high altitudes with heavy weights so that, when they’re accustomed to that, running unladen at sea level feels like a breeze? It’s like that after studying Japanese. Two years of banging my head against the brick wall of fluency in Nippongese, and when I try my hand at Swedish, it’s like punching through cardboard. There’s so many cognates that vocabulary – lång (long), hem (home), också (also, pronounced ockso) – just pops into my memory in a way that Japanese words never do. Knowing a little German helps too – läsa (lese, read), arbeta (arbeite, work).

It always seems remarkable to monolinguists like myself when you hear of people who can speak three or four or six languages, but once you’ve learned the skill-set necessary to learn a language – which tools to use, how conjugating works, what articles and particles do – the next language is half as hard. Conjugating Swedish verbs is essentially the same as conjugating Japanese verbs – it’s just a matter of learning different ‘bits’.

I watched Tora Tora Tora today (remarkably, half-directed by Kinji Fukasaku, he of the Yazuka Papers and Battle Royale) and as a test, tried to understand the spoken Japanese without the subtitles. Entirely hopeless. Been studying this two, three years and I can’t understand even a sentence or two.
I know the answer is “study more” but it’s hella depressing.

I also watched the much-hyped The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor) and found it to be pretty enjoyable, even if I’m always suspicious when beautiful troubled young women end up sleeping with chubby, middle-aged author surrogates. (When I’m an author, my protagonists will be celibate and miserable.) I liked Lisbeth – she put me in mind of one of William Gibson’s heroines, and in a way the whole film is like some kind of modern post-cyberpunk thriller. Sort of. You know, the stuff that Gibson was pioneering in the 80s – technology as an integral part of our daily lives, a world where everything’s on the net and information is a commodity, all those cliches which were revolutionary then but today sound ancient – that sort of stuff is so mainstream now that you hardly notice it.

I noticed Lisbeth’s password was only four characters, though. No real hacker would let that slide.

So I’ve hopefully got an interesting little job lined up, if I pass the final interview next week. Heading up to Leeds this weekend to move into my house and kill a few days before the interview and then, if I get it, starting my induction the week after – then it’s Freshers’ Week and finally, after that, lessons begin again.

I’ve been worrying about what to do for my dissertation, but the other day I found myself writing a blog post about the future of Japan – slowing economy, fossilised government, aging population, freeters, continued backwards attitude to immigration – and realised I’ve got a beautiful paper to write right there. If I do it right. The New World: Changing Paradigms For Japan In New 21st Century Economic Realities – Demarking the Migrant Pathos and the Erotics of Primal Pathology, it will be titled.

Until then, then, I chill out, raid the fridge, learn lines like “Du bröt dig in i mitt hem. Jag kan ha ihjäl dig utan vidare.”* and try to put off packing until Friday.

* “You broke into my house. I can kill you without consequence.” Learning lines from films is much more fun than “I am Herr Smitt,” don’t you think?

I’ve been back a long time! After the initial week of sorting out all the immediate concerns, life has sort of settled into a hikikomori-ish fugue where I translate manga, to try to maintain a doggy-paddle in the sea of Japanese; pretend to be writing a novel, which will solve all my money concerns; and worry about money.

I am broke, and then some. I sent off an article to a magazine that hasn’t got back to me yet, and in the meantime applied for a few jobs. The only place that got back to me is Sainsbury’s in Leeds, but as I’m not up there yet I couldn’t go to one of their interviews. I suppose I’ll just have to try next month. In the meantime, I have pretty much nowhere to turn, unless I follow millionaire David Willett’s advice and do some volunteering. Thanks, Education Minister. That’s really useful.

Yesterday I spent the last of my money catching the coach (most cheap option, and not bloody National Express rail, but it’s National Express coach so it’s ultimately a futile gesture, but then isn’t everything in our brutish lives) to London to see my “homeslices” and many of them there were: Rob, Kanako (in London for a few weeks only so I won’t see her again until I get back to Japan, which is sad), Jameses E and B, Hugo and Emily, Kazuya (now at Sheffield for the year! fantastic) and even Ed. We went to Mitsukoshi, a Japanese department store in the heart of London, which provided the surreal experience of being a thousand miles away in Tokyo and a month ago in July as we were welcomed with いっらしゃいませぇぇぇ～～～ and browsed their bookstore. It was full of Japanese tourists – imagine coming all the way to London and then visiting a Japanese department store! – but then that’s what we did. We ate at a really expensive (by our standards) Japanese restaurant, which served up some tasty-looking katsu kare, but then I had the shoyu ramen which was … disappointing. Really, disappointing. I thought a bad bowl of ramen was impossible, but this was just … not at all what I’m used to.

“What I’m used to.” Pfft. Anyway, most of my money went on day travelcards, because the tube is ridiculously expensive if you don’t have Oyster. I kept seeing adverts on the tube for the next big novel – marketed fiction, fiction which says “You’ve read Stieg Larsson, now read this!” as if mentioning a popular novellist you may have enjoyed is enough to convince you that this other entirely unrelated novel might be a decent read. You may as well have adverts that say “You’ve enjoyed foie gras, now try cat food!”

I hesitate to take the piss out of published authors and of books I haven’t read, but there was a ad for a book so unrelentingly generic that I had trouble finding it on the web. The ad reads: “THEY STOLE MY LIFE. I WANT IT BACK. I WON’T GET MAD, I’LL GET” and then in red letters, separated from that seeming non sequiter, “EVEN” which is the title of the book, by Andrew Grant. Like I say, I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment on a novel which is about a secret agent racing against time and which has 3.5 stars on Amazon. All I’m saying is, read that strapline over again and decide if you really want to read that book. Is that the best a copywriter could come up with? They stole his life. He wants it back. I’ll hazard a guess and say that it’s rogue elements in the government or secret services that stole his life, and that he had a perfect wife and a perfect son (it’s never a daughter, is it?) and now they’re dead, I’ll postulate, and there will be a shootout and a car chase, I humbly hypothesise, and that there will be tender moments when he picks through the fragments that remain of his old life, I’ll put forward, and finally there won’t be closure, just a set-up for the next novel, but there will be a satisfying death of a minor villain, I will cautiously submit.

Like I say, I don’t like to snark, and I know airport fiction will always be this way, but I think I might have heard this plot two or three or sixty times before.

Anyway, we had a wander around Camden Town, then went back up to Rob’s where we a) ate lots of Chinese food b) played Super Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6 and Soul Calibur 4 c) watched Family Guy d) slept. We woke up. I had a scotch egg. Uh, that’s about it.

So yeah, London! It Wasn’t As Bad As Last Time. How’s that for a strapline?

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)…

I feel – off, a little. After the doldrums of mid-March and the frantic-but-exciting exam cramming of the first week of May, I’m back to normal life, and…

It’s kind of dull. Which isn’t right. It’s very, very wrong. I’m in Tokyo. I should be doing ten exciting things before breakfast. And yet, when you’re a student repeating the last semester, stuck in a small room with not much money in the suburbs of Tokyo, it’s somehow …

empty.

And as my remaining days dwindle to insignificance, it becomes harder and harder to begin anything new. No point joining a club now; no point finding the cool bars, no point getting a job. I want to do so much with my time here. I wanted to do so much.

What am I?
What am I?
What am I in my own dear eyes?

It’s frustrating. It’s like I want to achieve so much, but I’m stuck with giant lobster claws for hands, and if I try to build a house or paint a self-portrait my giant lobster claws flounder uselessly and it’s hard enough just getting dressed and making breakfast in the morning when you have giant lobster claws, so I tend not to try to do too much. Which sucks.

Signed up for next year’s modules. Aside from the compulsory Japanese language modules, I’m taking an English Language module on the Language of Power, which I assume is about writing to persuade and influence, which sounds interesting enough. And, because I thought I’d better do some literature, a module on Civil War and Restoration literature. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but the only other options were Medieval lit (what I done last year) and Renaissance lit (which is basically Shakespeare, innit?).

None of the Japanese studies modules really appealed to me, so I decided to take a module on China since 1979 and also, in the first semester, a Short Dissertation. I’m not really sure what I should make it about, but I’ll have a good think.

It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon and the sports teams are on the sports pitch doing whatever the hell they do (they never seem to play sport, they stand in huddles shouting at each other) and I still have 94 days in Japan and the Leeds exam is increasingly in the past and I think I did alright and yet I can’t shake this strange desire to keep going. I want to learn it all. I doubt this’ll last, but I might as well go along with this feeling as long as it persists.

So many things to do, but nothing that I really need to do… Might go into town, later. I was watching the video for m’flo’s “Been So Long” (I can’t tell if it’s self-consciously ironic or not) and realised I miss the big empty streets of places like Minato-ku, so I was thinking of doing some arty night black-and-white photography down there, like every single photograph of New York ever taken.

I want to finish off Yoshida, at least the #gowife portion. Gotta pay my bills. Play 龍が如く, the Kabukicho-based GTA clone, which I picked up from (the hilariously named) Book Off the other day. Find an arcade and get good at DrumMania (seeing as the actual PS2 drum controller is nowhere to be found).

Cycled to Hachioji the other week – took about two hours each way, and I reached the edge of Tokyo, which is quite a feat. Here’s some pretty pictures.

I think most of my problems in life stem from being a determinist at heart. I’m not completely sure free will exists. I feel like innate personality (determined by biological and external social factors) determines your actions, not your consciousness and not free will.

This raises big, scary questions. Like, is it fair to punish criminals if they had no control over their actions anyway? Can a leopard truly change its spots? If I simply put my mind to something, can I do it?

More specifically, if I decide to work hard at Japanese, would I get better? Yes, but can I actually decide to work hard at Japanese? It’s like sleep paralysis; you’re awake and fully conscious and trying so desperately to move your legs, feeling like you’re suffocating, but it’s impossible. It’s physically impossible. I sit down to study Japanese, I get bored and do something else.

Is this an error on my part? Should I try really, really, really hard instead of merely quite hard? Or is it blind deterministic mechanics, that I am a product of my upbringing, that I will always pick the easy path, that I have no patience, that I get easily distracted?

I don’t know. It’s a philosophical question, anyway. The main thing is, do I want to keep doing Japanese?

I don’t know!

I think my honest feelings are: I’d like to do Japanese if I could just coast through like I always do, turning up to most lessons and doing enough of the homework and doing sorta okay. But it’s a damned hard degree, and I apparently just won’t do all the work that’s necessary to pass.

I think my honest feelings are: I don’t want to do Japanese. I know enough to get by, and I basically only took this degree because I wanted to live here for a year for free. I can read Yotsuba-to and that’s enough for me. I’d much rather do English or Graphic Design or something like that. I don’t really have any desire to learn the language.

I think my honest feelings are: I love Japanese. I want to become impeccably fluent. I want to watch films and read books and talk to interesting people. I want to learn all the kanji and all the words. It’s just the teaching style here I can’t get on with. When I think about it, I really miss the Leeds department. Somehow everything was easier there, more fun.

Indecision. What’s made my day is that I emailed Leeds to let them know of my possible intentions, and I just got a reply to say that I can put a request in to the English department in May if I want to switch to Single Honours, and they’ll decide in June by the earliest. Meanwhile, I get to finish my year here whatever happens.

That’s the best news I could get. (Well, realistically winning the lottery isn’t going to happen, especially since I don’t play.) I’d hate so much to go home early, to encounter enormous visa and financial wrangles, to possibly have to pay back all my JASSO (god that would ruin me) and generally ruin my year. I get to stay.

Kinda makes me want to start studying again…

In other news, I’ve put up the teaser page for Yoshida, my work-in-progress visual novel salaryman simulator. Demo someday. I worry I made the titular Yoshida rather too stylish, rather than the chubby sweaty salaryman I envisioned him as.

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…

Just ran some errands; posted some letters, signed for JASSO, paid some bills. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Well, not really, but there’s a strange sense of satisfaction in getting small things done.

I was talking to my friend Emily about this. She wants to stay in education, do a Masters. Me, I kind of just want to get out there in the real world. Like Rob Fleming or Jesse (Hawke?) I don’t feel like a real person, living in a single room and eating combini food and scripting visual novels no one will ever play. I want a job – something interesting, mind – and a proper apartment or a real house with more than one room and beanbags and big giclée prints (bizarre fact: the development of giclée printing was spearheaded by none other than Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash) on the walls and a cat called Noboru Wataya.

Obviously, when I’m working my 9 to 5 in Sainsburys and living in a quiet backstreet in Leeds I’ll miss the student life, so basically the lesson here is never try to do anything, ever. (I’ve become a nihilist, lately. Does it show?)

Last week was a bit of a fugue, a blur of hanami and hikikomorish tendencies. Yesterday, after a sake-induced hangover I kind of snapped out of it and went for a walk in Yuutenji, which Emily told me was a pretty nice area. And it was. I had a proper coffee in a proper coffee shop, visited the temple (awash with sakura, obviously) and wandered through the city of Meguro, which reminded me awfully of some area of Leeds.

I love cities. It’s interesting, though, that all cities are kind of similar… all built from offcuts of each other. Parts of Higashi-Shinjuku are identical to New York (round about the corner of 47th and 6th, near the NHL store). I stumbled across Chicago in Niigata, found Norwich in Harajuku, and this bit of Meguro really nailed that “concrete Holiday Inns and big roundabouts with hundreds of road signs and a dozen pedestrian crossings” bit that cities like Leeds do. You know what I mean – designed for cars, not people.

Down by a weird riverside bit (it had the feeling of a riverside area with cafes and bars, but it was built on a five story embankment above a feeble drainage ditch) there was loads of sakura and a big matsuri (festival), with food stalls and huge throngs of Meguro residents and a fat lady (who did indeed sing, to a large audience) and a wonderful, rejuvenating sense of life.

Of course, it couldn’t stay sunny for long, and now Tokyo is overcast and rainy again.

Stay inside and drink tea, as the Bryce 2 materials browser would commonly recommend. In conclusion, I have one goal in life now, which is to play “Black Out Fall Out” on electric guitar in front of a billion fans and then spontaneously combust, because nothing can top how awesome this song is.

音がない (No sound)
泣き止まないずっと (Don’t cry your heart out)
もうCRY OUT (Keep crying out!)
I know I know la la la la
もう止まらない！ (Don’t stop!)

(oh cool, previously unheard original 2002 version, though I wager the version on 2005’s Polysics or Die!!!! is better)